One of Toni’s Parisian contacts was awaiting us at the entrance to the ‘Arrivals’ area. Small, slim and beautiful, Oly imperturbably guided us through a dense and dangerous bureaucratic jungle. We had been warned that the capital’s airport officials represent all that is worst in modern Madagascar; and when we looked at them crouching behind their desks, poised to spring on defenceless vazaha, we could believe it. But Oly, an Air Mad hostess, warded off all predators, however grand their uniforms, with a subtly menacing insouciance that recalled the tougher Merina Queens.
Soon we each had an armful of forms, including an engaging leaflet which said:
‘MALAGASY DEMOKRATIC REPUBLIC: MINISTRY OF HEALTH – Sanitary Control at Frontiers – IMPORTANT ADVICE: – Keep this ticket during one month. If you are ill or you does not feel weel during this time, you should show this ticket to the doctor to help him for taking care of you.’
Cerebral malaria remains such a hazard that the government has undertaken to provide all vazaha victims with free medical treatment on presentation of this leaflet. Whether or not these official good intentions could be implemented outside – or even inside – Antananarivo is a question we luckily cannot answer.
When all formalities had been completed (or not, as the case might be) Oly guided us to the bank. But then duty called and she had to leave us to discover for ourselves the whimsicality of Malagasy logic.
It was 4.05 p.m. and an international flight had just arrived. It is illegal both to import FMG (Malagasy francs) and to change money outside a bank. Yet the airport bank had closed at 3 p.m. and the nearest alternative was fifteen miles away. For the Malagasy passengers, all met by jubilant relatives, this did not matter, and it would be uneconomic to keep a bank open to serve six vazaha; so this contretemps was part of the price to be paid – willingly, in our case – for an almost tourist-free country.
It’s an ill-wind … Several taxi-drivers, grinning all over their faces, converged on the two German girls and ourselves as we stood irresolute by the shuttered bank. They amicably competed to take us (COD) to the Hilton Hotel where the Tourist Bank would certainly be open. We did a not too unreasonable deal (£3.35 each), but that drive to Tana – the capital’s universally used nickname – was marred by our companions’ contempt for the illogical inefficiency of the Malagasy. We felt they should have stayed at home if logic and efficiency were so essential to their peace of mind.
Our ebullient taxi-man displayed another sort of Malagasy illogic. He believed that if you drive fast enough, on either side of a narrow road, everything else in sight – rickshaws, poultry, pedestrians, buses, cars, pigs, handcarts – will have to get out of your way just in time. Because of this unsoothing delusion, we merely glimpsed tall, winter-bare roadside trees and gushes of colour as flowering shrubs spilled over high walls around French colonial villas and crowded suburb-villages of brick or wood or tin shacks and loads being carried on heads and butchers, fruit-sellers and ironmongers occupying cubby-hole stalls and long-legged panic-stricken cocks squawking and scattering as we sped past. Twice we swerved violently on corners to avoid oncoming overloaded buses. Only when we had skidded to a halt did I realise that my fists were tightly clenched and fear-sweaty.
Tana’s Hilton looks like a Hilton and is by far the tallest building in Madagascar. But that afternoon its vast foyer was empty and its reception-desk unmanned. Wandering down long silent corridors of standardised affluence, we saw no other vazaha. At intervals gorgeously uniformed servants emerged smiling from alcoves and niches; clearly we were not Hilton material, yet their welcoming handshakes were as genuine as the surrounding glamour was phoney.
The young woman behind the bank-desk had high cheekbones, a milk-chocolate skin and long orange finger-nails. She wore a coral necklace and expensive scent and was our first grumpy Malagasy; perhaps she has too much time for introspection. Dismissing my traveller’s cheque she said brusquely, ‘Tomorrow, please! Come back tomorrow – this is now five-ten and the business has stopped at five.’
The wall-clock over the door said 4.45, as did all our watches – including Miss Grumpy’s. When I pointed this out she sighed theatrically, then opened the safe. We were baffled; it took us a few days to learn that the Malagasy treat time as something pliable. They do not argue about day and night – the sun’s movements are incontrovertible – but otherwise time is there for man’s convenience and may be manipulated according to individual needs or moods. This is one reason why Madagascar has never got its industrial act together; the fundamental characteristics of the Malagasy cancel out Western priorities. There is supporting evidence for this statement around every corner in Tana.
Outside the Hilton we consulted our guidebook which said – ‘There are many touristic folders on Antananarivo so we need not describe the town.’ It did however list hotels and we wondered about the Auberge du Soleil Levant – ‘twenty-four bungalows handicapped by the absence of running water’. Finally we settled on the Hotel Lido – ‘in the midst of the Zoma, very nice panarama from the solarium’. The Friday Zoma is Tana’s famous market and by chance we had arrived on a Thursday. Traditionally each town’s market was known by the day on which it was held and ‘Zoma’ means ‘Friday’. (In fact Tana’s market now operates daily – only more so on Fridays.)
Malagasy exiles call their capital ‘Vohitsara’ (City of Beauty) and truly Tana is a wondrous place. It has grown on the sides of a Y-shaped rock-mountain as vegetation grows on an embankment, the houses finding spaces where they could – balancing on ledges, clinging to precipices, tucked between boulders and trees, peering down onto each other’s red-tiled roofs. Around the base of this granite rock lie flat paddy-fields, now slightly encroached on by a new district, Ampefiloha, where the alien Hilton towers over jerry-built government ministries that have aped its incongruous functionalism.
