‘Bustling’ is not a word that could ever be applied to the Malagasy; like the Irish, they believe in ‘not killing themselves’. But, as we left Tana, Route Nationale No. 1 was thronged and quietly animated. A mile-long market was being set up and, with a guesstimated eighty per cent of Malagasy still engaged in agriculture (mainly subsistence), markets are where the action is.
Almost every head in sight was wearing a burden of saleable goods, from the grey-wispy head of a limping granny under a sack of cabbages to the frizzy black head of a tiny girl in a flounced pink frock under a tower of newly woven raffia baskets. Tongas were being drawn by pairs of briskly trotting, fine-boned, glossy ponies, the majority well-fed and groomed. Madagascar’s equine population is restricted to the flat plain around Tana; the fate of the first horses to arrive, with James Hastie, made future importers cautious. But some race-horses are bred in Imerina, and Tana has its clique of keen race-goers. Each ramshackle tonga was packed with produce and people, so inextricably mixed that only unrelated arms, legs and heads – the last usually decorated with happy grins – were visible between bundles of firewood, live hens, sacks of rice and rolls of raffia bedmats. From within these cargoes came squeals of laughter, snatches of song and greetings shouted to passing friends. A few myopic men sit in Tana offices dreaming and planning (fortunately mostly dreaming) about a ‘strong industrial base’ for Madagascar. But how much laughter and song would there be among a crowd of Malagasy workers commuting to a factory?
This was a ‘down-market’ market; none of the traders had motor-vans and the bulkier goods – second-hand furniture, bales of hay and the like – were piled high on speedy two-man-power rickshaws. These are pulled by one runner and pushed by another who on level ground uses only his forehead, keeping his hands clasped behind his back. The Malagasy call these vehicles pousses-pousses because when ascending steep hills the puller repeatedly urges his mate to ‘Pousses-pousses!’ (push-push!).
Soon we were surrounded by paddy-fields, some being prepared for the spring sowing by pairs of zebu drawing ploughs not much less primitive than those we saw in the Andes. Several men followed each plough, breaking huge clods with short spades. The women play their part later, during sowing, re-planting and harvesting.
We planned to turn off Route Nationale No. 1 fifteen miles west of Tana, at Arivonimamo, where a dirt road leads into the Ankaratra range. This brief Route Nationale (it ends abruptly at Tsiroanomandidy) has an astonishing velvet-smooth tarmac surface; we were to see nothing else like it in Madagascar. Of the country’s 22,800 miles of so-called ‘motor’ roads only ten per cent are tarred and only twenty-eight per cent permanently usable; the rest are washed away annually during the rains. And even the tarred stretches tend to be of uncertain temper: on a good day it takes five hours to drive the 105 miles from Tana to Antsirabe.
Suddenly we heard what sounded like rifle-shots. Then round the next bend came fourteen magnificent zebu – sleek chestnut backs shading to black underparts – being driven at a fast trot by two men continuously cracking long leather thongs. These drovers were lean, dark-skinned and bare-footed, with broad features and masses of curly hair looking like red-powdered wigs. They wore only ragged shorts and lambas and had the aura of folk who do not belong anywhere near a city. Such drovers often maintain this steady speed for up to twenty miles. Prudently we stood on the ditch; this mettlesome herd filled the road and their wide-curving horns were long and sharp. A head tossed casually in our direction – meaning no harm – could do damage. The men ignored us as they passed.
We were gazing after the zebu – marvelling at the rhythm of their and the men’s movements, which seemed part of one action – when a van-driver offered us a lift. He was a blond Italian priest, wearing slacks and an open-necked shirt and going to the next town some five miles on. We appreciated his offer; it is no fun walking fifteen miles on a hot tarred road.
Paulo had been seven years in Madagascar and took an anxious interest in local politics. He commended the President’s austerity campaign. ‘Madagascar doesn’t have rich natural resources, so it’s the only way. And of course Ratsiraka isn’t a Communist! How could anyone, even if they wanted to, turn the Malagasy into Communists? They can’t be brainwashed – not by Marxists or Christians or the CIA. Yes, you will see and hear some surface signs of Communist influence – but don’t be alarmed. These are only a protest against Tsiranana’s outlook – his gross Capitalism, always geared to suit the French economy. Ratsiraka knows he must dodge both power blocs. Yes, he has made some very bad mistakes – he tried to turn the export trade into a State Monopoly and that was a disaster. But he is big enough to admit this – not in words because he’s a politician but by loosening the government’s grip on the export companies. Many complain – are disillusioned – say it was better under the French. But now some things are beginning to improve. And the people will rebel only if there’s not enough rice. Rice is the one thing they won’t do without. They eat more rice than anyone else in the world – an average of half a kilo every day for each Malagasy. They used to grow a surplus, for export. But that was another terrible mistake – the President reduced the price paid to the peasants so they went back to subsistence farming, and at the same time the urban population was growing. So last year three hundred and fifty thousand tons had to be imported and Ratsiraka had to ask the West for help. And still rice had to be rationed in the towns, which makes always a big black market and a lot of anger. But this policy too he has changed. He’s learning, though at the expense of the poor. The rich can always dodge restrictions.’
We said goodbye to Paulo in a charming little town of red-brown houses with carved wooden pillars and balconies; the name of the place escapes me. Many towns and villages begin with ‘Ambohi’, but apart from ‘Ambohipotsy’ and ‘Ambohijoky’ – which somehow do stick in the memory – time has fused them in my mind to ‘Ambowhatsit’. You might imagine that this ‘Ambohi’ is akin to the Irish ‘Bally’ or ‘Knock’. Not so, however. The situation is much more complex – and I do not intend to analyse it.
Beyond Ambowhatsit lay neat smooth hills, low curving ridges, broad shallow valleys – a landscape long since subdued by man’s needs and wounded by his ignorance. Some grassy slopes were strewn with grey rounded boulders; others were red-streaked, erosion-gored. All the valleys held rice-fields and on several ridges new pine-woods flourished. Hereabouts reafforestation efforts are consolingly conspicuous; we passed stands of eucalpytus and pine – and other unfamiliar deciduous trees, tall and stalwart – and dense coppices of ‘tapia’. These look like olive trees but aren’t; their leaves feed the Malagasy silk-worm.
High white clouds drifted across an intensely blue sky, their shadows muting the reds, browns, greens and greys of the pattern below; a hot noon sun glinted silver on water-channels crisscrossing the valleys; a strong cool breeze stirred flowering mimosa by the roadside. Scents were pungent: of resin and herbs and strange aromatic shrubs, dark green and glossy. The few distant villages would have been invisible but for their (two) church towers, usually tin-roofed.
