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On and Off the Road in Madagascar
Not-So-Wild Madagascar
UNICEF had booked a resort hotel in a national park east of Tana for a weeklong workshop to launch the research project. Away from the noise and bustle of the capital, free from classes and meetings, our five-person team and our colleagues from UA could huddle in breakout sessions, share meals, and build personal relationships. In the jungle, mobile phone coverage was patchy and the Internet slow. There wasn’t much to do when the sun went down except sit on the veranda, enjoy a rhum arrangé, and listen to the lemur lullabies.
It’s just over ninety miles from Tana to Andasibe National Park on RN2, the highway to Toamasina, the main port on the east coast. If the weather is clear and the traffic light, you can reach Andasibe in two hours; our outbound and return trips both took three hours, an average of thirty miles per hour. Trucks hauling fuel and containers wheezed up the hills; every few miles, we came across one stranded by the roadside, its driver sprawled across the open engine, or the trailer precariously jacked up, teetering on the edge of a cliff. Almost all freight to the capital and highlands is transported on this road. The single-line railroad the French built along the route could carry heavy freight, but the truck owners’ cartel has put pressure on the politicians to withhold funding for maintenance, and the track has fallen into disrepair. We saw only one train.
From Tana’s so-called ring road, the surreally named Boulevard de Tokyo (built with Japanese aid), RN2 rises through the hills. It’s a similar landscape to the Imerina region west of the city, with most land devoted to rice cultivation. The paddies stretch out over the bottom lands and the lower slopes of hills where farmers build terraces; water flows from springs into the terraces and then to the lower paddies through channels or pipes, where flow is controlled by sluice gates. In the fields, wood-fired brick kilns stand like sentries, and large stacks of rough red-mud bricks line the roadside; in several places, the granite outcrops have been gouged to quarry stone for road and home construction.
In 1817, the Merina king Radama I led an army of twenty-five thousand along this route to subdue the Betsimasraka and capture Toamasina. The Betsimasraka (the “many inseparables”) was a loose confederation of clans that ruled a large stretch of the eastern seaboard and had long-established trading relations with Europeans. The kings periodically processed through their domains to remind the kinglets of who lived in the largest rova, who had the troops and cannon, and who had the support of the British Empire. The royals and other andriana were carried up and down the hills on sedan chairs by teams of bearers. Depending on the royal weight, there were two or four bearers up front and at the back. It was an exhausting but prestigious job carting around the royals and, later, French colonial officials and missionaries. According to Luke, those at the front of the sedan needed different strengths from those at the back, so they developed muscular specialties. You can almost hear the negotiation. “OK, I’ll go back right on Monsieur, le colonel. My rate is ten francs a kilometer on flat stretches, fifteen up hills, and three meals a day. An extra charge if he’s more than eighty kilograms.”
As RN2 descends from the highland escarpment, the hills on either side are clear cut or covered with second-growth eucalyptus forest. A hundred years ago, old-growth forest extended over much of the highlands and northeast, but most has been destroyed by slash-and-burn agriculture and the cutting of timber for charcoal, firewood, and home construction; perhaps as much as 90 percent of the island’s original forest has been lost. The French planted the fast-growing eucalyptus to provide fuel for the railroad and steam engines used on plantations, and today these trees are the main source of charcoal. It is estimated that 95 percent of Malagasy households, including those in urban areas, use firewood or charcoal for cooking and heating. Along RN2, the trees are cut down to their stumps, and the wood is slowly burned in earth ovens to produce charcoal. Sacks are piled by the roadside; the local price is about $2, making it worth the trip to transport charcoal to Tana, where it fetches $6 a sack. The eucalyptus stumps soon sprout again, but it is a stubby new growth. Any wildlife that once lived in these forests has fled or been hunted. Only in the protected areas of the national parks do the eucalyptus trees and native varieties grow high, providing shelter and food for wildlife.
Today, mining poses a deeper threat to the environment. For many years, foreign investors shied away from Madagascar, deterred by political instability, corruption, and poor infrastructure. What was the point in building a mine or factory if the politicians were going to nationalize it or grab the profits? Or if there were no roads, reliable power supply, and skilled workforce? Recently, multinational mining companies have started to exploit the vast and largely untapped resources.
Since 2005, the British-Australian company Rio Tinto has invested almost $1 billion in an operation near Fort Dauphin (Taolagnaro) on the south coast to mine ilmenite, which is used to make titanium dioxide, the white pigment commonly found in paint, toothpaste, and cosmetics. Global demand has been growing, especially in China and India, and the Rio Tinto mine—20 percent owned by the government—was expected to give a major boost to the economy and provide jobs in one of the poorest regions of the country. From the start, the project was mired in controversy. No agricultural land was available to compensate those who gave up land for the mine, so the company paid them in cash. Construction created a temporary employment boom, but when production began in 2009, few jobs were available. Critics claim only 10 percent of employees are locals; Rio Tinto says it’s 70 percent. Whatever the real number is, mining transformed the local economy. Hotels sold out for two years, ruining the local tourist business. Sex workers spread STDs. And people who had been living on less than $1 a day suddenly had more money than they would previously have seen in a year. Some used it to set up small businesses, but most failed. “People were buying cars, TVs, generators, drinking,” one construction worker recalled. “It was like a party every day.”
