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Land of the Merina
Of Kings and Drunken Soldiers
“We’re on our way to Arivonimamo—the town of a thousand drunken soldiers.”
Richard Samuel laughed at his own joke as he edged his dented Nissan pickup through the chaotic traffic of Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo, weaving around aging Citroën and Renault taxis, potholes, and hand carts hauling furniture, metal fencing, and sacks of charcoal.
The name of Richard’s hometown evokes the heyday of the Merina, the highland ethnic group that ruled Madagascar during the nineteenth century and is still prominent in politics and business. In an early campaign, the Merina king Andrianampoinimerina dispatched a thousand soldiers to capture a market town in the rice-growing region about thirty miles west of Antananarivo. Facing little resistance, the soldiers didn’t have much to do except get drunk on home-brewed, sugarcane rum and give the new garrison town its name. In Malagasy, “Arivo” means thousand and “nimamo” drunks.
Richard is proud of his Merina heritage and claims descent from “a former king (roi).” In Madagascar, the word “king” needs to be treated with caution. Until the French colonized the island at the end of the nineteenth century, the central highlands were a bit like medieval Europe, albeit with nicer weather. Local lords, supported by armed retainers, ruled the villages and their rice fields from fortified hilltop positions. To call them kings is a stretch; my colleague Luke Freeman, an anthropologist who has worked in Madagascar for more than twenty-five years, more aptly describes them as kinglets (in French, roitelets or petty kings).
Whether roi or roitelet, Richard’s ancestors were local nobility, their power measured by the size of their domain and the number of zebu—the humped oxen that are the mark of wealth in rural Madagascar—in their herd. Today, descendants of noble families still claim moral authority because of their lineage and, in some cases, their healing powers.
“I have inherited, along with all the members of my extended family, the power to cure burns,” Richard told me. “It’s not a skill, it’s a gift. All the members of my family have it. My son, my daughter, my sisters, my brothers—all can cure.” It was, he said, a matter of noblesse oblige. No traditional healer in a community hangs out a shingle like a doctor or dentist. People simply know which family has the power to cure this or that ailment. Richard says he does not expect payment; his power is a gift from the ancestors, and he must use it to benefit others. Some traditional healers take cash payments, but Richard says it’s more common to receive a gift—a bag of rice or cooking oil.
I met Richard at the University of Antananarivo (UA) in September 2014, on my first trip to Madagascar for the UNICEF research study. He was soft-spoken, modest about his own experience, and respectful of others’ opinions. We bonded quickly, and on my visit in March 2016 he invited me to travel to Arivonimamo.
Richard lives in two worlds. He has advanced degrees in economics and development studies, has worked in senior positions for government ministries, and is on the sociology faculty at the country’s leading teaching and research institution. As the descendant of nobility and a traditional healer, he inhabits another world, far from the pressures of life and work in the city. As often as he can, he returns to Arivonimamo—to the modest home of his parents, to the Catholic high school where he was educated by Canadian friars, to the church where he was baptized and had his first communion. On the main street and market, people stop to ask for his advice on all sorts of matters. Most of his family members still live in the area. A few miles west of the town is the new house Richard and his wife Tina have built for weekend getaways and their retirement. It’s next door to the family cemetery.
FIGURE 3.1 Richard Samuel, academic, political activist, minor nobility, traditional healer
Island or Continent?
If people have an image of Madagascar, it’s usually of a beach, a baobab tree, or a cartoon lemur. The island’s name recognition was boosted immensely by the 2005 computer-animated comedy hit from DreamWorks about four animals from New York’s Central Park Zoo who, after spending their lives in happy captivity, are suddenly repatriated to Africa and shipwrecked off the coast of Madagascar. Two sequels and a spin-off, the implausibly titled Penguins of Madagascar, put the “big red island”—so named because of the red, claylike soil of the central highlands—on the movie map and may have given a minor boost to tourism.
It wasn’t always an island. It was once part of the supercontinent of Gondwana, sandwiched between Africa and India. Gondwana started breaking apart about 180 million years ago, but it was another 100 million years before Madagascar detached itself from Africa and floated off into its present position in the Indian Ocean. Stretching almost 1,000 miles north to south and almost 375 miles across at its widest point, it’s almost the size of Ukraine and a little larger than Texas; it’s in the top fifty countries in the world for land area, larger than Kenya, Thailand, or Spain. It’s often ranked as the world’s fourth-largest island, after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo. But is it an island? Its long geologic history, wide range of vegetation and climatic zones—from semidesert to tropical rainforest—and biodiversity arguably place it in the “continent” category; indeed, some (including, of course, the tourist companies) call it the “eighth continent.” Neither geologists nor biologists, writes geologist Maarten de Wit, “have a definition that is capable of classifying Madagascar unambiguously as an island or continent.” Which gives de Wit a catchy subtitle for his scientific journal article: “Heads It’s a Continent, Tails It’s an Island.”1
Because it was separated from other landmasses for eighty million years, Madagascar developed a unique ecosystem, with plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. It has more than twelve thousand plant species, almost ten thousand of them found nowhere else, almost 350 reptile species, and forty-three primates, including the signature cuddly ring-tailed lemur. The biodiversity makes Madagascar what de Wit calls “the world’s hottest biodiversity hot spot,” attracting thousands of well-heeled tourists, mostly from North America and western Europe, who take guided tours through the jungles, cactus forests, and deserts. It’s also a favorite, safely exotic destination for French vacationers, who come mostly for the beaches, nightlife, and excellent haute cuisine. In the French tourist brochures, it sits alphabetically between its two main tropical rivals—the French-speaking Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.
Long Sea Journey
There are no cave paintings, parchment scrolls, or even oral traditions to tell us when Madagascar was first settled by humans—a lack of evidence that has led to a long and vigorous debate over origins. However, most scholars agree that in the scheme of human history, settlement came late, probably not before the fifth century. By that time, trade routes had been established across the Indian Ocean, linking Southeast Asia, India, the Arabian Peninsula, and east Africa.
Geographically, one might expect the first settlers to have come from Africa, making the relatively short (250–400-mile) journey across the Mozambique Channel. Astonishingly, they came from the other side of the Indian Ocean—from the Malay Archipelago, or what today is Indonesia. Although it is not known who they were or when they arrived, the historical evidence is persuasive. The Malagasy language borrows words from Javanese, Malay, and the languages of Borneo and Sulawesi; its nearest linguistic relative is a language spoken in southern Borneo. Some crops—rice in particular—are found throughout southeast Asia. On the coast and rivers, Malagasy travel in outrigger canoes like those used in Indonesia. Ethnomusicologists compare the simple Malagasy xylophone to one used by tribes in Borneo. Conclusive scientific evidence came in a 2012 study of matrilineal lineage that made a statistical comparison of the mitochondrial DNA of people from Madagascar and Indonesia. The team, led by Murray Cox of New Zealand’s Massey University, concluded that Malagasy and Indonesian DNA separated about twelve hundred years ago, close to the date when historians believe the island was first settled.
What were the reasons for settlement? At the time, much of the Malay Archipelago was part of the Srivijayan Empire, a major trading power that had the ships and men to mount an expedition; however, there is no historical evidence that it did. “Most likely, then,” notes the Economist in an analysis of the settlement evidence, “the first Malagasy were accidental castaways, news of whose adventure never made it back home. But there is still a puzzle.” Because people inherit mitochondria only from their mothers, the study tracked only the female line of descent. That means that the first party of settlers must have included some women—perhaps as few as thirty, according to Cox. Most ships’ crews were male, so why were women on board? One explanation is that the women were the cargo, and that Madagascar’s original inhabitants ended up on the island by chance after a slave ship wandered off course or was wrecked on the reefs.2
Whichever historical narrative is applied—that the first Malagasy were traders or shipwrecked slaves—it is unlikely that they were heading for Madagascar, or that they even knew where they would end up after they left the Malay Archipelago. Even with favorable winds, trading ships could not have made a direct crossing of the Indian Ocean. It is almost four thousand miles from the west coast of Sumatra to Madagascar, and the ships would have run out of fresh water and food after a few weeks. Instead, they took the long way around, stopping at ports in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea before heading south along the east coast of Africa, a journey that may have taken years. Although most trading ships returned home with cargoes, some did not, their crews deciding to settle and seek their fortunes in ports around the Indian Ocean. They intermarried with the indigenous people, creating the racially mixed population that is typical of many coastal communities.