We picnicked beside a long lake, level with the road. Clumps of tough reeds broke its surface and several punting fishermen paused to stare at us, standing statuesque in tiny rough-hewn boats, their lambas fluttering brightly against the dark water. Here we saw white herons feeding and small blue butterflies flickering through the mimosa. Less agreeable were countless colonies of monstrous black and yellow spiders – thousands of them – suspended amidst intricate web-cities on telegraph wires and trees. As a victim of spider-phobia I felt no urge to study these remarkable creatures, but our friend Hilary Bradt, who has an insatiable curiosity about Malagasy flora and fauna, later wrote to us:
‘Those lovely big black and yellow jobs that live in the telegraph wires weave golden webs that are so tough you can literally raise them with one hand and duck under as though they were a wire fence. Last century an imaginative textile person thought they might supersede the silk-worm and experimented for a while, using spider webs to produce fine silken goods. The idea never came to anything commercially, but Queen Victoria was given a pair of stockings made from Malagasy spider silk.’
Soon after lunch we were again picked up, by a Merina engineering student on vacation from a French university. He deplored our trekking intentions, asserting that to camp in the mountains in winter could only lead to hypothermia. Near Arivonimamo we were stunned to see an outburst of High Technology, the only one in Madagascar. Our driver explained proudly that this NASA-built ‘earth station communications satellite’ provides excellent telephone links with the rest of the world. Maybe so, but it does nothing whatever for the domestic telephone system.
Arivonimamo has grim associations that may be variously interpreted. On 22 November 1895, two months after a small French force had conquered Tana, the town’s Christian Merina District Governor, and a British Quaker missionary family (parents and a small daughter) were slain during the first of many anti-French and anti-Christian uprisings. Their killers belonged to the Menalamba, a group dedicated to the elimination of all missionaries by way of restoring Malagasy traditions. They were convinced – as were their successors in the south during the 1947 uprising – that ancestral support and the ombiasas’ magic charms would protect them from even the most modern vazaha weapons. (Ombiasa may be loosely translated as ‘witch-doctor’, though this is a simplification of his function in Malagasy society.) When avenging French troops were sent from Tana the Menalamba fought ferociously, losing 150 men before their retreat into the Ankaratra.
Christian vazaha now visit Arivonimamo to honour the memory of its martyrs by laying flowers on the monument that commemorates their massacre. But a Malagasy, Sennen Andriamirado, has recently written: ‘The first national liberation movement, the Menalamba, declared itself symbolically by massacring a family of British missionaries in Arivonimamo … This movement spread throughout the country and was only completely crushed ten years later after a long war of “pacification”.’ One man’s martyr is another man’s symbol.
Had we not been put down at the appropriate junction we might have had some trouble finding it; the quaint European custom of maintaining signposts has long since been abandoned. Anyway, it would – we then thought – be misleading to suggest that such a rain-ravaged track is ever vehicle-worthy. Soon however we were to learn that by Malagasy standards this track was an almost flawless motorway.
My spirits rose as we turned towards the high blue barrier of the Ankaratra. But I suspect Rachel was day-dreaming of coral reefs and lemurs; fast-growing fourteen-year-olds tend not to be energetic. We climbed gradually towards an isolated pudding-shaped hill, aridly brown, with one wind-deformed tree on its summit. All around shimmered the blue-green saplings of a eucalyptus plantation. Otherwise there was no cultivation until we approached a hamlet that seemed to have grown out of the earth.
Here a score of bare-footed boys, wearing blue cotton shorts, white cotton shirts and quasi-military peaked caps, were being drilled on a rocky slope. This ‘Revolutionary Drill’ consists of marching around in circles, thrusting forward clenched left fists in unison, scowling malevolently (presumably as one is visualising the Enemies of the Revolution) and generally looking foolish and incongruous on a Malagasy hillside. The sight of two laden vazaha marching dustily to nowhere provoked rebellion. Ignoring the commands of their young Sergeant-Major, several boys leaped onto the track – then suddenly were overcome by shyness, looked at one another, giggled and retreated. Probably they had assumed us to be males and on realising their mistake were unable to cope with the situation.
These curious drillings are now undertaken, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, throughout Madagascar. They form part of a Presidential campaign to restore the self-respect of rural communities, who now enjoy a degree of autonomy unknown since the Merina began the administrative unification of the island and the French completed it. Opinions differ as to whether or not this abrupt delegation of responsibility makes sense. However, Malagasy villagers have never given up the habit of working together at rice-cultivation and house-building; and their traditional organisational methods are practical, efficient and generally accepted by the whole community.
From the base of the pudding-mountain we were overlooking an immense sweep of broken countryside: red slopes, silver rivers, green scrubland, grey-brown valleys, red-brown villages. At intervals our track could be seen wriggling towards a knot of mountains some twenty miles away.
It was now time to look for a campsite and around the next corner we paused to fill our water-bottles at a wayside tap serving a scattered hamlet. Like most highland homes, these two-storeyed thatched dwellings had small unglazed windows and wooden pillars supporting an upper balcony. Merina villagers usually follow a simple traditional design, yet no two houses are exactly alike in size and decoration. We were puzzled then by the numerous ruins interspersed with inhabited dwellings; later we realised that these buildings are not very durable and that to construct a new house is often easier than doing repairs – most of the raw materials cost nothing except hard work.
Our use of the communal tap caused a sensation; within moments men, women and children were emerging – cautiously – from their homes to stare and speculate. The majority wore rags and were so filthy one couldn’t assess skin-colour, but their features and hair suggested more Merina blood than any other. The nearest group – all women and girls – stood some fifteen yards away, looking apprehensive. When I waved and smiled, as reassuringly as I could, they slowly came closer and began to exchange whispered jokes about the vazaha. Luckily language barriers never prevent the communication of essentials and they quickly accepted us as harmless. A torrent of questions followed and our total non-comprehension provoked paroxysms of laughter. Then even the men crowded around, and everyone shook hands, and children of all sizes came running or toddling to join in the fun.
The atmosphere changed suddenly on the appearance of a young man wearing a torn blue lamba and a worried expression. He too shook hands, before questioning us suspiciously – though his tone was not unfriendly. He was it seemed a person of some authority, yet too young to be Chief. I produced Samuel’s ‘Letter of Explanation’ in Malagasy, given to us for just such an occasion. But the young man couldn’t read, and was plainly embarrassed by this limitation. For a few moments he stood frowning at the sheet of paper, turning it this way and that while wondering what to do next. Then a buxom young woman with baby on back stepped forward and took it from him. She had a wild mop of uncombed hair and wore a tattered once-white skirt and a ravelling blue sweater. Slowly but without hesitation she read the letter aloud while the crowd pressed forward eagerly to listen. I have never discovered exactly what Samuel said, but it went down a treat. The young man looked relieved, the crowd laughed again and some of the children clapped and cheered. (That young woman’s literacy – evidently exceptional in the hamlet – puzzled us; her standing in the community seemed no different to anyone else’s.)
