I took Latin for 3 years at school and visited Rome 3 times (this is a picture from my 2016 trip) but I have yet to be able to put together a full well-written paragraph in Malagasy or visit Mahilaka (You should really attend next Saturday seminar). It’s been a thrill on a personal level as a Malagasy foreign trained Architect working in my homeland that I manage to ggather a good background on everyhing from ethnology, anthropology, archeology but not much on architecture. One thing you can be sure of : I definetly will not be one of those who will suggest my clients to build some strange hilltop antics …
This is a thread I started few days ago as I noticed very few of my Malagasy friends know about our ancestry from the first waves of migrations. Of course everybody knows about proto-malagasy we call “Ntaolo” such as the Mikea, last primitive tribe the people of the forest, and the very prestigious Vezo, nomads of the sea, apart of them we are very very loose on determining of our origins.
I started this thread few days ago as I noticed very few of my Malagasy friends (me included) knew about our ancestry of the first waves of migrations. Of course everybody is aware of proto-malagasy we call “Ntaolo” such as the Mikea, last primitive tribe the people of the forest, and the very prestigious Vezo, nomads of the sea, apart of them we are very very loose on determining of our origins past the 6th generation. Therefore it took me dizains and dizains of scholars’ researches to read, digest and dots to link together. I am now able to summarize everything knowledgeable about our common Malagasy ancestry from African and Indonesian altogether from the 1st permanent and formal settlement in the 10th century.
On the other hand it is unsetlling to evocate that Madagascar as we know was a colony created intentionally by slave traders from a powerful empire who brought women and men from vassal tribes along with them.
After the French colonization, in 1960 the founding fathers of Madagascar Independance had to retrieve our Past and in their efforts were scrambling with harmonizing ethnicities which lived in together but fought with each others for centuries. The 1st settlers most precious legacies are our common language and also very very interesting practices of religions, a very specific kind of Syncretism. All post are in French, you might need to use translation app :
Intro https://purplecorner.com/syncretism/
Part 1 https://purplecorner.com/protohistoire-de-madagascar-nos-origines-banjar-sous-lempire-sriwijaya/
Part 2 https://purplecorner.com/histoire-de-madagascar-nos-origines-bantou-durant-lere-sriwijaya/
Part 3 https://purplecorner.com/histoire-de-madagascar-le-destin-de-la-civilisation-laissee-par-sriwijaya/
Outro
Thread on Twitter (frequent updates)