"I feel at home in Asia," said Hanitra, leader of the group Tarika, during a recent visit to Tokyo. "Africa is more foreign to me."
This might seem a bit odd, coming from a native of the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar off the southeast coast of Africa. But it was this feeling that led Hanitra (pronounced Anch) to explore her roots -- and their connectedness with the Southeast Asian nation -- on the group's latest album, "Soul Makassar."
"I saw a documentary film about Sulawesi [an Indonesian island] that included a ceremony that looked very much like the one we call Famadihana, in which we exhume dead people and put them in a new cloth. I thought this was only in Madagascar," she said. "It's [a link between the Malagasy and Indonesians] often talked about, but nobody went and searched it out. I wanted to find out and meet the people."