Ask a Malagasy family their religion and the answer will usually be Catholic or Protestant; ask who else lives in the house and the ancestors are on the list. Madagascar is around 85 per cent Christian, divided roughly evenly between the two, with a Muslim minority of somewhere between three and seven per cent and a small number recording no religion. Those figures are accurate and also misleading, because ancestral religion is not a separate category that a minority belongs to. It runs underneath the Christian majority, and a great many Malagasy practise both without regarding the combination as unusual.
The Razana Are Relatives, Not History
The organising concept of Malagasy religion is the razana, the ancestors, who are understood to remain involved in the lives of their descendants. They are not remote figures to be commemorated; they are consulted, informed of family news, thanked, blamed and appeased.
Above them sits Zanahary, or Andriamanitra, the creator — a figure who, as in many African cosmologies, is acknowledged as supreme and approached rarely, because the ancestors are closer and more directly concerned. Illness, business failure, infertility and accident are commonly interpreted as signals that an ancestral obligation has been neglected.
This is why the family tomb is frequently the most substantial structure a Malagasy family owns, often better built than the house. The living are temporary residents; the tomb is permanent.
Famadihana: The Turning of the Bones
In the central highlands, among the Merina and Betsileo, families periodically hold a famadihana — the turning of the bones. Every five to seven years or so, at an auspicious time determined with a diviner, the tomb is opened, the remains of the ancestors are brought out, and they are wrapped in fresh lamba mena, silk shrouds.
The dead are carried on the shoulders of their descendants and danced with, to the accompaniment of brass bands. Family members speak to them, introduce children born since the last ceremony, and ask for blessing. Rum is poured and shared. Relatives travel from across the country and from abroad, and the cost is substantial: a famadihana can consume years of savings, since guests must be fed for days and an ox or several are slaughtered.
It is not a mournful occasion. It is a reunion, and the mood is celebratory. The practice has declined somewhat under pressure from churches and from cost, but it remains widespread and is defended vigorously by those who keep it.
Fady: Taboos That Change From Valley to Valley
Fady are prohibitions, and they are the most pervasive feature of Malagasy religious life. They may forbid eating a particular animal, working on a particular day, pointing at a tomb, whistling on a beach, carrying certain objects into a village, or a woman washing her hair on a Thursday.
What makes them distinctive is that they are local and inherited rather than universal. A fady may apply to one lineage and not its neighbours, or to one hill and not the next. Visitors are expected to ask, and guides will list the fady of each village.
They have measurable effects. Several lemur species are protected in particular districts because they are fady to kill there, notably the indri and the aye-aye, although in other regions the aye-aye is considered an omen of death and is killed on sight — the same animal, the opposite rule, a few hundred kilometres apart.
How the Missionaries Arrived
Protestant missionaries of the London Missionary Society landed in 1818 and were welcomed by King Radama I, who wanted literacy, technical skills and an alliance with Britain. The missionaries produced a written form of Malagasy in Latin script, opened schools, and had translated the entire Bible by 1835 — remarkably early, and a decisive act for the language, since the Malagasy Bible fixed the standard written form.
Catholic missions followed later and were favoured after France colonised the island in 1896. That sequence produced a rough alignment that lasted into the twentieth century: Protestantism associated with the Merina highland elite and with British influence, Catholicism with the coastal peoples and with French administration, and both with political factions.
Ranavalona I and the Cliff at Ampamarinana
Radama's successor, Queen Ranavalona I, who reigned from 1828 to 1861, reversed course. She expelled the missionaries, banned Christian practice and treated conversion as a rejection of ancestral authority and therefore of the monarchy's legitimacy.
Malagasy Christians who refused to renounce their faith were executed, including by being thrown from the cliff at Ampamarinana below the royal palace in Antananarivo, and by being speared at Faravohitra. Rasalama, killed in 1837, is remembered as the first Malagasy martyr. Estimates of the total number killed vary widely and the period is remembered in Malagasy Christianity as the time when the church went underground and grew anyway.