Archaeological evidence shows that Bantu peoples from East Africa may have begun migrating to the island as early as the sixth and seventh centuries. Some were herders from the Great Lakes region, and they brought their animals with them. Linguists have noted that most Malagasy words for domestic animals have Bantu-language roots; for example, the word for the humped cattle zebu is hen’omby, from the Swahili word for beef, omby or aombe. Other historical records suggest some Bantus were descendants of sailors and merchants from the east coast—from modern-day northern Mozambique north to Somalia—who crossed to western Madagascar in their dhows to trade. Finally, some may have been transported to the island as slaves. Migrants cultivated crops found throughout the African continent, such as manioc and sweet potatoes.
The early settlers from the Malay Archipelago are referred to in some sources as the Vazimba, as if they were a distinct ethnic group that occupied a specific region during a certain period. It’s a convenient way for historians to box them into a timeline to fit a narrative of conflicts, cattle raids, and slavery. From a Malagasy perspective, history is more complicated. As Luke notes, the Malagasy use vazimba as a word for any unknown population that was in a place before they were and “left enigmatic traces of themselves such as abandoned tombs or a standing stone.” Throughout the island, “there are traces of lost people who settled and moved on and whose history and passing are lost in time. So vazimba are not really the ‘original’ or even ‘early’ people of Madagascar, just vanished predecessors, just people doing what all Malagasy people do: settling, moving on, fading away.” The problem, as Luke points out, is the use of the definite article; once you talk about “the Vazimba” rather than “vazimba,” you elevate their status from “just people” to that of an ethnic group.
A second wave of settlers from the Malay Archipelago arrived between the eighth and twelfth centuries. They were the Merina, Richard’s ancestors. They brought with them their traditional clan organization and agricultural practices, particularly rice cultivation. They settled mostly in the highland regions where the landscape of rice paddies today looks as if it could be anywhere in Thailand or Indonesia. Their skin color and straight dark hair make them Asian in appearance. However, many communities, especially in the coastal regions, are racially mixed, with generations of intermarriage between people of Asian and African descent, Arab seafarers, and later Chinese and Indian traders and European settlers.
From the seventeenth century, Madagascar became important in the Indian Ocean trade in silks, spices, and slaves, and a haven for pirates who preyed on merchant ships. Although successive European powers—the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, followed by the Dutch from the Cape Colony, then the French and the British—tried to establish trading and military posts, most settlements were short-lived. Other Europeans ended up on the island by accident, shipwrecked on its notorious reefs. The tribes, especially in the south, were often hostile, and disease and climate took their toll. The only group that adapted relatively successfully were the pirates who used the harbors of the east coast as bases to prey on merchant ships sailing to India; they had goods to trade for food, and some took Malagasy wives. By the mid-eighteenth century the British navy had sent most of the pirates scuttling back to the Caribbean. While other areas of Africa fell under European rule, Madagascar, relatively isolated and lacking exploitable agricultural or mineral resources, remained off the colonial radar. The island was divided between three large kingdoms and small feudal domains headed by warrior chieftains. They were almost always fighting each other, stealing zebu and taking captives to use as slave labor.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the Merina chieftain Andrianampoinimerina had subdued his rival kinglets and created a unified kingdom in the central highlands. He vowed that the Merina kingdom would have “no frontier but the sea.” In their imperial ambitions, the Merina kings had a willing ally in the British, who were competing with the French for military and commercial dominance in the Indian Ocean. The British struck a deal with the Merina kings—guns for slaves. In return for stopping the export of slaves to the French colonies of Réunion and Mauritius, Britain recognized Merina sovereignty over the island and provided economic and military aid, including firearms, enabling the kings to extend their domain outside the central highlands. The Merina replaced local chiefs with civil servants who collected taxes and imposed labor quotas. The irony is that while restricting the export of slaves—and so dealing a severe blow to the French plantation economy on Réunion and Mauritius—British support for the Merina boosted the internal slave trade. By the mid-1820s, the British-trained, musket-toting armies of Andrianampoinimerina’s son, Radama I, had conquered or subdued most of the island, capturing or taking as tribute thousands of Malagasy. A century after Britain abolished slavery in its empire, Madagascar’s slave markets were booming. Britain’s emissaries diplomatically ignored the Merina use of slave labor—either imported slaves or those from coastal areas—in plantations and factories. Although slavery was officially abolished in 1877, the institution remained until the end of the monarchy.
As the European colonial carve-up of southern Africa continued apace, British interest in Madagascar and support for the Merina monarchy waned. In January 1895, the French landed fifteen thousand troops on the northwest coast. Although half the force died or had to be evacuated because of disease, the Merina army proved no match. After a one-day artillery bombardment of Antananarivo, the Merina surrendered. The monarchy was abolished, slavery banned, and taxes imposed; French settlers arrived, coming to dominate agriculture, commerce, and industry. The great Merina landholdings were broken up, and local leaders replaced Merina in administrative positions. The Merina kings had allowed Protestant missionaries to establish churches and schools, and many had followed the lead of the royal family, which converted in 1869. With French colonization, pragmatic Malagasy Christians sensed the way the winds were blowing and found the Catholic mass more politically and socially agreeable than the Methodist or Lutheran service. Madagascar remained a French colony until independence in 1960.
Ethnic Mix, not Melt
Although maps and guidebooks show the island neatly divided into eighteen ethnic groups, each supposedly protecting its own cultural terrain, ethnicity in Madagascar is muddled. There’s no single criterion for defining an ethnic group; some are based on racial origins, some are alliances of clans that resisted Merina conquest, some are classified by economic activity, such as fishing or zebu herding. Throughout its history, Madagascar has experienced almost constant migration, both from other regions of the Indian Ocean and internally, as people moved to flee conflict, find better farmland, or work in mines. Except in isolated rural areas, most communities have an ethnic mix.
The historical divisions between the highland peoples of Asian descent, including the Merina, and coastal peoples (côtiers), primarily of African descent, are key to understanding Malagasy society. The highland peoples have a complex social structure; at the top of the hierarchy are the noble clans (the andriana) that ruled the island until the French arrived; further down are the hova (commoners) and clans with less land, zebu, and political clout; at the bottom of the social strata are marginalized clans of migrant workers and the descendants of former slaves. Depending on whom you talk to, intermarriage between the highland peoples and côtiers is either taboo, extremely rare, or, in urban areas, a lot more common than it used to be. The ethnic mix has not yet melted.
Ethnicity is a complex and sensitive issue. I respect the views of Richard and others who believe that colonization by the French destroyed the national unity the Merina kings had built. At the same time, other ethnic groups, especially in the south, have long regarded the highland Merina as oppressors. In the nineteenth century, the Merina conquered their lands, stole their zebu, and sold them into slavery; today, the central government, dominated by the Merina political elite, taxes them without providing schools or social or medical services. Although the monarchy collapsed in 1897 when France took control, the Merina have remained the most politically and economically powerful ethnic group in the country. In the nineteenth century, the andriana ruled from their palaces and traveled in sedan chairs; today, the Merina elite rule from ministries and corporate headquarters and travel in SUVs.
