Total population | |
---|---|
1,200 [1] | |
Regions with significant populations | |
Madagascar | |
Languages | |
Sakalava Malagasy, Vezo dialect, French | |
Religion | |
Christianity and Ancestral religion |
The Vezo is the term the semi-nomadic coastal people of southern Madagascar use to refer to people that have become accustomed to live from sea fishing. The Vezo speak a dialect of the Malagasy language, which is a branch of the Malayo-Polynesian language group derived from the Barito languages, spoken in southern Borneo. They currently populate most of the littoral zone along Madagascar's west coast between Toliara and Mahajanga.
"Vezo" literally means 'the people who fish', but also has been known to mean 'to struggle with the sea'. [2]
Vezo do not identify with a particular Malagasy ethnic group but instead with their way of life. [3] [ clarification needed ] They currently populate most of the littoral zone along Madagascar's west coast between Toliara and Mahajanga. [4] Like most other Malagasy ethnic groups, their origins can directly be traced to that original mix of Austronesian settlers from Asia and the Bantu migrants from mainland East Africa with Arab-Persian and Indian ancestry since the Middle Ages. They have been known to state emphatically that they need have no common origin or shared essence with one another. Their identity is instead contextual and embodied in learned skills such as fishing or swimming and the calluses they produce, rather than in shared origin. [2] [5] Because of their semi-nomadic marine migrations, their population is difficult to determine and has been estimated by counting the dugout canoes called pirogues (lakanas in Malagasy language) around Madagascar. The Vezo tribe is from Southwest Madagascar.
The Vezo are a fishing people who inhabit a coastal belt extending from Intampolo in the south to Morondava in the north of southwest Madagascar. Andavadoaka is a village whose population are of the Vezo tribe. It has a population of 1,200, with over 50% under 15 years of age. Household income is mainly from fishing. Fishermen make use of mangroves for timber, wood, and fishing. [6] The fishers participate in an artisanal fishery reliant on pirogues (canoes, made by hollowing out a large log) powered by sail and paddle, and most fishing occurs 5 km or less from shore. Men predominantly fish with line, nets, and spears. Women glean the reef flats for invertebrates including octopus and sea cucumbers. Fish sales, processing and trade supplement local income, as does tourism and local commerce.
The Vezo traditionally traded with the neighboring agro-foresters, the Masikoro. The Vezo also trade with the Mikea, exchanging fish for honey and tubers. [7] However, increased trade has changed the economy from barter to cash-based.[ citation needed ] Furthermore, growth in fish export from Madagascar has encouraged fish processing and export companies to the region, such as Murex and Copefrito (now operating in the southwest). Their purchases of marine products have increased fish demand and strengthened the cash economy. Besides gleaning from the reef flats, women are the ones who sell the catches that men bring them. With what they earn, women buy rice, the staple food, as well as other essential foodstuffs and a variety of luxury items. [3] Children go to school in the one village school building, where there are two designated teachers. However, due to the deterioration of public administration in Madagascar, the building and the teachers are hardly ever occupied. Whenever children are in the building, and if the teacher has not run out of chalk, the teaching largely consists in copying letters, numbers, and short sentences from the blackboard onto the child's own A5 size blackboard. Understandably, the many children who do not own a blackboard are allowed to play in the burning heat outside. [3]
Family ties are extremely important among the Vezo and elders are greatly respected in the community. Families often provide for each other with younger members building boats for the elderly to use. Maintaining family ties is important to ensure that one is looked after in old age, or after an accident or ill health. Family relationships are particularly important to Vezo fishers because they determine access to marine resources and fishing gear. [8]
The Vezo have official cultural ceremonies called Fomba. These include Bilo, Tromba, Savatse, Takasy and Soro. All these ceremonies, except Takasy, are practiced (with some variations) by the neighbouring inland Masikoro people. [3]
The circumcision ceremony typically lasts from 4 am until 9 am. The parents ask a wise elder to suggest the best date and time for the ceremony, and identify a nurse or doctor who knows how to perform the circumcision. Family members are invited to attend the ceremony, and one of the uncles holds the child during the ceremony. After the physical cut, there is drinking of alcohol. After the ceremony the child is called savatse.[ citation needed ]
The community life of the Vezo, as elsewhere in Madagascar, is guided by numerous fady (taboos). During the course of the life of a Vezo man, he is exposed to the danger of catching hanimboky, a very unpleasant disease that only affects men. The name literally means 'swollen/full with food', which makes it considered thus a male pregnancy. A man sick with hanimboky is constipated and this causes his stomach to swell up until it resembles the belly of a pregnant woman. The illness is caused by food that the male kin of a sexually active woman accepted and ate from her. The food is said to be dirty, for it is assumed that the woman had acquired it with 'tangy', the presents her lover gives her for having sex with him. When a man accepts food from one of his female kin, it is therefore as if he were receiving food from the woman's lover; if a man accepted such food, he would be put in a very inferior position. In essence, they are treated as if they were women by their daughter's or sister's lover. [3]
