Sakalava (Malagasy people)

The Sakalava are an ethnic group primarily found on the western edge of Madagascar, ranging from Toliara in the south to the Sambirano River in the north. They constitute about 6.2 percent of the total population of Madagascar, or about 2,079,000 in 2018. The origin of the word Sakalava is not fully known. The most common explanation is that their name means "people of the long valleys", or a similar modern Malagasy translation of long ravines, which denotes the relatively flat nature of the land in western Madagascar. Another theory is that the word is possibly from the Arabic saqaliba (which is in turn derived from Late Latin sclavus), meaning slave.