The history of Madagascar

Madagascar was one of the last large landmasses on earth to be settled by people, and its first permanent inhabitants came not from nearby Africa but across the Indian Ocean from island South-east Asia. Their descendants mixed with Bantu-speaking Africans and with Arab, Persian and Swahili traders to form the Malagasy people, who speak an Austronesian language related to those of Borneo. A patchwork of kingdoms gave way in the nineteenth century to the Merina monarchy of the central highlands, which built a literate, Christian state recognised abroad before France conquered it in 1895. Independent since 1960, Madagascar has passed through four republics, several mass protest movements and repeated changes of power outside the ballot box, most recently in October 2025.

Madagascar broke away from Africa around 160 million years ago and from India around 88 million years ago, and its isolation produced lemurs, chameleons, giant elephant birds and thousands of plants found nowhere else. When humans first arrived is still argued over. Cut marks on animal bones hint at visits by foragers thousands of years ago, but the earliest clear evidence of continuous settlement dates to the middle of the first millennium CE.

Language, genetics and crops point to the origin of the main founding population. Malagasy is closest to Ma'anyan, spoken in southern Borneo, and contains Malay and Javanese loanwords. The settlers, probably sailing outrigger canoes along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, brought rice, bananas, taro and coconuts, and traditions of house building, music and burial shared with peoples across the Austronesian world, from Indonesia to the Pacific. Scholars place their arrival anywhere from a few centuries BCE to around 500 CE. Malagasy oral tradition remembers the early forest-dwelling peoples of the highlands as the Vazimba, and the fishing peoples of the south-west coast as the Vezo, a name still used today.

The newcomers cleared forest by slash-and-burn farming and hunted the island's megafauna. Within a few centuries the giant lemurs, pygmy hippopotamuses and elephant birds had gone extinct, through hunting, habitat change and probably climate.

From roughly the seventh century Madagascar was drawn into the wider world of the western Indian Ocean. Bantu-speaking farmers and herders from the East African coast, part of the long Bantu expansion, settled on the island, especially in the west, and by about 1000 had introduced zebu cattle, which became central to wealth, ritual and status everywhere on the island. Malagasy absorbed many Bantu words, and over centuries of intermarriage the Malagasy became a people of roughly equal Asian and African ancestry.

Muslim traders from the Swahili coast, the Persian Gulf and Arabia founded trading posts in the north-west, around what is now Mahajanga, linking the island to the towns of Swahili culture such as Kilwa and Zanzibar and to the Comoros. They brought Islam to some coastal communities, and in the south-east scribes of the Antemoro people wrote Malagasy in Arabic script, a tradition called sorabe. The island exported rice, cattle and enslaved people, and imported cloth, ceramics and metalwork. Marco Polo described Madagascar from hearsay, confusing it in part with the African mainland.

The first European to see the island was the Portuguese captain Diogo Dias, whose ship was blown off course on the way to India in August 1500. The Portuguese Empire traded on the coast but never settled. English attempts at colonies in the 1640s failed within a few years, and a French post at Fort-Dauphin in the far south-east, founded in 1643, lasted until 1674, when its last survivors were evacuated after conflict with the Antanosy. The Kingdom of France kept a claim to the island, and French settlement shifted to the neighbouring islands of Réunion and Mauritius.

Between about 1680 and 1725 the north-east coast, especially Île Sainte-Marie and Antongil Bay, became a base for pirates preying on the shipping of the Indian Ocean, among them Henry Every and Thomas Tew. Some settled and married into local families. Firearms obtained in exchange for captives shifted the balance between Malagasy groups. On the west coast the Maroserana dynasty built the Sakalava kingdoms of Menabe and Boina, which grew rich on cattle and the slave trade and from the seventeenth century dominated much of the western half of the island. On the east coast, Ratsimilaho, said to be the son of an English pirate and a Malagasy princess, united the Betsimisaraka confederation in the early eighteenth century.

In the central highlands the Merina people developed intensive irrigated rice farming that supported dense populations. Around 1610 King Andrianjaka seized the hill of Analamanga from the Vazimba and built a fortified royal compound, or rova, there, the beginning of Antananarivo. Imerina later broke into four rival kingdoms. Around 1787 Andrianampoinimerina, ruling from the sacred hill of Ambohimanga, began to reunite them through marriage, diplomacy and war. He reorganised farming and drainage around the capital and declared that the sea was the boundary of his rice field, a claim to the whole island.

His son Radama I, who ruled from 1810 to 1828, set out to make it real. Britain, newly in control of Mauritius after the Napoleonic Wars, wanted an ally against French influence and an end to the slave trade. In 1817 Radama agreed to ban the export of slaves in return for weapons, money and military advisers, and Britain recognised him as king of Madagascar. Welsh missionaries of the London Missionary Society opened schools, and in the 1820s the Malagasy language was written in the Latin alphabet, with a complete Bible translation printed by 1835. Merina armies conquered the Betsileo and much of the east coast, though the Sakalava and the peoples of the far south resisted.

