Vazimba

The Vazimba are remembered in Malagasy oral tradition as the first inhabitants of Madagascar, Austronesian settlers who reached the island from the Indonesian archipelago between roughly 350 BCE and 500 CE. They cleared highland forests by slash-and-burn farming, growing bananas, tubers and ginger, and tradition holds that they knew neither metallurgy nor rice cultivation.

By the eighth century they had absorbed or displaced earlier settlers and called themselves tompontany, masters of the soil; their highland villages and kingdoms were often ruled by queens.

From the fourteenth century the expanding Merina kingdoms pressed on their lands. The rulers Andriamanelo, Ralambo and Andrianjaka drove them out of the highlands between the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The last independent communities were destroyed or absorbed into Merina society.