The party ended violently in January 2013 when several hundred protesters armed with spears and slingshots blocked the mine access road, complaining about high unemployment, corruption, and inadequate compensation for landowners. For a time, the company’s chief executive and 178 staff were trapped inside the compound. Eventually, troops using tear gas dispersed the crowd. The protests made Rio Tinto wary of future investment; it shelved plans for a second, and larger, mine in nearby St. Luce.1
Madagascar’s other major mining operation is off RN2 near Moramanga, the site of the massacre of prisoners during the 1947 rebellion. The Ambatovy nickel and cobalt mine, built by a Canadian-Japanese-Korean consortium at a cost of $8 billion, claims to be the largest-ever foreign investment in the country and one of the largest lateritic nickel mines in the world. The ore is strip-mined and sent to a preparation plant; the nickel and cobalt ore slurry is then piped underground for 136 miles to a processing plant and refinery south of Toamasina, where it is separated and loaded onto ships.
Critics say the government granted the mining license with minimal study of its potential impact. Rather than employing and training local people, the company brought in a foreign workforce (mostly South Asian and Filipino) to build the mine and pipeline. The influx of foreign workers and money transformed Moramanga, a regional market center, into a boomtown, its streets lined with import shops, hotels, restaurants, and karaoke bars. Rents soared, forcing local people to move out of town. Crime and prostitution levels increased, with teachers reporting that most teenage girls had dropped out of school. There was more money to be made working the streets than working the rice paddies. That went for the men as well as the women. The streets of Moramanga are crowded with brightly painted pousse-pousse bicycle rickshaws. The drivers, who rent their machines by the day, must hustle hard to make money.
The tourism industry, while less destructive than mining, is changing the country in other ways. There are two types of tourists. One heads for the beaches and tropical islands; there are direct flights from Paris to Nosy Be (Big Island), the largest and most developed resort area off the northwest coast. The tourists never see the urban sprawl and poverty of Tana, or the rural central highlands. The second type comes to see the lemurs and other wildlife in the national parks. They stay at tastefully designed lodges with manicured gardens where diesel generators provide backup power, the showers always have hot water, the juice is freshly squeezed, and the buffet offers a mix of European and Malagasy dishes. Andasibe National Park has half a dozen lodges catering to foreign tourists who come in small parties (no large buses) and sit at dinner tables reserved for “Wild Madagascar” or “Jungle Adventure.” Then they go off to see the lemurs.
We did too, on an afternoon break from the workshop. You don’t have to venture too far into the jungle to find your photographic prey. At the Wakona Lodge, most lemurs live on a small island in a river (a thirty-second canoe paddle from the parking lot). They do not hide in trees but bound out of the undergrowth to greet you, climbing on your head or shoulders in the hopes you brought bananas. This is wildlife at its most accessible. Most of these lemurs were donated by people in Toamasina who had kept them as pets. I’m sure they’re happier living on the island than in cages, but calling this “Wild Madagascar” seems a stretch. However, it’s enough for many tourists who don’t want to walk too far to get their photographs. They can go home with stories of the jungle and make donations to wildlife charities to protect Madagascar’s biodiversity. They may not think much about the people of Madagascar or economic or social conditions. The national statistics for poverty, health, education, safe water, and other indicators are woeful, but also tedious and easy to ignore, especially for tourists on jungle tours. Poor people are not nearly as cuddly as lemurs.
Jungle Prisoner of Sociological Theory
The UA sociology professor leaned across the table. “I’d really like to talk about Max Weber,” he whispered. As session chair, I weighed my options. I could say no and risk a minor academic diplomatic incident. I could feign an apology, claim it was time for the coffee break and hope he would not remind me later. Instead I did the diplomatic and, in hindsight, the right thing. I surrendered to sociological theory. “Mais bien sûr [but of course],” I said.
I wondered how he was going to connect Weber’s antipositivism to childhood vaccination rates, school enrollments, the building of latrines, or any of the topics UNICEF had selected for the session. I need not have worried. In his ten-minute monologue he made no reference to the practical research issues on the agenda.
My colleagues and I knew that working with the UA faculty would require patience and tact. Looking back, I’m sure the UA faculty felt the same about us. It was not only the language barrier. The main challenge was that most of the UA faculty had a traditional French academic background that emphasizes theory and language over practice. They had little experience in the applied research that can help a development agency such as UNICEF improve health or education. Weber does not offer guidance on how to persuade people to use latrines or wash their hands before eating.
We felt frustrated. Our colleagues seemed more interested in discussing theoretical issues than in hashing out topics and questions for the study. It was tough for the interpreters, grappling with three-way simultaneous translation—Malagasy to English, French to English, and English to French. The day reached a low point when I heard this through my headphones: “The real problem is situated somewhere between the problematic and the problematization.”
