Everything about Madagascar is surprising: its terrain, flora, fauna, people, language, history, religion, politics – and the fact that it doesn’t have an embassy in London. For British and Irish travellers the nearest source of visas is Paris, where Rachel and I went visa-hunting in April 1983. We were not leaving for Madagascar until June but a prolonged and strenuous hunt seemed likely. In general, the more obscure a country the more convoluted its bureaucracy.
We stayed with Toni, an old friend who lives in an eighteenth-century attic in the Latin Quarter, and over the years has done us more good turns than you could reckon on a lama’s prayer-beads. On our way home from Baltistan, for instance, she nursed me through an almost lethal attack of food-poisoning picked up between Karachi and Moscow. Rachel was then aged six and a half and had much enjoyed her three-month mid-winter ride through the Karakoram on a retired polo pony, though we lived mainly on dried apricots and the night temperatures often dropped to minus twenty degrees. Three years later she and I trekked some twelve hundred miles with a mule through the Peruvian Andes: also quite a rough journey. Now Rachel was fourteen and a half – suddenly as tall as her mother – no longer a juvenile appendage. On our way to Paris I wondered, slightly apprehensively, how the mother–daughter relationship would withstand Malagasy hardships. The days of being a stoical foal-at-foot were certainly over for Rachel, and I reckoned that travels with a fourteen-year-old would be different. Which they were.
Toni had spent the previous month gently persuading the Embassy of the Democratic Republic of Madagascar that our summer plans could help the Malagasy tourist trade, which may partly explain why it took us only eighteen minutes to get our visas. But it must also be said that the Malagasy Embassy in Paris is singularly unbureaucratic. As you appear, before you’ve said a word of self-identification, swarms of small pale-brown happy-looking people, with soft welcoming voices, smile delightedly; and no one is interested in trivia like passport numbers and health certificates. True, our visas cost £22 each and were valid for only one month. But if tourists come at the rate of two a week, or thereabouts, you’ve obviously got to make the most of them.
Samuel Rajaona, a Malagasy colleague of Toni’s, invited us to a corner of Madagascar in a Parisian apartment block to meet his wife and son. French is Madagascar’s first European language but the Rajaonas also speak fluent English and gave us much practical advice, supplemented by a marked map of Madagascar, a list of possibly useful addresses, a street plan drawn by Samuel to help us to find his niece in Antsirabe – to whom he promised to write, preparing her for our arrival – and a chit in Malagasy requesting village headmen to tolerate and, if necessary, assist us. This last document was more important than I realised at the time. Madagascar’s pervasive fady (taboos) still operate powerfully in rural areas, pace the LMS. We were moved by the Rajaonas’ imaginative kindness. The warmth of this ‘welcome-in-advance’ seemed like a blessing on our journey.
Samuel presented to us his only copy of an irreplaceable volume published in 1975 for Air Madagascar. This soon became our favourite of many eccentric guidebooks. It radiates an endearing guilelessness as it explains how many roads have fallen into disrepair and become impassable, how many taxi-services no longer exist, how many beaches have sharp-edged mussel-shells making it dangerous to go ‘bear-footed’ (sic). We felt that tourist-evasion was not going to be one of our problems as we read this description of the area around Vohimasina:
‘where are the ruins of a Corsair Fort, with wells disposed at an isoceles triangle. There are five unimportant hotels, except maybe the Bamboula Hotel where are two bungalows with three beds. To South at Ambilalamaitso are many private villas but the hotel is not opened regularly. There is only one restaurant keeper, Mr Marcelle, who prepares nice meals but only for a limited number. Swimming in the sea is prohibited because of sharks. And the swimming-pool in the lagoon has to be re-built. Camping sites there are. Hunting and fishing give excellent results there. And with an outboard one can make nice trips beholding delightful landscapes on the Pangalaues canal. With a good boat driver knowing this water way one can reach Akanin’ny Nofy (the Nest of Dreams). Akinin’ny Nofy is pretty dormant for the now being, in spite of the presence of the motel with attached buildings of a really good standing but more or less closed. It is a region of salted lakes and there are many waterfalls. Let us also mention lemurs, reptiles (inoffensive), nice flora, medicinal plants. For hunting there are winged games.’