Happily Ampefiloha is a small district and unlikely to expand in the near future. Soon we had left it and were rustling through autumn leaves by the tree-fringed shore of Lake Anosy, created when the ancient marshes were drained. The still water reflected a simple First World War Franco-Malagasy memorial obelisk, standing on an islet smothered in fabulous ferns, jacaranda trees and bougainvillaea vines.
We followed a tarred road, lavishly pot-holed, never suspecting that its name (Route Nationale No. 7) would be engraved on our hearts within a month. Then we asked the way of two graceful girls escorted by a shy smiling youth. They silently beckoned us to follow them and we panted up a long zig-zagging flight of broken stone steps, very narrow and steep between ramshackle flower-bedecked dwellings. The stench of stale urine was asphyxiating and here we first heard the rhythmic thud of rice being pounded in stone mortars – Madagascar’s signature tune. The gradient eased as we passed the bullet-riddled ruins of a modern government building wrecked during the 1972 ‘protests’. Moments later we were on a wide colonial shopping street near a small, tree-shaded park – the Place Colbert. Before we could adequately thank them our guides had disappeared down another precipitous alleyway.
As we crossed the park – on the spine of one mountain ridge – the western sky suddenly flared to an unreal flamboyance of orange, crimson, purple and copper. Jet-lag breeds subjective reactions and I took this conflagration personally, as a welcoming gesture from the local spirits. Tana is famed for its sunsets but we never again saw anything quite so spectacular.
Suddenly we were overlooking the Zoma on low ground far below, where the arms of Tana’s Y-mountain diverge. Hundreds of off-white cotton umbrellas were shading small stalls crowding around a dozen substantial buildings – the lock-up shops of prosperous merchants. Each building had a tiled red-brown roof, high-peaked, then curving prettily towards the eaves; the façades were broken by vaguely Moorish arches giving access to shadowy arcades.
There is no twilight in Madagascar and as we descended a wide flight of steps, lined with traders’ stalls, darkness came. Half-way down was the Hotel Lido, where a lame youth with tightly curled hair and a mild stutter showed us to our room on the top floor. He was profusely apologetic, but ineffectual, when the door refused to lock. The window latch was also broken, the ceiling was coming undone and the ‘hot’ tap gave forth only a grudging trickle of cold water containing interesting fauna. For £7 (sterling) this seemed poorish value – until we opened the shutters to see the Zoma being dismantled by candle-light, and a myriad windows glowing dimly gold on the amphitheatre of mountain opposite our own cliff. Forgetting jet-lag, we hastened out.
Most of the stalls had already been cleared and their umbrellas folded; each umbrella has bamboo ribs and a stout six-foot branch as handle. The only illumination came from guttering candles, or oil-wicks in minute tins flickering below brown faces amidst the few remaining piles of fruits and vegetables. We stumbled more than once into open drains, or over mounds of noisome refuse and chunks of broken paving. Small sleeping children were curled up inside raffia mats by the parental stalls and the traders were now catering for each other, bartering an over-ripe hand of bananas for a lump of sizzling hot pork-fat, or an orange for a bunch of onions, or a mug of coffee for a limp lettuce, or a handful of tiny dried fish for three squashed tomatoes, or a snifter of crude home-made rum (the ‘ardent spirits’ so unsuccessfully opposed by the LMS) for a skinny roast chicken. Cheerfully loquacious men and women, wrapped tightly in their lambas against the winter night (for us just pleasantly cool), squatted around toadstool-shaped tin charcoal stoves grilling meaty or fishy titbits, or brewing bitter herbal (veronia) tea in battered rusty tins retrieved long ago from some affluent dump-heap. Mothers were simultaneously suckling babies and stuffing rice into the mouths of toddlers while fathers counted takings or packed unsold goods into round floppy raffia baskets. Three aged down-and-outs shuffled between the empty stalls, pausing often to grope hopefully through piles of invisible refuse. They begged from us, timidly, asking if we were French as they peered up at our candlelit faces. They had never heard of Ireland. Before returning to the hotel we bought bananas at a stall where the price was clearly chalked on a piece of wood. When I offered the correct number of coins the merchant laughed and shook his head and handed me back 50 FMG. Bananas go cheap after dark.
Clanging metal bars and rattling corrugated iron woke us at sunrise; big stalls were being prepared for Friday’s Zoma. Most umbrellas were still folded, looking like those slim mushrooms that grow in cowpats, but as we watched from our window, while eating a breakfast of Aeroflot leftovers, they suddenly blossomed everywhere – even up the steep flight of steps opposite our own. The sky was overcast and the air autumnal chilly; herbal-teasellers were doing a brisk trade. Just below us whole families were unloading ancient motor-vans, the five- and six-year-olds skipping through the throngs jauntily balancing baskets of vegetables on diminutive heads. Other traders used hand-carts or wheelbarrows, or bicycles or bus-roofs. But most goods arrived on a human head, which in Madagascar can bear loads of formidable weight and preposterous bulk. The younger women also carried babies on their backs and were followed by a straggle of unwashed offspring; Madagascar is said to have one of the world’s highest birth rates. The adolescent girls moved with marvellous grace but too many wore European-style clothing, garish and ill-cut. How much lovelier they would look wearing traditional skirts and shawls! Through binoculars we watched deft brown hands building fruits and vegetables into pyramids or towers or rotundas or rectangular walls; this task obviously encourages the stall-holders to express their creativity in friendly competition. Being midwinter, the range of nuts and fruits was restricted: peanuts, oranges, lemons, bananas, expensive strawberries. The vegetables were almost all of boring European extraction: carrots, onions, cauliflowers, potatoes. We remarked on the gaiety of the noises that filled the grey chilly morning; it suggested a public holiday rather than the start of a long day’s work.