We felt like prisoners in a jungle of theory. I thought briefly about running off into the real jungle to hang out with the lemurs. Yet over the next few months, we came to realize that the lecture on Weber and other apparent diversions into Marxist, literary, or linguistic theory were not academic posturing. They were, to use development jargon, capacity building. UNICEF had asked our team to build the capacity of UA faculty and postgraduate students to conduct social research. We knew how to design a study, do the data analysis, and write the report, but we knew little about Madagascar, its culture and turbulent history, or how our Malagasy colleagues regarded research. Rather than writing us off as the latest group of foreign academics to show up, run around the country, and leave without learning anything, they couched their critique in the shared language of theory. Their priority for the workshop was not to draft questionnaires but to build an equal, trusting research partnership. Capacity building goes both ways.
A Marriage of Convenience
It had been an arranged match with UA, without even a blind date. In the bidding process, we worried that our proposal would not make the cut because of our modest French-language skills. My recent experiences were at holiday parties at my sister’s home in the Dordogne region of France, where the conversation usually focused on wine, food, plumbing, and knee replacements, not sampling, focus groups, or multivariate analysis. A few months later, we learned we had been awarded the contract. It was time to pull out the maps, bone up on French research phrases, and get to know our academic partner in what UNICEF was grandly calling the “international research consortium.”
Madagascar’s development challenges are daunting. The country has long languished in the “low” category on the UN Human Development Index for health, education, and income levels. Coups and political instability have scared away donors and foreign investors. Three-quarters of households live on less than $2 per day and over one-third are classified as food insecure. The maternal mortality rate has been rising and child vaccination rates declining. Many households lack access to safe water, and open defecation is common. Only three out of ten children who begin primary school complete the cycle. Child marriage is prevalent, with close to half the female population aged fifteen to forty-nine married before eighteen years of age. Sexual exploitation and violence against children are major concerns. Almost every year, the country experiences cyclones and floods on the east coast, and sometimes drought in the south.
UNICEF had stacks of demographic data—tables, line graphs, bar graphs, and pie charts presented in glossy reports and PowerPoints complete with stock images of happy children in classrooms, women engaged in ecofriendly, income-generating craft cooperatives, and villagers sitting under trees earnestly debating local issues. The data were descriptive and demographic—how many (or what percentage) of urban or rural children in which family income bracket had (or had not) had all their shots, completed the primary school cycle, or met a global nutrition standard. The statistics were listed by year to indicate possible trends, and by region for comparison. What they did not tell us was the why—the reasons people believed and did (or did not) do something. Or, if they believed in something, such as keeping children in school, why they did not do it in practice. Why did women give birth at home? Why were girls married off in their teens? Why did people think water from a river was purer than water from a tap? Were the barriers to better health, nutrition, sanitation, and education the result of culture or other factors? Who influences attitudes and behaviors—clan leaders, traditional healers, midwives, mothers-in-law, or radio broadcasts? Working with UA, our task was to design and undertake research on knowledge, attitudes, and practices, or, in bureaucratic shorthand, a KAP study.
The UA campus sits on a ridge in Tana, with commanding views across the highlands. Founded in 1955, it’s the country’s leading institution, with master’s and PhD programs and links with French and Western universities. It is also, like the education system in general, woefully underfunded. Faculty pay is low and working conditions are difficult. The red-brick and concrete buildings, most dating from the 1960s and 1970s, have cracks in the walls; inside, paint peels from the plaster and classrooms with wooden desks and chalkboards line dimly lit corridors. Power cuts are frequent, and the water supply unreliable; on a day when we discussed how to phrase questions about hand washing, we could not wash our hands because there was no water in the building. UA reminded me of the not-so-genteel decay of universities in Central Asia that I wrote about in Postcards from Stanland. The only saving grace is that it never gets too cold in Madagascar, so you don’t have to wear an overcoat, hat, and gloves to teach.
Although UA was paid for the research, and although being part of an international research consortium may have a certain cachet, the strongest motivation for the faculty and postgraduate students was the research experience they would gain. Under our contract, we were supposed to build capacity at the same time as we conducted the study. Balancing the two tasks and staying on schedule and on budget proved challenging.
Who Are the Vazaha?
The first Malagasy word I learned was vazaha. Translated literally, it means “foreigner,” and it aptly described the members of our multinational team—from the United States, the UK, South Africa, France, and Nepal. At the lodge in Andasibe National Park, there were good-natured jests about throwing the vazaha into the river to feed the crocodiles. But the banter suggested deeper social rifts. The word vazaha is also a disparaging term for a person of higher economic, social, or political status—an outsider, a government official, or an aid worker in a SUV.
Most faculty and postgraduate students at UA are Merina. If the research study had been conducted in the central highlands, where Merina form the largest percentage of the population, there would have been few barriers to data collection. However, the three regions selected by UNICEF were all coastal—two (Anosy and Atsimo Andrefana) in the south, and one (Analanjirofo) in the northeast. The researchers would be working in areas where people were mostly of African descent, where the cultural terrain, including the dialect, was unfamiliar.
