Madagascar
Capital: Antananarivo · East Africa & Horn
The great island where Austronesian seafarers met African migrants — producing the Malagasy language, famadihana ancestor rites and the Merina monarchy.
Ethnic communities
- MerinaHighland kingdom builders of Antananarivo
- BetsileoMaster rice-terrace farmers and woodcarvers
- SakalavaWestern coastal kingdoms with royal relic cults
- Betsimisaraka, Antandroy, BaraCoastal and southern pastoral cultures
More communities of Madagascar
- Betsimisaraka · East-coast vanilla and clove cultivators
- Antandroy · Spiny-desert herders of cactus country
- Bara · Zebu pastoralists of the southern plateau
- Tsimihety · 'Those who never cut their hair' — independent northerners
- Antaimoro · Keepers of sorabe Arabic-script manuscripts
- Antanosy & Mahafaly · Southern tomb-art sculptors of aloalo posts
- Vezo · Nomadic sail-fishers of the west coast
- Mikea · Forest foragers of the dry southwest
- Antakarana · Northern kingdom of tsangantsaina pole rites
- Sihanaka · Lake Alaotra's rice-basin farmers
- Zafimaniry · Woodcraft villages of UNESCO-listed artistry
- Makoa · African-descended communities of the coasts
Languages
Major languages: Malagasy, French
Language families: Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Kingdom of Imerina
- • Sakalava kingdoms (Menabe, Boina)
- • Betsimisaraka confederation
Heritage sites
- • Royal Hill of Ambohimanga
- • Tsingy de Bemaraha
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Madagascar
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Politics & liberation1884–1943
Jean Ralaimongo
Nationalism
Veteran of the First World War who founded the Malagasy nationalist press and campaigned for equal citizenship rights under French rule.
- Music & the arts1901–1937
Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo
Poetry
Largely self-taught, he is regarded as Africa's first modern poet, writing in Malagasy and French before taking his own life at 36 after colonial rejection.
- Politics & liberation1861–1917
Ranavalona III
Monarchy
Last sovereign of the Kingdom of Madagascar, deposed and exiled by France in 1897. Her remains were returned to Antananarivo in 1938.
Deep-dive community profiles
Antaimoro
The people of the sacred manuscripts — a south-eastern coastal group descended in part from Muslim settlers, keepers of the sorabe books written in Malagasy in Arabic script, and makers of the paper those books are written on.
Open deep profile →Antandroy
The people of the thorns — cattle herders of Madagascar's spiny desert, whose carved aloalo grave posts stand above tombs grander than any house, and who migrate across the island for work while their dead stay put.
Open deep profile →Bara
The cattle people of Madagascar's southern plateau — herders for whom stealing zebu was a required proof of manhood before marriage, and whose dead are carried up sandstone cliffs into caves that nobody can reach.
Open deep profile →Betsileo
The rice-terrace engineers of Madagascar's southern highlands — whose hillsides are carved into staircases of paddy, whose famadihana reburials are the island's most elaborate, and whose Fianarantsoa country is the heart of Malagasy scholarship.
Open deep profile →Betsimisaraka
Madagascar's second largest people, of the rainforest east coast, whose name means the many who do not separate, assembled into a confederation around 1710 by the son of an English pirate and a Malagasy noblewoman.
Open deep profile →Merina
The highland kingdom-builders of Madagascar — an Austronesian-African people whose rice terraces, royal hill-cities and famadihana ancestor ceremonies unified the great island under Queen Ranavalona's dynasty from Antananarivo.
Open deep profile →Mikea
The forest people of the south-west — families who live by foraging in the dry spiny forest, drawing water from tubers rather than wells, and whose existence has been argued over by anthropologists for fifty years while their forest is cut for maize.
Open deep profile →Sakalava
The kingdom-builders of Madagascar's west coast — whose Menabe and Boina empires once dominated half the island, whose royal relics (dady) are honoured in the fitampoha bathing ceremony, and whose tromba spirit-possession lets dead kings speak.
Open deep profile →Sihanaka
The people of the marshes — rice farmers of Lake Alaotra whose drained wetland is Madagascar's granary, whose lake is shrinking under silt from the deforested hills, and whose name means those of the swamps.
Open deep profile →Vezo
The people who are Vezo because they fish — a west-coast community defined by activity rather than descent, sailing outrigger pirogues without engines or charts, and now watching industrial fleets take the reef they read like a map.
Open deep profile →