Where They Came From

Granted my visa arrives before Saturday, I leave the United States on Sunday. And all this past weekend I have realized that 9 months in a new place wildly different than what is common and familiar is quite a bit of time. Not that I didn’t know this before, but realizations like these often sneak up on us when we least expect them and most certainly when they are unwelcomed and untimely. But I needed to write about something this week before I leave, if for no other reason than to get used to writing interesting things for you. So I decided, after only a short deliberation, that the best way to introduce you to Madagascar is to tell you about the Malagasy and how the ancestors of now nearly 28 million people arrived on a genuine ark of nearly continental size.

If you did not play an incredible amount of RISK growing up, you may be unfamiliar with Madagascar’s location. I encourage you to look at it on a globe rather than a map so you can see how large this African island that sits nearly 250 miles off the coast of Mozambique actually is. For those of us who are geographically and directionally challenged, I’m talking about the southeastern coast of the continent of Africa. From northern tip of Nosy Be to the southern cape of Cape Sainte Marie, Le Grand Île stretches 1000 miles. And with the exception of a few inlets and salients, the tropical coastline runs perfectly parallel from north to south with the widest point of the island spanning some 300 miles. From the international space station, it looks like a very pointed left-shoe. To put this into perspective, Madagascar is the world’s 4th largest island, not including Australia, with an estimated 90-95% of its biodiversity being unique to the island itself. So isolated from the rest of the world, Madagascar, biologists and geographers say, with a handful of exceptions, has not changed for nearly 40 million years, and humans didn’t arrive until nearly the time of Christ, or even after. And that leads us to the legend of the Malagasy people and how they arrived on the Eighth Continent some 1,500-2,000 years ago. Come, let me tell you a few stories of where they came from.

According to legend, Ietsy was the first man to live on Madagascar. He fell from the sky, or so it is said, and found a lush and rich island of lizards, birds, and small mammals. All around this island he found statues, beautiful statues, of human figures. He admired and cherished them, but they were static, dull, and lifeless. So Breath spoke with Andriamanitra, who is god, and offered to breath life into them. And so he did. The statues sprung to life, and Ietsy became their father, and they, his children. These first Malagasy, called the Vazimba (an important name for later), realized that the harsh and sweltering heat of the coastal regions was too much to bear. Thus, they moved into the center of the island where a long mountain range of plateaus, hills, and valleys protected them from the heat of the Indian Ocean.

Approximately 3,500 miles away, Galo, who, as far as I know, was just some average joe living on an island somewhere out in the Indian Ocean, presumably Indonesia, took a walk along the beach and stumbled upon an injured bird. The goodhearted Galo, so compelled with compassion, maybe, assisted the bird who thanked him. When Galo asked the bird where he came from, for the bird was like none he had ever seen on his island before, the bird told our hero about a beautiful island where the rivers run freely and shine like silver. Well, Galo needed no further explanation, nor was evidence of such an island necessary, when he resolved to make voyage to this seeming paradise and call it his own.

He returned to his village and told them about this island, excluding the fact that he had heard about it from an injured foreign bird he had found on the beach, and proceeded to employ what I would call the most rhetorically successful speech in the history of mankind. When asked what was on this island that was so important, Galo responded, “the future.”

“What is the future,” his village asked.

“I don’t know. But that is where it is, and we will only know if we go there.”

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Galo’s people were hooked. His charism burst from his words. His wisdom clearly derived from the ancient spirits. His logic and reasoning unsurpassed by any and impenetrable to any argument. And so, Galo and his people packed up their canoes fashioned with outriggers, and in what I can only imagine was a journey as overwhelmingly pleasant and filled with singing, sort of like the last scene in Disney’s Moana, set sail to find “the future”. Ah yes, I can see it now, the peaceful ocean with the wind only ever blowing in the right direction, the rains coming just softly enough to replenish the water supplies, and enough rice stored and fish caught to last the journey four-times over. I cannot possibly imagine a 3,500-mile voyage across the Indian Ocean going any other way.

Anyways, Galo and his people reached Madagascar. Upon realizing that the coastline, for lack of better or more elegant terminology, sucks, decided to move inland to get away from the heat. They marched up to the plateau where, to their great surprise, found an entire civilization, the Vazimba. Galo’s people, the first Malagasy, is said to have either killed, pushed out, or absorbed them into their own. From there, the rest of Malagasy history proceeds as expected. There are zebu (a type of cow), rice fields, tavy (a slash and burn agricultural practice), slavery, dancing with the bones of the ancestors, spiritual possession, tossing out children born on unlucky days, fady (or taboos set by the ancestors), the usual. Although this story is interesting, for the most part, it only becomes more exciting when it is paired with how archeologists, ethnographers, and anthropologists actually think the Malagasy people showed up.

The process of colonizing and then fully occupying Madagascar is sometimes referred to as “the most beautiful enigma in the world.” Why? Because there seems to be only two things we know for certain about Madagascar’s people. First, they are distinctly Indonesian in culture with square houses, a near identical language, and the practice of various ancestor veneration (worship is the wrong word here). Second, there is a distinctly East African aspect of their culture revealed in the practice of cattle farming of the zebu, the dark skin tones and other physically Bantu features of the people in the western part of the island, and the sparce usage of some East African words from a variety of the languages there, such as omby for cow. Other than these, there is no consistent or evidenced consensus on when, where, how, or why the Malagasy people showed up in Madagascar. Likewise, there are two theories of how Indonesia and Africa had an unexpected love-affair child on a mini-continent seemingly cut off from the rest of, well, everything.