The research study focused on five areas—health, nutrition, water and sanitation, education, and child protection. UNICEF wanted to know whether certain ethnic groups had specific attitudes and practices. Did one group fear needles and refuse to have their children vaccinated? Did another have food taboos? Did another believe that water from the river was cleaner than treated water from a well? The first time we asked our mostly Merina colleagues at UA about ethnicity, we faced a stone wall. “There are no ethnic groups in Madagascar, we are all Malagasy,” was the collective response. Knowing that most Malagasy identify by village or community and hold ceremonies to honor their ancestors, we came up with a roundabout way of asking about ethnicity in our questionnaire: Where are the tombs of your ancestors? If we had that information, we could be reasonably confident about ethnic origin because the boundaries of tribal regions roughly correspond to those of old kingdoms. Again, we were stymied. When the final versions of the questionnaires were translated from French to Malagasy, the question was cut.
When You Die, You Live Together in the Same Tomb (Malagasy Proverb)
You’d expect a road called Route Nationale (RN) 1 to be a major highway. Typically, the number one national route in any country is a major artery, connecting the capital with important regional centers, helping to drive the national economy. On that measure, Madagascar’s RN1 is a disappointment. It starts in the right place—the capital Antananarivo, familiarly known as Tana—as a divided highway heading confidently westward toward the coast. Outside the city, it reverts to a two-lane that winds lazily through the highlands. Seventy-five miles west of Tana, RN1 seems to hesitate and divides into two branches. They are reunited 60 miles further west at Tsiroanomandidy on the edge of the highland plateau. That’s where RN1 and the blacktop end, still more than 125 miles short of the coast and what should be its terminus, the fishing port of Manitrano. The fizzling out of RN1 is symptomatic of Madagascar’s infrastructure problems; without better road or rail connections, or electricity-generating capacity, economic development will always be hampered. For those traveling on from Tsiroanomandidy to the coast, the dirt road descends from the highlands to the savannah grassland, and then to the coastal plain. It’s a bone-rattling fifteen-hour trip by 4x4 or high-riding vehicle. In the dry season, the trip by taxi-brousse (bush taxi) costs 70,000 ariary ($23); in the monsoon season, it’s 100,000 ($32). The people of Manitrano call it “the devil’s route.”
MAP 3.1 Madagascar (map by Belén Marco Crespo)
The highland region west of Tana is called Imerina, literally the homeland of the Merina. RN1 winds gently up and down the low hills, skirting fields of corn, rice paddies, and secondary-growth stands of pine and eucalyptus; along the roadside, billboards feature images of politicians planting trees and declaring their commitment to environmental conservation. Brick kilns dot the fields; with most wood used for charcoal, homes are built from rough mud bricks fired from the red-clay soil of the region. The towns are agricultural and commercial centers, selling farm implements, seeds, and supplies and shipping produce to the capital.
Richard, Tina, and I stopped at the roadside to eat fresh corn, grilled in cocottes over charcoal fires. “This is an agricultural region, but the farmers are not self-sufficient,” said Richard. By tradition, land is divided among sons, so over generations farm plots have become smaller. The national average for a family farm, Richard said, is half a hectare—about half the size of a football or rugby field. “You can’t survive on that, and the population continues to grow. That’s why the people go to Tana every day to do petit commerce, selling farm produce, secondhand clothes or cheap consumer items.”
We stopped for lunch in Arivonimamo, the town of a thousand drunken soldiers, and visited Richard’s family home and the Catholic lycée where he studied. The first armed rebellion against the French occurred here in late 1895, soon after Tana surrendered, and the queen signed a treaty establishing a French protectorate. Some regarded the Merina monarch and political leaders as traitors for abandoning the religion and traditions of the ancestors, converting to Christianity, adopting Western ways, and accepting defeat and occupation. A force of two thousand men seized Arivonimamo and murdered the Merina governor, two Quaker missionaries, and their child. The force planned to regroup in Tana on market day, with arms concealed in their clothes, to attack the royal palace, the French residency, and the European quarter, but the plot misfired, and French troops were sent to Arivonimamo to quell the uprising. Insurrections broke out in other parts of the island in 1896 before the French were able to assert control.
FIGURE 3.2 Cooking corn in cocottes on charcoal grills at roadside on RN 1, west of Antananarivo
FIGURE 3.3 On the market at Arivonimamo—manioc, a staple in the Malagasy diet
A few miles beyond Arivonimamo, we pulled off into the red dirt driveway of the new family home. Like all residential construction projects, this one had been going on longer than Richard and Tina expected, but they seemed stoic about the delays. Richard’s brother, wearing a yellow-and-green Brazil football T-shirt, was sitting on a stone wall waiting to greet us.
FIGURE 3.4 Lala and Richard Samuel at new family home near Arivonimamo. Go Brazil!
Richard introduced us. “His name is Relax,” he joked, then corrected himself. “Lala.”
I wondered for a moment if the Richard of the city and university was envious of his brother’s simple, unhurried lifestyle as a subsistence farmer. Their parents had seven children. Three brothers had died, leaving Richard, Lala, and two sisters. Richard was the only child to go to high school and university. The others remained in the Arivonimamo area.
Richard, Lala, and I walked outside to the terraced garden with sweeping views from the ridge to the south. Tina had planted manioc, coffee, and lychees, as well as herbs; a patch of ground had been excavated for a fish pond. From the garden, it was just a few steps to the family cemetery—half a dozen above-ground stone and concrete tombs. Two zebu wandered among the tombs, grazing on the long grass. I thought to myself that when Richard and Tina die, they won’t have too far to go.
I pointed to one grave dug in the earth and decorated with flowers. “In 2014, we lost an elder brother,” said Richard. “And soon after we buried him, a cousin died. We will move them into the tomb at the proper time. You can’t just open up a tomb when someone dies.”
For the Merina, the proper time is the famadihana, literally the “turning of the bones,” a three-day celebration when extended families gather to open the tombs, exhume the corpses, and rewrap them in silk shrouds (lamba). For many Malagasy, death is the passage between life on earth, which is ephemeral, and life beyond, which is eternal. The ancestors’ spirits, writes Madagascar historian Sir Mervyn Brown, “watch over every aspect of daily life. . . . The concept of the ancestors as a collective entity embodying traditional wisdom reinforces the unity and continuity of the family.”3 In life and death, family ties are unbroken. Richard quoted a Malagasy proverb: “When you are alive, you live together under the same roof. When you die, you live together in the same tomb.”
The famadihana is the opportunity to communicate with the ancestors, to seek their blessing for health and wealth. “You pray to be successful in business and to have many zebu,” said Richard. The standard ethnographic view of the ceremony, writes anthropologist David Graeber, is “that the living wish to give honor to the dead, and that by doing so they receive their tsodrano or blessing—a blessing that will ensure their continued health, prosperity and fertility.” However, in attending seven famadihana in the Arivonimamo district, Graeber found a darker side to the practice—a fear of ancestral violence. This is linked to what the Malagasy call fady (taboos). There are fady on plants that should not be grown or eaten, on stealing from members of one’s clan, on selling ancestral land to outsiders, on intermarrying with lower castes, particularly the descendants of slaves. When Graeber asked people what would happen if famadihana was not performed, the answers were unequivocal: their children would die, their health would fail, or the family would fall deeper into poverty. When asked about “the origins of the dark, murderous specters that disturbed children’s sleep or otherwise plagued the living, most people immediately suggested they were ancestors whose descendants ‘no longer took care of them.’” Memory of the ancestors, writes Graeber, is double-edged—they are both celebrated and feared.