By eight o’clock it was difficult to squeeze between the stalls and, being taller than the average Malagasy, our eyes were perilously within range of protruding umbrella ribs. Few shoppers were buying in bulk and Rachel noted that those few had the air and apparel of servants from rich households. The Friday Zoma is, it seems, as much a social occasion as a shopping expedition. And for the vazaha it is total immersion in Tana life. Every sense is engaged – by a swirl of unfamiliar smells; by the bold colours of exotic merchandise and tribal fashions; by the musical surging of the Malagasy language as buyers and sellers haggle, discuss, advise, tease, condemn, laugh, protest; by the textures of homespun silk lambas, scaley tree-barks, dried shreds of animal skins and feathery bunches of freshly picked herbs; by the weird flavours of spicey titbits hot off charcoal and containing God-knows-what.
Suddenly my mind leaped to a typical Western supermarket: neon-lit, sterile, odourless, computerised, TV-guarded, its chemically sprayed fruits and steam-scoured vegetables bred to standardised shapes, sizes and shades, its shelves shiny and bright with slick deceptive packaging, its wan and bored check-out staff scarcely acknowledging the customer’s humanity. Surely the Zoma way is better than our way? Is there not a value beyond calculating in the links between producer and consumer, seller and buyer, Nature and Man?
On a long flight of wide, shallow steps, leading to the Upper Town, we realised that we were in the Recycling Department, as Rachel put it. Those steps were thronged – they serve as one of the capital’s main streets – and trade was brisk. The merchants were selling grubby well-worn clothes, piles of plastic footwear, Nestlé milk tins containing home-made floor-wax, antibiotic injection phials refilled with traditional remedies, mountains of multicoloured, multishaped buttons, rows of empty bottles, tins, jars and boxes scavenged from embassy garbage-sacks, historically valuable collections of old locks, bolts, keys, hinges and spare parts gleaned from deceased motor-vehicles, bicycles and sewing machines – and stacks of disintegrating French romantic novels and French magazines, few dated later than 1971, accompanied by the latest issues of bargain-price French-edition Soviet newspapers. We noticed that these last were less popular with browsers than the ancient magazines.
Most goods were displayed on wooden trestles, though some had been spread over a chalked-out area of step. Apart from the second- (or fifth-) hand garments, which were being continuously rummaged through, everything was neatly – even tastefully – arranged: this was no jumble sale. The young men attending the hardware-cum-machinery stalls were doing a steady trade and looked proud of their merchandise – as well they might, in a country where business life often grinds (literally) to a halt for lack of some minor spare part. The collectors of ex-embassy containers (usually elderly women or young girls) had washed and polished their finds, and graded them according to size, shape and material. As we stood admiring one such display Rachel said, ‘You should hire a freight plane and set up business here!’ – an allusion to my psychopathic and space-consuming inability to throw away any re-usable object. There was an air of achievement about this Recycling Department, which depends on individual enterprise, ingenuity and persistence. Anyone can pick up a telephone and order a consignment of new bedside lamps or bicycles from a wholesaler; not everyone can find a suitable replacement for broken switches or pedals.
Friday’s Zoma also overflows onto the Avenue de l’Indépendance, Tana’s main thoroughfare. This dual carriageway leads to a memorable railway station, the sort of thing that might happen if a Moghul mosque mated with a Venetian palace. Here up-market stall-holders sell fresh orchids, cheap jewellery, bed-linen and blankets, shoddy new furniture, crudely made toys, lengths of printed cotton, raffia work, semi-precious stones, wood-carvings mainly for the vestigial tourist-market, kitchen ware – and mass-produced landscape scenes so horrendously ugly that one doubts afterwards if one has really seen them.
Within deep arcades are dozens of spacious colonial shops, unkempt and almost empty. On their shelves faded French advertisement placards replace the goods advertised; and behind long plate-glass windows dust accumulates around their meagre remaining stock. No one will buy these goods, we were told, because they are defective, being displayed only to take the bare look off emporia where once it was possible to purchase anything, however rare or luxurious, that was available in Paris.
In 1845 Queen Ranavalona I became suspicious of the activities of vazaha traders on the east coast and banned all foreign goods. But fifty years later, at the end of the ‘Anglo–Malagasy friendship era’, Tana’s shops were offering Cheddar and Cheshire cheeses, Keating’s Insect Powder, Suffolk kippers, Bartlett pears and tinned Oxford sausages. Now all foreign goods have again been banned, by President Didier Ratsiraka, as part – his supporters say – of a harsh but wise campaign to force the Malagasy to become self-sufficient in manufactured goods. Others blame the ban on Madagascar’s economic collapse after Ratsiraka’s régime cut the link with the French franc and spent $US300 million on Soviet arms – a sum which Western economists reckon is only $US20 million less than Madagascar’s export earnings for 1982.