The major barrier to development in Madagascar is poor infrastructure. On the maps, the Routes Nationales (RNs) are confidently marked in solid red, suggesting adequate connections between population centers. But just a few miles outside Tana, vehicles slow down to dodge the potholes or mudslides. In the south, some RNs are little more than dirt roads. During the cyclone season in Analanjirofo, which is crisscrossed by several rivers, travel is difficult as floods sweep away roads and bridges. We had used geographic and economic criteria to classify communities into four types: interior, subcoastal, coastal, and urban. Some interior communities were two days by zebu cart from the main dirt road; to include them would have lengthened the project and strained the budget, so we had to compromise.
Most people in southern Madagascar depend on subsistence agriculture or fishing. Access to health services and schools is poor. The government is resented for taxing and exploiting natural resources without giving back. The view from the capital is that “parts of the south are ungoverned, and parts may be ungovernable,” said Luke. The army, police, and even health workers venture into the so-called zones rouges (red zones) at their peril. Local people, according to Luke, see it differently, maintaining that their own social systems and norms preserve order. They are naturally suspicious of outsiders who ask about living conditions and household income (even if they also ask about vaccinations). Are they really university researchers, or are they gathering data for the tax agency?
To their credit, the UA researchers worked hard to build trust in the communities where they did interviews, focus group discussions, and observations. But they faced research fatigue. People have seen data collectors come and go and have not seen any benefits. Why should the latest group of researchers with their notebooks and audio recorders be any different? Community members will not turn away researchers, but their answers, according to Luke, may be “terse, evasive . . . politely subversive.” During a later workshop, one team reported that people in Mahavatse, a low-income community of fishermen, small traders, and rickshaw drivers in the south, were reluctant to talk to them. One reason was that as Merina “we looked different—some people said we were vazaha.”
Because of its relative isolation and ethnic diversity, Madagascar has been a happy hunting ground for anthropologists. In a study commissioned by UNICEF, the depressingly titled “The South: Cemetery of Projects?” the authors compiled sixteen single-spaced pages of books, articles, and dissertations with titles such as “Funeral Rites of Betsileo Princes,” “Identity and Descent among the Vezo” and “The Sakalava Poiesis of History.” The sheer volume of studies makes it tempting to think that traditional beliefs and practices dominate every sphere of life.
Our study indicated that traditional practices persist. Many pregnant women still drink a noxious potion called tambavy. After birth, the umbilical cord is buried near the ancestral tomb or cast into the river at a sacred site. Food taboos (fady) remain. Traditional forms of marriage are still practiced. However, many barriers to improving health, sanitation, nutrition, and education are practical—distant health facilities, bad schools and untrained teachers, poor infrastructure. Changing people’s beliefs was not the issue. It was about providing better services.
Our UA colleagues did not deny the role of tradition. They simply said that it was not the only or even the most important factor. They reminded us that for many people in Madagascar, survival remains a daily challenge. In May 2015, with the project already months behind schedule, we politely asked when data collection could begin. The chair of the communication department, Lucie Rabaovololona, reported that in Analanjirofo roads were still closed by floods and mudslides. Meanwhile, the two southern regions were experiencing drought and food shortages. The project timeline had to be amended, she said. Her rationale was simple yet evocative: “We should not be asking people questions about nutrition when all they have to eat is cactus.”
Abide with Me
The sound of the group singing drifted in from the courtyard of the Norwegian mission on a sunny December morning in Tana. The tune was familiar, but in my early-morning stupor after a long flight I couldn’t place it. Then it came to me. It was my father’s favorite hymn, “Abide with Me,” a Church of England standard. I had sung it during my childhood, usually at school assemblies or compulsory Sunday church attendance; it closed the funeral service for my father in 1985. I recalled the opening line, “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide,” although it seemed surreal on a warm morning in the middle of Madagascar’s capital city. I wondered how this hymn had traveled across two continents and been translated into Malagasy.
For that cultural exchange, we can credit the Norwegian Lutherans and other Protestant missionaries who have worked in Madagascar for two centuries. The London Missionary Society (LMS), a product of the evangelical revival of the late eighteenth century and composed mostly of Congregationalists and other nonconformists, was the first to plan a mission to Madagascar. The British seizure of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius from the French in 1810 provided a base for operations. In August 1818, two twenty-two-year-old Welshmen, David Jones and Thomas Bevan, arrived in Toamasina from Mauritius and opened a small school. Their wives and young children followed, but by the following January Jones was the only survivor, the others having died from the fever. Jones persevered and in 1820 was welcomed to the court of Radama I. Other LMS missionaries followed and within a decade had established schools and gained converts in the highlands.
