The Best Short History and Story of Madagascar – 250 million years ago to 2050

PRECAMBRIAN TO PRE-COLONIAL

Since about 250 million years ago, Madagascar has had fantastic forests and fiction novel-worthy fauna wax and wane, multi-colored mountains jut skyward and recede back asunder in continuum, and eery endemic life forms blossom and bloom…up until and through the arrival of humans 10 centuries ago.

1,000 years ago the human race had explored most of this island’s surface and their chickens goats and cows had come to walk most corners, or at least most coasts, merrily munching in Madagascar with pastoralists. Soon in the last millennium Malagasy rizaculture and farming stacked with fishing fed still larger societies, which clotted into denser gene subgroups. Thereafter in amassing and accelerating agroproduction, Malagasy started taxing or trading goods, ideas, and genes with each other across the island geography.

Cyclones ironically generated lots of the exceptional biodiversity seen here, as continental drift got Mada into the direct path of the great gyre, keeping these famously cute wildlife citizens on their toes, via lives sufficiently brutish and short to refresh the regimes of fauna. Sexual selection here was constantly trimming and training them, while interspecies competition and assimilation went on between new genes and plants literally brought by the winds and currents. Over millions of years Madagascar is and has been a net importer of genetic material, which was repurposed to make incredible, uncanny, endemic wildlife that culminates in what’s on display today.

Meanwhile in Central Madagascar, the wind and water was weathering the hell out of the swathes of ridges and rock strata, spanning the eastern seaboard then into deep central mountainous Makay, 100s of centures of wind’s carvings and cuttings strewn of saprolite and of iron reddish clay (that brought about the name “The Red Island.”) This ancient wear and tear tapers off finally in the rock-knife pointy valleys of “lavaka”… an obvious optical result of where the shielded rocks weren’t as acutely weathered away. These (most buffered or shielded) areas historically created surreal, strange, and sharp rock records above ground in Mada. These wonders tourists eagerly hike to see today, but local settlers always stayed away from these places like in Bemahara, Makay, and Ankaranana.

AMAZING WILDLIFE AND ASTEROID WIPEOUTS

There were, as cuddly as Madagascar looks today, plenty of dangerous animals in prior periods, even as Madagascar is now literally famous for having no dangerous or venomous animals anymore. 

Frogs the size of dogs – with sharp teeth, speed, and that cold amphibian indifference to killing…with bites stronger than nile crocs, would have been serious problems for us if we were walking around in their day for example. That’s usually the house favorite for fossil hunters, but there are other reptile and dino dire opponents like Majungasaurus that used to run around slashing and biting since before the time of the ceolocanth (which still is pulled up by fishing boats time to time in Madagascar itself, and eaten!…) 

The Meteor didn’t leave many survivors in Mada even among the tougher organisms, and there was generally a dive to biodiversity death 70 million years ago (65~millon)…but a return and rebound too. You can still always and through the entire ELE and the hellish episodes to follow find a fossil record of the ever-stoic giant hissing cockroaches, the prototypical bugs of the same hissing scary cockroaches of today. Perhaps the oldest organism you will encounter on a regular basis here, these hissers have developed a long friendship with cleaning mites that live literally in and with the cockroaches. Straight out of a Dante book, Munch paiting, or Stephen King movie, the hissing bugs with an army of mites are actually clean and friendly pets for those with such sensibilities.

OH NO, WHERE DID THE TREES GO? :(… AND WHAT’S WITH ALL THIS GRASS?

5 million years ago grasslands totally took over Africa and Madagascar and made possible the treeless grassland veldts and dahalo-lands that make Andilamena and other landscapes like this today. Long inextricable to conventional wisdom and emotion-driven green policy, It wasn’t humans that created these grasslands at some expense of some vague lost forest cover. They weren’t spread through zebu either. Though the cattle nibble around them now and degrade any terrain on which they dwell, slash-and-burn actually manages the grasslands with fire despite the burnings’ ugly appearance and horrified NGOs and tourists. It is in backsweeps of 20 years or so in 1 burn cycle that fire is an important healthy tree-saving part of the system here, and enflaming storms and slashing burning settlers have helped the grasslands and buffer trees to some extent stay healthy. Endemic species in Madagascar actually like and need this burn cycle in the veldts as well, and coevolved and actually do better with fire swinging in routinely….at least for enough millions of years to assuredly not have needed humans to stop it.

FUTURE OF THE FAUNA

While grass and flames are not exactly invasive demons supplanting trees brought from human and foreign inflows, protecting animals is frought with human friction…Some of the stranger or most-in-danger animals in Madagascar just can’t do anything about escaping humans if they aren’t protected and policed by law. The law, meanwhile, is toothless, for sale, and corrupt if not occassionally collusive in Madagascar.