The Malagasy do not take kindly to industrialisation, as Jean Laborde, the French architect and entrepreneur, discovered in the 1830s when he established several large factories near Tana. Then the Malagasy abhorred such work, and they still do. Under Queen Ranavalona I the problem was easily solved; Laborde used forced labour, providing food and lodging but no pay, and imposing ruthless military discipline. At the first opportunity – in 1857 – these wretched slaves destroyed all his machinery, workshops and factories and for a century thereafter the Malagasy were free of any large-scale industry. But over the same century they developed a taste for imported manufactured goods, which the country can no longer afford, and President Ratsiraka’s industrial pioneering has not so far been a great success. Billions of francs have been squandered on a fertilising plant that cannot produce fertilisers suited to Malagasy soil, on a tannery for which no hides are available and on a battery plant now idle for lack of money to buy raw materials.
Half-way down the Avenue de l’Indépendance we were shocked by the Hotel de Ville, war-battered and scorch-marked. This ugly relic of civil strife gives Tana’s main street an uneasy look, yet it must have been quite a handsome building before 13 May 1972. On that date it was attacked, as a symbol of the pro-French ‘Establishment’, after police had fired indiscriminately into a student-demo-cum-strikers’-march peacefully protesting against the policies of Philibert Tsiranana, the first President of independent Madagascar. Under his rule foreign trading was restricted almost entirely to France, French advisers remained in most government departments, 3,500 French sailors used the only Malagasy naval base – at Diego Suarez – and French aid balanced the national budget.
We were told that the Hotel de Ville has been left in ruins as a reminder of the sacrifices made to turn Madagascar into a ‘Marxist Christian’ state – President Ratsiraka’s description of his own régime. This somehow seems implausible; more likely no cash is available for its restoration. It certainly serves as a reminder of Madagascar’s political instability, something not normally evident as one explores the capital’s laughter-filled streets where children play exuberantly and greet the vazaha warmly, good manners curbing their curiosity. True, we noticed in the Zoma pairs of young unarmed soldiers, wearing camouflage battledress and red berets, and their relations with the crowd seemed slightly strained. In 1981 a riot started near the market when students stoned soldiers. The official figures later said – ‘five dead, forty-four wounded’. Rumour said – ‘eight dead, eighty wounded’. Those students represented both left and right, which is not as irrational as it may sound. A Christian Marxist government can scarcely avoid displeasing everyone. However, even those who most dislike President Ratsiraka’s ramshackle ideology concede that he is an able man with enough maturity to admit in public to some of his own mistakes. Despite his ill-judged industrial ventures he may do more good than harm if he survives.
The President’s survival is a matter about which he himself seems pessimistic. He lives in the Ambohitsorahitra Palace (French Colonial Renaissance) and when we blithely approached it, as gawping tourists approach Buckingham Palace or the White House, we were turned back by heavily armed soldiers while still some fifty yards from the railings – behind which anti-aircraft guns lurk among tall trees. One theory explains these weapons by referring to the President’s conviction that Pretoria is keen to eliminate him. Another theory maintains that he is afraid of no one but invented a South African threat to justify his irresponsible purchase of Soviet guns, tanks, MIG-21s and MIG-17s. (Madagascar’s MIGs are rumoured to be no longer airworthy and those we saw at the airport did look under-exercised; grass had grown quite high around them.) A third theory suggests that the President lives in terror of his political rivals; his predecessor, Colonel Richard Ratsimandrava, was assassinated in 1975 after six days in office. In Tana political controversies generate as many theories, few capable of proof, as there are interested Malagasy. But elsewhere we learned that the armed forces, if not the President himself, are indeed jittery about South Africa’s attitude to Malagasy socialism.
In 1975 President Ratsiraka wrote his Boky Mena (Red Book) in which he adapted Marxist principles to Malagasy needs. At once the Western media, which only occasionally glances at Madagascar, yelped – ‘Communist!’ And then they turned away again, since the island’s domestic politics are not circulation-boosters. Yet within days of arriving in Tana one’s antennae have registered that the President is not running a Soviet-type régime, whatever else. Madagascar’s politics, like its wildlife, are unique to the island – and are now evolving rapidly, unpredictably and so far not as attractively as the flora and fauna.
Tana’s population of half a million (it was about ten thousand in 1820) is predominantly Merina though representatives of every tribe are to be found in the capital. Happily it is still free of the Third World’s worst urban problem – swarms of starving peasants squatting in shanty-towns. But the national population graph is ominous; from four and a half million in 1945 to nearly ten million in 1983, with about a third of the population under ten.
The Government Information Minister, Mr Bruno Rakotomavo, admits that Tana is ‘the town that has suffered most during the present economic crisis’. Yet despite its outward appearance of a once well-maintained colonial city now grievously neglected, it does not have a Third World aura. By our standards it is poor, but not desperately so. Compact and idiosyncratic, it is an intimate, personal place – a big village with the panache of a capital. Thus it is a complex place, as the Malagasy are a complex people, and it would be futile to try to describe it by likening it to anywhere better known. It is – and one hopes it will long remain – superbly itself.
Large churches of various denominations rise above the crowded dwellings, recalling the importance of one-up-manship to nineteenth-century Christians. No less conspicuous is the colonial legacy of schools, colleges, institutes, hospitals, banks – the majority handsome buildings, also dominating their surrounding areas. Yet by now all these landmarks have somehow lost their ‘European-ness’ and merged into the general enchanting craziness that is Tana. Neither the nineteenth-century missionaries nor the twentieth-century colonists damaged the integrity of this place. They came, they preached, they exploited – but they didn’t conquer.
