Madagascar, officially the Republic of Madagascar, is an island country in the Indian Ocean that includes the island of Madagascar and numerous smaller peripheral islands. Lying off the southeastern coast of Africa, it is the world's fourth-largest island, the second-largest island country, and the 46th-largest country overall. Its capital and largest city is Antananarivo.
Following the prehistoric breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana, Madagascar split from Africa during the Early Jurassic period, around 180 million years ago, and from the Indian subcontinent approximately 90 million years ago. This isolation allowed native plants and animals to evolve in relative seclusion. As a result, Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot and one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries, with over 90% of its wildlife being endemic. The island has a subtropical to tropical maritime climate.
Madagascar was first permanently settled during or before the mid-first millennium CE (roughly 500 to 700) by Austronesian peoples, presumably arriving on outrigger canoes from present-day Indonesia. These were joined around the ninth century by Bantu groups crossing the Mozambique Channel from East Africa. Other groups continued to settle on Madagascar over time, each one making lasting contributions to Malagasy cultural life. Consequently, there are 18 or more classified peoples of Madagascar, the most numerous being the Merina of the central highlands.
Until the late 18th century, the island of Madagascar was ruled by a fragmented assortment of shifting sociopolitical alliances. Beginning in the early 19th century, most of it was united and ruled as the Kingdom of Madagascar by a series of Merina nobles. The monarchy was ended in 1897 by France's annexation of Madagascar, from which the country gained independence in 1960. It has since undergone four major constitutional periods, termed republics, and has been governed as a constitutional democracy since 1992. Following a political crisis and military coup in 2009, Madagascar underwent a protracted transition towards its fourth and current republic, with constitutional governance being restored in January 2014. In 2025, a series of mass protests resulted in a military coup and the installation of Michael Randrianirina as president of a military junta.
Madagascar is a member of the United Nations (UN), the African Union (AU), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. Malagasy and French are both official languages of the state. Christianity is the country's predominant religion, with a significant minority still practicing traditional faiths.
Madagascar is classified as a least-developed country by the UN. Ecotourism and agriculture, paired with greater investments in education, health, and private enterprise, are key elements of its development strategy. Despite substantial economic growth since the early 2000s, income disparities have widened, and quality of life remains low for the majority of the population. As of 2021, 68.4% of the population was considered to be multidimensionally poor.
In the Malagasy language, the island of Madagascar is called Madagasikara (Malagasy pronunciation: [madaɡasʲˈkʲarə̥]) and its people are referred to as Malagasy. The origin of the name is uncertain, and is likely foreign, having been propagated in the Middle Ages by Europeans. If this is the case, it is unknown when the name was adopted by the inhabitants of the island. No single Malagasy-language name predating Madagasikara appears to have been used by the local population to refer to it, although some communities had their name for part or all of the lands they inhabited.
One hypothesis relates Madagascar to the word Malay, referring to the Austronesian origin of the Malagasy people in modern-day Indonesia. In a map by Muhammad al-Idrisi dating from the year 1154, the island is named Gesira Malai, or "Malay island" in Arabic. The inversion of this name to Malai Gesira, as it was known by the Greeks, is thought to be the precursor of the island's modern name. The name "Malay island" was later rendered in Latin as Malichu, an abbreviated form of Malai Insula, in the medieval Hereford Mappa Mundi as the name of Madagascar.
Another hypothesis is that Madagascar is a corrupted transliteration of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia and an important medieval Indian Ocean port. This would have resulted from the 13th-century Venetian explorer Marco Polo's confusion of the two locations in his memoirs, in which he mentions the land of Madageiscar to the south of Socotra. This name would then have been popularized on Renaissance maps by Europeans. One of the first documents written that might explain why Marco Polo called it Madagascar is in a 1609 book on Madagascar by Jerome Megizer. Megizer describes an event in which the kings of the sultanates of Mogadishu and Adal traveled to Madagascar with a fleet of around 25,000 men in order to invade the wealthy islands of Taprobane and Sumatra. However, a tempest threw them off course and they landed on the coasts of Madagascar, conquering the island and signing a treaty with its inhabitants. They remained for eight months and erected eight pillars at different points of the island on which they engraved Magadoxo, a name which later, by corruption, became Madagascar. Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, a Dutch traveler who copied Portuguese works and maps, confirmed this event by saying, "Madagascar has its name from 'makdishu' (Mogadishu)" whose "shayk" invaded it.
The name Malagasikara, or Malagascar, is also historically attested. An English state paper in 1699 records the arrival of 80 to 90 passengers from "Malagaskar" to what eventually became New York City. An 1882 edition of the British newspaper The Graphic referred to "Malagascar" as the name of the island, stating that the word was etymologically of Malay origin and might be related to the name of Malacca. In 1891, Saleh bin Osman, a Zanzibari traveler, referred to the island as "Malagaskar" when recounting his journeys, including part of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. In 1905, Charles Basset wrote in his doctoral thesis that Malagasikara was the way the island was referred to by its natives, who emphasized that they were Malagasy, and not Madagasy.
Traditionally, archeologists have estimated that the earliest settlers arrived in successive waves in outrigger canoes from South Borneo, possibly throughout the period between 350 BCE and 550 CE, whereas others are cautious about dates earlier than 250 CE. In either case, these dates make Madagascar one of the most recent major landmasses on Earth to be settled by humans, predating the settlement of Iceland and New Zealand. It has been proposed that Ma'anyan people were brought as laborers and slaves by Javan and Sumatran-Malays in their trading fleets to Madagascar. Dates of settlement of the island earlier than the mid-first millennium CE are not strongly supported; however, there is scattered evidence for much earlier human visits and presence.
Upon arrival, early settlers practiced slash-and-burn agriculture to clear the coastal rainforests for cultivation. The first settlers encountered Madagascar's abundance of megafauna, including 17 species of giant lemurs; the large flightless elephant birds (including possibly the largest bird to ever exist, Aepyornis maximus); the giant fossa; and several species of Malagasy hippopotamus, which have since become extinct because of hunting and habitat destruction. According to the General History of Africa, these first settlers, the tompontany (masters of the soil/land), are thought to have been the Kimosy in south-central Madagascar, the Antevinany in the southeast, the Antankoala and Kajemby in the northwest, and the Rasikajy in the northeast. Newer arrivals formed marriage alliances with the tompontany, facilitating their gradual assimilation.
By 600 CE, groups of these early settlers had begun clearing the forests of the Central Highlands. According to the General History of Africa, by the 8th century the Vazimba (a "way of life" rather than ethnic group) had absorbed or violently displaced the first settlers, and had come to refer to themselves as tompontany. Malagasy popular belief, however, regards the Vazimba as the island's first inhabitants.