Malagasy Erotic

The Malagasy are the people of Madagascar, and their existence on that island is one of the strangest facts in human migration. They speak an Austronesian language — closer kin to the languages of Borneo than to anything spoken on the African mainland four hundred kilometers across the Mozambique Channel. Sometime between roughly 350 BCE and 500 CE, outrigger canoes carried settlers from what is now Indonesia across the Indian Ocean. Later waves of Bantu-speaking arrivals, Arab traders along the northwest coast, and smaller numbers of South Asians and Europeans layered themselves over that founding population. The result is a people whose faces, food, kinship terms, and rice-paddy agriculture all carry both halves of that origin at once.

There are roughly twenty recognized sub-groups, and Malagasy themselves take the distinctions seriously. The Merina of the central highlands built the kingdom that, by the nineteenth century, controlled most of the island; the Betsileo are their southern highland neighbors and master terraced-rice cultivators. The Sakalava dominate the western savanna and once ran their own competing kingdom. The Vezo are coastal fishers of the southwest, the Mikea a forest-dwelling people of the southwest interior, the Antandroy and Mahafaly cattle-herders of the arid south, the Betsimisaraka the long coastal population of the east. Highland and coastal Malagasy historically distinguished themselves with some friction, and that division still surfaces in politics.

The language is a single one, mutually intelligible across the island in its standard form but split into regional dialects that mirror the sub-group map. Christianity — both Catholic and a strong Protestant presence dating to nineteenth-century missions — is the dominant religious affiliation, but it sits on top of, rather than replacing, an indigenous framework centered on the ancestors. The razana, the dead, are not gone; they are consulted, fed, and kept close. Among many highland groups this finds its most visible expression in famadihana, the periodic exhumation and rewrapping of ancestral remains, accompanied by music and feasting. Fady — local taboos varying by region, lineage, and sometimes individual — govern food, places, days, and behavior, and breaking one is a serious matter even among nominally Christian families. The result is a religious life in which the imported and the indigenous are not in conflict so much as stacked.