Until the mid-nineteenth-century the use of stone or concrete was considered sacreligious in the Merina sacred city. The oldest houses are therefore of wood and the finest of these may be found in the Upper Town around the royal rova, now known as ‘the Queen’s Palace’. This is a district of charming oddities where many dwellings have long, flower-filled, delicately carved wooden balconies, looking from a distance like aprons brimming with scarlet blossoms. One house has a wing resembling a bell-tower – painted blood-red, with mock-Romanesque windows set high under a steeply sloping roof. Another sports a pale pink tower wearing a comical square tin roof like a Christmas cracker hat. Often such happy extravagances are attached to otherwise conventional two-storey stone dwellings; no doubt they were added as families grew in number or prosperity. Some stand on wooden stilts, some on brick pillars; all are cunningly contrived to fit a quart of humanity into a pint pot of mountainside.
One brick cottage with a steep tiled roof and neat dormer windows would not startle in an English village. Close beside it an even smaller cottage has a pale blue tin roof with a crimson-shuttered dormer; only in Tana could corrugated iron actually add to the beauty of a townscape. Overlooking these is an elegant three-storey villa of rosy brick, its russet roof broken by an extraordinary variety of dormers in unexpected places, its windowless gables showing how effectively brick can be used to pattern a façade. Higher still, a gazebo of stone-pillared balconies, enclosed by lacy wood-carving, has wide orange-shuttered windows: its three sharply peaked tin roofs are surmounted by copper orbs and sceptres. Beside this outburst of eccentricity rises a tall, slim, white-washed house, split into three levels: one dormer window is also a side-door and from the fanciful fretwork roof a catwalk leads to a cliff-face. Everywhere laundry flaps on balcony clothes lines, half-hiding exuberant pot-plants and vines; and between the dwellings – where one has to walk in single file – small shrubs somehow find space to grow at odd angles. I do not recall seeing two identical buildings in the whole of Tana. Each home is the product of its owners’ inventiveness.
In Ambohidahy, the colonial commercial district, one realises the true meaning of the word ‘recession’. After a long search we came upon what seemed to be Tana’s last packet of envelopes. Rachel could find no picture (or other) postcards to send her schoolmates. No street-plan was available, nor could we find any of those ‘touristic folders’ mentioned by our guidebook; where there is almost no tourist-trade it is not worth reprinting such ‘literature’. The absence of other vazaha, apart from a remnant enclave of French residents, adds immeasurably to Tana’s charm. In most non-European capitals the presence of hundreds or thousands of fellow-Westerners creates an inescapable ‘them-and-us’ atmosphere in which youngsters like Pierre and Joseph would never have approached Rachel and me, volunteering to guide us to the rova.
Both were seventeen-year-old schoolboys, taller than the average Merina. Joseph wanted to practise his French, Pierre – most unusually – his English. (Few Malagasy now speak English: and outside of the main towns not many speak French.) Our response to Tana astonished these lads; from their elders they had acquired the notion that it has become a shamefully scruffy city ‘not fit for tourists’. Already we had observed among the older generation of middle-class Merina a tendency to apologise for the fact that ‘Tana is not what it was’. Their apologies were of course oblique; the Malagasy are never obvious and anyway are too proud to criticise their country openly. But it is sad that some youngsters are being led to compare Tana unfavourably with what they can see of other capitals on the blurred and jerky black-and-white screens of Malagasy television. (Mercifully all the few television aerials are indoor.)
As we climbed steeply towards the rova, Rachel took several photographs of the Lower Town and the surrounding valley. Then, as we were approaching an army post high above the road, our friends insisted that she conceal her camera. No one had warned us of any local restrictions on photography but the boys’ fear was so palpable that we did not argue.
Soon we passed the (accidentally) burnt-out ruin of Andafianaratra Palace, a startling pink and white edifice of colossal proportions, completed in 1872 for the Prime Minister. Four massive corner towers, each supporting a bloated mushroom of masonry, are still connected by three tiers of balconies once enhanced – our friends said – by some of the finest wood-carving in Madagascar. Before the 1976 fire it had a glass dome which must have made it look even curiouser.
Nearer the rova we received another architectural shock, this one uncompromisingly Greek: Queen Ranavalona II’s wall-less Judgement Hall, which has sixteen stone columns twenty-five feet high with clumsily carved capitals. It dates from 1881 and stands on the edge of a cliff overlooking the tranquil village-dotted countryside far below – an appropriate position, as hurling people over cliffs was the favoured Merina method of public execution.
Alas! the Queen’s Palace was being repaired so the rova – strewn with building materials – had been closed to visitors. Frustrated, we peered through the open main gate in a monumental stone archway surmounted by a bronze eagle with outstretched wings. According to Pierre, this bird represents Radama I’s crack troops – known as ‘eagles’ because they stood sentry, day and night, on this rova hilltop.
The open gate, and a walk around the periphery, allowed us to see most of the rova’s bizarre conglomeration of constructions; these prompted Rachel to murmur that we were probably missing nothing, aesthetically, by being excluded from the museum. The original palace (Manjakamiadana) was a simple wooden building on which the French architect, Jean Laborde (the same who used slave labour) elaborated in the 1840s. Then, between 1868 and 1873, an astonishing Scotsman named James Cameron devised, by Royal Command, a stone ‘shell’ for the palace. He was so carried away by this commission that he added four Italianate towers, a Loire Château roof and a façade of ten late mediaeval cloister arches – five up and five down – beneath a Haussmann balustrade. The result seemed to me entirely pleasing as a decoration on Tana’s highest point, though if one met it in Europe one might be tempted to smile.
