Malaria in Precolonial Malagasy History

Abstract

Although malaria has always been one of the greatest killers of humans in Madagascar, its history has been largely ignored, even by scholars focussing on medical history in the island (Anderson 2017). European accounts had long testified to the presence of malaria on the Malagasy lowlands, but little attempt has been made to trace the origins of malaria in the central highlands. In 1987, Yvan-Georges Paillard asserted that malaria first erupted on the plateau from 1895 due to the social upheaval that followed the implantation of colonial rule (Paillard 1987, 38, 40). A number of subsequent works have challenged Paillard’s claim. In one of the most recent of these, Eric Jennings (2006, 128–129) underscores the very high incidence of malaria among French invasion troops in 1895, but concurs with Françoise Raison-Jourde (1991, 684–685) that the first epidemic to hit the highlands was in 1878. J. Mouchet et al. (1997) consider this event to have been linked to an inflow of Sakalava from Western Madagascar, where malaria was endemic, to work on church construction, and to the profusion in the highlands of irrigated rice fields which offered a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes, notably the Anopheles funestus (Mouchet et al. 1997, 123–124). By contrast, Bernard-Alex Gaüzère and Pierre Aubry (2013, 149) associate the outbreak with an allegedly massive influx of Africans to work the irrigated rice fields. This chapter re-assesses the history of malaria, its treatment, and rapid spread in nineteenth-century Madagascar in the light of chiefly missionary sources.