FIGURE 3.5 Richard Samuel and brother Lala at family tombs
The famadihana has a set ritual and sequence of events. It begins with a procession to the tomb led by an astrologer, usually accompanied by men carrying photographs of the most important ancestors and followed by neighbors, guests, and women carrying straw mats. After uncovering the stone door to the tomb, the men descend the steps with candles or lamps and carry out the bodies, rolled in the mats, in order of seniority, calling their names as they emerge. The crowd shouts for joy, and the band cranks up the beat as the men dance the corpses around the tomb. Placed on the laps of the women, the corpses are sprinkled with rum and honey, then rewrapped in new white silk lamba, and held by family members who pray silently. The music picks up again and mixed groups of men and women dance the corpses around the tomb one more time. The mood, writes Graeber, is one of “delirious abandon,” with the corpses “twisted and crunched about a great deal before finally being returned to their places inside.” As the crowd begins to drift away, the tomb is sealed with earth. Later, the astrologer and a few assistants return to perform a fanidy, symbolically locking the tomb by burying magical objects around the doorway. If done correctly, writes Graeber, a fanidy should ensure that “the ghosts of those within would remain there, unable to emerge again and trouble the living.”4
The famidhana is a joyous occasion, but an expensive one. A huge feast is prepared, one of the few occasions when a zebu is killed for meat. There are the costs of the silk lambas, the band, the bottles of homemade rum. Family members are expected to contribute what they can, handing over an envelope of cash to the host. The event can cost from $1,500 to $2,000, more than many families earn in a year. “It is usually held in winter after the harvest when families have the means,” said Richard. Winter is also the dry season; for public health reasons, the government has banned the exhumation of bodies during the monsoon months.
There is no set interval between the famadihana, although some say that once in seven years is common. “It depends on a family decision, and financial means,” said Richard. Lala was suggesting it was time, and maybe they could do it in September. “We need to consult everyone in the family,” Richard replied. By then, he hoped, the house would be finished so everyone could stay overnight.
The practice of famadihana has been criticized. A Washington Post article attempted to link it to the spread of bubonic plague in Madagascar, although the connection seemed weak;5 in a country where over 75 percent of the population live on less than $2 a day, many people live in unsanitary conditions that provide fertile breeding grounds for rats and fleas. Attempting to ban a strongly established cultural practice because it may result in a few cases of plague diverts attention from the structural problems of poverty, sanitation, and lack of infrastructure. The government could achieve more by picking up the trash and enforcing sanitary regulations than by banning famadihana.
Richard did not forget Lala’s request. The family agreed to hold the two-day famadihana in mid-September. I was sorry I could not attend, but Richard posted photos to my Facebook page.
Paris with Rice Paddies
Most travelers arrive in Madagascar at Tana’s Ivato international airport, about eight miles from the city center. There are daily flights from Paris, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Maputo (Mozambique); connections to Indian Ocean destinations—Mauritius, Réunion, the Comoros, and Seychelles; and weekly flights to more offbeat destinations such as Bangkok and Istanbul. The Bangkok passengers include gem dealers with illegal shipments of rough sapphires sewn into their underwear or in bottles labeled as vitamin tablets. Others travel to buy electronics and upscale consumer goods for resale to middle-class customers. Until the domestic market grows enough to make it viable to use air freight, business owners will continue to make shopping trips, stuffing cheap luggage with designer-label clothes, iPhones, and cosmetics.
Domestic flights are on Air Madagascar. Or “Air Maybe,” as one passenger described it. “Sometimes they fly, sometimes they don’t,” she said. “You can never be sure.” The airline seems to suffer from the same disease as the government that owns it, staggering from one financial or management crisis to the next. Sometimes it’s bankrupt. Sometimes the pilots are on strike. Sometimes there is no fuel. You should never book too far ahead on Air Maybe.
The road to the city from the airport passes through a densely populated area. After a few hotels and the Chinese casino, it’s the typical African or Asian street scene—honking cars, slow-moving trucks, hole-in-the-wall shops, children playing on the narrow sidewalk, porters lounging on hand carts. Change the language on the signs and it could be almost any city in India, Bangladesh, or Indonesia. A mesmerizing array of small retail establishments are crammed into narrow storefronts—a tire repair shop next to a beauty salon, then a halal butcher, a one-room health clinic, a furniture workshop, a SIM card recharge outlet, a shop selling friperie (secondhand clothes), a small hotel, a lumberyard, a used car parts store, another beauty salon. Then a wall plastered with posters for music concerts and religious revivals, almost obscuring the Défense d’Afficher (forbidden to post) sign. A jumble of colorful hand-painted signs, mostly in French or Malagasy with a sprinkling of English—Good Auto, Rehoboth Shack, Smile Pizza, Quick Fix Oil Change, Flash Video. For the last four miles, the road runs along the levee of the River Ikopa. The low-lying areas around the city are crisscrossed by canals supplying water to the rice paddies. Among the paddies are islands of shacks, with chickens, geese, and ducks (some destined to be pâté) running free, and zebu grazing on patches of grassland. Then past the fifteen-thousand-seat national rugby stadium—home of the Makis (the lemurs)—to a retail district centered, without any sense of ideological irony, on a square dedicated to a communist hero, the Place de Ho Chi Minh.
Situated just over four thousand feet above sea level, Tana, with its hills and narrow, winding streets, feels like a tropical, slightly rundown version of Paris with rice paddies. From the original rova (fortress) built by the Merina king Andrianjaka in the early seventeenth century, the royal real estate expanded, with new palaces and royal tombs built on the highest points of the ridge. The residential topography of Tana (as in other Merina towns and villages) reflected class distinctions. Down the hill from the palaces were the houses of the andriana, the noble class; the commoners, the hova, lived further down the slope, and the slave caste (andevo) and rural migrants on the plains to the west. Members of castes were required to live in designated districts and return to them after working in other places. Nonnobles were not allowed to build wooden houses or keep pigs within the city limits. As the population grew, the Merina kings used forced labor to construct a massive system of dikes and paddy fields around the city to provide an adequate supply of rice.
Tana temporarily lost its status as the Merina capital in the early eighteenth century with the death of the king Andriamasinavalona. The kingdom split into four territories and for the next seventy-odd years, Merina kinglets fought, intrigued, allied, married, and died as they competed for supremacy. The eventual winner was Andrianampoinimerina from the eastern district, who conquered Antananarivo in 1794, ending the civil war. His former capital, Ambohimanga, was designated the spiritual capital of the Merina, and Antananarivo the political and commercial capital. Andrianampoinimerina created a large marketplace at Analakely, the lowland area between the two ridges, and it remains the city’s economic center.
By 1810, when Andrianampoinimerina’s son Radama I ascended the throne and began expanding the Merina empire, Antananarivo, with a population of more than eighty thousand, was the largest and most important commercial city on the island. Radama’s successor, Ranavalona I, helped launch Madagascar’s modest industrial revolution. British missionaries introduced brickmaking, and a shipwrecked French craftsman, Jean Laborde, established factories to produce construction materials, agricultural tools, and weapons for the army; in Antananarivo, two massive staircases were built to connect the market at Analakely to the growing residential areas on the two ridges.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, all houses in Madagascar were built from wood, grasses, reeds, and other plant-based materials deemed appropriate for structures used by the living; stone, as an inert material, was reserved for the dead and used only for family tombs. In 1867, after a series of fires destroyed wooden homes in Antananarivo, Queen Ranavalona II lifted the royal edict on the use of stone and brick for construction. The royal palace was encased in stone. The first brick house built by the London Missionary Society in 1869 blended English, Creole, and Malagasy designs and served as a model for a new style built in the capital and across the highlands. Termed the trano gasy (Malagasy house), it is a two-story, brick building with four columns at the front that support a wooden verandah. In the late nineteenth century, these houses quickly replaced most of the traditional wooden houses of the andriana. As Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic Church gained adherents, stone and brick churches were constructed.
In the early twentieth century, under French administration, the city spread out along the lower hilltops and slopes in la ville moyenne (the middle town). In the basse ville (lower town), northwest of the Analakely market area, French urban planners laid out the streets on a grid pattern aligned with a broad boulevard, now called the Avenue de l’Indépendance, with the city’s Soarano railroad station at its northwest end. Engineers drilled tunnels through two large hills, connecting isolated districts; streets were paved with cobblestones, and some later with blacktop; water, previously drawn from springs at the foot of the hills, was piped in from the Ikopa River. Since independence in 1960, the city has spread out across the plains in every direction, and urban growth has been largely uncontrolled. In the sprawling districts of the basse ville, where roughly built houses are vulnerable to fire and flooding, many residents splice into city power lines to steal electricity. Informal settlements, without adequate water supply and sanitation facilities, have grown up on agricultural land on the outskirts.
