The Malagasy

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Count to ten in Malagasy and the counting is in an Austronesian tongue, in numbers a speaker of the Barito rivers of Borneo would half-recognize seven thousand kilometers away. Name the outrigger canoe drawn up on a western beach — the lakana, with its balance-pole and its square patched sail — and the word belongs to the same seafaring vocabulary, the speech of islanders who read the monsoon and crossed open water in the dark. Then name the humped cattle standing in the paddy, the zebu that is a family’s wealth and its gift to the dead, and the word came the other way, up the Mozambique Channel from the East African coast, with the herding and much of the cultivating life it names. One language holds both. Before either shore had a word for the people who would speak it, the Malagasy tongue was already braided from Island Southeast Asia and Bantu Africa, and the braid is the plainest fact about the people who carry it.

A lakana, the Malagasy outrigger canoe whose form and much of whose vocabulary reached the island from Island Southeast Asia. Jonathan Talbot, World Resources Institute, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

One people of many peoples

The Malagasy are the people of Madagascar: some thirty million of them, one people speaking one language in a spread of dialects that shade into one another across the fourth-largest island on earth. The count is not exact — the CIA World Factbook estimates about 28.8 million for mid-2024, the World Bank runs nearer 31 million — but the order of magnitude is firm, and the singleness is firmer still. From the highland rice terraces to the spiny south, from the eastern rainforest coast to the dry cattle country of the west, a fisherman of one shore and a herder of another can make themselves understood, because the language is one. Malagasy belongs to the Austronesian family, and within it to the Greater Barito East subgroup; its closest living relative is Ma’anyan, spoken along the Barito rivers of southern Borneo, with a stratum of Malay navigational terms above the shared base and, layered over all of it, the Bantu, Swahili and Arabic borrowings the island’s later history brought in. A tongue of Southeast Asian islanders reached Africa’s edge and stayed, and became African.

The record names the Malagasy as some eighteen to twenty groupings of that single people — never separate nations, but regions and lineages of one. The Britannica and the Factbook list them: the Merina of the central highlands, about a quarter of the whole and the most numerous; the Betsimisaraka of the long east coast, roughly a seventh; the Betsileo of the southern plateau around Fianarantsoa, an eighth; the Sakalava of the west and northwest; and the Tsimihety, the Antandroy of the thorn desert, the Bara of the cattle plains, the Antaimoro of the southeast who keep the old Arabic-script sorabe manuscripts, and a dozen more. The names are geographic and historical, not tribal fractions of a country that never had a Malagasy word for itself as a state until the highland kingdom made one.

The double origin is written in the genome as clearly as in the grammar. The largest study of it, Pierron and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017), sampled thousands of Malagasy across hundreds of villages and read a common Bantu-and-Austronesian descent shared by every one of them — on average roughly two parts African to one part Asian, but unevenly, the Asian inheritance heavier in the highland interior and the African heavier toward the coasts. The admixture was sex-biased, the maternal lines running strongly to Island Southeast Asia in places where the paternal lines run to Bantu Africa. The pattern the authors read from it is not a people who arrived already mixed, but two colonizations — one out of Asia, one out of Africa — meeting and blending on the island itself, with much of the mixing and most of the population’s growth falling within the last thousand years. The linguistic match to Ma’anyan is exact enough to place the Austronesian homeland in southern Borneo; the genetic signal is broader, tracing to a range of Island Southeast Asian peoples rather than to the Ma’anyan alone, as if a language of one river-country had traveled with a company drawn from many.

When the crossing happened is far from decided, and the honest answer is that the datings do not yet agree. A critical review of the island’s radiocarbon record by Douglass and colleagues (Quaternary Science Reviews, 2019) found first-arrival estimates spread across some nine thousand years — the widest such window for any island within the reliable range of the method — and, after weighing the dates for reliability, supported a human presence by at least two thousand years ago while leaving the character of any earlier presence unresolved. That earlier presence is itself contested: cut-marked and fractured bones of the giant elephant-bird, reported by Hansford and colleagues (Science Advances, 2018) and dated beyond ten thousand years, have been read as the trace of foragers on the island long before any lasting settlement — a reading others dispute. Against it stands the mainstream account of sustained settlement in the mid-to-late first millennium of the common era, with towns and interior sites — the enigmatic rock-cut complex at Teniky in the Isalo massif among them — standing by about the tenth to twelfth centuries. Until the dates converge, the arrival is best treated as unknown, which is where the evidence leaves it.

