from the pressures of life and work in the city. As often as he can, he returns to Arivonimamo—to the modest home of his parents, to the Catholic high school where he was educated by Canadian friars, to the church where he was baptized and had his first communion. On the main street and market, people stop to ask for his advice on all sorts of matters. Most of his family members still live in the area. A few miles west of the town is the new house Richard and his wife Tina have built for weekend getaways and their retirement. It’s next door to the family cemetery.
FIGURE 3.1 Richard Samuel, academic, political activist, minor nobility, traditional healer
Island or Continent?
If people have an image of Madagascar, it’s usually of a beach, a baobab tree, or a cartoon lemur. The island’s name recognition was boosted immensely by the 2005 computer-animated comedy hit from DreamWorks about four animals from New York’s Central Park Zoo who, after spending their lives in happy captivity, are suddenly repatriated to Africa and shipwrecked off the coast of Madagascar. Two sequels and a spin-off, the implausibly titled Penguins of Madagascar, put the “big red island”—so named because of the red, claylike soil of the central highlands—on the movie map and may have given a minor boost to tourism.
It wasn’t always an island. It was once part of the supercontinent of Gondwana, sandwiched between Africa and India. Gondwana started breaking apart about 180 million years ago, but it was another 100 million years before Madagascar detached itself from Africa and floated off into its present position in the Indian Ocean. Stretching almost 1,000 miles north to south and almost 375 miles across at its widest point, it’s almost the size of Ukraine and a little larger than Texas; it’s in the top fifty countries in the world for land area, larger than Kenya, Thailand, or Spain. It’s often ranked as the world’s fourth-largest island, after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo. But is it an island? Its long geologic history, wide range of vegetation and climatic zones—from semidesert to tropical rainforest—and biodiversity arguably place it in the “continent” category; indeed, some (including, of course, the tourist companies) call it the “eighth continent.” Neither geologists nor biologists, writes geologist Maarten de Wit, “have a definition that is capable of classifying Madagascar unambiguously as an island or continent.” Which gives de Wit a catchy subtitle for his scientific journal article: “Heads It’s a Continent, Tails It’s an Island.”1
Because it was separated from other landmasses for eighty million years, Madagascar developed a unique ecosystem, with plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. It has more than twelve thousand plant species, almost ten thousand of them found nowhere else, almost 350 reptile species, and forty-three primates, including the signature cuddly ring-tailed lemur. The biodiversity makes Madagascar what de Wit calls “the world’s hottest biodiversity hot spot,” attracting thousands of well-heeled tourists, mostly from North America and western Europe, who take guided tours through the jungles, cactus forests, and deserts. It’s also a favorite, safely exotic destination for French vacationers, who come mostly for the beaches, nightlife, and excellent haute cuisine. In the French tourist brochures, it sits alphabetically between its two main tropical rivals—the French-speaking Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.
Long Sea Journey
There are no cave paintings, parchment scrolls, or even oral traditions to tell us when Madagascar was first settled by humans—a lack of evidence that has led to a long and vigorous debate over origins. However, most scholars agree that in the scheme of human history, settlement came late, probably not before the fifth century. By that time, trade routes had been established across the Indian Ocean, linking Southeast Asia, India, the Arabian Peninsula, and east Africa.
Geographically, one might expect the first settlers to have come from Africa, making the relatively short (250–400-mile) journey across the Mozambique Channel. Astonishingly, they came from the other side of the Indian Ocean—from the Malay Archipelago, or what today is Indonesia. Although it is not known who they were or when they arrived, the historical evidence is persuasive. The Malagasy language borrows words from Javanese, Malay, and the languages of Borneo and Sulawesi; its nearest linguistic relative is a language spoken in southern Borneo. Some crops—rice in particular—are found throughout southeast Asia. On the coast and rivers, Malagasy travel in outrigger canoes like those used in Indonesia. Ethnomusicologists compare the simple Malagasy xylophone to one used by tribes in Borneo. Conclusive scientific evidence came in a 2012 study of matrilineal lineage that made a statistical comparison of the mitochondrial DNA of people from Madagascar and Indonesia. The team, led by Murray Cox of New Zealand’s Massey University, concluded that Malagasy and Indonesian DNA separated about twelve hundred years ago, close to the date when historians believe the island was first settled.
What were the reasons for settlement? At the time, much of the Malay Archipelago was part of the Srivijayan Empire, a major trading power that had the ships and men to mount an expedition; however, there is no historical evidence that it did. “Most likely, then,” notes the Economist in an analysis of the settlement evidence, “the first Malagasy were accidental castaways, news of whose adventure never made it back home. But there is still a puzzle.” Because people inherit mitochondria only from their mothers, the study tracked only the female line of descent. That means that the first party of settlers must have included some women—perhaps as few as thirty, according to Cox. Most ships’ crews were male, so why were women on board? One explanation is that the women were the cargo, and that Madagascar’s original inhabitants ended up on the island by chance after a slave ship wandered off course or was wrecked on the reefs.2
Whichever historical narrative is applied—that the first Malagasy were traders or shipwrecked slaves—it is unlikely that they were heading for Madagascar, or that they even knew where they would end up after they left the Malay Archipelago. Even with favorable winds, trading ships could not have made a direct crossing of the Indian Ocean. It is almost four thousand miles from the west coast of Sumatra to Madagascar, and the ships would have run out of fresh water and food after a few weeks. Instead, they took the long way around, stopping at ports in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea before heading south along the east coast of Africa, a journey that may have taken years. Although most trading ships returned home with cargoes, some did not, their crews deciding to settle and seek their fortunes in ports around the Indian Ocean. They intermarried with the indigenous people, creating the racially mixed population that is typical of many coastal communities.
Archaeological evidence shows that Bantu peoples from East Africa may have begun migrating to the island as early as the sixth and seventh centuries. Some were herders from the Great Lakes region, and they brought their animals with them. Linguists have noted that most Malagasy words for domestic animals have Bantu-language roots; for example, the word for the humped cattle zebu is hen’omby, from the Swahili word for beef, omby or aombe. Other historical records suggest some Bantus were descendants of sailors and merchants from the east coast—from modern-day northern Mozambique north to Somalia—who crossed to western Madagascar in their dhows to trade. Finally, some may have been transported to the island as slaves. Migrants cultivated crops found throughout the African continent, such as manioc and sweet potatoes.
The early settlers from the Malay Archipelago are referred to in some sources as the Vazimba, as if they were a distinct ethnic group that occupied a specific region during a certain period. It’s a convenient way for historians to box them into a timeline to fit a narrative of conflicts, cattle raids, and slavery. From a Malagasy perspective, history is more complicated. As Luke notes, the Malagasy use vazimba as a word for any unknown population that was in a place before they were and “left enigmatic traces of themselves such as abandoned tombs or a standing stone.” Throughout the island, “there are traces of lost people who settled and moved on and whose history and passing are lost in time. So vazimba are not really the ‘original’
