MADAGASCAR: A SHORT HISTORY - SOLOFO RANDRIANJA & STEPHEN ELLIS

I’ve wanted to read a book like this for a long time. I’ve read a half dozen other books about Madagascar, mostly travelogue, ethnography, history or biology. This is the sort of book I’ve wanted to read for a long time and I’m glad exists (in English, for obvious reasons most of the books written about Madagascar are in French). My only complaint is that I wish I’d read it sooner, even before moving there. Even the ways in which the book is outdated (it was published in 2009) are fascinating. This book includes the theory that I’ve always heard, that Madagascar was one of the last places on earth people settled (New Zealand being the very last) and this took place only about 2,500 years ago. Well, just this year a paper was published in Science Advances titled, “Early Holocene human presence in Madagascar evidenced by exploitation of avian megafauna” which is presented evidence (tool marks on bones) suggesting humans were butchering the now-extinct Elephant Bird almost 10,500 years ago. That’s a 6,000 year window thrown open. Way less archeology and exploration has been done on Madagascar that it seems like anywhere else, which is why discoveries like that are possible in the year 2018. However, the fact that people were eating monstrous birds for millennia doesn’t, necessarily, mean that they lived there. This book did a great job explaining the early (w/r/t the settlement-2,000-years-ago timeline) history of Madagascar, specifically how groups from all over the Indian Ocean, from Malaysia to Oman to Somalia to India would use this large empty island to stop over on a long journey, or camp out until the Monsoon winds changed. Slowly one after anther of these groups stayed and set up permanent shop and slowly moved inland. This inland was driven by another force this book does a good job of highlighting: slavery. It’s impossible to talk about Malagasy history without mentioning the constant churn and drive for slaves, both to sell abroad and to use at home, and what that drive did to the island. Originally people were moving inland to escape coastal slave raids, eventually this flips and powerful Merina Kingdoms in the middle, highland portion of the island organize campaigns against all other parts of the island. This book does a good job highlighting how the fact that there is even one country that is all of Madagascar is largely a European desire projected on the island: “It was not Madagascar’s inexorable destiny to become one country under the rule of a single government. This outcome is best understood as the result of a long series of particular struggles and patterns of interactions.” There’s lots of wonderful stuff about all the different names Madagascar has been known under and Malagasy, the languages, doesn’t have non-European word for the whole island. My only other complaint is that the book focuses strongly on the highlands and northern coasts (Sakalava, Betsimisraka and Merina people get basically all the stage time). This is a pretty constant problem with Western works about Madagascar and I know that this book is a “short” history, but even still, it was a bit too myopic in this regard. Finally, it was fascinating to read this while I’ve been following the 2018 Malagasy Presidential election. Like I said, this book was published in 2009, so it doesn’t include information about the 2009 political crisis that the current election seeks (fingers crossed) to resolve. In 2009 Ravalomananan (who is still in power at the end of the book) was deposed by weeks of protest and unrest, much of which was lead by the then-mayor of Tana, Andry Rajoelina. In 2013, when I lived in Madagascar, they held an election but would not let Rajoelina nor Ravalomanana run. The winner was a man named Hero Rajaonarimampianina (longest name for a head of state) but this didn’t really solve the feeling of illegitimacy. This month they had another election. The first round of voting is over but since no one candidate received 50% of the vote Rajoelina and Ravalomanana will face each other again on December 19th. I will understand the results better having read this book. 444 Baobob trees.