Madagascar

 Kanusiky-Sakalava of Morondova (after Dr. A. Voltzkow)

Photographs from the 1939 Clerisse expedition to Madagascar shows most people wearing regular Western style clothing (introduced by French colonists I presume). The photograph of a Kanusiky-Sakalava tribesman I used was taken in 1901, thirty-eight years before the expedition that yielded Homage to the King featured in the Top 100 2020. While usually I'm very conscientious about this sort of thing I must admit I've fallen for an inappropriate form of exoticism. Not only should I have settled for an image from the Clerisse Expedition, I also managed to search for an image by the wrong tribe. The track Homage to the King is coupled (on the record The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Vol. 2: French Africa) with a recording of the Sakalava people but the former is actually recorded by the Ambilube [sic]. On the other hand Homage to the King references a time from before the French colonization in 1883, when the island was the Kingdom of Madagascar. Today, searching for these ethnic groups (Ambilube and Sakalava and others), the names don't even show up because the people of Madagascar are pretty much homogeneous and referred to as Malagasy. There are different ethnic identities among the Malagasy but there's hardly any tribalism. The ancestry of the Malagasy is curiously enough closer related to the people of Indonesia than to those of the African continent.