As an emblem or easy point-to example to drive this point home, you’ll immediately see the yellow-black turtles hosted everywhere. These hapless shell-dwellers simply can’t get too hot or thermoregulate seemingly at all, and so they have to hang out in cool areas, even if they starve 1 field away from food. They just can’t make it across the field or else they flat out burnup! So you’ll generally see turtle homes everywhere to help, metaphors to how vulnerable animals are to the whims of Malagasy and of all mankind here. Radiated tortoises, sadly, even used to cross the roads down here in the early days of MVC, and you’d almost run over them all the time!….but now they are stolen and strangely missing, smuggled to East Asia, (via Thailand.) Thai boats also scrape the southwest and southeast coasts illegally for seafood, which they bring back apparently sometimes on the same vessels.

To date Malaysia Thailand China and Indonesia are the main wildlife trafficking nexus nations for Malagasy smuggler chains. We’ve seen 2 busts so far in the vanilla coast and assisted with 1 other snag via Japanese and Chinese authorities, and Myanmar’s main and 1 Indonesian chain was shattered, but a lot of money has pooled in Mauritius and Comoros now to facilitate the smuggling and evade global finance tracking using cash in ariary yuan and euros, and shrouded banking in the Comoros that is utterly offline.

Aye ayes, the cute gremlin-like weirdos, are meanwhile an emblem of the sort of endemic technology that would be lost here if the wildlife aren’t well managed or just left alone. The demon-like creatures in Masoala and Maroansetra finagled out of their evolution some sort of sonic radar, with which they can hear holes in materials deep below the surface. 

Ayeayes track sonic signatures of internal cavities or holes that we can’t see (much less detect) with any machine yet manmade. No technology or science has been able to figure out how they do this yet either, but the aye-ayes only live in a few forests around our vanilla coasts, and nowhere else seems to do the trick for their tastes. So if the trees are toast…the aye ayes are bye byes…

Marine environments are easier to lever action towards conservation on thusfar in Madagascar and to repopulate, perhaps due to lack of places for intruders or criminals to hide close offshore, and as money can pull the ecology apart from Asian markets pull, money also moves Malagasy to protect fish species due to purely selfish incentives too. In 2004, Blue Ventures chilled out the locals to lay off their heavy octopus fishing for a spell, and this made the octopi population soar back up in numbers, thus making locals actually motivate themselves to not overfish. For “cash from catch.” Overfishing abated in the southwest and marine conservation won the day via fishermens’ wallets, in other words. 

(Sadly, in terms of wildlife conservation, that Blue Ventures story is so far the only affective and verfiably effective NGO that MVC has seen to recharge wildlife numbers…and we’ve seen alot.)

FUTURE OF THE FLORA

Plants are also in danger but downright invisible here because they don’t have any cute faces, so sensibly the flora and forests don’t command attention as much as a ringtail lemur’s memorable maki face does. 

Since French times and post-French colonialization, the northwest of Mada was deforested, majorly, but as for the rest of Madagascar, counterintuitively it doesn’t seem like humans gutted much of the trees during prehistory. Before long cattle and iron forging fed by charcoal came along and attacked the other forests of the island, and cattle and charcoal still does, yet still the rest of the island has not been as deforested by humans as it has by natural ecosystem trends from bush to grass. Contrary to conventional wisdom (conventional outrage, more aptly named,) aside from the major eastern rainforests along the valleys of the eastern highland rift, many imagined lost tree cover was never in fact lost, or at least not lost when any humans had even found Madagascar yet.

Near the MVC vanilla tracts there are 97 different trees around Mananara, of which a staggering half are endemic. Meanwhile everyone around us in Mananara Nord has no idea what the plants are or were 50 years back, any less than they can seemingly and strangely trace their own ancestry. 

In fact, an uncanny number of people want to fashionably claim they have pirate ancestors, but can’t point to any story or script as to why, or to who, at all other than that “it sounds cool and they read it on a book (facebook)”…Overestimating oral traditions in hopes of mysterious wisdom is not a good method for ascertaining historic plant catalogs here any more than it is a barometer of back catalogs of Malagasy places and persons either. Scientists on the vanilla coast have tried and PhD dissertations have been deserted after years of trying that epistomological quest. It seems there has never been a decent historic cataloging of plants to cross compare with today’s.

A HISTORY OF WHO REACHED, GOT RICH, AND RULED IN MADAGASCAR

Whenever the pioneers made the trip across the ocean and made landfall on Madagascar, it may have been preceded by a lot of people who didn’t, and whose skeletons are somewhere on the bottom today under or after the Maldives. 

