Writing Stories

Tarika – Tracing Origins of Madagascar Music

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Courtesy YouTube

The album Soul Makassar (released in 2001) by Madagascar’s Tarika was a special project where their leader Hanitra Rasoanaivo travelled to Sulawesi in Indonesia looking for the ancestral origins of the Malagasy people. It was recorded in London, Bandung and Jakarta with Indonesian musicians guesting.

From Hanitra’s album notes:

“I wrote this song on the second day after I arrived on the island of Sulawesi. From my hotel room window every evening I could see the red sun setting between the light blue sky and the dark blue sea. I was taken on an imaginary trip by the boat of Tanaberu called Amanangapa which supposedly left the south coast of Sulawesi to go to Madagascar. I saw the pinisi, the outrigger canoes crossing the sea in front of me. I felt like I had been taken back home after many years of being lost. I was in a new Antananarivo, an Antananarivo where there was nobody else but my own tribe. The Makassar people say that I am from the Takalar tribe! There was not even one vazaha (white person) in sight at that time. I felt at home.”

14 thoughts on “Tarika – Tracing Origins of Madagascar Music”

      1. I too long for the 3 years when my roof was of the attap branches and walls were rough planks and the floor was grey cement…. but we wandered all over within 5 kilometres amongst the streams, the semi-dense foliage and the grass spaces where no one was normally present…..urbanisation dampens the soul unless one nurtures it in some ways….

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