FIGURE 3.6 Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, “Paris with rice paddies”
Today, the historic haute ville retains its late nineteenth-century charm. Trano gasy houses with steeply pitched tiled roofs, verandas, and flowering cactus line the cobbled streets snaking up the hillsides; alleyways with stone steps descend to the Analakely market and shopping streets branching off from the Avenue de l’Indépendance. Among the most impressive buildings are the stone-built churches on the summits. Below the Malagasy Montmartres, people cook over open charcoal fires, draw water from hand pumps, and sleep in doorways. The official population of the Tana metropolitan area is more than two million—about one-tenth of the total population of Madagascar—but that does not count unregistered migrants from rural areas who arrive every day to work or engage in petit commerce.
The French influence is still apparent—in language, the architecture of public buildings, the bakers selling baguettes and croissants, the escargots and pâté de foie gras on the restaurant menus. At the Soarano railway station, the Café de la Gare resembles a brasserie in a French provincial town, with its dark wood paneling, chandeliers, candlelit tables and white-shirted waiters. The best hotel in the city, the Colbert in the haute ville, founded as a handful of rooms above a café in 1928, reeks of colonial extravagance with its marble-clad lobby, patisserie, hair salon, perfume shop, spa, and casino. At the nearby Café du Jardin, overlooking the Analakely market, the large-screen TVs rebroadcast French provincial rugby matches.
My guide to the city was Luke, who had worked in Madagascar on and off for more than twenty-five years. He arrived in Tana in 1989 as the country was emerging from more than a decade of what some termed “Christian Marxism” (Marx would have turned in his grave). He was supposed to be fulfilling his university foreign-language requirement by spending a year studying French. He had another motive. “Saying you’re going to Madagascar to study French is rather like saying you’re going to Nigeria to study English,” he said. He improved his French but concentrated on learning the Malagasy language and studying the culture. Since 1989, he has returned to Madagascar almost every year. As an anthropologist, cultural study meant more than wading through dissertations, books, and articles on kinship, tradition, and religion. Luke worked as a rice farmer and herded zebu across the southern deserts.
It was in 2004, while Luke was on a zebu drive, that he was summoned to the capital by the so-called yogurt king Marc Ravalomanana, winner of the December 2001 presidential election. The president wanted to reduce Madagascar’s dependence on France and open trade links with English-speaking countries, particularly the United States and South Africa. Luke was appointed the president’s English speechwriter and communication adviser. “One day, I was sleeping under a tarpaulin,” Luke recalls. “Three days later, I was in a luxury hotel in Addis Ababa, writing a speech for Ravalomanana to deliver to the African Union.” He moved to Tana and worked for Ravalomanana before returning to the UK to take a university position.
Luke had been a late addition to our research team, stepping in when another member withdrew for medical reasons. His knowledge of the history, geography, economy, and culture of Madagascar proved indispensable; he was the first to make us aware of the divisions between the Merina and the côtiers and their implications for the research study. He helped us understand how our UA colleagues viewed the project, and what they hoped to gain from it. In Tana, he knew where to shop and where to eat (he introduced us to Ku-de-ta). Like anyone who has lived long enough in another country, Luke knew how to get things done. A case in point: most bureaucratic transactions require an official stamp. When Luke applied for an extended visa, the immigration authorities demanded a stamp from his institution, at that time the London School of Economics (LSE). LSE does not have a stamp, but Luke had to come up with one. He went to the bazaar where a skilled artist created a mirror imprint of the LSE logo and made a stamp. It was good enough for the immigration authorities.
Luke helped us understand Madagascar’s complex, love-hate relationship with its former colonial master. French rule brought law and order, roads and railways, schools, a health system, nice restaurants, and good pastries, but it also forced people to leave their homes to work on plantations. France is still the leading foreign investor (although China is catching up), and French tourists bring in much-needed foreign exchange. France is still seen as the place to receive higher education, and maybe to migrate for work. At various times since independence, nationalists have discouraged the use of the French language, yet it is still taught in schools and widely spoken, especially in urban areas. Madagascar-historian Sir Mervyn Brown, who served as UK ambassador in the late 1960s, recalled that French nationals still occupied senior positions:
It is normal when a country becomes newly independent that colonial officials should remain in important positions for a short time. . . . But in Madagascar, even ten years after independence, the French were still there in force. In the President’s office his secretary general was French, and the head of security was French, the head of his personal staff was French, a gendarmerie colonel; and they weren’t very discreet about it. Neocolonialism was very evident.6
I wondered what people would think of my rusty French. I need not have worried. As I emerged from a mobile phone store after buying a SIM card, I told Luke that the staff must have been snickering over my mangled syntax. “They don’t care,” he said, “It’s not their language.”
Vive le Renault 4L et le 2CV!
“Do you have a lot of 4Ls in the United States?”
Richard asked the question as our Renault 4L taxi hurtled down a cobblestone hill in Tana. It was a jarring, noisy ride. I gripped the door handle, which appeared to have been re-riveted to the frame more than once. At the bottom of the hill, the driver crunched into low gear and began a slow climb.
I told Richard I had never seen a 4L in the United States. His question puzzled me but, as I looked out at the chaotic traffic, I realized why he had asked. In his urban landscape, the 4L was a dominant species.
When I traveled in France in the 1970s, the Renault 4L was a common sight. With its functional, box-like design, it sat high (for its size) on its chassis, its front end leaning slightly down as if it was getting ready to dive into the potholes and muddy farm fields. It was introduced in 1961, aimed at the lower end of a market dominated by the two-cylinder Citroën 2CV, the celebrated deux chevaux (two horses), a small front-wheel-drive sedan marketed as a people’s car in the same class as Germany’s Volkswagen Beetle. The 4L, like the 2CV, was seriously underpowered, taking several minutes to reach its preferred cruising speed of about 80 kilometers (50 miles) per hour. Once it made it, it chugged along happily, using much less petrol than anything else on the road. For the new driver, the gear shift on the 4L and 2CV was a challenge—you pulled it out directly from the dashboard, then twisted it left and right, forward and backward, in a complex series of motions. In my twenties, living in Britain, I owned first a 2CV and then the slightly upmarket (but no more powerful) Citroën Diane. I soon became expert at the contortions required to shift gears.
I visit my sister and her husband in southwestern France every couple of years. There, it’s unusual to see a 4L or 2CV on the road, although I’ve spotted a few rusting in barns. But they are still the most common taxis on the roads of Tana. Many are survivors of the city’s traffic wars, with battered panels and out-of-whack alignment. On some, the ignition no longer works, so the driver hot-wires the engine. As you rattle up the cobbled streets you try to forget that there’s almost no suspension and just marvel that the car is still running.
The history of the French automobile industry lives and breathes—or rather wheezes—in Tana and other Madagascar towns. I’ve seen other Renault and Citroën models, the Peugeot 204, 304, and 404, and even the occasional Citroën DS (Goddess), the sleek, streamlined car with a hydraulic system that looked years ahead of its time when it was introduced in the mid-1950s. There are gas-guzzling SUVs on the roads of Tana, but in a country where all indicators—unemployment, poverty, health, literacy—put it in the “least developed” category on global indexes, you’re fortunate if you own a 4L or a 2CV. The last ones came off the production line in the early 1990s, but they still command high prices on the used-car market, more than $2,000 for a model with a few dents, a cracked windshield, and worn seats.
