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, fishing, and farming fed still larger societies that clotted into denser gene subgroups. Thereafter in accelerating agroproduction, the Malagasy started taxing, tearing up, or trading goods, ideas, and genes with each other.

Cyclones ironically generated lots of the biodiversity seen here, since continental drift got Mada into the direct path of the great gyre, keeping these famously cute wildlife citizens on their toes and life sufficiently brutish and short to refresh the regimes of fauna. Sexual selection was constantly here trimming and training them as well, while interspecies competition and assimilation went on too, with new genes and plants literally brought by the winds and currents. Over millions of years Madagascar is a net importer of the genetic material, which was repurposed to make incredible and 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 from the eastern seaboard to deep central mountainous Makay, 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,” and obvious optical result of where the shielded rocks weren’t as acutely weathered away. These (most buffered) areas historically created surreal, strange, and sharp rock records above ground in Mada. These are the wonders that tourists see today but that settlers stayed away from, 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 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 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 find the 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 unextricable 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, and they weren’t spread through zebu. Though the cattle nibble around them now while slash-and-burn actually manages them well with fire, in backsweeps of 20 years or so in 1 burn cycle, fire is an important healthy tree-saving part of the system here, and storms and settlers have helped the grasslands and buffer trees to some extent stay healthy. Endemic species in Madagascar actually like and need this burn cycle 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 fire are not exactly invasive demons from human and foreign inflows, 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. 

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 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.) 

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 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.

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 they 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 or to repopulate, perhaps due to lack of places to hide offshore, and money moves Malagasy to protect fish species due purely selfish incentives for “cash from catch.” Overfishing opens eyes to the importance of marine conservation via lightening fishermens’ wallets, in other words. In 2004, Blue Ventures chilled out the locals to lay off their heavy octopus fishing for a spell, and made the octopi population soar back up in numbers, thus making locals actually motivate themselves to not overfish. 

(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 they don’t command attention as much as a ringtail lemur face does. 

Since the 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 did somewhat and still does, but 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 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. It seems there has never been a decent cataloging of plants or insects, ever, 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.

As there is an acute lack of foreign capitalists in Madagascar (or appealing regulations to invite them) from outside Malagasy or old French ranks, the government organization, UN, and NGO international labor force in Madagascar is beset by a downright dismal lack of talent and competence, staffed by strange characters unlikable in their home nations coming for CV points, and academics with axes to grind and no accountability (or accounting at all) to prove the efficacy of their programs on short term assignments. The insidious power of numbers with false precision to push funds and fiery emotions around conservation is a problem more than a protection now here. As Richards from Yale bravely points out, 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. No.

Perhaps the inverse of the “parasitic natives” condescension that is in a lot of the conservation conversation here, Rousseau-esque flattering views of local management of this wilderness also get in the way of planning, as destructive native superstition does seep into most Malagasy life since a millennia ago here. Many local oral traditions see some ecology of the island as full of evil forces and of animals to be killed, though that is not exactly a popular fact to point out in the west or locally. 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, except when preservation can be of course monetized for them. 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 either. 

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.

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 too, 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, science, and history literature is a fictional guess. It isn’t correct. A good cause, and many good intentions that bring good investment in saving them…but not correct. Voyagers mythologized a veritable promised land, this “lemuria,” as a projection of paradise lost. Western “Milton Myths” aren’t useful anymore here. It’s time to get real. The national parks system, strict draconian laws on wildlife trafficking and trade, punitive accountability on the Asian embassies to stop this on both sides, wildlife repopulation and ecology exchanges worldwide, and standards for land use and development are the fundamental levers. For most of Mada life however, monetizing and modernizing yields as highly as possible in the grasslands and buffer zones, for all crops and products and not just vanilla in the secondary forest canopy or of rice and cattle, will go a long way to keeping the surrounding forests intact.

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…