History · Madagascar

Madagascar: The Eighth Continent

A vast Indian Ocean island settled from Borneo, unified by the Merina kings, conquered by France after a bloody war, and marked by the 1947 uprising and decades of decline since

By Worldlore Editorial · 30 September 2026

A dirt road lined with enormous smooth-trunked baobab trees at sunset
The Avenue of the Baobabs near Morondava. Around 88 million years of isolation gave Madagascar an ecology found nowhere else — roughly 90 per cent of its species are endemic. (Hiroki Ogawa / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 3.0)

An island unlike anywhere

Madagascar is the world's fourth-largest island, off the south-east coast of Africa, with about 32 million people. It is biologically a world of its own, and its people are unusual too: the Malagasy speak an Austronesian language whose closest relative is spoken in southern Borneo, thousands of kilometres away. Madagascar is where Austronesian and African peoples met and blended, and it was settled by humans late, within roughly the last two thousand years. It is also, today, one of the very few countries poorer than it was at independence.

A short history

  1. c. 350 BCE–550 CE

    Settlement

    Austronesian seafarers from Borneo reach the island.

  2. 1500s–1700s

    Coastal kingdoms

    The Sakalava states; a pirate haven on the east coast.

  3. c. 1787–1810

    Andrianampoinimerina

    Unifies the central highland kingdom of Imerina.

  4. 1810–1828

    Radama I

    Conquers much of the island; welcomes British missionaries.

  5. 1828–1861

    Ranavalona I

    Expels Europeans and bans Christianity.

  6. 1895–1897

    French conquest

    France takes Antananarivo and abolishes the monarchy.

  7. 1947

    The uprising

    A nationalist revolt is crushed with tens of thousands of deaths.

  8. 1960

    Independence

    Within the French Community, under Tsiranana.

  9. 1975–1993

    The Ratsiraka era

    A Marxist "Democratic Republic" and economic collapse.

From Borneo, and Africa

Austronesian voyagers settled Madagascar by the middle of the first millennium CE, bringing the outrigger canoe, wet-rice farming and their language. Later came Bantu-speaking Africans across the Mozambique Channel and Arab and Swahili traders on the coasts. The Malagasy that emerged are a blend — highland peoples such as the Merina more Austronesian, coastal peoples more African — united by one language, rice cultivation, cattle, and the veneration of ancestors and their tombs.

Terraced green rice paddies filling a highland valley in central Madagascar
Rice terraces in the Merina highlands. Paddy rice, an Austronesian inheritance, is the staple and the centre of Malagasy life. (Luc Legay / Wikimedia Commons)

The Merina kingdom

Trading states rose on the coasts — the Sakalava kingdoms in the west, and, from the late 17th century, a notorious pirate haven on the east coast. In the central highlands the Merina kingdom formed around Antananarivo. Andrianampoinimerina reunified Imerina in the late 18th century, and his son Radama I conquered much of the island with a European-trained army, opened Madagascar to British missionaries — who wrote Malagasy in the Latin alphabet and spread literacy — and signed a treaty with Britain.

The kingdom

A tall stone royal palace with steep roofs on a hill above Antananarivo
The Rova of Antananarivo, the Merina royal palace. Gutted by fire in 1995, it has since been rebuilt. (Pufacz / Wikimedia Commons)
A painted portrait of Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar in royal dress
Ranavalona I (reigned 1828–1861), who expelled most Europeans and banned Christianity, keeping Madagascar independent through harsh isolation. Her successors reopened to the West, and the court became Christian in 1869. (Wikimedia Commons)

French conquest, and 1947

France invaded in 1894–95, took Antananarivo, and made Madagascar a colony, abolishing the monarchy in 1897 and exiling the last queen. A revolt known as the "red shawls" resisted; Malagasy deaths in the rebellion may have reached 100,000. Colonial rule brought forced labour, cash-crop plantations — vanilla among them; Madagascar is today the world's largest vanilla producer — and a French administration.

A stone memorial obelisk commemorating the 29 March 1947 uprising in Madagascar
A monument to the uprising of 29 March 1947. The French suppressed the nationalist revolt over the following year with mass killings; estimates of the dead range from around 11,000 to over 100,000. (Robin Taylor / Wikimedia Commons)

The 1947 rebellion, and its crushing, is Madagascar's foundational national trauma.

Independence and decline

Madagascar became independent on 26 June 1960 under Philibert Tsiranana, whose close ties to France drew protest. He was toppled in 1972, and in 1975 the naval officer Didier Ratsiraka took power and imposed a Marxist-Leninist state, with nationalisations and a turn to the Soviet bloc. The economy collapsed — output per head fell for two decades, one of the sharpest sustained declines anywhere. Pro-democracy protests in 1991 forced a transition; Ratsiraka lost power, returned, and finally lost a disputed 2001–02 election to the businessman Marc Ravalomanana after a standoff of several months.

Instability, and the environment

A ring-tailed lemur sitting upright, its striped tail curled, staring at the camera
A ring-tailed lemur. Lemurs exist only on Madagascar — and are gravely threatened by deforestation, which has cleared most of the island's original forest cover. (Charles J. Sharp / Wikimedia Commons)

Ravalomanana was overthrown in a 2009 coup by Andry Rajoelina, the young mayor of Antananarivo — a crisis sharpened by a secret deal to lease about half of Madagascar's farmland to a South Korean firm. Rajoelina won elections in 2018 and again, in 2023, in a vote the opposition boycotted. In October 2025, after weeks of youth-led protests over water and power cuts, the army unit CAPSAT sided with the protesters; Rajoelina fled abroad and was impeached, and the unit's commander, Michael Randrianirina, was sworn in as president of a military-led transition that has promised a referendum and elections within two years. Madagascar remains among the world's poorest countries, with around four-fifths of people below the poverty line, severe deforestation, recurrent cyclones, and drought and famine in the deep south.

What Madagascar carries

Madagascar's history has a distinctive opening — an island reached from across the Indian Ocean and shared with Africa — and a familiar middle: a unifying kingdom, a violent French conquest, a bloodily suppressed revolt, and a disappointing independence. What sets it apart now is the trajectory: rich in endemic life and poor in almost everything else, and with living standards that have gone backward for two generations.

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