FIGURE 3.7 His pride and joy, a Renault 4L taxi
With spare parts no longer available, except from specialty dealers at high prices, how do drivers keep their cars running? The answer is “bricolage” (from the French verb bricoler, to tinker), loosely translated as “do-it-yourself.” “We Malagasy always manage to find a bricolage solution,” Richard told me. The auto parts trade, he said, is controlled by Indian and Pakistani shopkeepers who import parts from factories in Mumbai and Karachi. Many either fit the old cars or can be made to fit with a little bricolage. For that service, you go to one of the many metal fabrication shops that cut and weld made-to-order fencing, pipes, market stall frames, and agricultural implements. They can take a Tata or Mahindra part and make it work for your 4L; if not, they’ll just make you a new part. When cars eventually break down and cannot be repaired, the parts are salvaged and resold. “In this economy, there’s almost always a new use for something,” said Richard.
Madagascar Recycles
You’ll find the most ingenious examples of recycling and bricolage on Tana’s markets. Not the upscale markets where middle-class Malagasy, expatriates, and tourists shop, but the regular markets that serve most residents. Luke took me to the Isotry quartier, one of the poorer districts of central Tana, south of the Soarano railroad station. The Isotry bazaar is off the tourist route, and the more interesting for it. Live geese, ducks, chickens, and turkeys are crammed into straw baskets. Scrawny cats, tethered by string to the baskets, are also on sale; the point-of-purchase message is that if you buy a cat to keep down the vermin, it will not attack your poultry. There are live crabs in buckets, and stacks of friperie (secondhand clothes) and shoes. There’s new stuff, of course, including the bizarrely branded Chinese T-shirts and underwear—Tokyo Super Dry, Cool My To Rock, Hugo Premium Fashion Boss. Because it was early December, vendors were hawking artificial Christmas trees and decorations. In the consumer electronics section, it took me a few minutes to figure out why stalls displayed guitars, amplifiers, car batteries, and solar panels together. It’s because electricity is still not available in some communities around Tana, and city districts experience power cuts. The band must play on, so musicians travel with their own power supply.
At one stall, we found a selection of farming hand tools, with blades of different lengths, widths, and angles designed for every task, all forged from scrap metal. Richard had told me that the scrap metal trade is controlled by ex-zebu herders from the south, a tough bunch who drive hard bargains. Next door, the vendor was selling hand weights fashioned from car gears. Bottles and jars are washed and reused. I bought jars of homemade lasary mango hot sauce, a specialty of northwest Madagascar, and sakay, made from red chili peppers with ginger and lemon juice. To carry the jars, I used a shopping bag made from polyester straps used to secure boxes for shipping. The Malagasy have long learned to recycle and reuse—not through any sense of environmental consciousness but because in a poor country there’s no alternative.
One section of the market is devoted to traditional medicine. The stalls are piled high with wood sticks, bark, shells, bottles, and packets of remedies. One promised to cure almost anything—diseases of the heart, liver, lung, and stomach. Others claimed to improve fertility or build muscles. To ward off evil spirits, there are amulets to wear and incense to burn. It occurred to us that perhaps UNICEF should commission research on the market. The use of traditional medicine is not confined to remote rural regions and ethnic groups; here in the capital city there were dozens of stalls, most offering the same range of merchandise, and people were buying.
An Ample Supply of Vowels
In April 1996, at the height of the Balkan crisis, the satirical newspaper the Onion reported the latest US initiative to bring peace to the region:
Before an emergency joint session of Congress yesterday, President Clinton announced US plans to deploy over 75,000 vowels to the war-torn region of Bosnia. The deployment, the largest of its kind in American history, will provide the region with the critically needed letters A, E, I, O and U, and is hoped to render countless Bosnian names more pronounceable.
The deployment, dubbed Operation Vowel Storm by the State Department, is set for early next week, with the Adriatic port cities of Sjlbvdnzv and Grzny slated to be the first recipients. Said Sjlbvdnzv resident Grg Hmphrs, 67: “With just a few key letters, I could be George Humphries. This is my dream.”7
Far be it from me to criticize US foreign aid policy—even a satirical version of it—but I feel obliged to point out that large stocks of vowels are lying idle and unpronounced in other countries. If the State Department had done its research more thoroughly, it could have purchased an ample supply from Madagascar, giving a much-needed boost to the country’s foreign exchange earnings. Americans should be asking why their government is sending its hard-earned vowels overseas when some American schoolchildren are struggling to form syllables. We need to keep our vowels at home to help make America great again.
Unlike some African countries that have many languages and even more dialects, Madagascar has a single, vowel-rich national language—Malagasy—with French as the second language for most educated people. There are regional differences, of course. Standard or official Malagasy is the dialect of the highland Merina, the government, and national media. Outside the highlands, especially in racially mixed coastal areas, dialects are spoken; people understand official Malagasy but do not use it in everyday life.
Malagasy is not related to other African languages, although it imported words from Bantu and Arabic, and later from English and French. It belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family; its nearest linguistic relative is a language spoken in southern Borneo. Madagascar has a long and rich oral literary tradition, expressed in hainteny (poetry), kabary (public discourse), and ohabolana (proverbs); the Ibonia epic poem, about a folk hero of the same name, has been handed down in different forms across the island, and many stories, poems, and histories are retold in musical form. From the seventh century, ombiasy (wise men) transcribed Malagasy using an Arabic script called sorabe to record sacred knowledge. Written, Western-inspired literature developed shortly after colonization by France at the end of the nineteenth century, and it flourishes today.
Malagasy positively brims with vowels. Of course, some unstressed syllables are dropped, and diphthongs compress vowels, but that’s cold comfort for the tongue given the abundance of a, e, i, and o in many words. A simple greeting, “Hello” (two vowels in English), has seven in Malagasy—Manao ahoana. That’s manageable, but the names of some people and places seem bewilderingly long to the non-Malagasy speaker. The chieftain who unified the Merina clans in the late eighteenth century to form a powerful kingdom in the highlands went by the polysyllabic name of Andrianampoinimerinandriantsimitoviaminandriampanjaka. Presumably, some rival Merina chiefs surrendered after failing to successfully pronounce his name, a small triumph for syllables over armed conflict. Later, he adopted the shorter, easier-to-recall name, Andrianampoinimerina (the lord at the heart of Imerina). His son, who expanded the Merina empire, made it easier for his foes to negotiate terms. He was called simply Radama I.
As in other languages, the name tells a story about the position or lineage of its owner. The name of some kings begins with “Andriana,” a term that denoted the noble caste of Merina society. In the extended form of Andrianampoinimerina, “Andria” appears three times, indicating that the king ruled over three regions. It’s a well-worn monarchical marketing strategy to project power by accumulating titles, so the Merina king was doing no more than European rulers had been doing for centuries. Andrianampoinimerina’s British contemporary, the unfortunate George III, was officially King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, King of Hanover, and Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg. Napoleon I made himself Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, and Mediator of the Helvetic Confederation. All of which makes the Merina king’s name look rather modest. The difference, of course, is that in Malagasy, the titles run together in a compound word.
The Merina kings followed the playbook of all conquerors, renaming places to imprint their own version of history. “The imperial tactic,” according to Luke, “was to inscribe the Merina presence in the mythology and identity of local places.” In many cultures, the clearest markers of settlement and land ownership are ancestral tombs; when these are removed by a conquering army, the original inhabitants’ historical claims to the land are erased. In the early seventeenth century, the chieftain Andrianjaka expelled the inhabitants of Analamanga, a village at the highest meeting point of two forested ridges, and built a rova. According to oral tradition, he deployed a garrison of one thousand soldiers to guard the rova. A later king, Andriamasinavalona, renamed the settlement Antananarivo, the “city of the thousand,” in honor of Andrianjaka’s soldiers, and it became the capital of the Merina kingdom. A hundred miles west of Richard’s home town of Arivonimamo (the “town of a thousand drunken soldiers”), on the edge of the highland escarpment at the terminus of RN1, is the town of Tsiroanomandidy where “two shall not rule,” which is reportedly what the Merina king told the local ruler when he conquered the place. East of Tana on RN2, place names commemorate the passage of the Merina kings and queens and their retainers. There’s Manjakandriana, which literally means “where the king passed through.” Nandihizana is “the place where there was dancing,” marking the arrival of the Merina queen and the cue for the local population to turn out and boogie.