The Chief arrived next; his age-dimmed eyes were kindly in a wrinkled copper face. He wore a straw Homburg, tattered grey pants and a knee-length check shirt beneath a new white lamba obviously donned to honour us. Although he could recall only a few words of French, his dry humour repeatedly came through in the course of that evening. Having read our Vital Document, he beckoned us to follow him; his gesture was as much an order as an invitation and to have disobeyed it would have been to risk throwing the whole hamlet into a state of alarmed confusion. We were led by an indirect route to a newish mud shack overlooking paddy-fields: our lodging for the night. The Chief regretted its unworthiness – we expressed joyful gratitude – everyone was happy.
Being a guest in a Malagasy village puts a certain strain on the traveller. Paradoxically, these seemingly easy-going, cheerful, friendly Malagasy are so constrained by a complicated system of beliefs and prohibitions (superstitions, to us) that fear is one of their dominant emotions – even in the 1980s. One cannot easily detect the extent to which ancient traditions still affect the urban middle class. But probably few Malagasy have entirely discarded them, for their tentacles reach into every corner of life and are very much part of being Malagasy.
Anthropologists and ethnologists get extraordinarily steamed up about the origins of Madagascar’s pervasive taboos (a Polynesian word) or fady (an Indonesian word). Some try to trace them back to Arabic sources because Malagasy ombiasa use the old Arabic calendar when determining vintana (destiny) – a process of truly mind-boggling intricacy. (The vintana concept profoundly affects every aspect of an individual’s life.) Mild feuding takes place between those who claim Arabic influences and those who deny them, but the fact remains that Madagascar’s present network of beliefs and consequent restrictions is unique. It has not been imported from anywhere, whatever tenuous links with other cultures may be discerned by excited academics through the mists of history. It expresses only the Malagasy way of thinking, feeling, imagining, interpreting, inventing.
The pioneer missionaries were heartened to find a country apparently without any organised, institutionalised religion: without temples, priests, scriptures, pilgrimages, shrines – all those tiresome trimmings that make it so difficult to ‘convert’ Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims. The Malagasy seemed easy prey: straightforward pagans who had only a few vague notions about being nice to their ancestors and were pretty certain to lap up whichever version of Christianity might come their way.
This illusion did not last long. Soon the Reverend Ellis was reporting, with his usual sonorous verbosity:
‘The operation of an invisible agency, or of different agencies, they see demonstrated in the phenomena, the order, and the formation of the universe around them. Yet strangers to the sublime idea of a superintending Providence, and almost equally strangers to any rational and philosophical explanation of daily occurring natural phenomena, they promptly attribute everything to the influence of charms (ody), which their imaginations invent, possessing qualities and virtues adequate to the production of all the varied effects either witnessed or experienced … While a belief in the efficacy of these potent charms is, in the minds of these credulous people, intimately associated with a conviction of the infallibility of the sikidy, or divination, this again is as closely blended with a belief in some superior power … Their minds are not a blank, upon which truth may at once be inscribed in legible characters, but filled with vain imaginings, erroneous fancies, crude conceptions, superstitious fears, and a pertinacious adherence to the opinions and decisions of their ancestors.’
That was written 150 years ago, since when much has changed. Babies born on unlucky days are no longer put out to be trampled by zebu, criminals are no longer thrown over precipices, people suspected of witchcraft are no longer required to drink tanghin poison to prove their innocence. But despite these not insignificant modifications to the customs of the country, the Malagasy do still have ‘a pertinacious adherence to the opinions and decisions of their ancestors’.
Without fluency in the language, and years of study, no outsider could hope to understand the whole fady, sikidy, ody conglomerate. Fortunately casual travellers only need to know that they are dealing with a society far more complex than it looks and to remember that they may be seen as potential dangers because vazaha are ignorant of local taboos and could possess mysterious powers to which the Malagasy have no antidotes. This is why so many fady surround the treatment of vazaha and why one’s behaviour in a village should, as far as possible, be guided by the people. Especially in remote areas, it is easy unwittingly to insult, frighten, desecrate or appear to threaten. Thus when the Chief led us through his hamlet, it was advisable to follow exactly the path he took. Had we deviated to examine something of interest we might have infringed on an area forbidden to vazaha – a sacrificial site or Vazimba grave (not easily detected by the unknowing eye), or a sacred cairn, spring or tree. If we did give offence this would be no trivial matter. The whole terrified community would feel obliged to organise expensive and inconvenient rituals in an attempt to undo the damage.
It helps to enquire about particular local taboos. In the Ankaratra we might have caused panic by taking from our rucksacks a tin of ham or sausages, or a pack of salami – not that any of these was available in Tana. The Ankaratra ancestors send crop-destroying hail and thunderstorms in response to pork’s polluting presence: a fady doubtless inherited from the Vazimba. Imerina’s first settlers are said to have been implacable pork-haters and those who worship at their graves, as some still do, must avoid all contact with pigs. A pig-herd’s first duty is to keep his charges away from such graves; this is even more important than keeping them out of the precious rice-fields. Elsewhere however pork is much relished by the Malagasy and pigs are among the commonest domestic animals; they even share their owners’ homes at night should there happen to be a pig-napper in the area. (There are baffling regional fady associated with them, as with all animals and birds; a typical example is the taboo on stub-tails because a pig without a curling tail brings poverty on his owner.)
Throughout Madagascar the good name of a region requires strangers (not only vazaha) to be entertained as generously as local resources permit. Yet the offering of hospitality to passing travellers cannot be a spontaneous kindly gesture, as it so often is in remote areas. In itself, it is one of the precautions taken to ward off the possible ill-effects of a stranger’s presence and the Chief decides where guests are to stay. Those who seem to merit VIP treatment are not expected to muck in with a family; they must be given a house to themselves and when the Chief has chosen the most suitable its owners have to move out ‘for the now being’ – it is fady to dispute his decision. Some towns and large villages have the equivalent of Indian dak-bungalows – guest-houses built by the French, in local style, for travelling officials.
Our one-storeyed, white-washed lodging was neither dwelling nor guest-house; the small Malagasy flag over the doorway marked it as a People’s Executive Committee office – in theory if not in practice. A rectangular building, about eight feet by thirty, it was divided into two identical rooms, each with an unglazed window in the gable end. One room was empty; the other – ours – had a crudely made trestle-table down the centre with a wobbly bench on either side. This edifice had been constructed (by reluctant ‘voluntary’ labour?) with much less skill and care than the average family home. Its narrow ill-fitting door of rough planks had no fastening, its window shutters were jammed, its loose tin roof leaked and never have I slept on a bumpier mud floor.