Radama's widow, Ranavalona I, reigned from 1828 to 1861. Determined to protect the kingdom's independence and traditional religion, she banned Christianity in 1835, expelled missionaries and had many converts executed, enslaved or otherwise punished. She also used the French adventurer Jean Laborde to build workshops producing guns, glass and soap. Warfare, forced labour and disease took a heavy toll on the population during her reign. Her son Radama II reopened the country to foreigners and granted sweeping concessions to a French businessman, Joseph-François Lambert, but was killed in a palace coup in 1863.

Real power then lay with the prime minister Rainilaiarivony, who held office from 1864 to 1895 and married three queens in turn: Rasoherina, Ranavalona II and Ranavalona III. In 1869 Ranavalona II was baptised and the royal idols were burned, making Protestant Christianity the faith of the court. The state modernised quickly, with a written legal code, a standing army, a medical school and hospital, newspapers and, by the 1890s, schools attended by about 200,000 pupils.

French claims, revived through the Lambert concessions, led to a first Franco-Malagasy war from 1883 to 1885, which left France with a protectorate over the kingdom's foreign affairs and the port of Diego-Suarez. During the Scramble for Africa, Britain recognised a French protectorate in 1890 in exchange for French recognition of its own over Zanzibar. In 1895 a French expedition landed at Mahajanga and marched on the capital, losing thousands of men to malaria but taking Antananarivo that September. France annexed the island in 1896. When the Menalamba ("red shawl") rising spread across the highlands, General Joseph Gallieni was sent to crush it, and in 1897 he abolished the monarchy and exiled Queen Ranavalona III, eventually to Algeria.

Colonial rule rested on forced labour, head taxes and land concessions to French companies, and favoured coastal peoples over the Merina elite. Slavery was formally abolished in 1896. Malagasy soldiers fought for France in the First World War, and nationalist societies such as Vy Vato Sakelika, founded in 1913, were repressed. In 1940 Nazi planners briefly considered deporting Europe's Jews to the island, the so-called Madagascar Plan, which was dropped as the regime turned to the Holocaust. In the Second World War the colony was held by Vichy France until British forces invaded in 1942 and handed it to the Free French.

After the war Malagasy deputies elected to the French parliament campaigned for independence through legal means. On the night of 29 March 1947 armed nationalists attacked French bases and plantations in the east, and the revolt spread across much of the island. French forces, including colonial troops from Africa, suppressed it with mass killings, torture and the destruction of villages. Estimates of Malagasy deaths range from about 11,000 to nearly 90,000, many from hunger and disease among people who fled into the forest. The nationalist deputies were tried and condemned, though later freed.

Reforms followed in the 1950s, and in 1958 the Malagasy Republic became self-governing within the French Community. On 26 June 1960 it became fully independent, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa, with Philibert Tsiranana, a schoolteacher from the north-west, as president.

Tsiranana's First Republic kept close ties with France, which retained bases and economic dominance. Student and worker protests in 1972 forced him to hand power to General Gabriel Ramanantsoa. In February 1975 his successor, Colonel Richard Ratsimandrava, was assassinated after six days in office, and in June a military directorate chose Lieutenant-Commander Didier Ratsiraka as head of state. Ratsiraka's Democratic Republic, created that year, nationalised banks and industry, drew closer to the Soviet Union and North Korea during the Cold War, and expelled French forces. The economy declined badly, and from the 1980s he turned back to the market and the International Monetary Fund.

Mass protests in 1991, during which the presidential guard fired on marchers, forced multiparty elections, and in 1993 Albert Zafy defeated Ratsiraka and opened the Third Republic. Zafy was impeached in 1996, and Ratsiraka won the election that followed. In 2001 the mayor of Antananarivo, the dairy businessman Marc Ravalomanana, challenged him; both claimed victory, and the island was split by a months-long standoff in 2002 until Ravalomanana prevailed and Ratsiraka went into exile.

In 2009 another mayor of the capital, Andry Rajoelina, led protests against Ravalomanana, and with army support took power. The African Union suspended Madagascar and donors cut aid, and the economy suffered during a long transition. A new constitution created the Fourth Republic in 2010, and Hery Rajaonarimampianina was elected president in 2013. Rajoelina returned to office by winning the 2018 election and was re-elected in 2023 amid an opposition boycott and very low turnout.

Madagascar remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with frequent cyclones, droughts in the south and heavy loss of forest. In late September 2025, protests led largely by young people began over chronic power and water cuts and grew into demands for Rajoelina's resignation. On 12 October an elite army unit, CAPSAT, which had also backed Rajoelina's rise in 2009, joined the protesters. Rajoelina left the country, the National Assembly voted to impeach him, and the military announced that it was taking power and suspending most institutions. On 17 October 2025 Colonel Michael Randrianirina was sworn in as president, promising elections within two years. The African Union suspended Madagascar's membership.