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In the inland districts of Madagascar, in the neighbourhood of Antananarivo, there are properly only two seasons, a hot rainy period from the beginning of November to the end of April, and a cold dry period during the other months. However four seasons are distinguished:—lohataona, ‘head of the year’, September and October, when the rice is planted and a few showers fall; fahavaratra, ‘the thunder-time’, from the early part of November to the end of February or into March; fararano, ‘the last rains’, from the beginning of March to the end of April; and ririnina, ‘time of bareness’, when the grass becomes dry, June to August. Rice is planted twice, first before the end of October and again in November or December; the first crop is ripe in January or early in February, the second about April; the two crops however are not clearly distinguished and together last about four months[298]. One name for winter is maintang, ‘the earth is dry’[299].

The Hottentots seem to keep in view the vegetation rather than the climate. Their seasons are four in number. First, early spring. When with increasing warmth, independently of the rain-fall, trees and bushes break into leaf, and in good years winter or early spring rains have revived the grass, spring or blossoming-time has come; it begins in August and ends in October. The following season, which in the upland Damara dialect is called ‘the sun-time’, embraces the first half of the hot period in which, when the year is good, the so-called lesser rains fall. If these are wanting, or, as is usually the case, are scanty, the land is for the most part desolate, without grass or herbage. This time of drought is described by the same word as the drought itself: it prevails from October to December inclusive. The season upon the productiveness of which the welfare of the Hottentots in the main depends may be called the pasture-season: it includes the period of the greater rains and the time immediately after this, when the fodder has not yet lost its freshness. It fills, loosely speaking, the period January-April, and constitutes summer and early autumn. Winter, or the cold season, May to August, embraces two-thirds of autumn and the first half of winter[300]. The Herero also have four seasons:—spring (from September onwards), summer, autumn or the rainy season, and winter[301].