History - Madagascar - page 374

These first settlers brought with them the food crops of their homelands, such as rice.
This Asian influence was tempered over the years by contact with Arab and African
traders, who plied the seas of the region with their cargoes of silks, spices and slaves.
Gradually the Asian culture of the new settlers was subsumed into a series of geographic-
ally defined kingdoms, which in turn gave rise to many different Malagasy tribes.
The word for zebu cattle in Malagasy is hen'omby , which is of Bantu
origin. Linguists have established that all words used for domestic anim-
als have African roots, confirming the fact that African migrants who
settled on the island brought with them the prized animals.
Marco Polo was the first European to report the existence of a 'great red island', which
he named Madagascar, after possibly having confused it with Mogadishu in Somalia. But
Arab cartographers had long known the island as Gezirat Al-Komor, meaning 'island of
the moon' (a name later transferred to the Comoros). It wasn't until 1500 that the first
Europeans set foot on Madagascar, when a fleet of Portuguese vessels arrived. The Dutch
and British tried to establish permanent bases at various points around the coast, only to be
defeated by disease and less-than-friendly locals.
More successful were the efforts of buccaneers from Britain, France and elsewhere, who
from the end of the 17th century onwards made Madagascar a base from which they at-
tacked merchant ships sailing between India and Europe.
SORABE
Sorabe ('Great Writings', from the Arabic word sora , 'to write', and the Mala-
gasy be , meaning 'big') is an early written form of Malagasy using Arabic
script. The earliest Sorabe manuscripts were written sometime after the 15th
century under the influence of Muslim traders (academics disagree on whether
they were from the Arabian Peninsula or what is now Indonesia) who wanted to
reproduce pages of the Koran. Sorabe was later used to write histories and gene-
alogies, astrologers' predictions and various works on traditional medicine.
Knowledge of the script was primarily the preserve of specially trained scribes
known as katibo . Most Sorabe manuscripts are in the possession of the An-
taimoro and Antambohoaka tribes in southeast Madagascar, although the oldest
surviving example is conserved in a library in Paris.