As we unpacked, the elated crowd who had followed us from the road jostled around the doorway, commenting on our possessions with exclamations of wonder and curiosity. None of them entered the room, yet after a few moments we began to register, for the first time, a phenomenon that was to become very familiar – the powerful pong of a Malagasy gathering.
We were about to start our supper of inoffensive bread and chocolate (Malagasy chocolate is surprisingly good) when the Chief’s brother arrived to supervise our entertainment. Of minute stature, he wore a long grey shirt over striped pyjama-trousers, and a dark blue embroidered skull-cap which made him look remarkably like a Chinaman. He signed to us to put away our own food, pointing to two girls hurrying across a field bearing a tin stove and a basket heaped with rice. We were expected to provide the necessary cooking utensil and everyone was aghast on discovering that our saucepan lacked a lid. While a small boy was fetching one the girls pulled fistfuls of dry brown grass, stuffed it into the stove’s hollow base and lit it with my matches. Normally a cube of glowing charcoal would have been used; matches cost money and nowadays are not always easy to find. They had been among the many everyday items absent from Tana’s shops; to get even one box it was necessary to know a man who knew a man …
Like most Malagasy, these villagers looked reasonably well-fed despite a wildly unbalanced diet of rice three times a day, with eggs (irregularly) as the main source of protein in the Ankaratra region – no fruit, no dairy produce, no vegetables. The only signs of malnutrition were minor chronic eye infections and some worm-distended bellies among the younger children. Magnificent teeth filled every mouth. As the Reverend Ellis noted: ‘All the tribes have naturally fine and regular teeth, beautifully white, which is to be ascribed to their practice of washing them regularly, and cleaning or bleaching them by the use of a dye, or pigment, made from the laingio, a native plant.’ This compliment still applies outside of the towns, but where the sugar-habit has been acquired Malagasy teeth go very bad.
While the rice was cooking we sat among our friends, full of that content which blesses the end of a trekker’s day. Our shack faced west (it is fady for a house to do otherwise) and stood on a ledge of rough grassland above bare fields in which geese were being argumentative. That hamlet seemed to have no other livestock: no zebu, or dogs or cats, or sheep or goats. To our left half-a-dozen dwellings were semi-encircled by tall trees – eucalyptus, cypress and various unfamiliars. As the sun sank these houses glowed orange-red against their green background while the wide sky ahead became a glory of peach and grey-blue and russet clouds. During the night we felt less appreciative of those clouds when they were joined by many others and cold rain dripped lavishly onto our flea-bags.
In the fading light we ate gluey, saltless rice, mixed with two raw eggs donated earlier by a wordless smiling elderly woman. She had presented her gift with such formal graciousness that at once it was transmuted into something very precious. The courtesy of these bare-footed, unwashed, ragged villagers reminded me of their counterparts in the Ethiopian highlands, though the Malagasy are much jollier than the Amharas.
We were organising our ‘study’ on the trestle-table, to diary-write by torchlight, when the Chief returned with two candles and insisted on our torches being put away. He and Brother remained with us (but they would not sit down: another fady?) while the crowd outside dispersed, presumably to sup. Soon after seven o’clock they were back, reinforced by a group of earth-coated men who had been clod-breaking all day in the fields. It then emerged that the Chief had several worries, only two of which we could understand. ‘Where were our beds?’ ‘How could the door be secured to protect us from robbers?’ The rest of the evening was pure farce – something easily achieved when sign-language is the main means of communication, fady rules OK, and everyone is desperately anxious to be polite without feeling at all sure of the appropriate formulae.
Only the Chief and Brother entered our shack. The rest crowded outside, shrouded in lambas against the cold wind and creating quite a festive atmosphere as they disputed, laughed, speculated and sang snatches of what we would call ballads to enliven the vazaha’s evening. Several crises seemed to be simultaneously on the boil but as each Malagasy much enjoys his own eloquence these may have been of far less import than was suggested by the prolonged debates they inspired.
Two youths were despatched to find a length of rope to secure the door and six people had six conflicting opinions about how best a fastening might be improvised. But the rope was so rotten that it at once disintegrated (much laughter) when stretched. I then produced two yards of tough emergency cord and the youths worked with that, and a bent nail and a heavy stone, while Rachel threw torchlight on their endeavours – which were frustrated by the mud wall’s natural tendency to collapse (more gales of giggles from outside) wherever they tried to hammer in the bent nail.
Meanwhile a few of the older men among the newcomers – members of the village council – were becoming uneasy about our credentials. Samuel’s letter had to be produced again and was sceptically scrutinised; being handwritten on a sheet of lined foolscap, without benefit of printed heading or official seals, it failed wholly to reassure them. They were not antagonistic to us, personally, but were unmistakably concerned about our presence – for reasons they could not explain and we could not guess. It was probably a coincidence that their unease first became apparent when I unwittingly broke a taboo by asking the literate young woman to write her name and address in my notebook. It is, we later learned, fady for guests to ask the name of their host, or of his village. Despite mutterings of disapproval from some elders, our buxom friend had no inhibitions about giving us the name of the village. But she firmly refused either to tell us her own name or to write it down.
Suddenly someone said – ‘Good-morning!’ very loudly, and from the blackness emerged a breathless charming young man wearing a multicoloured lamba and a short beard. He beamed, shook hands and said, ‘English speak! You speak English – you, me, speak English all together! From polisy I come – polisy know you not. What work do you? What many years you live? I say polisy all I know of you!’
We were somewhat taken aback; the village of Ambohina-havony-Ambonirohitra had seemed an unlikely site for a police-post. ‘You have polisy here in this place?’ I asked, taking our passports from their permanent home in my bush-shirt pocket.
‘Yes, we have one polisy – every Malagasy city has one polisy!’ Augustin (for such was his name) then peered around the shadowy shack, recognised Brother leaning against a wall and exclaimed, ‘This is our polisy!’
Brother – obviously pleased to have his light removed from under its bushel – bowed, smiled, nodded and echoed, ‘Polisy!’ But I found it hard to believe that it was he who had summoned the English-speaker to investigate us in depth.
