Close encounters of the worst kind: Malagasy resistance and colonial disasters in Southern Madagascar

The arrival of Europeans on the southern coasts of Madagascar in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries had profound if unusual consequences for indigenous societies. Certain of these, the Tandroy, Karembola and Mahafaly peoples, actively shunned contact and trade with the outsiders, although they imported large numbers of trade guns. The historical evidence indicates, however, that these slave‐based societies did not provide substantial numbers of slaves to the Europeans. Descriptions of their isolation and endemic warfare can be matched by archaeological evidence for major discontinuities in the settlement patterns of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, when settlements in the river valleys were abandoned for defensive locations in the waterless southern plain. Whilst warfare may have been a feature of the expanding polities in the sixteenth century and later, it was undoubtedly exacerbated by the arrival of French troops and guns in the seventeenth century. The two European trading/colonial interventions in the south, at St Augustine and at Fort Dauphin, were unsuccessful not only because of their involvement in this warfare but also because colonists did not fully understand the central position of women within trading networks and political alliances.