Vezo cemeteries lie in the forest, far away from the villages and are so well hidden by the vegetation that they are considered "invisible to the eye". The cemeteries must be hidden in this way because the sight of tombs makes the people sad and unhappy. Cemeteries are not places the Vezo like to visit very often. One does not simply go for a stroll near the cemetery. The living only approach a cemetery when they bear a corpse or when they have to "work" for the dead, such as digging graves and building tombs. [9]
In western Madagascar, Sakalava and Vezo funerary sculpture is renowned internationally for its erotic wooden figures, often depicted during copulation and showing oversized phalluses and breasts. It is unknown as to why the sculptures have this sort of eroticism, but it may have to do with meeting growing tourist demand. [9]
Even after their ancestors have passed, the Vezo keep them involved in many different affairs. Many events in the productive, reproductive and social life of any Vezo family require that the dead be promptly informed, for example if one intends to move to a temporary fishing location, if one is moving into a newly built house or is launching a new canoe, if one is having a difficult birth or if a newborn is brought out of the house for the first time, if one is about to sit a school exam, if difficult words have been spoken which make people's heart heavy with anger, if the visiting anthropologist arrives or leaves, and so on. It is the responsibility of the senior head of the family to call the dead and talk to them, asking for their protection or their forgiveness, and ensuring that they are kept well informed of life's events – for whenever the dead have reasons to be “surprised," they will want to ask questions, thereby causing trouble for the living. [3]
The dead communicate with their living descendants through the dreams that they induce in them. This is because when a person dies, the breathing stops, the body becomes stiff, cold and soon begins to stink and to decompose. But when a person dies, the ‘spirit’ – known as fanahy up to the moment of death – permanently departs from the body. In its new disembodied, ghostly form, the spirit – now known as angatse – is invisible, and moves around like wind. To be seen by living people, it enters their dreams, where it appears together with its original uncorrupted body, just as it was when the person was alive.
The Vezo speak a dialect of the Malagasy language, which is a branch of the Malayo-Polynesian language group derived from the Barito languages, spoken in southern Borneo. [10]
Off the coast of Madagascar, overfishing has become a major issue. The Vezo rely entirely on fishing, who for the past 2,000 years have been navigating the stretch of the Indian Ocean that separates Madagascar from the African continent in hand-carved pirogues. Increasingly, commercial boats, mostly from Asia and Europe, are fishing those same waters. Thus, it is difficult for the traditional fishermen to compete in the market. In response, many Vezo have resorted to fishing hundreds of miles offshore, spending six to nine months a year in rough and dangerous waters in search of sharks and sea cucumbers, both in high demand in Asian seafood markets. Some bring their families and all their possessions and set up camp on sandbars far from civilization. [11]
Fishermen believe that the current fishing practices have to change by keeping successful skills, removing destructive fishing practices and adopting new fishing technologies. The lack of a system allowing local users to have a shared assessment of the fishing conditions and to define a common vision is the main problem for Vezo traditional fishers. They are so good at tracking the changes in fish catches over time and have a better understanding of the multiple uses of the available habitats but when it comes to pooling their knowledge into one system, they just can not make it by themselves. This shows that traditional ways of solving problems have failed to make its way to modern days. Traditional leaders used to play an important role in preserving wealth of the community by providing guidance to resource users according to the best available judgment. This role has been weakened by several factors including his social status. [12]
Even worse, there is no significant improvement of household revenue in short term by setting up a marine reserve, it is hoped that the approach is likely to bring a much bigger impact on targeted fisheries in a mid and long term exploitation. From a biological point of view, a larger female octopus for example tends to lay many more eggs than young ones. By providing a few more months to grow in a closed fishing ground, it allows octopus individuals to get to bigger sizes. [12]
The Vezo have a long history of subsistence turtle exploitation and associated cultural traditions. By local law, turtles are protected under Decree 24 passed in 1923, but this law has seldom been enforced. The low reproductive potential and delayed sexual maturity of turtles make all species unsuitable for intensive harvest. Even as far back as the early twentieth century, it has been reported that turtles play an important role to Malagasy fisheries. There has been a decline in numbers of the hawksbill turtle and the disappearance of nesting populations. The raiding of the turtle nests and hunting for the meat and carapaces are believed to be the fundamental causes of decline for four of the five species in the region. [13]
The History of Madagascar started from the ancient supercontinent of Pangaea, containing amongst others the African continent and the Indian subcontinent, and by the island's late colonization by human settlers from the Sunda Islands and from East Africa. These two factors facilitated the evolution and survival of thousands of endemic plant and animal species, some of which have gone extinct or are currently threatened with extinction. Trade in the Indian Ocean at the time of first colonization of Madagascar was dominated by Indonesian ships, probably of Borobudur ship and K'un-lun po types.