The uneasy elders, craning through the doorway, now urged Augustin to get on with it. But he, poor fellow, was nonplussed by our passports. When I placed them under the candles he glanced at them, shook his head impatiently, pushed them aside and took out half an exercise-book page and two inches of pencil. ‘Name?’ he asked. ‘Country you live? Many years? Work you do for get money?’ He carefully inscribed my answers, then to our bewilderment squealed with excitement on hearing that I write for get money. ‘Writer you are! Please give me one book – please! English I study but books I have none so learn I cannot!’ His round dark eyes gleamed covetously in the candlelight; and the genuineness of his book-lust so moved us (normally the Malagasy never cadge from vazaha) that he got the H.E. Bates Rachel had bought at Heathrow.
Augustin understood much more of Rachel’s French than of my English but preferred not to admit this. ‘No good young Malagasy speak French. English and Russian is good. French is bad.’ Yet as we struggled to communicate he repeatedly fell into the trap of Rachel’s questions and answered in the ‘bad’ language. He had been hoping to go to Moscow University on a scholarship but when the rice prices fell his family could not afford Tana school-fees. ‘Maybe next year rice prices go good and I go back to school to study to be scientist for farming and learn to mend the mountains.’ As we journeyed on through Madagascar’s ravaged landscapes I often remembered that phrase – ‘mend the mountains’. But do even Soviet agricultural experts know how?
All this chit-chat was visibly irritating the elders around the doorway, though the Chief and Brother rejoiced to have an interpreter; I was beginning to suspect disunity among Ambohinahavony-Ambonirohitra’s council. In any case it now felt like time to end the party; we had been up before dawn and walked over twenty-five miles. Looking pointedly at my watch, I unrolled our flea-bags – thus causing the general worry about our bedding to erupt again. The elderly egg-donor vehemently argued that we should be provided with raffia-matting but for some reason (some fady?) this was not on. Augustin protested frantically that no vazaha could sleep in meagre flea-bags on an earthen floor throughout a winter night. The Chief’s agitation made him look quite haggard and he was unsoothed when I showed him the space-blankets under our flea-bags – admittedly not the sort of equipment likely to impress Malagasy peasants. Finally I was driven to announcing that everyone in Ireland always sleeps on the floor, whatever the weather – and in a flash of inspiration I added that for us beds are fady. That settled the matter. Five minutes later Rachel was asleep and I was diary-writing.
Less than a page had been written when voices approached and the door was pushed open, causing that nail to fall out again. A delegation of smiling women, young and old, laid a colossal pot of steaming, coagulated rice on the table and then stood in a row against one wall, to watch me eat.
I did my best. But Malagasy rice is just that: rice unadorned. Salt would have helped, but I feared to give umbrage by using our own. Gallantly I shovelled it in – and soon many of our old friends came flitting moth-like towards the light from the open door. The party, it seemed, was not yet over. One girl was carrying a huge enamel mug of rice-water, the commonest beverage in Malagasy villages. This substitute for tea or coffee is made after each meal by boiling water in the emptied rice-pot, to which some burnt grains always adhere. It looks like weak China tea and it tastes like – well, like rice-water. However, in regions where water is scarce and likely to be contaminated it is of great value and comfort to the vazaha. Having been boiled for several minutes, to extract the flavour from the burnt rice, it is almost always safe to drink.
When Brother and Augustin returned the women shook hands, urged me to eat on and left. Then an odd thing happened. Noticing my open diary, Brother became unmistakably unnerved and even Augustin looked worried. Together they pored over the thick book, and as they leafed through its closely written pages their anxiety increased. When Augustin asked if all this was about their village I explained that most of it was about Tana. That eased the tension – slightly. Did they imagine me to be writing a spy’s report, and if so for whom? Or did my diary seem to represent those mysterious powers which make vazaha feared? Brother’s reaction was perhaps understandable, but it surprised me that a young man with ambitions to study abroad should be so upset by the note-taking of a self-confessed writer.
Rachel was now awake, though cravenly lying doggo lest she be required to join in the rice-eating marathon. When three youths arrived to tackle the door problem from another angle – with a tree branch – she inevitably got the giggles and strange muffled snorts at floor-level augmented the evening’s improbability. The youths served as a screen behind which I hastily tipped the remains of the rice into a yellow plastic Heathrow bag, prudently retained for emergencies. When I had been shown how to barricade the door, by wedging the branch across it, the youths tied our cord to the branch, and then to a nail hammered into the outside jamb. Thus we were, in theory, locked safely away for the night. Luckily that nail too fell out when Nature called.
Nature’s call was but one of many factors inhibiting repose. The floor felt tolerable, once ribs and hips had been adjusted to its corrugations, but by midnight the Indian Ocean’s celebrated trade wind had reached gale force and the rattling of the loose roof made sleep impossible for over two hours. Then came a deluge, and efforts to elude various leaks left my head only inches from an icy draught blowing under the controversial door. On such occasions it was hard to believe that Madagascar lies so near the equator.
Unlike most peasants, the Malagasy do not rise with the sun – at least not on cold winter mornings – and there was no one in sight when Brother and Augustin led us out of Ambohinahavony-Ambonirohitra’s territory. (As Rachel feelingly remarked, ‘It’s the last straw when they’re double-barrelled.’) For guests to offer money is fady so we had left behind a selection from our gift-box: razor-blades, pocket-combs, hair-slides. As we said good-bye Augustin presented us with provisions for our journey: two kilos of uncooked rice and three raw eggs. To avert a nasty calamity I soon ate the latter. (This was not a reprehensible example of child-neglect; Rachel is unenthusiastic about raw eggs.)
Already the sun felt gently warm and the sky’s deep blue was emphasised by gauzy veils of high white cloud. A strong wind made loud sad music in the tassels of roadside pines and tossed the glistening silvered leaves of swaying eucalyptus saplings. As we walked uphill between banks of red earth, plump brown and grey thrush-sized birds ran along the track ahead of us, then briefly flew, then ran again. We saw dozens of these during the next few days but could not identify them for lack of a book.
Beyond this ridge lay an oval valley, its brown floor scattered with reflected blue where tiny fields had been irrigated. A narrow river raced between long whale-like boulders and a few men were repairing dykes and channels, or hoeing rhythmically together to aerate the heavy soil. Their friendly hamlet stood on a spur in the valley centre. We paused there to refill our water-bottles, then again climbed steeply past skinny zebu grazing on the coarse grass that grew between deep red gullies, known as lavaka.
Here we could see exactly how erosion works. Lavaka are not what we think of as ‘gullies’ – permanent features of a landscape created in ages past. They are, as it were, gangrenous wounds. Every year they become not only deeper but much wider as the hard laterite clay along their edges collapses by the ton, exposing the softer base which is even more rapidly washed away. Nowadays the air is so full of statistics that we scarcely notice them any more. But walking by the fragile rim of a lavaka, looking down at the maimed earth, one is almost brought to tears by the tragedy of Madagascar’s most significant statistic – three-quarters of the island’s surface is officially classified as ‘severely degraded’. And each rainy season inexorably brings about a further deterioration. By now the grassy patches on which those skinny zebu were grazing will have disappeared.
