Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic. Wendy Wilson-Fall

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СКАЧАТЬ to the transmigration of Malagasy people from the western Indian Ocean region to the Atlantic (see glossary for an explanation of these terms; map 1.1 shows the location of the coastal ports central to the book). The following questions lead the main themes of this chapter: What were the conditions that developed in this island that led to the export of slaves from the Indian Ocean region to the Atlantic seaboard of North America and to the Caribbean?¹ Is there documentation in the archives or quoted in secondary sources that references this movement of human cargo? What were the economic and political conditions that drew Virginia planters into the global network of Indian Ocean and transatlantic networks?

      Map 1.1. Madagascar (showing St. Mary’s Island, Majunga (Mahajanga), and Fort Dauphin)

       The Historical Record

       Geography and Early History of the Island

      Madagascar is a large island, almost a thousand miles long and about 350 miles across at its widest point. It is two and a half times the size of Great Britain.² The eastern coast of the island faces the Indian Ocean, while the western coast is on the Mozambique Channel. The Malagasy language is an Austronesian language and most closely resembles the languages of central Borneo. Most recent research suggests that the island was first settled by immigrants from the Indonesian archipelago from fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago.³ Scholarly research also indicates that mixture with Africans took place either somewhere on the eastern coast of Africa, where Indonesian sailors may have landed before migrating to Madagascar, or on the island of Madagascar, shortly after Indonesian arrival there. In any case, the omnipresence of zebu cattle and their importance to Malagasy culture shows an early link with continental Africa. The predominance of early Indonesian and then Arab immigrant settlements in the east can be attributed to the wind patterns of the western Indian Ocean. It is thought that in the eighth or ninth century adventurers may have arrived from the Arab gulf states or from Islamicized areas of Indonesia.

      There is fairly strong cultural homogeneity throughout the island, with certain striking features such as terrace farming of rice, reverence of ancestors, and square thatch huts, which reflect historical links with Indonesia. The Malagasy language is spoken throughout the country, with some regional variations. In addition to much Bantu vocabulary of East African origin, there are also Arabic loan words in Malagasy, especially for days of the week and words connected with astrology, arithmetic, and divining.⁴ This influence derives from the Anteimoro, Antambahoaka, and Antanosy peoples of the east.⁵ Although there is substantial evidence of an Arab presence along the eastern littoral since the eighth century, and Chinese contact before that, Madagascar was not “discovered” by Europeans until 1500, and in the following centuries it became familiar to seamen of western European nations as a staging point on the route to the Indies.⁶

      Privateers and various European adventurers used both the western and eastern coasts of Madagascar as important provision points, as they also used the Comoros Islands, to the northwest, both being long known as sources of fresh foodstuffs that were critical to keeping ship crews alive. The Malagasy traded cattle and fresh vegetables in a world where food preservation was rudimentary and fresh daily fare on European ships was meager. Access to fruits, vegetables, and meat was integral in planning a sea voyage of any duration.

       The Sixteenth Century

      In the late sixteenth century the people of northeastern Madagascar lived in communities whose identity was based on affiliation with maximal lineages and clans. Families within clans shared the same taboos (fady).⁷ The geography of eastern Madagascar did not favor large political groupings, which may have been constrained by the north-south mountain ranges some miles inland from the coast. One indication of this is the way kingdoms in the coastal southeast developed, such as the Antambahoaka, the Anteimoro, and the Antanosy, noted above.⁸ These kingdoms did not expand beyond the mountain ranges leading to the western plateaus. During the late sixteenth century the northern clans of the northeast, living in loosely centralized communities, were repeatedly raided for slaves by Sakalava from the northwest, who sold them in a variety of directions. By the mid-seventeenth century, the people of the eastern coast were themselves involved in exporting slaves, some of whom had been brought across the island by Sakalava traders. Recent research suggests that the slave trade from Madagascar is probably much older, and of greater volume, than has previously been suspected.

       The Seventeenth Century

      Archival material and historical studies of Indian Ocean commerce in the seventeenth century show Dutch, British, French, and colonial North American activity. These sources provide some historical context for the claims of today’s American slave descendants to Malagasy heritage. By the middle of the seventeenth century both the French and the English were attempting settlements in eastern Madagascar, which included missionaries, adventurers, and pirates. In this context, pirates were seamen whose maritime violence was justified by neither written commission nor unwritten policy and thus considered outside both international and local European law, though many had tacit government support or the support of gentry and merchants who profited from their activities.⁹ Sometimes, it must be noted, the same men who were pirates began or ended up as legal privateers or the reverse. Many of the pirates who came to Madagascar were fleeing action by the English government to suppress piracy in the Caribbean.¹⁰

      Some pirates took part in interclan raids and wars either as mercenaries or on their own account in order to obtain slaves to sell to visiting slave ships, although slaving was not the major activity or economic base for pirates in Madagascar. Trade in captives was well established in the seventeenth century, as were networks to the New World (via Portuguese or Dutch trade). Between forty and one hundred fifty thousand slaves or more “were exported during the seventeenth century solely from the northwestern town of Mazalagem Nova alone, over an extended period.”¹¹

      A colonial report, dated 1676, mentions that Barbados already had a population of over thirty-two thousand slaves from Guinea and Madagascar; Malagasy slaves were also exported at that time to Jamaica and the Carolinas, and even to Boston, where there were two hundred African and Malagasy slaves in 1676.¹² Likewise, it has been suggested that as many as “2,000 to 3,000 slaves were exported from Madagascar annually before 1700 by Swahili merchants working out of Lamu and Pate particularly” on the East African coast.¹³ It is likely that some of these slaves were shipped in British vessels during the periods that the trade was allowed by the British government; other slaves may have been traded by the Dutch, who had an important port in what is now South Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town), and in New Netherland in the Americas (which became New York State and parts of Delaware and New Jersey). Among what can be learned from the European shipping records, of special interest is the fact that the people of Madagascar were noted separately from Africans. These records tell us that at this time Europeans recorded slaves coming from Madagascar as a particular population.

      In the mid-seventeenth century the British Board of Trade, fearing the creation of a pirate state, reported fifteen hundred men, forty to fifty guns, and seventeen ships at the settlement on Saint Mary’s alone.¹⁴ Numerous reports which the British Privy Council received from India and America indicated New Amsterdam (New York City) as the home port for many pirates.¹⁵ From the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, Madagascar remained an important pirate refuge.¹⁶

      One of the first instances of slave capture and trade as a retaliatory act was when a Huguenot named Pronis sold seventy-three Malagasy to the Dutch in Mauritius.¹⁷ This event in the mid-seventeenth century gives additional evidence that СКАЧАТЬ