Also within the rova are what seem at first glance to be a pair of twee seaside chalets. In fact these are The Kings’ Tomb and The Queens’ Tomb, which since 1897 have held the bodies of rulers formerly buried at Ambohimanga, the ancient royal ‘city’. Amongst those present is Andrianampoinimerina, who began the political unification of Madagascar in the late eighteenth century and rested for eighty-seven years at Ambohimanga before being taken to the capital in a silver boat casket. The last ruler of Madagascar – Queen Ranavalona III, who died in exile in Algeria in 1917 – returned to Tana in 1938 and was reburied with ceremonial flourishes that are still remembered. Joseph told us that behind those tombs – invisible from the gate – are seven small tiled houses holding the bodies of those who ruled before Andrianampoinimerina. (In those days the Merina ‘kings’ were really tribal chiefs, later upgraded.) Only three Merina rulers are excluded from the royal burial place, two because they were dethroned and one because he died of leprosy. The reverence with which the boys spoke of all these burials and reburials suggested that the traditional beliefs of the Malagasy are not weakening among the younger generation.
In bemusing contrast to the royal mausoleums is a smallish church, the Royal Chapel, that might have been designed by Wren. Queen Ranavalona II laid the foundation stone soon after her baptism and the architect was William Pool, an English LMS builder. He must have been a man of many moods because he was also responsible for the singularly un-Wren-like Andafianaratra Palace. Pierre and Joseph did not share our enthusiasm for this golden-stoned gem. Pierre remarked that Queen Ranavalona I (she who ordered Madagascar’s early Christians to be flung off a 600-foot precipice) was a ‘strong leader’ who recognised Christian missionaries as the thin end of the colonial wedge and sought to preserve ‘the religion of our ancestors’. In 1895 – he added – many peasants blamed the French conquest on the monarch’s desertion to Christianity, which meant forfeiting the protection of the ancestors. We knew both boys to be Christian, yet he sounded as though he approved of the peasants’ attitude. I longed to discuss with him the role of Christianity in present-day Madagascar. But then I looked at his serious young face – bronze and smooth-skinned, with wavy hair falling over a high forehead into slightly slanting eyes – and I sensed that any probing on such matters would be considered unmannerly. The Malagasy character contains more than a soupçon of oriental inscrutability.
As we left the rova an invisible two-man army band began to play Schubert’s Marche Militaire with tremendous verve; in winter this sundown concert is a daily event. The boys lived nearby so we returned to Analakely on our own, by a new route down the grassy slope below the Grecian columns.
The equatorial sun was slipping perceptibly towards the horizon, its gentle brilliance pouring across the plain far below us – glinting gold on water channels between green market gardens and grey-brown paddy-stubble, emphasising long gashes of dark red earth, laying grape-purple shadows on the distant encircling hills. Then all colours merged into the grey-blue of a brief dusk and, from above, the National Anthem signalled the lowering of the Malagasy flag on the Palace roof. I am always disquieted by the zeal with which ex-colonies cultivate such nationalistic trimmings, often while excoriating every aspect of the culture in which they are rooted. National anthems and flags symbolise something peculiarly European; they are derived from ancient – and long since perverted – ideals which are utterly alien to the spiritual or emotional inheritance of a country like Madagascar.
We were soon lost; even in daylight Tana’s geography baffles vazaha. But it was fun being enmeshed in a network of ladder-like paths connecting scores of hillside dwellings to each other – though not, so far as we could determine, to anything else. Occasionally those paths became tree-trunk bridges across narrow chasms. Often they wandered through back (or front) yards, past open living-room doors revealing families eating mounds of rice by candlelight. The two vazaha, tripping over jerry-cans, hen-coops and rice-baskets, caused much amusement. Several kind people gave us detailed directions in Malagasy, which they took it for granted we would understand. (The French were good at learning it.) When at last we stumbled – literally – onto one of Tana’s few tarred roads, it was by accident.
These roads have no corners, only curves; thus we went around in circles for another half-hour, noting landmarks like church spires, then ten minutes later seeing them below us when they should have been above. In desperation we tried one of the wide flights of concrete steps that link Tana’s various ‘shelves’ in the city centre. Many steps once had reinforcing metal bands along their edges and these have now come unstuck in enough cases to present a fearsome night-time hazard.
Equally hazardous are the unlit footpaths beside the tarred roads. The Malagasy have a penchant for removing huge slabs of pavement to expose deep holes containing esoteric interweavings of sewage-pipes, water-pipes, thick cables and thin wires. All over the world urban authorities enjoy exposing their subterranean technological wonders, but usually the exposure is temporary and it is the custom to provide warning lights and protective barriers. Not so however in Tana, where these death-traps are permanent features of the city scene. Rachel was convinced they’d been opened the day before the French left and were unlikely to be closed until the Russians came. We never saw anyone working near them and, in most cases, no chunks of pavement were awaiting replacement; these have apparently been removed to serve a more useful purpose elsewhere. Within such chasms the liquid mud is always malodorous and, if the percentage of straying sewage is high and the dead cats are very dead, it exhales near-lethal fumes.
Eventually Rachel decided that we should go through a mountain, as the road ahead of us did. Her usually reliable sense of direction had been atrophied by Tana but at this point – perhaps reactivated by hunger – it told her, correctly, that Analakely District lay beyond that tunnel. Plunging into its pitch-blackness, we felt grateful for the absence of human hazards in Tana.