Radama was personally indifferent to religion but wanted to improve the economy by adopting Western technologies. He welcomed the LMS because the missionaries included artisans—a tanner, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a cotton spinner, and a printer—who taught new skills; one, the Scot James Cameron, introduced brick making. By the time of Radama’s death in 1828, the LMS missionaries had established twenty-three schools with twenty-three hundred students, one-third of them girls. The missionaries began transliterating Malagasy into a written script, using the Latin alphabet. The LMS shipped a printing press, and by 1828 the missionaries were printing spelling books and readers, as well as gospel tracts. By 1830, three thousand copies of the New Testament in Malagasy had been printed.
After almost two decades of openness to trade, religion, and other European contacts under Radama I, the Merina kingdom turned inward and xenophobic under his successor, the capricious and bloodthirsty Queen Ranavalona I. Her reign began with the ritual murder of all potential rival claimants to the throne, including Radama’s mother and brother-in-law. The traditionalist party gained dominance at court and lobbied for cutting trading and diplomatic ties with the French and British. For a few years, the missionaries were allowed to continue teaching, preaching, and distributing religious texts, but from 1831 the government started clamping down on their activities. The queen’s hostility was fed by reports that Christian converts were contemptuous of ancient customs and regarded the royal talismans—sacred wooden objects carried on military campaigns and state processions to protect the kingdom—as idols. In 1835, she banned Christianity and ordered all who had been baptized to confess and recant. Most did, but those who refused, or continued to practice religion in private, were vigorously persecuted.
The lucky ones—mostly members of the noble andriana caste—lost their property or official position. Some were sold into slavery or exiled to unhealthy regions of the island, where they succumbed to disease within a few months. Other converts were executed in public, with cruelty designed to strike fear into the population. They were speared to death, burned at the stake, or hurled off a cliff below the queen’s palace. Some were placed head-down in a rice pit; boiling water was poured on them, and the pit was filled with earth. A few survived the notorious tangena ordeal by poison. The accused was made to swallow three pieces of chicken skin and some rice, with scrapings from the poisonous tangena nut, then drink a large quantity of rice water to induce vomiting. If all three pieces of skin were vomited up whole, the accused was considered innocent but then often died anyway from the effects of the poison.
In 1835, all missionaries left Madagascar, but many converts held to their faith, worshipping in private homes or in the countryside, hiding their Bibles in caves and holes in the ground. The martyrdom suffered by Malagasy Christians served only to strengthen their resolve. When, in 1861, the new king Radama II restored freedom of religion and declared an amnesty for all condemned for their beliefs, thousands flocked to newly opened places of worship. Christianity was no longer a foreign import because the Malagasy Christians had their own martyrs, preachers, and ordained pastors. Protestantism became established, even socially fashionable, among the ruling classes, when the new queen, Ranavalona II, and her prime minister, Rainilaiarivony (who married her, in accordance with political custom), converted in 1869. Soon after the marriage, the queen ordered the burning of the royal idols, completing a symbolic break with ancestral beliefs.2
With the field opened again for missionary activity, the LMS faced competition from other Protestant denominations, including the Anglicans. The Jesuits, based on the French island of Réunion, established small missions on the west coast and by the 1860s were competing for souls in the central highlands and on the east coast. Like the Protestants, the Catholic missionaries contributed to education, establishing primary and secondary schools, but the two groups were always in competition.
The LMS, Anglicans, and Catholics were followed by Norwegian Lutheran missionaries. They were young men from the farms and fjords, who set off for a long sea trip to an unknown island in the southern Indian Ocean. Some left young wives behind, promising to return when God’s work was done. Most never did, entering into accepted, but unsanctified, unions with Malagasy women. The first two missionaries arrived in 1866, establishing a church south of Tana. This precipitated a turf war with the LMS, but eventually both sides agreed to reserve the region of Betsileo in the southern highlands for the Lutherans. The Norwegians were followed by American Lutheran missionaries from Minnesota; they founded a small mission in Fort Dauphin in the south where they were never in competition with other Protestant missions.
After Madagascar became a French colony in 1896, the Catholic Church gained strength. Today, about one-fifth of the population (four million) is Catholic; the Church of Jesus Christ in Madagascar (FJKM), which united the LMS with the Quakers and other evangelicals, is the largest Protestant group, with about 3.5 million adherents. The Malagasy Lutheran Church (FLM), with 3 million, comes in a strong third; the Fifohazana, an indigenous revival movement, has made the Malagasy church one of the fastest-growing Lutheran churches in the world. The alliance of these three with the Anglicans in the Malagasy Council of Churches (FFKM) has been an influential force in Malagasy politics; in the disputed 2001 presidential elections, the FFKM rallied behind the Protestant candidate Marc Ravalomanana, whose electoral slogan was “Don’t be afraid, only believe.” Evangelical churches with charismatic preachers, meeting in sports stadiums and other large venues, have gained followers; Tana now boasts at least one “megachurch.” Muslims constitute about 7 percent of the population. Many Malagasy comfortably combine their religion with traditional beliefs, observing fady and consulting with astrologers on the most auspicious days to build a house, plant a crop, or hold a wedding or funeral.