At once ‘pretty dormant for the now being’ became embedded in Murphy-speak.
At Heathrow, on 28 June, Rachel guarded our ‘hand-luggage’ (her rucksack, weighing thirty-five pounds) while I took my rucksack (forty-five pounds) to the BA desk. Ahead of me a stocky young Nigerian stood beside five gigantic leather suitcases on wheels. When he was charged £647.50 for excess baggage I shuddered in sympathy. But he nonchalantly produced a wad of sterling, peeled off thirteen £50 notes – which scarcely diminished the wad – and had to be reminded to pick up his change. How the other half spends …
The weedy Englishman behind the desk – exhausted by all those suitcases – scowled at our ‘Aeroflot to Antananarivo’ tickets. ‘Blimey! Somewhere else no one ever heard of!’ He disappeared to find out the code letters and the restive queue behind me wondered why Aeroflot can’t check in its own passengers. I smirked inwardly. Travel snobs enjoy this sort of thing when everyone around them is labelled for dog-eared destinations like New York, Hong Kong, Karachi, Lagos.
Aeroflot is commendably austere: no wasteful bumph in the seat-pockets, no duty-free luxuries for sale, no professional (or other) smiles from the cabin-staff. But our lunch was good, apart from a macabre white wine which only the Russians could swallow. These were in the majority: well-groomed middle-aged men with pale faces, fat briefcases and, it seemed, many worries. They brooded silently over pages of figures, graphs and diagrams. They were, perhaps, a trade delegation.
We landed at Moscow in brilliant sunshine. Beside the runway, peasant women wearing headscarves were languidly raking hay in golden meadows; if there is a production target for haycocks it was not bothering them. Ninety minutes and several long queues later we were in the nearby Airport Hotel, a gaunt glass and concrete block which for transit passengers like us, staying overnight without visas, is literally a prison. All its doors are guarded twenty-four hours a day by armed men, impassive but alert in smart green uniforms. Others of that ilk supervise one’s fifty-yard walk from the bus to the hotel entrance, and back again when departure time comes. Any passenger who steps out of line provokes a yell and a scowl from the nearest guard. The general effect is of a neurotic mistrust holding the Soviet psyche by the throat.
While waiting for a lift to the eighth floor we enjoyed the English version of a multilingual notice: ‘Each room is smoothly supplied with water, heat, light, ventilation and other communal services … Hotel personnell cleans without violating passengers’ tranquillity.’ We glanced around us. ‘Tranquillity’ seemed not the mot juste. Overbooking on the Aeroflot scale can only be described as an unnatural vice and we were surrounded by passengers at various stages of bewilderment/rage/despair/hysteria – people who had thought they were about to leave for London, Lima or Ulan Bator but found that instead they were condemned to two, three, even four days in the Airport Hotel without their luggage and without access to their country’s diplomatic representative in Moscow.
Our room was not supplied, smoothly or otherwise, with soap, towels or lavatory paper. The sheets were clean but torn and damp, the electric light was too dim to read by, the ventilation was nil and the wall-long window locked. We got the key from our obese, expressionless floor-lady (why was it not left in the window?) and recklessly took out binoculars to study the landscape. Our view was limited to a tall forest of birch and pine beyond the narrow road leading to the airport. Only by standing on the table-shelf beneath the window could we see Moscow – a grey smudge along a cloudless horizon. In the cool of the midsummer evening a few smartly dressed off-duty hotel staff were sauntering, smoking, chatting and joking far below us. One young couple met outside the door of the kitchen-annex, which also had its armed guard, and hurried away into the forest. The bird life consisted of two fractious crows, two wheeling kestrels and three hopping sparrows; Marxism had not got to them and they were behaving just like Irish crows, kestrels and sparrows. We put away our binoculars and went downstairs to observe the resident fauna.
