Mahafaly
The Mahafaly (also Mahafale ) are an ethnic group in southwest Madagascar . They settled in an area that is in the center of the Ampanihy district . They speak an Austronesian language that is very closely related to the Tandroy language. The first European visitor to the Mahafaly area was Jean Foucquembourg of the French East India Company in the 17th century , but no record of him has survived. The surviving first description of the Mahafaly and their country goes back to the shipwrecked Robert Drury , he describes the settlement area of the Mahafaly as wild, mountainous and forested. By 1900 the Mahafaly had been split into five kingdoms and would have been an easy target for colonization. However, the region was considered too poor for the colonization costs to be worthwhile. From 1902 to 1908 there was a separate administrative unit for this ethnic group, the Cercle des Mahafaly . Even today the region is one of the poorest in Madagascar, it only has a very limited share in the economic life of the country.
literature
- Lotte Schomerus-Gernböck: The Mahafaly, an ethnic group . Reimer, Berlin 1981, ISBN 3-496-00184-4 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jean-Michel Lebigre: Petite du encyclopédie Grand Sud de Madagascar . Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux / LGPA-éditions, Pessac 2016, ISBN 979-1-03000030-6 , p. 119 .