The first, and probably my favorite, suggests that sometime around 500AD, a small group of Indonesian sailors “stumbled” into Madagascar. That’s right. A few voyagers were out there in the ocean and accidentally sailed 3,500 miles, so conveniently running into a massive island. Around the same time, a small group of settlers arrived on the west coast from Mozambique. Both groups made their way towards the center plateau of the island because, as previously mentioned, the coast sucks. There they mingled and became the Vazimba tribe (ah there it is again). Later, around 1,000AD there was an unprovoked mass migration from Indonesia to Madagascar. That’s right. An entire group of people decided to up-and-up leave and sail across the Indian Ocean for seemingly no reason, just so happening to run into Madagascar where, upon realizing that the coast sucks, moved up into the mountains and found, you guessed it, the Vazimba, whom they proceeded to kill, push out, or absorb. The rest is history.

The second, and probably more plausible explanation, is that the Indonesian people, being the voyagers and traders they are, set up a trade route along the Indian, Arab, and East African coasts. It is postulated that they settled, temporarily, in East Africa, and that some of its members moved to Madagascar in a first wave of migration around 500AD where, upon seeing that the coast sucked, moved into the plateau region of the island. Not too long after, a group of Bantu related Africans made the same journey and followed the original settlers up the mountains where they became, you guessed it, the Vazimba. Around 1,000AD, those Indonesians who remained in East Africa made a sudden and mass exodus to the northeast part of Madagascar. What prompted this movement is uncertain, but it is postulated that as the Bantu people, the ethnic group we most associate with Sub Sahara Africa, moved out of the Niger-Congo region towards the east, slaughtering pygmies and conquering other tribes along the way, the Indonesian settlers fled in order to escape the inevitable doom. After arriving on Madagascar, they realized that the coast sucked and moved inland to the plateau where they found, you guessed it, the Vazimba and proceeded to kill, push out, or absorb them. The rest is history.

And there you have it, the three theories of how the Malagasy came to Madagascar. Fascinating, isn’t it? That we can know so much and so little simultaneously. Ah! I get chills thinking about it because, as I said before, there is no solid evidence, necessarily, for any of this. That is, the story of Ietsy falling from the sky and Galo saving a bird and delivering the most spectacularly rhetorical speech in history or that an entire group of settlers just left their island and sailed 3,500 miles on a whim could both be true. The Merina people, those who settled Antananarivo, where I will be, and who were the first people to conquer nearly the entire island, say that their ancestors landed along the northeast coast, at some point. The timing is not really clear, but suspect around 1,000AD. Upon finding that the coast sucked, they moved to the plateau of Antananarivo where they found, again, my reader, you are so wise and learn so quickly, you guessed it, the Vazimba. They proceeded to… You should know by now.

But how interesting it is, that all of these stories, more or less, are the same and contain, probably, some grain of truth within them. It frustrates archeologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers that they cannot find any evidence to support definitively any of these stories. I didn’t even include the immense Arab and Islamic influence in the 1200s. Yet the influence is mostly on the southeast coast, the furthest point of Madagascar from the Arab coast. What?! I’ve also excluded that there is no sign of Indonesian settlements in East Africa. What? An entire people packed up and moved leaving absolutely no evidence? No pottery, building foundations, or signs? Nothing? Absolutely nothing?

What about the language? Don’t get me started that somehow 16 tribes or ethnicities (both terms are inappropriate for the actual relationships, but they’re the best we have right now) share a single language with no grammatical differentiation and only a small, generally arbitrary, difference in minute vocabulary. What?! Papua New Guinea, an island slightly larger with similar ancestral origins, has more than 700 distinct and unrelated languages whereas Madagascar only has one, Malagasy. And what about Galo? “The future”? Really? If someone had given me a description of a beautiful European city with running waterfalls and then proceeded to bring me to Lisbon Falls, which looks nothing like Lisbon, Portugal, nor has any majestic waterfalls, I would have killed him on the spot, maybe, violence isn’t necessarily my thing all the time. But that’s what happened, according to legend anyways.

I didn’t intend for this blog to be that long. So I apologize. But I hope it has been worth your read. I want to share with you as much of my experience as I can, and with any grace, this little introduction to the settling of the Red Island has given you a taste of the craziness that is Madagascar. To put it in perspective, this is only the beginning of the Malagasy people. There is still another 1,000-1,500 years of history, just as interesting, bizarre, and wild as these legends and stories. There’s more to Madagascar than a bunch of lost New York Zoo animals and a host of dancing lemurs trying to boogie in the jungle.

By the grace of God, I’ll be on the ground waiting for a negative Covid test this time next week in Ivato, Madagascar. Or I’ll be at home frantically trying to reschedule flights and hotels. Yet it is all in God’s hands.

May God be praised.