Our fellow-internees, like ourselves, had all been attracted by Aeroflot’s sensationally low fares and were travelling alone, or in pairs or family groups; Intourist looks after packaged tourists elsewhere. During the next twenty-four hours we talked with three Ethiopian students, a young Japanese woman journalist, two Swedish archaeologists, a Hong Kong Chinese family complete with granny, an elderly Kenyan couple flying for the first time and terrified, two Swiss ornithologists going to Tashkent, two portly Sudanese gentlemen with surprisingly strong views about Northern Ireland, a young Danish couple going home after three years hitch-hiking through Africa, an even younger Sinhalese couple with a minuscule new-born daughter in a carry-cot – and Belgians going to Libya, Pakistanis going to Britain, Spaniards going to India and young Arabs going all over the place. There were also many Malagasy on the way home (circuitously) from France or Italy. On our return to the airport we were joined by many more – Moscow University students on Soviet scholarships – and one of these told us that ninety-five per cent of the passengers carried on Aeroflot’s weekly flights to Antananarivo are Malagasy.
Despite our prison’s mixum-gatherum, the Malagasy were readily identifiable. They looked conspicuously cheerful and relaxed; their numerous small children were neither spoiled nor cowed and behaved admirably under stress; their dignified self-confidence – distinctive though hard to describe – contrasted strongly with the brash arrogance of some of our younger Asian and African fellow-internees.
Malagasy charm is founded on natural good manners and spontaneous amiability, yet behind this one senses a reserve that makes one feel honoured to be accepted by a Malagasy as a friend. In Paris we had met only Merina; here we were seeing a tribal cross-section and physical differences were marked, sometimes even within the same family group. Few Malagasy could be mistaken for true Africans, yet negro genes are often as obvious as Polynesian.
We left Moscow at 10.15 p.m. on 29 June. As we gained height the sun became visible – a vast red balloon balancing on the earth’s sharp rim beneath an eerie violet sky. Four other vazaha (foreigners) were on board: two taciturn young German women planning to trek in the eastern rain-forest and two elderly excited Norwegian women going to visit Lutheran medical missionary friends in Antsirabe. They had never before left Europe and spoke no word of French or English. On my right Rachel had a window-seat; on my left sat an endearing seven-year-old, son of an Italian father and Malagasy mother. Pappa was a small gentle ageing man, touchingly devoted to his three children; he spoke fluent Malagasy and seemed no longer a vazaha. Mamma was a generation younger, fat, kind and jolly with a broad brown face and a gurgling laugh. The two tall, slender, dark-skinned men in front of us had finely cut features and wore tweed suits (it was mid-winter in Madagascar) and bottle-green Homburg hats. All night they talked and laughed, their gestures gracefully expressive, their white teeth flashing.
During the seventeen-hour flight five meals were served, between four long refuelling stops; these combined quantity with quality and what we couldn’t eat I squirrelled away for future reference.
At Simferopol in the Crimea the midnight air was balmy but the dreary cramped transit lounge had only one ‘Ladies’ and one ‘Gents’, which caused a few catastrophes among abruptly awakened junior passengers.
At Cairo we had to stay put because the Soviet and Egyptian governments have fallen out; armed uniformed men strolled casually to and fro on the tarmac while our plane was receiving attention.
At Aden the 6 a.m. heat savaged us even as we descended the steps; within moments sweat was visibly streaming off everyone. In the squalid transit lounge, stinking of stale piss, the ceiling-fans were not working and much of the nasty plastic seating had disintegrated to expose dangerously inflammable guts. The flyblown cafeteria, the enormous duty-free department and the Soviet-stocked bookshop were closed. Women in yashmaks queued patiently at an unattended bank counter, the ragged airport staff went mad with lust when they saw Rachel, and the Norwegians’ camera was confiscated because they tried to photograph each other under a notice in Arabic. Seeing them verging on tears I intervened and successfully bullied the bullies.
