Question

Write a summary overview of the History of Madagascar?

Answer 1

Archeological studies in the 20th century revealed that around 700 CE of human settlers landed in Madagascar. Although the enormous island is geographically close to Bantu-speaking Africa, its language, Malagasy, belongs to the Austronesian language family's distant Western Malayo-Polynesian branch. Nevertheless, the language contains a number of Bantu words, as well as some Bantu origin phonetic and grammatical modificators. In every dialect of Malagasy Bantu elements exist and appear to have been established for some time.

By the beginning of the 16th century, much of Madagascar had been settled by internal migration, granting the formerly barren lands their tompontany (original settlers, or "masters of the soil"). Yet the island remained politically fragmented. Most of the nearly 20 ethnic groups that make up the present population of Malagasy did not attain any sort of "cultural" consciousness until new political ideas arrived from abroad in the 1500s and started to spread all over the island. A host of written European accounts from the 16th and early 17th centuries do not show any great state or kingdom, and none of the oral traditions of Malagasy recorded since the mid-19th century go back too far back in time.

Still, European ships visited small local states at many points along the coast. The capitals near the mouths of the river were almost always situated, territorial territories were always small, and rulers were independent of each other. Alliances and conflicts were usually short-lived affairs with minimal economic aims and no loss of life, and they never contributed to any boundary changes. Pastoral or rural markets were mostly a blend of the two and there were no major disparities in income