Madagascar and Africa: The Problem of the Bara

Consecutive articles in the pages of this Journal, based in part on a larger and forthcoming work, are intended to reopen the question of Afro-Malagasy connexions. Like its African counterpart, Malagasy history needs to be revised. New approaches to local history and the data assembled are meant to show in some detail that the cultural, linguistic and human presence of Africa in the Great Island can no longer be either denied or simply assumed without any supporting data. The initial article concerns the Bara of the southern Malagasy plateau. While their history has hardly been studied, the Bara merit the unique distinction of being often seen as ‘Africans’ of Madagascar who came to the island sometime in the eighteenth century. The arguments brought to bear on this verdict are utterly unacceptable to historians from the point of view of method and evidence. A reassessment of their past points to a Bara presence in Madagascar at least two centuries earlier. Bara history and available linguistic and ethnographic data suggest connexions with Rhodesia and western Moçambique without the slightest evidence for any wholesale migration.