Madagascar is a large island nation in the Indian Ocean, off the southeastern coast of Africa, the fourth largest island in the world. Long isolated, it evolved a natural world like nowhere else on Earth, where the great majority of its plants and animals, from lemurs to baobab trees, are found nowhere else. Its people, the Malagasy, are unusual too, descended from settlers who crossed the ocean from distant Southeast Asia as well as from nearby Africa, giving the island a culture all its own.
Remarkably, Madagascar was one of the last major landmasses to be settled by humans, reached around two thousand years ago by Austronesian seafarers from the region of modern Indonesia, who crossed thousands of kilometres of ocean, later joined by Bantu peoples from the African mainland. Over the centuries kingdoms rose on the island, and in the early nineteenth century the Merina kingdom united much of it under a single monarchy. France colonised Madagascar in the 1890s, ruling until the island regained its independence in 1960.
Madagascar is a long island dominated by a spine of central highlands, where the climate is cool and the capital sits, falling away to a narrow, humid eastern coast once cloaked in rainforest and to drier plains and spiny forests in the west and south. Its long isolation from any continent allowed life to evolve in extraordinary directions, making it one of the world's great biodiversity hotspots, home to lemurs, chameleons, and the iconic, swollen-trunked baobab trees, though much of its unique habitat is now under threat.
The flag of Madagascar has a vertical white band at the hoist and two horizontal bands of red over green. The red and white were colours of the historic Merina kingdom that once ruled much of the island, while the green is often said to represent the coastal peoples and the hope of the nation. The arrangement, with the white set vertically, gives the flag a distinctive look among national banners.
Madagascar's religious life blends Christianity, brought by European missionaries and now followed by a large share of the population in both Catholic and Protestant forms, with deeply rooted traditional beliefs. Central to Malagasy tradition is reverence for ancestors, expressed in customs such as the famadihana, or turning of the bones, a celebratory rite in which families exhume and rewrap the remains of their dead. There is also a Muslim minority, and the two world faiths often coexist with the older ancestral practices.
The cuisine of Madagascar reflects its mixed Asian and African heritage, centred firmly on rice, which Malagasy people eat in great quantity at nearly every meal, often more than almost anyone else in the world. Rice is accompanied by side dishes of meat, fish, vegetables, or beans in flavourful sauces, and the island grows the spices and produce, including vanilla, that enrich the food. Zebu, the humped cattle central to Malagasy culture, provide meat for special occasions.
Agriculture is the livelihood of most Malagasy, much of it small-scale and centred on rice grown in terraced and irrigated paddies across the highlands and lowlands. Madagascar is also the world's leading producer of vanilla, the costly flavouring derived from a climbing orchid, much of it grown in the northeast, along with cloves, coffee, and other spices and cash crops. Cattle, especially the humped zebu, are central to rural life and culture, valued as a sign of wealth and used in ceremonies.
The settlement of the island by ocean-crossing voyagers from Southeast Asia, an astonishing feat of early navigation, and the rise of the Merina kingdom that unified it, are foundations of the Malagasy story. French colonisation, resisted at times by force, ended with independence in 1960. In modern times Madagascar has struggled with political instability and deep poverty, even as it has drawn growing attention for the global importance and fragility of its unique natural environment.
Madagascar has a population of around 30 million people, the Malagasy, who, despite the island's African location, are descended from a blend of Southeast Asian and African ancestors and speak a single language, Malagasy, that belongs to the Austronesian family of distant Indonesia and the Pacific. French is also widely used. The population is largely rural and among the poorest in the world, concentrated in the highlands and along the coasts, with the capital, Antananarivo, set high in the centre of the island.