Rice-fields occupy eight-five per cent of Madagascar’s irrigated land; the remainder produces taro, maize, manioc, sweet potatoes, potatoes and – in one small area near Antsirabe – newfangled wheat. Some vazaha experts believe that the island could produce a wide variety of crops, but only rice is taken seriously – so seriously that one senses an almost mystical link between the Malagasy and their paddy-fields. The Reverend Ellis noted: ‘Apathy, want of decision, and excessive indolence, characterize, very generally, the natives of Madagascar … The mass of the people seem alike destitute of forethought and enterprise …’ These criticisms have since been oft repeated, though they are so blatantly unjust. ‘Excessive indolence’ and the successful cultivation of irrigated rice are incompatible. For ten months of each year rice-farmers and their families have to work long hours with a thoroughness and skill demanded by few other crops. There is much evidence that only rice-growing conquers Malagasy indolence, but far be it from me to censor anyone for not working hard at uninspiring tasks. I only work hard at writing, leaving the other compartments of my life in a state of irredeemable confusion – which is perhaps why I feel such a strong affinity with the Malagasy.
The relationship between the rice-growing peasants and their fields, and the other tribes and their herds, partly explains why Communism is a non-starter in Madagascar. Family property is of prime importance when generations of toil have gone to the creation and preservation of a few fertile fields or a numerous herd. Incidentally, paddy-culture also explains why Merina marriage partners are chosen, if possible, from within the compact group of hamlets that makes up the Merina version of the ‘extended family’. A suitable match is described as ‘closing the breach’, or ‘inheritance not going away’.
The oddly European sound of distant church bells reminded us that this was a Sunday morning. Soon we were meeting church-going groups equipped with slim black prayer-books: usually half-a-dozen women and children, sometimes with a man or two walking ahead. Far away on other hillsides similar groups could be seen converging on a church invisible to us; so many rural churches have closed that some families walk ten miles or more to worship. Everyone wore clean colourful garments and a few carried plastic sandals to be slipped on at the church door. Obviously Saturday night is bath-night, as it was in rural Ireland before mod cons arrived.
The next hilltop overlooked miles of golden grassland leading to a still higher ridge, its crest fringed with mature eucalyptus. There was not a house in sight but using our binoculars we counted eleven tombs on the surrounding slopes. These isolated grey stone cubes, looking from a distance not unlike military pillboxes, give the Imerina countryside a faintly uncanny atmosphere. Who is to say that the ancestral spirits are not still around, when their descendants’ relationship with them is so emotionally charged? Razana (‘the ancestors’) play such a singular part in the lives of the living that family tombs are built with much more care, and at far greater expense, than family homes.
These tombs may be seen as the visible expression of a form of razana-worship, though the Malagasy attitude to ‘the ancestors’, like everything else associated with their religious life, evades precise definition in our terms. Without formally ancestor-worshipping in the Chinese way, they obey what they believe to be ancestral rules and feel totally dependent on ancestral protection. Burial with razana is of immeasurable importance to even the most sophisticated Malagasy – who, if he goes abroad, likes to take with him a handful of earth from his future grave. That earth will always wish to return to Madagascar and should he die abroad its possession will increase his chances of burial in the family tomb.
This whole ‘cult’ (for want of a better word) is inextricably bound up with the deep love felt by the Malagasy for their Great Red Island. What we describe as our country, or nation, they describe as tanindrazana – ‘the land of the ancestors’. The entire island is tany masina – ‘holy ground’ – because it is thought about (or felt about) primarily as a vessel holding all the ancestral bodies. Hence some educated Malagasy believe in the feasibility of training peasants to combat erosion and forgo the indiscriminate felling of rain-forests. But so far the ancestors have shown no interest in ecology.
The razana element in Malagasy culture coincides at many points with the beliefs of animist black Africa, where tribal ancestors have always been ceremonially honoured. But it also coincides with Toraja traditions. In the humid forested hills of Indonesia’s Sulawesi, the proud, intelligent Toraja tribe still retains its ancient culture, despite intense pressure from Muslims and Christians. Toraja beliefs are centred on buffalo-sacrificing and death festivities, and their attitudes to both ritual cattle-killing and ‘the ancestors’ in many ways resemble Malagasy attitudes. But – as any Malagasy will tell you – whatever the origins of the razana cult it is now a distinctively Malagasy phenomenon, without exact parallel elsewhere.
Innumerable fady surround razana-worship (or dependence). For instance, a dog who lifts his leg near a tomb must immediately be killed. A human who does likewise (presumably this could only happen if he/she were drunk) must be fined one zebu, to be sacrificed at once on the scene of the crime. To point at a tomb is fady and anyone who accidentally does so must count their fingers aloud, from one to ten, beginning with a little finger and simultaneously spitting on each fingertip while saying, ‘My hand is not leprous, it is not leprous.’ A failure to do this may result in the hand becoming leprous. All such fady vary somewhat from region to region – and, nowadays, from family to family.
Any Malagasy who has to choose a tomb-site (which should be south-east or south-west of the village) is faced with a major decision because so many crucial fady are involved. A wrongly placed tomb may lead to early deaths in the family so the ombiasa has to advise on the exactly right spot. The tomb door must face west but not due west, to avoid giving it the same vintana (destiny) as the family home; because the dead have a stronger vintana than the living, a shared alignment would put them in a dangerously powerful position. No tomb must be built at the end of a valley, or where it can be seen from a village, and the building of it must take more than one year.
Not all these fady are still heeded, especially in Imerina where Christianity’s influence is most pervasive. We saw many family tombs built within sight of the home, or of a village – though none faced due west. As one cannot possibly know which fady is still operating where, we always looked around carefully to make sure there were no witnesses before photographing a tomb, or closely examining it. Most of the newer Merina tombs had an incongruously suburban aura, utterly unlike those of the southern tribes or of the east coast fishermen. A lot of concrete had gone to their making, they were surmounted by small carved granite Christian crosses, and their coloured stone motifs would not have surprised on the gate-posts of a Bexhill bungalow.
It would however be a mistake to deduce from those crosses, or from the sight of villagers proceeding decorously to church, that Christianity has even partially eclipsed the ancestors in Imerina. For most people it remains essentially an ancillary cult, though their Christian fervour may be totally sincere. During the regular Merina exhumation ceremonies, Christian blessings are sought and gladly given; no one questions the theological propriety of their juxtaposition to the immemorial rites of razana-worship. Similar mergings of Christianity and more ancient religions are of course quite common in Africa; the Zulus have their Zionist Church, the Congolese their Kimbanguist Church – and so on up and down the continent. But Malagasy syncretism seems to work better than most, no doubt partly because the Malagasy are an exceptionally subtle people and partly because the missionaries arrived in Madagascar some eighty years before the colonists – and were, originally, of a different nationality.