Four memorial churches now stand at the execution sites in the capital, built by the LMS after the persecution ended.
1869: A Queen Burns the Royal Idols
The reversal came under Queen Ranavalona II, who was baptised in 1869 along with her prime minister and husband Rainilaiarivony. Shortly afterwards she ordered the royal sampy — the palladia of the kingdom, talismanic objects that embodied its protection — to be burned publicly.
The kingdom converted with her, as kingdoms did. Protestantism became effectively the state religion of Imerina, church attendance was expected of officials, and the LMS found itself with a mass membership acquired by decree rather than by preaching.
What did not happen was the disappearance of ancestral practice. Tomb-building, famadihana, fady and divination continued through the Christian period, adapted rather than abandoned, which is how Madagascar arrived at its present arrangement.
The Fifohazana: Healing Inside the Churches
A distinctively Malagasy revival movement, the Fifohazana or awakening, began in 1894 with Rainisoalambo, a former diviner who reported a vision and began a ministry of healing and exorcism. Later movements formed around other figures, including the prophetess known as Nenilava.
The movement produced the mpiandry, the shepherds — lay healers, robed in white, who lay hands on the sick and cast out spirits, and who operate within the mainstream Protestant churches rather than in separate denominations. The Reformed church of Madagascar, the FJKM, incorporates them formally.
This is the key to why Pentecostalism has made less headway in Madagascar than in much of Africa: the mainstream churches already offer healing, deliverance and spirit-focused practice. The demand that Pentecostal churches meet elsewhere was met internally here.
Divination, and the Days That Are Wrong
Alongside the churches, the ombiasy — diviner and healer — remains a working profession. The main system, sikidy, involves arranging seeds or beans in a grid and reading the resulting columns against a formal scheme of figures, a method related to divination traditions that travelled from the Arab world across the Indian Ocean.
Its most consequential use is calendrical. The traditional system assigns character to days and to the destiny, or vintana, attached to the moment of birth, and a diviner is consulted to fix the date for a famadihana, a wedding, a circumcision, the laying of a house foundation or a journey. Some combinations are held to be dangerous enough to require ritual correction.
Clergy of most denominations disapprove of consulting an ombiasy, and most Malagasy do it anyway, usually without mentioning it at church. That gap between what is preached and what is practised is not hypocrisy in the local understanding; the ancestors and the calendar belong to one domain and the church to another, and both are taken seriously.
The FFKM as Political Referee
Four churches — Catholic, the Reformed FJKM, Lutheran and Anglican — form the Council of Christian Churches in Madagascar, the FFKM, and it has functioned repeatedly as the country's crisis mediator.
In 1991, during the mass protests against President Ratsiraka, the FFKM convened negotiations. It played a role again in the disputed election crisis of 2002 and in the 2009 removal of President Ravalomanana — himself a vice-president of the FJKM, who had risen through church structures. Church leaders have organised national reconciliation conferences and have at times been accused of taking sides.
The reason a church council performs this function is straightforward: in a country where formal institutions are weak and transitions have repeatedly been extra-constitutional, the churches have the national reach, the buildings and the standing that political parties lack.
Muslims of the Coast
Islam reached Madagascar early, carried by Arab and Swahili traders to the north-western coast, and Antalaotra communities there have been Muslim for centuries. The Antemoro of the south-east preserve sorabe, Malagasy written in Arabic script, a manuscript tradition used for divination and genealogy that is among the oldest written material in the language.
The modern Muslim population combines these older communities with Comorian migrants, who are numerous in the north-west, and with Indian-origin merchant communities — Khoja and Bohra — concentrated in commerce. Relations have generally been peaceful, although the 1976 Majunga riots against Comorians were severe and led to a mass return migration.
Estimates of the Muslim share vary widely between sources, from around three per cent to as high as seven, and the uncertainty reflects both weak data and the coastal concentration that makes national averages unhelpful. The island in full is our Madagascar country guide; readers starting from scratch can try where Madagascar is, and its position raises the question handled in which continent Madagascar belongs to.