The Norwegian mission is in the Isoraka district, high on one of the city’s hills near the Embassy of the Comoros (that’s the landmark for taxi drivers). It was originally built as the Lutherans’ administrative center and provided accommodation for missionaries visiting the capital. Today, its guest houses are open to all, but you won’t find it advertised on the hotel or backpackers’ travel websites. Luke, who had stayed there on previous visits, recommended it. A group of two-story buildings around a garden, it’s an oasis from the traffic and bustle of the city. Each building has a memorial plaque to a noted missionary or church leader. History is even celebrated in the Wi-Fi code. No boring “guest 123” login, but a real name, Andrianarijaona (difficult to type, especially if you’re in a hurry). It celebrates Rakoto Andrianarijaona, whose father and grandfather were both prominent revivalist pastors; in 1960, he became the first native Malagasy to be named leader of the national church.
For about $18 a night, you get a simple, clean room with bathroom, and a shower (the water was always hot). The so-called Norwegian breakfast (rolls, butter, jam, cheese, ham, tomatoes, cucumbers, juice, and coffee) sets you back 8,000 ariary ($2.50); for $2.00 you can have the Malagasy breakfast of rice with leaves (rice and leaves in a broth), juice, and coffee. There’s no bar, of course, but you are within a few minutes’ walk of three excellent, modestly priced French restaurants and a Vietnamese one. Or you can always join the mission congregation to sing “Abide with Me.”
Route Nationale 7—The Long Road South
I had arrived at Ivato Airport from Johannesburg late on a Saturday afternoon and was scheduled to lead a workshop for UA faculty and postgraduate students in Toliara (Tuléar), the main port on the southwest coast, starting Monday morning. Air Maybe was on strike again, so the only way to reach Toliara was by road on RN7. The UNICEF Nissan Patrol, with a driver and two staff members, was waiting at the airport.
“How long will the trip take?” I asked as I stashed my bag. I guessed we would reach Toliara on Sunday afternoon, giving me time to rest before the workshop began. There was an awkward silence. “Alors, ça dépend (Well, that depends),” the driver eventually said. I wanted to ask “Sur quoi? (On what?)” but thought better of it. I resolved to enjoy the trip, however long it took.
It’s officially 577 miles from Tana to Toliara. All the guidebooks (and every Malagasy I’ve met) say that RN7 is the best road in the country. It’s all relative. I’d classify RN7, a two-lane highway with many one-lane bridges, as a superior county road in Ohio or West Virginia, or maybe a lesser state route in need of maintenance. For better or worse, this is the main route to the south. And it doesn’t even go all the way. The southernmost port and city, Fort Dauphin, administrative center of the region of Anosy, is another two days’ travel from Toliara on dirt roads (which also have the status of RNs), bone shaking in the dry season and impassable during the monsoon.
To reach Fort Dauphin and other southern destinations, you need a vehicle that sits high off the ground so that it does not get stuck in the holes and ruts. Traveling south from Tana, we passed a boxy, high-riding bus, lumbering up a hill. “Fort Dauphin,” remarked our driver. The bus was packed with passengers squeezed onto narrow bench seats, luggage piled high on the roof. I asked how long the trip would take. “Four days,” said the driver. That’s four days and four nights. The bus makes rest and meal stops but travels through the night, the two drivers taking shifts. I was happy our workshop had not been scheduled for Fort Dauphin.
This close to the Equator, night comes early (around 6:00 p.m.). UNICEF vehicles are not allowed to drive after dark, mostly because of the hazards—people, animals, and bicycles without lights are still on the road. There are few hotels outside the main towns, so we called in for clearance to drive thirty more minutes to reach Antsirabe, about one hundred miles south of the capital. You would expect the third-largest city in the country with a population of more than two hundred thousand to have at least a minor rush hour, but we saw few cars. Most people were traveling by pousse-pousse. Our hotel was in the center of town, but the sound of traffic was strangely absent—just the occasional car or motorbike. After 9:00 p.m., the only sound came from barking dogs.
We left at 7:00 a.m. and in late afternoon, 250 miles on, passed the Fort Dauphin bus as it struggled up another hill. Its passengers faced another fifty to sixty hours of travel, most of it on dirt roads. At least the bus had suspension to soften the ride. Throughout the south, the standard (and cheapest) mode of long-distance transport is the camion-brousse (literally “bush truck”). It’s a military transport or freight truck with a rigid frame outfitted with bench seats; passengers are exposed to wind and dust, are bounced around violently, and are frequently sick. Public transport at its roughest.
Driving on RN7, it sometimes seemed that half the country was on the move: by taxi-brousse (bush taxi), the minivans with luggage, bicycles, and yellow bidons (jerry cans used for carrying water) piled so high that they look as if they will tip over on a curve, which they sometimes do; by auto and bicycle pousse-pousse; by bicycle; or by carts pulled by zebu. Every hour or so we stopped to let zebu cross the road, the boy herders shouting and waving their sticks. Outside the towns and villages, there were always people walking along the road. Rice farmers going to and from their fields. Men walking with axes and long sticks with curved blades, cutting eucalyptus trees for firewood and charcoal. Children returning from the river with bidons, lashed onto wooden pushcarts, the day’s supply of water for cooking and washing. Families walking home from church.
