Myth and History: The Malagasy Andriambahoaka and the Indonesian Legacy

Abstract

The early cultural history of Madagascar, inseparable from that of the Indian Ocean, remains very poorly known. I agree with other authors that the peopling of the island is recent; so far we do not have any archeological evidence dating prior to the ninth century. While it is beyond doubt that the islands received people, techniques, and ideas from all the areas around the Indian Ocean, recent work confirms the dominance of a double--or rather a triple--component: an Indonesian one, much Indianized before being tinged with a particular brand of Shicite Islam around the thirteenth century; an Arabo-Persian influence; and an African, particularly Bantu, influence. The Bantu influence, is in most cases, inseparable from the preceding. Deschamps believes that the more recent, “Islamized,” arrivals brought with them new political concepts that led, according to Kent, to the emergence of the first Malagasy kingdoms at the beginning of the sixteenth century. I also agree with this point and believe that the concepts of a kingship based on the mystic pre-eminence of a sovereign of which the prototype were the Andriambahoaka were introduced into Madagascar by the first Malagasy dynasty, the ZafiRaminia (lit. “the descendants of Raminia”). These ZafiRaminia, who dominated for a time the entire coast and penetrated at an early date into the interior, largely constitute the origins of other dynasties in the central, southern, and western parts of the island. This does not preclude that these various dynasties were later strongly marked by other influences, especially that of the Antemoro.