Madagascar and Africa: II. The Sakalava, Maroserana, Dady and Tromba before 1700

Abstract

Linguistic research has revealed a Bantu ‘substratum’ among the few ethnic relics of western Madagascar that survive in what became known as the Sakalava empire. Early in the 1600's, two Jesuits familiar with both sides of the Moçambique Channel, discovered that some 300 miles of western Malagasy littoral bore the name of Bambala and were inhabited by Bantu-speaking agriculturalists, whose idiom was only modified by Malagasy loans. Bambala's African colonies were sub-divided into riverain chiefdoms, the largest of which was Sadia, with some 10,000 inhabitants in 1617. From it, the Sakalava warriors fanned out in the 1620's, came into contact with the southwestern Maroserana dynasty and gave it an empire by 1690 stretching from St Augustine Bay to present-day Majunga.Maroserana kings adopted two of Bambala's politico-religious institutions, while the empire-building gradually decimated the original Sakalava warriors and swept away Bambala's Bantu speakers by ± 1710. Pastoralists from north, south and east replaced the former agricultural peoples while retaining the name ‘Sakalava’. But, there is no doubt that the first Malagasy empire was an African creation, and doubly so since association with gold confirms anew the close links between the Maroserana and gold-bearing Mwene Mutapa.