Madagascar has had eight presidents since independence in 1960; the names of six begin with “Ra”—Ramanantsoa, Ratsimandrava, Ratsiraka, Ravalomanana, Rajoelina, and Rajaonarimampianina. When I first reviewed the list of our UA colleagues, I was similarly dismayed: they included Rabaovololona, Ralalaoherivony, Randriamasitiana, Ravelonjatovo, Rakotonirina, Rasolofoniaina, and Ramamonjy. The lineage of most highland Malagasy is represented through their names, which position them in relation to their clan, region, or village. Remembering them is easier when you mentally lop off the honorary “Ra” prefix, which means “Mr.” or “Ms.” But there are still a lot of vowels and syllables. Even for the Malagasy. Antananarivo is usually abbreviated as Tana, except on the iconic French red and white kilometer road markers, where it is uncomfortably squeezed into an ugly “Ant/rivo.”
Divide and Rule
For even the experienced analyst, Madagascar’s politics are infuriatingly complex. Since independence in 1960, the country has vacillated between dictatorship and freewheeling democracy, between socialism and unbridled capitalism, while maintaining a close but uneasy relationship with its former colonial master. Five successive presidents were forcibly ousted from office. In a continent that has seen more than its fair share of coups, Madagascar is near the top of the league table; in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it had at least four actual or attempted coups. The name of that Tana restaurant, Ku-de-ta, is no joke.
“Parties keep changing their colors,” said Richard. “Today, a party is in opposition, but tomorrow it will rejoin the alliance of the party in power and in return has to be given a ministry.” Richard served in government positions under three presidents and criticizes a system that is “100 percent influenced” by politics. Ministers are, of course, political appointees, but party membership is also required for department heads who, in another country, would be career civil servants. Ministers and their staffs are constantly changing. Richard recalls a test question on the entrance examination for first-year sociology students: Who is the minister of public services? “No one knew. It changes so often.”
Richard credits his political activism to his father, Rasamoelina, who worked as a barber in Arivonimamo. Rasamoelina was a member of the Democratic Movement for Malagasy Renovation (MDRM), formed by French-educated nationalists after World War II to push for independence. The MDRM hoped for a peaceful transition, but the French government refused to consider any degree of political autonomy. The French colonial minister, Marius Moutet, cabled the high commission in Tana to “fight the MDRM by any means.” As tensions rose, Rasamoelina’s smoke-filled barber’s shop became a hotbed of political discussion. In 1947, a revolt broke out in eastern Madagascar, with rebels attacking French commercial interests, including plantations and mines. The revolt spread to other regions. In Arivonimamo, Rasamoelina, aged thirty-two, left his family and shop to join a rebel unit. He was lucky to survive.
The suppression of the 1947 rebellion is regarded by historians as one of the most brutal of the colonial period. There were few French casualties because most fighting was done by Senegalese—an example of one colonial people being used to suppress another. Psychological tactics were employed—rape, torture, and the burning or razing of villages. In one town in the southeast, prisoners were thrown from an aircraft on a so-called death flight. In Tana, prisoners were herded into railroad cars; at Moramanga, on the line to the east coast port of Tamatave (now Toamasina), the doors were opened, and the prisoners machine-gunned. French colonial reports put the death toll at eighty to ninety thousand, although later figures lowered it to eleven thousand. The discrepancy has never been satisfactorily explained. Perhaps no one will ever know how many died from hunger or disease after fleeing from their villages into the forest.
In Arivonimamo, Rasamoelina’s rebel unit was forced to flee to the hills ahead of advancing Senegalese troops. The group was captured, but Rasamoelina and a few others escaped from trucks while being transported back to Arivonimamo. A few months later, after the fighting was over, he returned to the town. Family connections enabled him to stay out of prison.
Richard was born seven years later, but the struggle against the French shaped his politics and passions. “My father always talked about how hard it was to achieve independence. We paid with many deaths, with torture, with forced labor.” Men were sent to build roads, and women and children conscripted into the civilian labor corps.
Richard criticizes the French for fomenting ethnic divisions in Madagascar. “My father talked about how the colonizers lit the fire between the coastal peoples [the côtiers] and those of the high plateau. It was the kings of the high plateau [the Merina] who united the island, after conquering the small coastal kingdoms. But when the French came to colonize, they told the coastal peoples, ‘We’re liberating you from subjugation.’ It was a policy of divide and rule.”
Too Many Coups
The nationalist leader Philibert Tsiranana, a côtier, became the country’s first president in 1960, but postindependence euphoria soon evaporated as the country struggled with debt and a poor economy. In 1972, popular protests forced Tsiranana to hand over power to the army commander, General Gabriel Ramanantsoa. Political turmoil continued, and in 1975, after surviving several coup attempts, Ramanantsoa stepped down. His successor was assassinated within a week of taking office, and another coup brought Admiral Didier Ratsiraka to power. He weakened relations with France and aligned Madagascar with the Soviet Union.
Although paying lip service to socialist principles, Ratsiraka sought to impose a revolution from above. Madagascar even had its own “Red Book” (Boky Mena) to guide the actions of the five pillars of the revolution: the Supreme Revolutionary Council, peasants and workers, young intellectuals, women, and the Popular Armed Forces. The Red Book advocated a foreign policy of nonalignment, with domestic policies focused on economic development through rigorous planning. Political parties were suppressed, and strict censorship enforced. Because of its situation on the Mozambique Channel—a major shipping route for oil and other commodities—Madagascar became a key proxy in Cold War geopolitics. Although the government had nationalized some French companies, France maintained a large embassy and a major aid program. When Malcolm McBain arrived as UK ambassador in 1984, he found a “considerable diplomatic presence.”
It was also important to the Russians. [They] had a large embassy. There were about forty diplomatic missions, resident missions in Madagascar, plus numerous non-resident missions and a large European delegation. . . . The Communist Chinese were running an aid programme, and rebuilt the key road linking the capital with the main port. The Japanese were there, with some valuable aid. Also represented by embassies were the North Koreans, the Libyans, the Indians, the Indonesians, the Cubans and the Vietnamese. The African National Congress had a representative there, the Egyptians, the Yugoslavs, the East Germans, of course.8
The Soviet Union deployed thousands of technical staff and advisers—on everything from aviation and the military to sports. Russian was introduced to the secondary school curriculum; the best students went on to study in Moscow and Leningrad. North Korea built Ratsiraka a new concrete presidential palace, modeled on the rova, outside the city. However, life for most Malagasy did not improve.
“The state controlled everything, all the wealth,” said Richard. “The only jobs were with the government, and you needed connections.” The French colonists had been replaced by a new group of homegrown oppressors. When Ratsiraka came to power, Richard was studying at UA, working at night in a gargotte (a roadside restaurant) to support himself. He joined the Proletarian Party and took part in student antigovernment protests. “We were reading Che Guevara, and running around at night, plastering posters on walls,” he recalled. “We were always running away, and in danger of being shot by the security forces. It was a great adventure.”
With Ratsiraka in power, most French faculty left the university, to be replaced by Soviet professors. “They brought with them lots of books on scientific communism,” said Richard. “They were serious about their mission and taught all subjects using Marxist-Leninist principles, but the students didn’t read most of the books. Fortunately, the students were exposed to two perspectives because the Malagasy professors stayed.”
Strikes and student protests continued as economic conditions worsened. In 1979, when Richard’s first child was born, almost everything—food, milk, medicines, soap—was in short supply. “You needed to belong to the cooperative of the revolutionary party to have coupons for supplies,” he said. “There were always shortages, but we were told we needed to make sacrifices to reach the socialist paradise.”