The Sarimanok sailing boat, impressively replicated and reproduced by French modelers in Indonesia, with no adjoining  nails for the structure of the craft, even almost went by it! They hit the Comoros and ended up in Nosy Be only with the help of French coast guard patrols from Mayotte. Some people and plants from after Muhammadian times in Arabia and prior to Islam’s march to Malaysia were brought along with their Malagasy words and names from Borneo Java on some sort of boat like this. In short, it is very easy to miss Madagascar while sailing from Asia to Europe or Africa, as almost all winds and currents push you away from the island. As Captain Cook found out, “it is highly dangerous to miss the turnoff at the Comoros for Cape Town.”

Whenever they first arrived, it was the beginning of the end of the largest land animals, especially birds and reptiles. The really giant lemurs have been gone since around the time of Muhammad in ~700. The impressive elephant bird of 15 ft. height disappeared by roughly then too finally, and was by many accounts like a velociraptor and probably could have killed a man in a fair fight without tools. As fierce as it was…humans hunted the hell out of it. 

“Zebu” came later from the Indian subcontinent, cows that can rough it longer out in the styx. Now, these zebu are literally the sign of wealth of half of the isle, up until the French minted the first Malagasy franc from the bank. Money and nice phones and cars have supplanted zebu and are the status symbols of Malagasy herders who round up many wives and homes, a tradition that started with the old cattle barons.

It wasn’t food or zebu however but crystals that made the first colossal wealth and true tycoons in Madagascar, as the rock crystal barons prior to the mongols made stuff for Islamic khans, and thus enabled the first “Malagasy millionaires.” Over the Mongol times, and through the Ming dynasty expansive arc of that contemporary period (meanwhile) in Asia (before the treasure fleets were recalled and China descended into isolation,) Madagascar as a crystal mining center eventually had tiny warring factions of 1-3000 people.

Bigwigs among merina mainlanders started getting powerful during the 1700s, 400 years after the inception of the central Merina gene pool from Java/Borneo into the highlands of Madagascar. The Merina still strikingly resemble Southeast Asian people’s faces and features today. Europe was now ruling the high seas and the new world, and Europe even seized with the former sailors’ origin of Java. America was about to be born as an independent nation in that new world, while across from Java, the world was seeing the end of the massive Thai and Burmese armies and empires, Asia’s largest, which came about through their final destructive war while the British empire nextdoor started cracking open China, and Japan closed the borders altogether.

Rizaculture and agriculture then made merina fortunes at this time in the 1700-1800’s, until the trade of guns inspired them to change their mind and business model and start kidnapping, sometimes shooting, or mostly selling slaves to Arabia and Portugal. 200 years finally later after tons of people worldwide were hauled around the world everywhere from Africa and Asia as servants to work all sorts of farms before the industrial revolution, the French stopped slavery in the 1900’s. Though the French are not exactly the most popular people in Madagascar nowadays, they weren’t the ones who started it in Madagascar, as up until the 20th century the Malagasy were prodigously kidnapping and slaving other Malagasy ethnic groups left and right from all regions, taking them to the nearby Muslim world who ran the most trafficking logistics on slavery by far in the Indian Ocean. – Arabians on the Comoros islands have a strange slavery text from 1550-1690 that for such a tiny island has a staggering amount of documentation about this.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT TO THE IDEOLOGICAL INVENTIONS OF TODAY

Most writing about the environment in Mada let alone forests and islands in the 21st century start with several paragraphs of climate and catastrophism platitudes, hedges, and tributes to ward off scorn…preaching to the climate choir to placate university or company ESG tones, before getting to the meat of the matter. 

English and French literature and academic “niche” (nobody reads it) journals about this country pack their prologues or abstracts now with climate dogma and deforestation declarations, needing to creep precariously around formally signaling climate solidarity upfront, before they can then talk about what they were actually studying.

Meanwhile, back in reality and within observed practice and field results, overly assertive climate models pervasively plague effective planning for Madagascar, and conservationists here often become indistinguishable from the missionaries that came prior. Equally religious, often they suck at understanding, suck at making studies let alone money to run applications of these studies, and so far haven’t been even accurately identifying causes and effects, often reversing their order into “wet streets cause rain” types of reports of endemic ecology and phenomena or changes. Eli Rajanarison, the most awesome of Antananarivo anthropologists, famously and frankly assessed the early 70’s-90’s conservationists as the same in their peddling “sacred text salvations” as proselytyzing as the Christian church was in Madagascar in the earlier 20th century. Now they have computers.

There is an acute lack of foreign capitalists and builders in Madagascar (or appealing regulations to invite them) from outside Malagasy or old French ranks. Thus it is the non profit and diplomatic sector that hosts most of the correspondents on Madagascar’s situation from economy to ecology. The IO, diplomatic, UN, and NGO international labor force in Madagascar is beset by the commensurate and downright dismal lack of talent and competence. General vazaha organizations are stuffed and staffed with long-term expatriate unsuccessful characters, unlikable in their home nations or coming briefly for CV points. The second rank of expats with other people’s money to be here is running with academics with axes to grind and no accountability (or accounting at all) to prove the efficacy of their programs on short and medium term assignments for poverty and ecology. 