That afternoon we looked for a campsite far from the local razana. Eventually we chose a glade amidst young eucalyptus, reasoning that a government plantation was almost sure to be neutral ground, free of sacred rocks and springs and invisible Vazimba graves. By then the wind was so strong that we had some difficulty getting the tent up and it flapped noisily all night.
Next morning Ambatolampy began to plague us and it continued to do so for three days. Ambatolampy is a town on Route Nationale No. 7, midway between Tana and Antsirabe, and whenever we asked the way to Antsirabe (due south) we were directed towards Ambatolampy, to the east. Clearly nobody now walks from the heart of the Ankaratra to Antsirabe; they go instead to this wretched Ambatolampy, and there take a bus, and everyone assumed the vazaha must wish to do likewise. So – having been unable to find a detailed map of the region – we were dependent on our compass and Rachel’s sense of direction (I do not have one).
We first heard of Ambatolampy when we stopped for breakfast in a village near our eucalyptus-glade camp. At 7 a.m. it was still cold and the thatched, low-ceilinged café-shack had just opened. House-flies covered the smoke-stained mud walls and were swarming inside a rusty bucket from which a beautiful and charming young woman was ladling grey-brown batter into a frying-pan on a charcoal stove. Meanwhile her husband (handsome and charming to match) was lighting a mud stove in one corner, to boil the coffee-water, and three small filthy children – sensationally good-looking, with huge eyes and happy smiles – were balancing on an unsteady bench eating bowls of rice-gruel, the standard Malagasy breakfast. As no one spoke French our conversation was limited to my asking, ‘Antsirabe?’ and the young couple chorusing, ‘Ambatolampy!’ while pointing to the rising sun. But their kindliness glowed through the language barrier and warmed us long before we were handed dirty mugs of black coffee – hot, strong and sweet.
Four mugs of coffee and seven delicious crisp pancakes cost the equivalent of 35 pence, according to Rachel’s calculation – she was the expedition’s treasurer. I have no head for figures and the Malagasy coinage is grotesquely complicated. The official monetary unit is the Malagasy Franc (FMG) but you also have to cope with the piastre, known variously (depending on denomination) as ariary, drala or parata. As far as I could make out (not very far), the substantial 5-ariary coin equals 100 FMG, which I found intolerably confusing; in any rational country it would equal 50 FMG. Moreover, people use all sorts of coins (ariary, drala and parata) in a single transaction, so that only a computer (or Rachel) could work out the value of a handful of change.
This chaotic system addles the average vazaha shopper. In markets and eating-houses I often overpaid – then felt a joyous lift of the heart when surplus coins were handed back. Such experiences remind us that money-making is not the inbuilt mainspring for all human activity everywhere. A ragged woman selling bananas by the roadside, who returns coins that would have trebled her profit, undermines the argument that ‘it’s only human’ to give material gain precedence over every other consideration. Somehow we in the West have been persuaded that greed is a natural motive for every sort of perfidy. ‘You can’t do anything about it, it’s human nature’ – so people say when multinationals inflict extra hardship on those already grossly deprived. Or when a tycoon’s sharp practice causes the draining of irreplaceable wet-lands, or the bulldozing of beautiful buildings, or the pollution of a lake or vandalising of an archaeological site. Yet the honesty often found in remote regions proves that greed is not so ‘natural’ that we must surrender without a fight to the ‘profit-motive’ ideology now corrupting our civilisation – and spreading its contagion wherever it can.
I am not of course suggesting that the Malagasy are like something out of a Rousseau fantasy. They have their share of urban cheats and predatory peasants and one of the latter joined us in our café-shack as we were paying the bill. He was that rarely seen animal, a surly Malagasy. Elderly, stooped and slightly cross-eyed, he exuded xenophobia and urged the young man to ask us to give our change to the children – using sign language as well as words, so that we too would get the message. But both our host and hostess rejected this idea, showing some irritation. (He was, I think, the father of one of them.) As they argued, our host caught my eye and we both smiled; and that moment became one of those strange little examples of perfect understanding without benefit of speech. The young couple knew how much we appreciated their endearing trio, who had been fascinated by our map – the youngest had ended up on my knee. And I knew they knew my not tipping the children was a sign of respect rather than meanness. And we each knew the other felt a tip would have spoiled the quality of the relationship we had enjoyed during our forty minutes together.
We saw no other surly expressions in that neat, clean, substantial village of two-storeyed thatched houses. Like most Merina villages it seemed relatively prosperous though there were no shops: instead, wandering traders set up stalls. Behind the ‘main street’, and on the outskirts, were many ruined dwellings, their rain-melted mud-brick walls giving them the appearance of some recently excavated archaeological site.
Walking up the rough street, we savoured the incense-like eucalyptus smoke of breakfast fires as it came drifting through windows and doors; the rural Malagasy consider chimneys an unnecessarily complicated addition to their homes. Shutters were being opened and bedding shaken from handsomely carved balconies – women with battered tins were queuing at the communal tap – loquacious hens were leading broods of belligerent chickens to the nearest dump-heap – yawning men sat on doorsteps, wrapped in bright lambas, awaiting their rice-gruel. Our progress caused much subdued excitement. Women called the rest of the family onto balconies to view us, most people waved and smiled shyly in response to our greetings, and when we paused outside the last house to ask – ‘Antsirabe?’ everyone in sight shouted ‘Ambatolampy!’ and pointed east.
The amiability of Malagasy village dogs is remarkable. Several large silent mongrels either ran away from us or tentatively wagged their tails when spoken to, instead of barking threateningly at the intruders as their counterparts do in every other country I know. The Malagasy are on the whole a gentle people and seem never to have encouraged that savagery essential for an efficient watch-dog system. This aspect of local life may seem unimportant from a distance. Yet not having to be ever on the alert to ward off slavering hounds contributes more than a little to the welcoming atmosphere of Merina villages.