At Nairobi the temperature was perfect, the sky grey, the breeze cool, the airport buildings First World-ish. An abundance of duty-free goods and folk-art souvenirs was tastefully displayed on both sides of a high-ceilinged circular arcade, freshly painted and spotlessly clean. Here the Norwegians were tricked into paying $US7.50 for a tiny bottle of nail-polish. Touchingly, they sought me out; and in my novel role as guardian angel I talked grimly to the Kikuyu merchant – six foot four and surly in proportion – about police and trading licences. Reluctantly he returned the precious dollars, but only after a senior Kenyan army officer had coincidentally appeared nearby. Meanwhile Mrs Nilsen had lost her boarding-pass, at which we all panicked. (I had lost mine at Moscow Airport but Rachel found it just in time, under a restaurant table.) She was however allowed on without it; the hard shell of Soviet bureaucracy hides many a tender heart, as our own Moscow adventures have more than once reminded us.
Next came the excitement of Kilimanjaro, rising alone and snowy out of a softness of cloud – scarcely ten miles away across the cinnamon Nyiri Desert. Then we were staring down at the Indian Ocean’s smooth blue width, through a scattering of motionless cloudlets far below. These created the illusion that the sky was underneath as well as above; from that height, in the equatorial noonlight, the two blues were identical.
Since leaving Moscow our Malagasy fellow-passengers had remained exuberant: even Aden failed to depress them. Somehow they generated a celebratory feeling which we, heading for an unfamiliar and unimaginable country, were very much in the mood to share. Over the Mozambique Channel this feeling intensified and their joy was palpable. Eagerly they took it in turns to peer through the windows and at last their beloved coast appeared – flat, red-brown, indented, surf-fringed. Up and down the plane we saw them smiling at each other, for once not saying much, their big brown eyes lustrous with happiness.
This was our first glimpse of the Malagasy’s profound patriotism – as distinct from nationalism, of which the majority are innocent. They love their Great Red Island with a religious fervour linked to those peculiar forms of animism and ancestor-dependence which underlie their culture and have not been weakened – only modified – by the influence of Christianity. In 1837 the Rev. William Ellis of the LMS noted: ‘Often, when setting out on a journey, they take with them a small portion of their native earth, on which they often gaze when absent, and invoke their god that they may be permitted to return to restore it to the place from which it was taken.’ Nowadays a popular proverb, frequently printed along the hems of lambas, expresses, this same spirit – ‘The zebu will lick bare stone, and die in the earth of the place he loves.’
Even from 35,000 feet, we could see an alarming amount of bare stone between the coast and Antananarivo. The most quoted description of Madagascar is not flattering – ‘an island with the form, colour, consistency and sterility of a brick’. This seems not much of an exaggeration as one gazes down on a barren landscape where centuries ago the fires of slash-and-burn cultivators became out-of-control infernos, still vivid in the folk-memories of several tribes. The central plateau (average height 4,000–5,000 feet) is a muddle of low mountains on which erosion has left cruel wounds, looking from the air like giant red fans. Occasionally symmetrical volcanic cones and massive misshapen granite peaks rise above wide valleys holding narrow red-brown rivers which fill their beds only during the summer rains. The crust of hard red clay that covers most of the island seems particularly obvious in winter, when the coarse grass which somehow sustains millions of zebu is sparse and brown.
As we lost height thread-like paths could be seen crossing the hills, linking tiny hamlets, and red tracks wound through the more populated valleys; we were soon to discover that these are motor-roads, catering for very few motors. Then we were over the Imerina heartland where stubble-brown paddy-fields separated the many villages, each with at least two churches. In the near distance rose the mighty rock of Analamanga, the ancient Vazimba fortress on which Andrianjaka, founder of the Merina kingdom, built a royal enclosure (the rova) from which grew Antananarivo. As we touched down the Malagasy cheered and clapped and burst into song; so infectious was their delight that at last Soviet smiles appeared.