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'One That's More Torrid': The Pirates of Madagascar

Madagascar (Part II) Stilts

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Madagascar: II While the precise details of initial settlement of Madagascar are still under investigation, it is clear that the Austronesian settlers did mix with the Bantu people of east Africa, who had probably long visited the island on a seasonal basis.
The new civilization appears to have thrived, and “By 1100 CE, there was no single region of Madagascar, including the hinterland, whose most favorable points were not occupied, even if the total population of the island remained small” (Randrianja and Ellis 48).

The gradations of genetic heritage within the Malagasy people were visible to early visitors to the island, with the people of the central and northern regions noted as more physically similar to the Indonesian strain of origin and the Malagasy of the western and southern regions more influenced by African ancestry. European visitors generally assumed a racial hierarchy based on these differences, but what extant evidence exists suggests that was based more on the Europeans' own cultural assumptions than any real fact, and that social and political hierarchies were far more complex than the visitors realized. A "racially diverse population" was present for centuries, united by language and "common culture, of which the main features are ancestral veneration [...] the ritual importance of cattle [...] and the construction of rectangular houses" in the Austronesian style (Brown 11-12).

The proto-Malagasy, as these early settlers are called, were visited by further waves of visitors. Several of the most significant immigrant groups brought dramatically new cultures and faiths to Madagascar. Around the turn of the first millennium CE, Arab traders grew very influential in "east Africa (the Swahili coastal towns), the Comoros islands and the northern and eastern coasts of Madagascar [...] based on slaving and the long-distance exchange of exotic goods" (Parker Pearson 394). The Zafibrahim ('Descendants of Abraham') arrived around the twelfth century CE, possibly from the Middle East, although their practices appear to have been pre-Islamic. The Zafiraminia appear to have arrived from Sumatra a century or two later (in Arabic, the core of "Raminia" is "ar-Ræmyn," meaning the "Children of the Sumatrans"). The latter not only brought a particularly significant knowledge of the now-Islamicized region's faith, but "separate words for 'politics' and 'faith'" which had, until that point, been inexorably linked in Malagasy culture (Randrianja and Ellis 62).

The already hybrid Afro-Austronesian culture thus shifted towards Islam, although that influence seems to have faded over time. "'The people hold to the law of Mohammed,'" according to a sixteenth-century French traveler, "'yet they do not worship either God or Mohammed, but the moon'" (Larson 46). The latter claim was no doubt a bit hyperbolic, as other travelers of the time observed residents who had “knowledge of the Qur'an and of the annual feast of Ramadan” and noted “they did not eat pork and they practiced circumcision” (Randrianja and Ellis 62). It does illustrate, however, that the Islam of the Malagasy was as unique and multifaceted as their language and heritage. Elements of the island's original religious structures remained intact (some to this day) and no mosques were built on the island in this period.

Kings ruled for hundreds of years in manner very similar to those of the Austronesian kings, both in terms of their titles and the their symbols of power. Nobility was conferred to a broader subsection of society that in European structures, and could imply rights to certain rituals and foods, without necessarily including greater political power or wealth. Furthermore, Randrianja and Ellis note that the definition of terms such as "white" (fotsy) and "dark" (mainty) in early modern records of the Malagasy must be expanded, as they did not necessarily coincide with skin color (67-8).

Until the early seventeenth century, the people of Madagascar appear to have been largely "organized into small, ethnically based communities that subsisted on trade, agriculture, and cattle herding" (Bortolot). At that point, descendants of the Zafiraminia and several other groups in the southwest consolidated power. Known as the Sakalava (and sometimes referred to by the name of their ruling family, the Maroserana), they dramatically shifted the island's economy to larger-scale trade in slaves (often from neighboring populations on the island and the northwesterly Comoros islands) and cattle. Population growth of the Sakalava state appears to have occurred partly through assimilating communities in the region who sought protection from other regional slave raiders, both European and non-European (Hooper 64).

The first significant Sakalava ruler was "King Lahifotsy (c. 1614-83), who quickly acquired vast wealth in cattle and made war on rival rulers along the west coast, building a substantial kingdom and entering into direct contact with Dutch traders" (Ellis 444). Another prince was given the name "Andriamandazoala, or 'The Prince who Destroys the Forest', quite possibly a reflection of the tendency of the Sakalava kings to cut down trees in order to establish grazing lands" (Randrianja and Ellis 94).

Glimpses of this shifting economy are found in the General History, as the pirates visit virtually all regions of the island. The increasingly centralized power on the southwestern coast (soon to be followed by rising power in the central highlands, by the Merina kingdom) increased the speed and efficacy with which visitors to the island could trade. Already at a crossroads for African and Asian travelers, the island would soon become a useful center of trade for European travelers -- and its unique coastline and location would make it the most significant center for European pirate activity outside of the Caribbean.