The 2-Minute Tour

I guess when people first hear the name Madagascar, they think of this:

Or this:

(Awww...)

On the whole, not bad stereotypes for an African country to have! But there's a lot more to Madagascar, and if you have a few minutes to read what I lifted off the internet and Peace Corps reading materials, you might find some of it fascinating. (And for those of you who haven't read my blogs before, this is me going into academic lecture mode, so bear with me... :)

Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world, a footprint-shaped (if you squint) landmass the size of Texas off the southeast coast of Africa. It's one of the most important biodiversity hotspots an earth: about 90% (exact amount up for debate) of its plants and animals are found nowhere else, leading some biologists to refer to it as the "eighth continent"or "the island ark". It was separated from the African mainland about 165 million years ago, and since there were no large predators in Madagascar, the animals didn't need to evolve and as such are living fossils.

But this diversity is seriously threatened by poaching, severe erosion, and deforestation (it's lost nearly 90% of its original forests due to the lumber trade and slash-and-burn agriculture). Madagascar is also one of the poorest countries in the world: with a per capital gross national income of about $233 per person per year, it ranks 152nd out of 170 countries. Around 80% of Malagasies rely on subsistence agriculture to survive.

The Malagasy population of around 18-20 million is comprised of 18(ish) different ethnic groups/"tribes", each of which speaks a dialect of the Malagasy language. French is another official language, but its use is mainly confined to urban areas. Malagasy, from my limited exposure, seems to combine vowel-happy Hawaiian with length-happy German to create words like varavarankely (window) and mandrapihaona (see you later). It's most closely related to the languages of Borneo, a fact that illustrates Madagascar's diverse cultural background of African, Southeast Asian, and Arabic contact.

Before Madagascar was officially colonized by the French in 1895, it was ruled by dominant regional kingdoms, with influence from Arabic and European coastal trading posts. Resistance against the colonizing French heightened during the Malagasy Uprising of 1947, and full independence was achieved in 1960.

More recently, Madagascar has continued to have political struggles. The Peace Corps actually left the country for about 9 months of 2009 after Rajoelina ousted Ravalomanana in a coup. The situation has now calmed enough to send volunteers back.

Made it this far? Yay, thanks for reading! You now know more about Madagascar than about 95% of your peers. And if you're interested in reading more, you can:

• visit some more volunteer blogs
• click on some of the "Madagascar Links" on the right side of the blog (I especially like Wild Madagascar)
• pick up a book! I'd particularly recommend The Eighth Continent, by Peter Tyson (yup, that's where I got the idea for the blog name).