Within the tradition the first people of the land have their own name. They are the vazimba, remembered as those who held the island before the ancestors of the present lineages, keepers of the springs and pools and the oldest tombs, whose sites remain places of hasina where offerings are still left. Whether the vazimba are the memory of a real earlier population — foragers, or an early Austronesian wave since absorbed — or a founding people of legend is one more contested thread, and it is held apart from the archaeology rather than folded into it. What is not in doubt is that the vazimba are honored still, at the water and the old stones, as the ones who were here first.

The terraced highlands of the interior, the rice country of the Merina and Betsileo. Hardscarf, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The ancestors and the order they hold

At the center of the Malagasy religious world stand the dead. The razana, the ancestors, are the senior members of a family that death has not dissolved but reordered: the living are its juniors, the dead its elders, and the two make one society divided only by the threshold of the tomb. Honored — addressed at the stone chamber, given the first of the rice, kept in their due — the razana bless: they quicken the fields and the line, steady the household, watch over the venture. Neglected or offended, they warn, and the warning comes as a dream, an illness, a run of ill luck that a family reads as a summons from a senior who is near and expects to be answered. The full theology of the ancestors is their own; what belongs to the people is that this is the axis the rest turns on.

Above and behind the ancestors is the Creator. The highlands name that power Andriamanitra, which the tradition glosses as the Fragrant or Sweet Lord; much of the island says Zanahary, the Creator who made the earth and humankind. Whether the two names are one power under different words, regional variants of a single sky-lord, or distinct powers is not settled — not among the tellers and not among their students — and the matter is complicated by the mission era, when the Bible of 1835 took up Andriamanitra as the name of the Christian God, so that the older, pre-Christian referent has to be read back through the encounter that reshaped it. The Creator makes; the ancestors, a rank below, bless and warn; the living stand below them, in the current that runs down from both.

That current has a name: hasina, the sacred efficacy that flows between the Creator, the dead, the living and the land, potency and rightness at once. Hasina fertilizes the rice and quickens the child; it ratifies the one who holds authority and imbues what he holds; its wellspring is the ancestral order, and to stand rightly in that order is to stand in its flow. Conduct is fixed by fady, the taboo-system whose particular prohibitions — a food not eaten, a day not worked, a direction not taken — descend most often from an ancestor’s word, binding a line for generations after the forebear who set it. And the whole is held together by fihavanana, the bond of kinship and solidarity that prizes the shared over the singular, the tie of havana, kin, extended outward until it becomes the first value of Malagasy life: to be in right relation with one’s people, living and dead, above the getting of any private good.

The rites answer the geography of the island. In the highlands the Merina and the Betsileo keep the famadihana, the returning: some years after a first burial a family opens the tomb, lifts out its wrapped dead, renews their shrouds of red silk — the lamba mena — carries them among the living with music and speaks their names again, and lays them back. It is a rite of togetherness and continuity, of grief turned to festival, and it is not the “dancing with corpses” that outsiders have named it — the phrase says more about the visitors than about the thing they came to see. In the west and northwest the Sakalava keep tromba, in which the royal dead return to speak through their mediums, the saha, at the doany, the spirit-house, and at the mahabo, the royal tombs; a living king or queen of an earlier century enters a chosen person and gives judgment, counsel and demand to those who come. And across the island the diviner-healer, the ombiasy, tends fate, sickness and misfortune — the mpisikidy who reads the sikidy, the geomantic divination of seeds and grains, and the mpanandro who reads the days and the destiny of times, setting what may be done and when. The dead themselves have a country: in Betsileo and highland telling the souls of the departed make their way to Ambondrombe, the forested mountain of the south, where they gather and take up a common life, and from which, those who live below it say, the sounds of that life can be heard at night. Other places keep their own sanctity and their own fady — among them Lake Tritriva, the deep crater lake of the highlands that is said to rise and fall against the seasons and to hold its dead.