The Philippine Sea is a marginal sea of the Western Pacific Ocean east of the Philippine Archipelago and the largest sea in the world, occupying an estimated surface area of 5 million square kilometers. The Philippine Sea Plate forms the floor of the sea. Its western border is the first island chain to the west, comprising the Ryukyu Islands in the northwest and Taiwan in the west. Its southwestern border comprises the Philippine islands of Luzon, Catanduanes, Samar, Leyte, and Mindanao. Its northern border comprises the Japanese islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyūshū. Its eastern border is the second island chain to the east, comprising the Bonin Islands and Iwo Jima in the northeast, the Mariana Islands in the due east, and Halmahera, Palau, Yap and Ulithi in the southeast. Its southern border is Indonesia's Morotai Island.
An aquatic animal is any animal, whether vertebrate or invertebrate, that lives in a body of water for all or most of its lifetime. Aquatic animals generally conduct gas exchange in water by extracting dissolved oxygen via specialised respiratory organs called gills, through the skin or across enteral mucosae, although some are evolved from terrestrial ancestors that re-adapted to aquatic environments, in which case they actually use lungs to breathe air and are essentially holding their breath when living in water. Some species of gastropod mollusc, such as the eastern emerald sea slug, are even capable of kleptoplastic photosynthesis via endosymbiosis with ingested yellow-green algae.
Toliara is a city in Madagascar.
Andavadoaka is a small fishing village located on the southwest coast of Madagascar. It is located in the Morombe (district), 45 km south of the town of Morombe in the region of Atsimo-Andrefana. It belongs to the rural municipality of Befandefa.
The Mikea are a group of Malagasy-speaking horticulturalists and foragers who are often described as the lowland hunter-gatherers of Madagascar. They inhabit the Mikea Forest, a patch of mixed spiny forest and dry deciduous forest along the coast of southwestern Madagascar. The Mikea are predominantly of Sakalava origin, although the term describes a shared way of life rather than an ethnic group per se, and individuals from a variety of Malagasy ethnic groups are found among the Mikea. The family encampments of the Mikea shift from prime corn planting territory at the edge of the forest in the rainy season to the interior forest rich with tenrecs and other game in the dry season, when the community becomes highly dependent on spongy tubers to meet their daily demand for water. Their lifestyle is interdependent with that of their neighboring Vezo fishermen and the Masikoro farmers and herders, with whom they trade products caught, foraged or cultivated in the forest. Many Mikea also occasionally engage in paid work such as guarding the zebu herds or tending the corn fields of others.
Betania is a coastal village in Western Madagascar south of Morondava with a population of around 2,400 Vezo fishermen. This village belongs to the municipality of Morondava and is situated on the southern side of the mouth of the Morondava River.
Lau Lagoon is a part of Solomon Islands. It is located on the northeast coast of Malaita Island. The lagoon is more than 35 kilometers long and contains about 60 artificial islands built on the reef.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to fishing:
The fishing industry in the Maldives is the island's second main industry. According to national tradition in the words of former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, "Fishing is the lifeblood of our nation, it is inborn. From the soil on which we live, to the sea around us, it remains an integral part of our existence. Fishing, and our country and its people, [are] one and shall remain inseparable forever." The Maldives has an abundance of aquatic life and species of fish. Common are tuna, groupers, dolphin fish, barracuda, rainbow runner, trevally and squirrelfish and many more. Aside from being of essential importance to the economy, fishing is also a popular recreational activity in the Maldives, not only among locals but by tourists. The islands have numerous fishing resorts which cater for these activities.
Watamu Marine National Park and Reserve is located in Kenya. Established in 1968, it was one of Kenya's first marine parks. It is located about 90 miles (140 km) north of Mombasa, Kenya's second largest city. Its coral gardens are 300 metres (980 ft) from the shore and are home to approximately 600 species of fish, 110 species of stony coral and countless invertebrates, crustaceans and molluscs. Water temperature varies from 20 degrees Celsius to 30 degrees Celsius. The park was designated as a biosphere reserve in 1979.
Wakatobi National Park is a marine national park in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. It was established in 2002. The name of Wakatobi is a portmanteau of the four main Tukangbesi Islands: Wangi-wangi, Kaledupa, Tomia, and Binongko. Since 2005 the park is listed as a tentative World Heritage Site.