If you’ve got something to sell—fruits, vegetables, motor oil, bicycle tires—your best storefront is along RN7, preferably on one of the few straight stretches. There are small retail clusters. If you’re in the market for a garishly colored Jesus or Madonna statue or one of the animals from the Ark (in Madagascar, Noah did not forget to save a place for the zebu), your destination is a stretch south of Antsirabe; further south, a line of stalls sell wooden cooking utensils; south of Fianarantsoa, the second-largest city and the commercial center of the southern highlands, you can find musical instruments including drums and the Malagasy ukulele, and brightly painted tin models of trucks and cars.
Of course, most people in central and southern Madagascar were not on the move or hawking their wares along RN7. It’s just that many of those who were traveling were squeezed onto its narrow ribbon. Outside the towns, I saw only a few east–west roads leading off RN7 with a tarmac surface, and who knows how far the tarmac went? Poor infrastructure—primarily the roads, but also lack of electricity supply in rural areas—is the major barrier to economic development. In the rainy season (January through March), landslides block the road, and sections wash away or develop huge potholes. In places, work crews were building ditches and culverts to divert the water, but many stretches had not been repaired. Our driver engaged low gear and zigzagged, expertly avoiding the largest holes. It was uncomfortable enough in a high-riding vehicle; it must feel much worse in a bus or taxi-brousse. Every government since independence has promised to fix the roads and extend the network, but, faced with poverty, hunger, and pressing social problems, the promises are soon forgotten. “You can’t eat roads,” remarked our driver drily.
The bridges, mostly one-lane, are in serious need of maintenance. That’s except for one newish structure crossing a river north of Fianarantsoa. The old bridge, one UNICEF colleague explained, did not fall into the river through lack of repair; in 2002, during the six-month presidential standoff, forces loyal to Ratsiraka seized the government buildings in Fianarantsoa and blew up the bridge to stop troops from Tana from reaching the city. After the conflict ended, a new bridge was built with French aid. Communities up and down RN7 were left wondering whether the easiest way to get their bridges repaired was to blow them up and wait for donors to build new ones.
South of Fianarantsoa, RN7 turns southwest, dipping down out of the highlands to the treeless savannah grasslands. This is Madagascar’s high plains country, where herders drive their zebu and sleep out under the stars. The grasslands stretch for almost two-thirds of the length of the country, west of the highlands, and have a dry season of seven to eight months. If it wasn’t for the distinctive red-and-white kilometer posts and the absence of pickup trucks, it could have been Montana or Wyoming, the long grass blowing in the wind, the mountain ranges on the horizon. The grasslands gradually give way to a desert landscape of canyons, steep cliffs, and buttes dotted with scrubby trees and cactus; in the late afternoon, with the sun casting long shadows off the striking rock formations, we could have been in Arizona or New Mexico. We stopped for the second night in Ranohiro, gateway to the huge L’Isalo national park. Chez Alice, with its cactus fence and corral boasting Malagasy rodeo (presumably bareback zebu riding), was full, so we found a hotel in the town center, eating dinner alongside long tables of European tourists on their “Madagascar Adventure” tour. We were on the road again at 6:00 the next morning, as the sun rose over the bluffs and canyons, bathing them in the warm morning light.
Desert Treasures
The wealth in this beautiful but desolate landscape is not in them thar hills, but in the ground. And it’s not gold, but sapphires. Gemstones were first discovered in the forests of northern Madagascar in the early 1990s, drawing migrants to seek their fortunes. In the south, prospectors were collecting garnets to sell to foreign dealers; in 1998, a batch mined near Ilakaka, a wide place in the road along RN7, turned out to be pink sapphires. The discovery transformed Ilakaka from a few ramshackle huts into a boom town. The field, which stretches southwest across the desert from Ilakaka, is reportedly the largest deposit in the world, yielding high-priced deep blue sapphires along with pinks, yellows, and rubies. Other mining towns sprouted up along RN7. Their streets are lined with ramshackle stores selling provisions and tools, and rough, single-story shacks where miners rent small rooms at high prices. These are wild towns, with high rates of crime and prostitution, where the lucky miner who has just sold his sapphires blows it all on sugarcane moonshine and the slots at Les Jokers Hotel and Karaoke Bar.
With such riches to be uncovered, no machinery is used; miners use pickaxes and shovels to break the rocky ground and dig shafts, using buckets to haul the earth to the surface. It’s dirty, dangerous work; in the rainy season, shaft walls can collapse, trapping the miners underground. Most mines are individual or family operations. A few commercial mines, with optimistic names such as African Bank, Swiss Bank, and World Bank, are financed by investors who hire day laborers. The landscape is pockmarked with mine workings, but the deposits closest to RN7 and the towns have been exhausted, and miners must walk miles into the desert to work their claims.3
The real wealth is controlled by foreign traders—mostly from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Thailand—who buy the rough sapphires and sell them on Asian markets. The names on the gem stores—Fayez, Najeem, Iqbal, Farook—tell the story. The government, with support from donors, is training Malagasy miners and small traders in gemology and stonecutting and trying to collect export taxes. Regulating the industry and stamping out corruption is challenging. Rough sapphires are routinely smuggled out of the country, with a wink and a $100 bill slipped into the passport at customs.
