Mikea’s portrait: the long-forgotten truth about one of the ancestors that populated Madagascar.

by Friday, 29 January 2021

There is a forest in the south of Madagascar named after the supposedly original inhabitants of the land “Mikea”, translated as “Tompontany”. The Mikea forest is an immense semiarid forest located along the coast of the southwestern region of the Big Island. There inhabits a little-known group of primitive people, estimated to count between about 1,000 and 2,000 people (Stiles, 1998). Many researchers have so long overlooked the existence of this group, while believing that Mikea was only a pure fantasy and a myth. It is similar with most of the Malagasy population who still ignore it and/or do not view it as being a part of Malagasy peopling formation. Nevertheless, individuals from a variety of Malagasy ethnic groups turn out to be partially found among the Mikea.

History and Origins of “Mikea”

Due to the lack of investment in infrastructure and the poor condition of many roads of the Big Island, many areas remain unknown and undiscovered such as the case of the Mikea region, on National Road number nine (RN9), in the North of Tuléar. Consequently, Mikea people seem to live in remote areas that are hardly inaccessible and cut off the outside world. The Mikea forest along the west and southwest coast of Madagascar is apparently a spiny and dry forest between Morombe and the Mangoky river in the north and the town of Manambo in the south, an area with a dimension of about 2,000 sq. km. There are many assumptions around the origin of the Mikea that have been established according to archaeological, ethnological and linguistic evidence. The Mikea clans have been thought to originate in Sakalava ethnic groups and other groups who fled into the forest to escape domination and exploitation by the late 17th and 18th centuries Sakalava and Merina dynasties, and the 20th century French Colonists (Dina & Hoerner, 1976). As a matter of fact, there was still no evidence of human occupation in the Mikea forest at that time, namely, prior to the 17th century.

At the same time, many have come also to believe that the Mikeas are descendants of the “Vazimba”, the commonly known as the original inhabitants of the central Highlands, while some have proposed the Masikoro as being their true ancestors. However, Masikoro tribes also known as “inland people” are originally Sakalava people who live with a quite different lifestyle compared to its neighboring ethnic groups “Vezo” and the Mikea. The difference has been shown that Masikoro people are more of the land, Vezo of the sea and the Mikea of the forest.

A point to note is that the Mikea people are forest-dwelling and are fully recognized as among the Malagasy population. They are indeed foragers or hunter-gatherers who are usually described as primitive nomads wandering in the bush to pick up fruits, collect wild plants such as tubers and hunt wild animals including Tenrec – a mammal species endemic to Madagascar that looks like a mouse and a rat – as one of their main and most common animals to hunt.

Sources: Daniel STILES (1998). “The Mikea Hunter-Gatherers of Southwest Madagascar: Ecology and Socioeconomics”; African study Monographs. / Jeanne DINA & Jean-Michel HOERNER (1977). “Etude sur les populations Mikea du Sud-Ouest de Madagascar” ; Omaly sy ny Anio.

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