Velondriake, meaning “to live with the sea” in the Vezo dialect of the Malagasy language, is a locally managed marine area (LMMA). Established in 2006 in southwest Madagascar, Velondriake is home to over 7,000 resident Vezo people and covers a marine and coastal area of about 64,000 ha making it one of the largest LMMAs in the western Indian Ocean. The LMMA includes extensive coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass beds, baobab forests, spiny forest and other threatened habitats. The LMMA includes five permanent coral reef reserves, two permanent mangrove reserves, and numerous periodic fisheries closures (PFCs), primarily for octopus on reefs and for mud crab in mangroves.
The Tandroy also known as Ampatres in the 17th century are a traditionally nomadic ethnic group of Madagascar inhabiting the arid southern part of the island called Androy. In the 17th century however, the Tandroy emerged as a confederation of two groups ruled by the Zafimanara dynasty until flooding caused the kingdom to disband around 1790. The difficult terrain and climate of Tandroy protected and isolated the population, sparing them from subjugation by the Kingdom of Imerina in the 19th century; later, the French colonial authority also struggled to exert its influence over this population. Since independence the Tandroy have suffered prejudice and economic marginalization, prompting widespread migration and intermarriage with other ethnic groups, and leading them to play a key role in protests that sparked the end of President Philibert Tsiranana's administration in 1972.
The Makoa are an ethnic group in Madagascar descended from enslaved people from mainland Africa that were traded through the major slave trading ports of northern Mozambique in an area mainly populated by the Makua people. They are among the last African diaspora communities in the world to issue from the slave trade. They are sometimes classified as a subgroup of the fishing peoples known as the Vezo, although the Makoa maintain a distinct identity, one reinforced by their larger physical stature and historic employment as police officers by the French colonial administration.
The Barren Isles are an archipelago located in an area spanning 40 kilometres off the west coast of Madagascar, in the Melaky region. The archipelago consists of 9 main isles or sand banks.
Aquaculture in Madagascar started to take off in the 1980s. The industry includes the cultivation of sea cucumbers, seaweed, fish and shrimp and is being used to stimulate the country's economy, increase the wages of fishermen and women, and improve the regions ocean water quality. Coastal regions of Madagascar are reliant on the Indian Ocean's marine resources as a source of food, income, and cultural identity.
The Masikoro are a group of farmers and herders who inhabit areas surrounding the Mikea Forest, a patch of mixed spiny forest and dry deciduous forest along the coast of southwestern Madagascar in Toliara Province. Along with Vezo and Mikea, the Masikoro are Sakalava people, the difference being that Masikoro are of the land, Vezo are of the sea, and Mikea are of the forest.
Nosy Ve-Androka National Park is a Protected Marine Area located in the southwestern part of Madagascar, south of Tulear, and 40 km south of the tourist village of Anakao. It lies between latitudes 25 ° 29/25 ° 09 South and longitudes 44 ° 50/45 ° 06 East and covers an area of 92080 ha. It is composed of Core Areas totalling 28,820 ha and Buffer Zones totalling 63,260 ha. The park is made up of eight parcels in two clusters, with part found along the coast adjacent to Tsimanampetsotsa National Park. It includes sections of the rich coral reef system of South West Madagascar in the Mozambique Channel, recognized as the third largest reef system in the world. Diversity of habitats include fringing reefs, barrier reefs, coral reef beds, seagrass area, open sea, rocky coast and sandy beaches. The Nosy Ve-Androka National Park contains about 140 species of coral and 240 species of fish. There are also rare species such as Coelacanths, marine turtle species, dugongs, dolphins and whales and sandy beaches that are used by nesting sea turtles.
The Tsiokantimo is a strong south wind that blows in the southwest region of Madagascar, usually from August to September. This wind hits the vast stretches of predominantly sandy coastline, causing wind erosion of the soil, and bringing a lot of dust to the city of Toliara in Madagascar, but also the anchovies that are pushed by the current and waves in the Tulear lagoon.
Through discussions with villagers (Linnecar, 2004), it can be ascertained that Vezo identity is not gained through the simple act of being born, or by descent, or by being inherited from the past[ permanent dead link ]
In 1995 a census was taken on lakana numbers and 22,000 documented, with 75% of them on the west coast of Madagascar with 50% of these in the Toliara region alone
Betania ... Population About 1,000 in August, 2004 ... Language Malagasy, Vezo dialect ... ancestral religion is predominant in the village ...
village of Anakao, with approximately 3000 inhabitants ... no running water, no electricity, no internet and no mobile reception ... consuming primarily what they can obtain from the sea, plus some pulses, rice and mangoes
ReefDoctor has an ongoing research programme that aims to enhance ... as 'ReefBalls' and conducting feasibility studies across the bay to determine suitable sites for future initiatives
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