The final sixty miles to Toliara are desolate, and the people poor. In contrast to the rough but functional two-story brick trano gasy houses of the highlands, the homes are single-room wood-and-mud huts with roofs of thatched reeds or palm leaves and a dirt floor, surrounded by fences of branches and cactus. Average rainfall in this region is just twelve to fourteen inches a year; the population depends primarily on zebu herding, raising meagre crops of maize, sorghum, and sweet potato in the sandy soil and along river banks.
Finally, we glimpsed the sea and the table mountain (a modest version of Cape Town’s landmark) that marked the final descent to Toliara. We crossed the low sandy hills into the city and reached the chamber of commerce in time for midmorning coffee. Just in time—my first presentation was scheduled for right after the break.
The “Champaign Country”
In June 1630, ships of the East India Company anchored in St. Augustine’s Bay at the mouth of the Onilahy River, about twenty miles south of present-day Toliara, to take on provisions before sailing up the Mozambique Channel. It was, by the standards of southern Madagascar, a cool winter, allowing the merchant Richard Boothby to feel comfortable in his suit of English cloth. During the three-month stay, not a single crew member died and there were few cases of sickness. “The country about the bay,” wrote Boothby, “is pleasant to view, replenished with brave woods, rocky hills of white marble, and low fertile grounds.” Crew members told him that away from the coast the land “abounds with mines of gold and silver and other minerals” and “a large plain, or champaign country, of meadow or pasture land as big as all of England,” with ample fish and game. “It is very probable,” Boothby wrote, “by the quantity of brown fat oxen, cows, sheep and goats brought down and sold unto us by the natives, that the country is very fertile.”
Boothby was intoxicated by what he saw and heard, as was his colleague, the surgeon Walter Hammond, who later published a pamphlet, Madagascar, the Richest and Most Fruitfull Island in the World. You must wonder if they were intoxicated by something else when they recorded their impressions. Compared with the east coast of Madagascar, with its tropical rainforest and lush vegetation, the land beyond St. Augustine’s Bay is among the most barren and infertile in the island.
Such enthusiastic accounts fell on eager ears in London, where city merchants, supported by King Charles I, were ready to invest in expeditions they hoped would make them wealthy. The East India Company was already engaged in a trading war with the Dutch and Portuguese in the Spice Islands and other parts of the Indian Ocean but had failed to establish settlements and forts. In 1635, a rival company, the Courteen’s Association, was granted a royal charter to trade in the East. Boothby and Hammond encouraged Courteen’s to sponsor a colony in Madagascar. Several attempts failed because of lack of funds and opposition from the East India Company, but eventually in August 1644 three ships with 140 men, women, and children, under the command of John Smart, set sail. They arrived in St. Augustine’s Bay in March 1645 and built a fortified settlement.
It was not the green and pleasant land Boothby and Hammond had promised. The settlers arrived at the end of the short rainy season, and the crops they planted perished for lack of water. The sparse cattle pasture soon dried up. There were no minerals. Smart sent out ships to seek trading opportunities, but they returned with discouraging news; the French and Dutch had established settlements on the east coast and threatened hostile action if the English tried to trade. By August, the St. Augustine colony was running out of supplies. The locals, writes Mervyn Brown, “who were usually friendly and ready to trade . . . became either non-cooperative or openly hostile when they realized that the visitors intended to settle and take some of their land.” The settlers got into disputes over cattle and rashly joined local clans in raids on their enemies. Dysentery and fever took their toll. When the colony was abandoned in May 1646, only sixty-three of the original settlers had survived. “I could not but endeavour to dissuade others from undergoing the miseries that will follow the persons of such as adventure themselves for Madagascar,” wrote one of the survivors, Powle Waldegrave.4
So ended, after little more than a year, the first English attempt to establish a colony. French trading settlements lasted longer, but none of the European trading powers succeeded in establishing a permanent commercial foothold on the island until French colonization in the late nineteenth century. English ships continued to call at St. Augustine, and some locals adopted English names, but no attempts were made to reestablish a settlement. After the French abandoned Fort Dauphin in 1674, trading contacts were mostly with pirates who preyed on European ships bound from the Cape to India and the Far East, and Arab vessels trading with East Africa. Pirate ships called in at St. Augustine and other west coast anchorages for provisions but did not establish settlements because of opposition from the powerful Sakalava kings and the danger of encountering warships on the main route to India. Although the south became part of the Merina Empire, its clans were never fully subdued. The French colonial government imposed nominal control, but historically this has been a region that has always resisted central authority.
The City That Never Sleeps