Several Malagasy had warned us that their capital is now a suppurating mass of pick-pockets, muggers and cut-throats. We doubted this; the Zoma has its share of professional pick-pockets but there is no nastiness in the city’s atmosphere by day or by night – no undercurrents of vicious violence or anti-vazaha resentment, no vulgar whistling or winking or jostling in reaction to an attractive young girl. The innate Malagasy dignity makes Tana seem truly civilised, whatever may be the state of the drains.
Only one car passed us in the tunnel. This capital goes early to bed and even the Avenue de l’Indépendance, where the nightlife would be if there were any, is virtually deserted by 8 p.m.
The Malagasy language is a joy to listen to but a torment to pronounce. Luckily however the most important words are manageable: aza fady and misaotra (please and thank you). Also, it helps that many Malagasy, especially among the Merina, have European first names which may be used if one is desperate – though at some risk of giving umbrage, the Malagasy sense of decorum being strong. Oddly enough, a compatriot of ours is partly to blame for the intractability of Malagasy As She Is Written.
James Hastie was born in 1786, to a prosperous Quaker milling family in Co. Cork, but he rejected pacifism and ran away from home to fight in the Mahratta War. At the age of thirty-six, as Sergeant Hastie, he landed at Tamatave, having been chosen by Governor Farquhar of Mauritius to tutor two young Merina princes. He was accompanied by the first horses to set hoof on Madagascar but few of these English thoroughbreds survived the gruelling climb to Imerina.
This courageous, shrewd and kindly Irishman contributed more to the Anglo–Merina alliance than any other individual. Among his contributions was some assistance to the LMS pioneers as they struggled to wed Malayo-Polynesian sounds to an incompatible Latin alphabet. The missionaries were also being helped by one Sergeant Robin, a deserter from the French army who arrived in Madagascar a year after Hastie, taught King Radama I to read and write in French, became his secretary and was mainly responsible for France’s continuing influence in Imerina throughout the British era. Unfortunately for posterity, the two sergeants disagreed about the pronunciation of vowels and consonants. Whereupon, according to one story, the King poured oil by decreeing that consonants be given an English pronunciation and vowels a French pronunciation. This must have seemed to him an ideal solution, bound to mollify both his friends, but the result was catastrophic.
Rachel’s flare for languages (not inherited from her mother) prompted me optimistically to buy off a Zoma book-stall An Elementary English–Malagasy Dictionary published in Tana in 1969 by the Lutheran Press. But even Rachel quailed on finding the following:
‘accommodation – ny zavatra ao an-trano ilain’ ny vahiny na mandry izy na misakafo
bar – hazo atsivalana amin’ ny lalana
beach – moron-dranomasina torapasika
buffet – fanaka fitoeran-dovia sy hanina
come on – mihaona na mifankahita kisendrasendra
daytime – ny fotoana anelanelan ny fiposahan’ny masoan-dro sy ny filentahany’
and so on down the alphabet to:
‘Zoo – saha misy bibidia hojeren’ ny mpitsangantsangana’.
Perhaps Madagascar should scrap the LMS system and start again?
The road from Analakely to Tana’s saha misy bibidia hojeren ’ny mpitsangantsangana is, by local standards, quite straightforward. But we found all the gates padlocked and there were no helpful notices about opening hours. This alarmed us; we were leaving Tana next morning and had been told we could get our lemur-reserve permits only at the zoo.
We were searching for some break-in point when a car approached, passed us – then abruptly stopped and backed. It was old and well groomed, like most Tana vehicles, and its youngish driver – dark-skinned, with Arabic features – was also well groomed. ‘You have a problem?’ he asked. Then he volunteered to drive us back to the main gate, where he would endeavour to solve our problem. In Tana we benefited from many such spontaneous acts of kindness.
Louis spoke basic English and his opening remarks recalled our Air Mad guidebook. ‘Now this zoo is no good. You will not enjoy it. Ten years ago it was very good. Now there is nothing to see. Most of the animals have died. They had nothing to eat and nobody cares any more.’ As we searched for someone with a key he elaborated on his country’s woes, concluding: ‘So here we have every trouble – no money for roads, no books for schools, no medicines for hospitals, no tyres for cars, no food in the shops, too much black market, nothing except for smugglers who bribe. It makes me sad in the heart! What was good before is now bad – bad, bad, bad!’
This blunt talk was novel to us; usually such complaints are merely hinted at through those stylised circumlocutions cultivated by most Malagasy. In an odd way Louis seemed to need the sadness in his heart, rather as a masochist needs flagellation. An Irishman also condemns his government with relish, but generally there is a self-righteous implication that if he were running the show all would be well. Louis however was almost taking a share of the blame, criticising himself as part of the Malagasy ‘thing’ that had gone wrong. It is unlikely that this was a conscious attitude, that he ever thought in terms of the individual citizen’s responsibility; yet as we talked a feeling of diffuse guilt came through strongly. Perhaps this is an extension of the Malagasy sense of close physical identification with their country, which itself is tied to their intimacy with their ancestors. Of which more anon.
Tana’s botanic garden-cum-zoo, skilfully laid out on a hillside, may once have been a delight but now rows of empty cages give it a stricken appearance – though we rejoiced that such cramped cages were empty. As Louis had predicted, we did not enjoy it. (In even the best of zoos my rapture is modified.) Most of the few surviving lemurs (ring-tailed) live on an isle in a lakelet. Before permit-hunting, we sat on winter-brown grass watching them playing in a dead tree, and being fed over-ripe bananas and stale bread by a keeper who paddled across six yards of deep water in a canoe.