Most problematic as a foreign import to Madagascar is the insidious power of numbers with false precision to push funds and fiery emotions around conservation, and this is a problem more than a protection now here. As A. Richards from Yale bravely points out only in the late 2020’s in the dusk of her career, that oft-repeated statement that “90% original forests have been lost” has become a self-replicating meme of false conservation wisdom. – Nobody knows what has been there to have been lost. There was no vegetation map of the island when people arrived, and one cannot determine the scale.

Several practical paths that would deliver a better future and virtually guarantee better results than the private, non-profit, and state sector has managed so far would be: 

1 – a robust and responsive flexibly managed national parks system that maintains dry and unreliguous rigour, is more agile to interact with a chaotic system and adapts the increasing suite of sensors available to track it, without creating static models.

2 –  stricter draconian laws on wildlife trafficking and trade, rewards or land/income tax breaks for increasing tree cover and creature populations, and punitive accountability for abusers and offenders particularly in hand with the Asian embassies to stop this in Asia.

3 – Wildlife repopulation and ecology exchanges worldwide and special visas for these exchanges 

4 – Another seriously effective idea would be to grant a passport and residence in exchange for certain reforestation and repopulation (animals) benchmarks, rather than in exchange for a 6 figure investment in the style of Seychelles or Mauritius.

5 – For most of Mada local life however, the path is monetizing and modernizing yields as highly as possible in the grasslands, buffer zones, and secondary cover forests, for all crops and products that lead seeds and tools away from the treeline.

Perhaps the inverse of the “dumb natives” condescension that is implied or baked in a lot of the aid orgs and the conservation conversations here, Rousseau-esque flattering views of local management of this wilderness also get in the way of planning. Destructive native superstitions still seep into common Malagasy life like they have since a millennia ago here. 

For example, all rare Chameleons are not good omens in Mada and people kill them outright still on site (we’ve seen this over 100 times in front of our eyes.) The sacred baobabs that tourists see and hear about on their 1-week trips enjoy a much-touted taboo and aren’t usually cut down…but baobabs or sacred plants meanwhile don’t exist in Masoala in the vanilla coast and in Mada’s oldest and thickest primary forests. This ancient primary forest is wholesale cleaved and cleared without any “Fady” (taboo.) Not only do the Madagascar vanilla coastal residents unfortunately until recently not revere the oldest grandest rainforests… they even feared (and some in the bush still fear) the girigiri (“black magic” or dark spells) of the dark deep forest there.

Many local oral traditions see some ecosystems of Madagascar island as full of evil forces and of creatures to be killed and conquered, though that is not exactly a popular fact to point out. As if extinct animals we all wish were around weren’t emotional enough a reminder, managing ecology isn’t something Malagasy have “performed at” by any generous metric, All Madagascar people, fresher foreigners forget, are fundamentally just immigrants to the island like anyone else, and they didn’t evolve as some sort of “endemic” in some sort of “balance” with its other fauna and flora either.

Fadys and fears over the years of forests aside, a mistake of ecologists in the past century has been to overattribute the loss of these forests to Malagasy actors and corruption, and moreover to simply overstate and overreport the forest loss as a whole. 20-year satellite images of deforestation are clear that forests near and not near human pressure are both waning, but the “Madagascar lost 90% of its original forest” figure pointed out and repeated everywhere in AI LLM training, in science, and irresponsibly even in history literature, is a fictional guess. It isn’t correct. 

A good cause is certainly afoot motivating these misstatements and made-up models, and many good intentions to protect these forests bring good investment in saving them…but the course and and the cause assumptions are just not correct. It becomes more forgivable in retrospective history, as zoomed out, all voyagers mythologized Madagascar as a veritable promised land, this “Lemuria,” as a projection of paradise lost. 

It’s just that these western “Milton Myths” aren’t useful anymore here to protect the future of the flora or the fauna in Madagascar. If Madagascar’s ecological future is to be managed for forest integrity and biodiversity…If endemics retention is to be maxed…everyone will need to do a better job of dispassionately assessing and auditing here, of being dynamic and reactive to realities as they arise out of a chaotic system here and not locked into a fundamentalist or fanatical view learned from literature vs practice, and not bringing dogma but bringing eyes, being flexible to accept what they see and learn directly. Best results will come by being dynamic and learning and improving, as the island’s ecology is always going to be complicated and uncooperative with the best laid projects, projections, and plans. It would certainly help if more people were actually here, seeing it for themselves…