Saint Augustin (Madagascar)
Saint Augustin ( Malagasy : Anantsoňo , Ianantsony ) is a bay with a village of the same name on the southwest coast of Madagascar . From the middle of the 17th to the middle of the 19th century it was an important trading hub in the Indian Ocean world. Today the population lives mainly from small-scale fishing .
geography
Saint Augustin is located around 35 kilometers south of Toliara on the border between the central and southern parts of the Malagasy coastal lowlands. In the bay, the Onilahy River flows into the Mozambique Strait .
administration
Saint Augustin is part of the Atsimo-Andrefana region and the Toliara II district. Until the administrative reform of 2009, it was also part of the Toliara province.
history
The area around the bay was settled by sedentary ranchers who had trade relations with other parts of Madagascar by the 12th century at the latest. From the early 16th century onwards, East Indiamans from Portugal, the Netherlands and Great Britain headed for Saint Augustin in order to get provisions on the way to South Asia. Portuguese sailors named the bay after Saint Augustine. The people of Saint Augustin lived in small local communities and belonged to the Fihereña population.
In 1645 , the British East India Company set up a fortified camp on the south bank of the bay to maintain the supply trade . After conflicts with the Fihereña, the settlers fled the base in 1646. From the middle of the 17th century, the Sakalava state in the east repeatedly attacked Fihereña communities and sold prisoners as slaves on European ships. From around 1690 pirates, who had been driven out of the Caribbean by the European naval powers, used Saint Augustin at times as a place of refuge.
In the early 18th century, the Sakalava rulers integrated the bay into their state and installed representatives who monopolized coastal trade. The slave trade increased as a result and reached its greatest extent in the 1820s and 1830s, but always remained of secondary importance compared to that on the north and east coast of Madagascar. In the middle of the 18th century, Saint Augustin advanced to become an important supply station for the Royal Navy in the course of the British-French colonial wars in India . In exchange for zebus , the Sakalava obtained muskets and ammunition, which they used to assert themselves against the expanding Imerina state and to carry out enslavement raids into the interior.
From 1801 at the latest until the time of the American Civil War, American whalers also regularly visited Saint Augustin to stock up on provisions. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, coastal trade in Saint Augustin collapsed because much of the merchant shipping in the Indian Ocean shifted north. At the time of the colonial conquest of Madagascar by France in the 1880s and 1890s, the bay had lost its importance as a trading hub.
literature
- Jane Hooper: Feeding Globalization: Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600-1800 . Ohio University Press, Athens 2017, ISBN 978-0-8214-2253-3 .
- Felix Schürmann: The gray undercurrent. Whalers and coastal societies on the deep beaches of Africa (1770–1920) . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / New York City 2017, ISBN 978-3-593-50675-3 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ To the general history section : Felix Schürmann: The gray undercurrent. Whalers and coastal societies on the deep beaches of Africa (1770–1920) . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / New York City 2017, pp. 257–290.
Coordinates: 23 ° 33 ′ 0 ″ S , 43 ° 46 ′ 0 ″ E