In 1989, Ratsiraka was returned for a third seven-year term in what many regarded as a rigged election. For the next four years, the country was paralyzed by general strikes and riots. In 1993, opposition candidate Albert Zafy defeated Ratsiraka, ending his seventeen years in power and sending him into exile in France. Three years later, Zafy was impeached by the parliament. To the surprise of the international community, and many Malagasy, Ratsiraka returned to win the 1996 election.
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ratsiraka abandoned the socialist experiment, imposed neoliberal reforms, and restored diplomatic and economic ties with France. The economy improved, with a boom in tourism and textile exports to the United States; from 1997 to 2001, foreign direct investment grew tenfold, and in 2001, the economy grew by 6.7 percent, one of the best performers in Africa.
Two Presidents, Two Capitals
Ratsiraka’s opponent in the December 2001 election represented a radically new direction. Marc Ravalomanana, the so-called yogurt king, had built his dairy products company Tiko into a business empire before being elected mayor of Tana in 1999. He was credited with cleaning up the capital, repairing roads, installing street lights, and putting more police on the streets. The city experienced a building boom, with new offices and supermarkets opening. The youthful Ravalomanana made much of his devout Protestant faith, and his TIM (I Love Madagascar) party ran a slick, media-savvy campaign. His TV and radio stations bolstered his candidacy, and his face was everywhere—on T-shirts, bags, and baseball caps. He favored economic links with the United States and South Africa, rather than France, and printed English-language slogans on Tiko’s bottles of milk and mineral water. He was a Merina, popular in Tana and the central highlands. Ratsiraka was a métis (mixed race) with Merina and Betsimisaraka lineage, so he had support across ethnic lines; however, his power base was in the port of Toamasina on the east coast, and much of his support came from the côtiers of African or mixed descent.
Officially, neither candidate gained an absolute majority in the election. Ravalomanana claimed the count was rigged and crowds in Tana turned out to proclaim him president. Ratsiraka denied election shenanigans and called for a constitutionally mandated runoff. For the next six months, Madagascar had two presidents, two prime ministers, two parliaments, and even two central banks. The economy went into freefall. The banks could not extend credit, and businesses could not repay debts; textile factories closed, tourists canceled vacations, and investors fled. Donors could not dispense aid because they did not know which government was in charge.
Ravalomanana’s government controlled Tana and the central highlands; Ratsiraka, backed by five of the six provincial governors and military top brass, set up a rival capital in Toamasina and controlled most coastal regions. His supporters built barricades and blew up bridges along RN2, the main road from the coast to the capital, halting supplies of food, fuel, and other goods. The Economist reported in May 2002 that at Brickaville, where RN2 turns west toward the highlands, “the country’s main commercial route is reduced to a narrow concrete path. . . . Men totter over it in single file under sacks of cement, crates of tinned food and baskets of chickens. Others wade across the river, pushing barrels of smuggled petrol. . . . Brickaville is becoming a border town, and a rough one at that.”9
The military eventually threw its support behind Ravalomanana, and in April 2002 the High Constitutional Court declared him the outright winner. TIM won a convincing victory in elections for the National Assembly. Ratsiraka was forced to admit defeat and return to exile in France. Ravalomanana embarked on a business-friendly reform agenda, providing tax breaks for foreign investors. The government improved roads, schools, and hospitals and fought corruption. Textile factories opened in tax-exempt free zones, and multinational companies started exploiting mineral resources. And the president hired Luke as his speechwriter and communication adviser.
Ravalomanana easily won a second term in 2006 but faced opposition when he proposed constitutional amendments that increased the power of the presidency and allowed him to stand for two more terms. The changes were narrowly approved in a referendum. Although the economy continued to grow, food prices rose, and opposition mounted to the free rein given to foreign investors. In July 2008, Ravalomanana signed an agreement with the South Korean conglomerate Daewoo for a ninety-nine-year lease of half of the island’s arable land to grow grain. South Korea, with a growing population and limited land and water resources, certainly needed the grain, but the decision was both legally and morally dodgy. The prospect of selling off ancestral land to foreigners horrified many people. What was to happen to the subsistence farmers who had used the land for centuries to grow rice and herd zebu? Would villages be moved from ancestral lands? Would Daewoo bulldoze family tombs to clear land for planting? This time, Ravalomanana had gone too far.
Richard, who had taken part in the popular uprisings against Ratsiraka in 1991 and 2001, was back on the streets in January 2009 to call for the resignation of Ravalomanana, the leader he had previously supported. For months, the president was locked in a power struggle with the young mayor of Tana, Andry Rajoelina, a former disc jockey, whose party had swept local elections. A week of rioting, looting, and burning in the capital left up to one hundred dead.
Ravalomanana’s ascent to the presidency had reduced French influence. The Anglo-leaning president actively sought commercial and political ties with the United States and promoted the English language as a way for Madagascar to compete in the global economy. With the discovery of offshore oil deposits in the Mozambique Channel, France claimed drilling rights around two of the Îles Éparses (Scattered Islands), small coral islands that were French territories and had no permanent population. Ravalomanana claimed the islands for Madagascar. His diplomatic saber rattling worried the French, who decided to support his rival and provided Rajoelina with refuge in their embassy. The public mood changed when the presidential guard opened fire outside the palace, killing twenty-eight protesters and injuring more than two hundred. The government lost control of the army and police force, and tanks moved into the capital. On March 17, a few hours after declaring he would fight to the death rather than resign, Ravalomanana stepped down, transferring power to a trio of loyal military leaders. A few hours later, the trio were arrested and handed over power to Rajoelina. Ravalomanana fled to Swaziland, then South Africa. He was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment on charges relating to the shooting of protestors outside the palace. The coup was roundly condemned by the international community, including the African Union (AU), but the AU was not ready to take on Madagascar’s large and well-trained army. Rajoelina was effectively left in power, with international bodies accepting his promise to call early elections.
Promises, promises. From March 2009 Rajoelina promised—and then postponed—elections every year until 2013. Meanwhile, the economy tanked; most foreign aid, which had accounted for 40 percent of the budget, was suspended; licenses for mining projects were revoked, and foreign investors were scared away. In polls, two-thirds of Malagasy described their financial situation as bad or very bad, compared with one-third before the coup. The main stumbling block to an election was the conflict over who could run. Eventually, a deal was brokered that barred both Rajoelina and Ravalomanana, but each endorsed a proxy candidate. In October, the proxies—former finance minister Hery Rajaonarimampianina for Rajoelina and former health minister Jean Louis Robinson for Ravalomanana—fended off thirty-one other candidates to go into a December runoff. Rajaonarimampianina was the eventual winner. The donors returned, followed, somewhat nervously, by the mining companies and other foreign investors.
Richard holds France partly responsible for Madagascar’s political instability and lack of economic progress. “When British colonies became independent, Britain did not meddle in their affairs and they were left free to develop,” he said. By contrast, through a policy sometimes dubbed Françafrique, France continues to intervene, militarily, politically, and economically, in its former colonies. “France wants our president to be on its side for political and economic reasons—for the oil of the Mozambique Channel, for mineral resources. French financial interests are still strong. All actions by our government are taken in support of France. It’s neocolonialism.”
Over his career, Richard has served in government for more than a decade, under three presidents—Zafy, Ratsiraka, and Rajoelina. Yet he also joined the street protests that led to the overthrow of three presidents—in 1991, 2001, and 2009. Like his dual roles as college professor and traditional healer, he sees no contradiction between his political positions. Yet he despairs of lasting change. “Since independence, Madagascar has had four republics. Each time we change the republic, we change the constitution. Each party, each faction rewrites the constitution to meet its needs.” He shrugged. “We’re always having referendums. It’s very tiring.”