The Directorate of Scientific Research was founded by the French for the study of demography, geography, agricultural genetics and medicinal herbs. Only one room was occupied, by a giggling gaggle of adolescent girls dissecting frogs. Here we learned that lemur-reserve permits are in fact issued by the Bureau d’Eaux et Forêts, which has its offices several miles away, near our hotel. When we sought admission to the Natural History Museum an amiable rotund gentleman, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and a halo of spiky silver hair, was desolate. ‘The key – no!’ he exclaimed. ‘My colleague I think have in his pocket for an accident – I am sorry! I am full of apology – tomorrow you come back and I have key – yes?’
‘Perhaps,’ we murmured, not wishing to seem unforgiving. Then we said, ‘Misaotra’, shook hands and departed. Snaking hands is important in Madagascar – something more than a formality. To omit this little ceremony can be construed as a deliberate insult.
I thought later about the sadness in Louis’s heart and the missing key and reflected that most of Madagascar’s inefficiencies and apparent stupidities involve the breakdown or misapplication of imported technologies or ideas. A semi-Western life-style, such as the French imposed on Malagasy towns, cannot be maintained without a modicum of organised work on the part of the administrators and their staffs. But the Malagasy are amenable only to those outside influences which they deem benign – and which include neither the ‘Work Ethic’ nor the ‘Save and Prosper’ ideal, not to mention their decadent child the ‘Rat Race’. Many Malagasy seem indifferent to comfort, convenience, cleanliness and efficiency, yet this does not mean that Madagascar is hopelessly corrupt or unable to run itself. The Malagasy have their own set of priorities, among which kindness, good manners, tact, generosity, fortitude of spirit and family loyalty rank high. By our standards their country is at present falling to bits, literally as well as metaphorically. Yet if they can avoid being blackmailed, bullied or otherwise lured into an alliance with either bloc, the Great Red Island may still be in harmony with its ancestral spirits as it enters the twenty-first century. And to the Malagasy this harmony is what matters most of all.
The Bureau d’Eaux et Forêts (Department of Waterways and Forests) occupies three small rooms, crammed with filing cabinets and desks, on the fourth floor of a modern government building in what seems to be Tana’s diplomatic quarter. Six-foot snake skins, giant mounted butterflies and the skeletons of extinct mammals decorate the walls. Dead beetles the size of dogs (chihuahuas) protrude from open drawers. The courteous staff of three generate no sense of urgency about the protection of waterways, forests or wildlife.
A not-so-young woman with a streaming cold peered at us through a veil of wavy raven hair. Between sneezes she indistinctly asked us to leave our passports in the next room and return for our permits at 4 p.m. – it was then 11 a.m. This seemed too speedy to be true: had we misheard her? ‘There must be a snag,’ muttered Rachel, who grew up in the hard school of Asian and South American bureaucracy. But there wasn’t.
At 3.58 p.m. we were graciously received by the Chef de Bureau, sitting plump and beaming behind a desk disconcertingly paper-free. He shook hands, presented us with our permits, advised us how best to avoid spear-carrying brigands in the lawless south and remarked, with chilling cheerfulness, that soon all lemurs will be extinct because they are so tasty.
Conservation is low on the list of official Malagasy concerns. Repeatedly we got the impression that it is seen as another form of Western exploitation, a left-over from colonialism which brings well-paid vazaha experts into the country to lecture the natives on how they should use their meagre resources. If drought or floods have reduced an area’s food supplies, why not catch as many lemur as possible for the pot? If I were the mother of hungry children, would I not urge my husband to hunt anything edible? It is easy to be a committed conservationist on a full belly.
In Madagascar only rich tourists, who are content to fly from A to B seeing almost nothing, can hope to follow a set plan: and even they have their problems. In most regions the sort of self-propulsion we favour is out; neither the arid southern deserts nor the humid eastern rain-forests encourage cycling or long-distance trekking. So our Malagasy journey was, as they say, unstructured, though three widely scattered objectives provided a provisional framework. These were: a mountain trek in Imerina (to gratify my deepest longing), snorkling around the coral reefs off the west and south-east coasts (to gratify Rachel’s deepest longing) and looking for lemurs in the Isalo Massif and the rain-forests (to gratify a common longing).
We had considered going to Nosy-bé, Nosy Komba and Nosy Tanikely, three islands off the north-west coast which offer the best snorkling and lemur-watching in Madagascar. But then we were warned that there are four real tourist hotels on Nosy-bé; and these include a ‘Holiday Inn’ of surpassing ugliness – for ‘high-quality tourism’ – built in 1977 on the most beautiful of the island’s beaches. It was also rumoured that live tourists may occasionally be observed in that area, wearing bikinis, listening to transistor radios and applying sun-tan lotion. Our flesh crawled and we scrubbed the north-west.
In Tana we discovered that no reliable information is ever obtainable about public (or indeed private) transport throughout the rest of Madagascar. It therefore seemed that we must leave the attainment of lemurs and coral reefs in the laps of the ancestors, who we hoped were regarding us favourably. But at least the mountains were easily reached. They surround the capital and at seven o’clock one cool grey morning we shouldered our rucksacks and set out to trek to Antsirabe through the Ankarata – a distance of some 130 miles as the Murphys walk.