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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
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.
1. The subject under discussion is an extremely vast one. Referring to my own articles, which themselves refer to extensive bibliographies, helps to limit the number of citations.
2. I do not discuss here the question of possible indirect or direct influences from Dravidian India. For these see Ottino, Paul, “L'origine dravidienne du vocabulaire du riz et de la riziculture à Madagascar,” Annuaires des Pays de l'Océan Indien, 2 (1975), 103–21.Google Scholar
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4. Deschamps, Hubert, Histoire de Madagascar (Paris, 1960)Google Scholar; Kent, Raymond K., Early Kingdoms in Madagascar, 1500-1700 (New York, 1970), 59.Google Scholar
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6. Ibid.
7. Collection des ouvrages anciens Concernant Madagascar, ed. Alfred, and Grandidier, Guillaume (9 vols.: Paris, 1903–1920), 2:193–94.Google Scholar Henceforth this work will be abbreviated COACM.
8. Ibid., 2: 169.
9. COACM 8: 40.
10. Ibid.
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14. Raminia--and not her father Ramini--appears to me to be the female ancestor of the ZafiRaminia. We have seen that Flacourt noted repeatedly that filiation was uterine (COACM 8:13). See also the ZafiKazimambo, the descendants of Kazimambo, as noted in fn. 11.
15. COACM 8: 80–89; de Lacombe, B.P. Léguevel, Voyage à Madagascar et aux iles Comores (1823 a 1830) (2 vols.: Paris, 1840), 2: 179–91Google Scholar; Ferrand, G., “Les voyages des Javanais à Madagascar,” Journal Asiatique, 10th ser., 15 (1910), 219–21.Google Scholar
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17. Ottino, Mythe d'Andrianoro,” 216.
18. H.G. Quaritch Wales, after describing the navigational difficulties along the east coast of the Kra isthmus in Malaysia, which (precisely in eastern Madagascar) is exposed without any shelter to prevailing easterlies) described the pangkalan or pangkalen as follows: “…the Malays were adept at making use of sheltered inland waterways, and it so happened that nature had provided them with one, requiring only small improvements, which gave all-weather safe navigation to the Inland Sea--and Satingphra. A canal some fifteen miles long running east from Nak'on connects with the mouth of the Phanang river, not far from where it empties into the Nak'on Bight. This river flows along the east coast from a point near the northern end of the Inland Sea, to which a short canal and the Ranot river give access.” Wales, Quaritch, The Malay Peninsula in Hindu Times (London, 1976), 154–55Google Scholar; see also 134ff. Wales notes that the Frenchman Lajonquiére had indicated on a map the course of this inland waterway. Ibid., 155n43.
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25. Ottino, “Mythologie malgache.”
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31. Hossein Nasr, Tabātābʿī, 85n7, gives the following: “The term ta 'wil, which plays a cardinal role in Shiʿism as well as Sufism, means literally to return to the origin of a thing. It means to penetrate the external aspect of any reality, whether it be sacred scripture of phenomena of nature, to its inner essence.”
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44. In my “Thème indo-malgache” I purposely did not treat the Persian versions of this same legend, nor the story of the two jealous sisters in The Thousand and One Nights.
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51. Ibid., 39.
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66. Ibid., 101.
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68. Ibid.
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70. Ottino, “Hiérarchie sociale.”
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95. COACM, 9: 91–92. Since an early article (Ottino, “Hiérarchie sociale”) my study of Matacassi is continuing and it would be premature to say more about it. Slipping from the status of Indianized God-king (see the episode related by Flacourt, in COACM, 9: 185)Google Scholar to that of simple magician-astrologer and talisman-maker is explained by the cultural context and the domination the Indonesian ZafiRaminia exercised over the populations of other origins. B.G. Martin poses, but does not answer, this same question with regard to the sayyids of the Indian Ocean, descendants of Muhammad through his daughter Fatima and ʿAli. See his “Arab Migrations to East Africa,” 379-80.
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