The kingdom, the mission, and the living present

The ancestral order acquired a royal architecture in the highlands. Out of generations of civil war in Imerina, Andrianampoinimerina (reigning about 1787 to 1810) drew the highland principalities back into one kingdom, and his son Radama I (1810 to 1828) carried Merina power across much of the island. The Merina kingdom wove the cult of kings and ancestors through its statecraft — the royal talismans that guarded the realm’s hasina, the tombs of the sovereigns at Ambohimanga and within the Rova of Antananarivo — and its full political history is its own; what belongs to the people is that royal power was itself a claim upon the ancestors, the sovereign the living apex of a line of ancestral kings.

Into that court came the London Missionary Society. David Jones and Thomas Bevan landed at Tamatave in 1818; Bevan and both families died within months, and Jones went on to open a school at Antananarivo in December 1820, under the eye of Radama I, who wanted letters and trades for his state before he wanted a new faith. The mission press followed in the mid-1820s, and the whole Malagasy Bible was completed in 1835 — among the earliest complete Bibles in any language of Africa, and the standard by which the highlands learned to read. Then the encounter turned hard. Ranavalona I, who held the throne from 1828 to 1861, read the new religion as a solvent of the ancestral order her sovereignty rested on, and from 1835 she moved against it: schools closed, foreign missionaries withdrew, and the Malagasy converts who persisted were fined, jailed, enslaved and in numbers put to death. The reversal came a generation later. Ranavalona II and her court were baptized publicly on 21 February 1869 and declared a Christian monarchy, and that same year the royal sampy — the palladia the missionaries called idols — were brought out and burned. They were not idols. They were guardians of the realm’s hasina, and the fire that consumed them was an act of the highland understanding it meant to end, relocating the sovereignty from the ancestral talisman to the Christian God, with the crown as its keeper.

The kingdom did not long outlast the change of foundation. France pressed its claims through the century’s end, took Antananarivo in September 1895, and annexed Madagascar as a colony in 1896, deporting the last sovereign, Ranavalona III, into an exile that ended in Algiers. Conquest and the “pacification” that followed cost tens of thousands of Malagasy lives; the great uprising that began on 29 March 1947 was put down with very heavy Malagasy losses, a wound the country still counts. Independence came on 26 June 1960.

The living tradition endures alongside a roughly half-Christian present, and the two are more often held together than traded. Estimates of how Christian the country is diverge widely — local religious bodies put Christians near half the population, a 2020 Pew study far higher, near 85 percent — with the Protestant FJKM, the Catholic Church, and the Lutheran and Anglican churches all large; and very many Malagasy Christians keep both allegiances at once, blessing their dead in church and then at the tomb. Church attitudes to the famadihana are themselves divided, some ministers consecrating the rite and others opposing it, and the turning of the bones, the tromba mediums and the work of the ombiasy continue as living observances and not as memories. (A single sober note attends the recent record: the pneumonic plague outbreak of 2017 drew official caution around large gatherings, a public-health matter and not a verdict on the rite.) When the Rova of Antananarivo burned on the night of 6 November 1995, taking the palaces and the royal tombs, it was the Royal Hill of Ambohimanga — the older capital, kept holy — that remained the surviving royal-and-ancestral seat; UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2001.

The scholarship rests on close acquaintance with the highland dead. Maurice Bloch’s Placing the Dead (1971) argued that among the Merina it is the collective tomb, not the house of the living, that defines the enduring family, and David Graeber, working at Arivonimamo, reread the famadihana as a working-through of memory rather than a cult of the dead; the possession scholarship of the Sakalava west keeps its own house in the tromba record, and Jørgen Ruud’s Taboo (1960) gathered the fady as the will of the ancestors made durable. Behind them all lies the Tantara ny Andriana, Callet’s great compilation of highland royal history — the deepest written well of custom the country has, and a court text to be read as one.

A stranger who reaches Madagascar by its western beaches meets the outrigger and the Asian sea; one who climbs to the rice terraces of the interior meets the zebu and the African land. Between the two the language runs unbroken, and so does the order it carries — the ancestors in their stone, the hasina in the field and the throne, the fady kept and the kin held close. The Malagasy did not arrive as one people. They became one, on an island that had no name for them until they gave it one, and they hold the two oceans inside a single word for themselves.

→ Related: Zanahary · Andriamanitra · Razana · Vazimba · Tromba · Ambohimanga · Rova Of Antananarivo · Ambondrombe · Lake Tritriva · The Ombiasy · Famadihana