The Malagasy canine/human relationship is what we think of as normal – i.e. loving, which is not at all normal in most peasant societies. This must partly explain the evolution of animals who are well-disposed even towards vazaha. Later I came upon a deplorably tendentious American missionary tract which listed the humane treatment of Malagasy dogs as yet another triumph for Christianity, though the various fady associated with dogs – which are mainly in their favour – antedate by centuries the arrival of the first missionaries. Unlike many taboos, these tend to have a known historical basis. For instance, to sell a dog is fady because long, long ago An Ancestor sharing property between three sons gave the youngest only a dog, who became the youth’s sole help and comfort as he travelled through wild country on the way to seek his fortune. Years passed, and he prospered and became powerful. (Hence his status as an ancestor influential enough to establish a fady.) On his deathbed he summoned all his children and said, ‘My dog was always my faithful friend during the difficult years. Cursed be the one of my children or descendants who sells a dog.’ For some families it is also fady to kill a dog. In the village of Ambatomiady, near Ambatolampy, a man fell from a cliff, many generations ago, and was too badly injured to move. His dog hurried home – a three-hour journey – to fetch rescuers, and eventually the man recovered. When he realised that he would predecease his dog he requested that after its death it should be wrapped in a red silk lamba and buried beside his own tomb. And he made it fady for any of his descendants to kill a dog. I could not find out what happens when two fady conflict. If this family had a dog who peed on a tomb and should therefore be killed, which fady would win?
Cats, I should perhaps explain, are another matter. Rachel has not yet fully recovered from the shock of discovering that in most parts of Madagascar baked cat is a delicacy – though among the Sakalava tribe to eat them is fady. On this topic Hilary Bradt wrote to us: ‘We were having a conversation with a tribal family in the eastern rain-forest and after we’d talked for quite a while about conservation and lemurs the father said, “Yes, and they certainly taste good!” “Taste? – what do they taste like?” “Oh, rather like cat.” End of conversation. End of conservation.’
According to our feeble map, the track we had been following here turned south-west, away from Antsirabe. (The map classified it as ‘motorable’ but the Malagasy know better and it was vehicle-free.) A faint alternative path along the edge of a lavaka eventually petered out on high savannah swept by an easterly force-ten gale; had we been seeking Ambatolampy we would not have not got far that day. From this 7,000-foot plateau we could again see the pudding-mountain, some thirty-five miles behind us. The few villages we had passed were just visible through binoculars; their improbable little churches gave that rugged landscape a tinge of cosy domesticity. Along the horizon, in three directions, stretched distant contorted mountains – volcanic formations recalling Ethiopia’s Simien range, as did the rich pure colouring of that high bright world, silent all day but for the endless song of the savannah wind.
Directly ahead of us, beyond the red, brown and green of nearer ridges, rose the weirdly misshapen granite summit of Madagascar’s third-highest mountain: Tsiafajavona, ‘place of standing mists’. This is a mere mini-mountain – just over 8,000 feet – yet it did not seem so as we walked towards it over flat miles of golden grassland, with a narrow cultivated valley far below on our right, half-hidden by a line of wind-demented eucalyptus planted on the escarpment edge. We found a path only when a solitary figure, bare-legged below his lamba, appeared in the distance carrying a bundle over his shoulder on the end of a long stick. Turning east, we bent to fight the gale and joined this path where it dipped into a sheltered gully. There we sat in the warm noon sun to eat our lunch of peanuts and glucose tablets and attend to Rachel’s foot-blisters. These were coming along nicely, in my detached view – almost ready to burst and free of complications. Rachel was less appreciative of their orthodox progress. Neither of us had ever before carried camping-equipment on trek – usually we have a pack-animal – and our feet were reacting accordingly.
As we continued, two young men came running towards us at a steady pace, on spindly yet muscular legs, each bearing half the carcass of an enormous black pig split exactly down the middle from snout to tail. Their head loads prevented them from turning to stare at us but when we passed two pairs of unmistakably startled eyes rolled towards us, showing the whites like nervous horses. Some way behind came their wives, glossy-haired and golden-skinned, wearing new turquoise and canary skirts and shocking-pink and lime-green cardigans. They carried empty raffia baskets, to be filled with household goods when the pig had been sold. Their wordless beams encouraged us to try to check on the path’s destination, but at the sound of my voice they were too overcome by giggles even to attempt a reply. Which, as Rachel observed, was better than being told to go to Ambatolampy.
We lost the path again while descending from the savannah around the grassy flanks of two steep mountains. Our objective was a flat-topped ridge beyond a mile-wide valley which, unluckily for us, had already been irrigated. Every square foot was flooded, and high, narrow, loosely built dyke-tops provided the only paths. We zig-zagged along these with arms outstretched, like tight-rope artistes, feeling guilty each time our heavy boots sent chunks of dyke crumbling into the water. Thrice we had to change course because of open dykes through which flowed brown cascades. And twice we had to cross swift, broad streams by leaping from one smooth spray-slippy boulder to the next. None of this would have mattered but for our rucksacks, which were destabilising – especially mine, with its nonsensical complement of hardback books. Several split-level obstacles required long jumps down or scrambles up and the team-manoeuvre of removing rucksacks and handing them up (or down) to each other was not easy on such narrow dykes – often no more than six inches across. We spent over an hour negotiating that mile.
A few crudely built houses were scattered on the lower slopes of our ridge, but as the vazaha approached to seek guidance everyone took fright and withdrew to the shadowy interiors. Then suddenly we were on a clear path, winding level around the mountains above the valley floor. As we debated whether to follow this, or continue due south across the pathless ridge, a young man – bolder than his neighbours – emerged from the nearest shack followed by an aggressively strutting turkey-cock. He had the unorthodox good looks of many of these village men: a broad bronze face, high cheekbones, a wide nose, a jutting square chin, thick wavy hair. Over filthy frayed trousers he wore a brand-new pale blue cotton shirt. Gazing at our packs with a sort of horrified fascination (which was rather how we ourselves felt about them, at that stage) he declaimed dramatically in French – ‘Here there is no tourist hotel!’ Rachel assured him that we were not seeking any sort of hotel and asked the way over the ridge. The young man frowned and advised us to take the path instead: eventually it would lead us safely to Manalalondo. The ridge route is never used nowadays, he said, and we would find no path, people, houses, food or warmth. At that I felt a surge of adrenalin; uninhibited pathless mountains are what travelling is all about … ‘You look like an aged war-horse scenting battle,’ observed Rachel sourly – she had fancied the level path. We were touched by our friend’s worried expression as he watched us scrambling through a débris of massive boulders on the lower slopes of the ridge.
This tough climb ended on a ledge where five inferior zebu with undeveloped humps and unprepossessing horns lay around under a few stunted pines despondently chewing the cud. In these grassland regions the lack of livestock surprised us. Perhaps intensive rice-cultivation leaves neither time nor energy for cattle-tending?
The flat-topped ridge (savannah again) ran north–south for many miles but was scarcely a mile wide. When the wind suddenly dropped we realised how tiring it is to be buffeted all day by a gale – even a cross-gale. It was now time to look for water and a site; the short days – only eleven and a half hours in winter – are a major snag for campers in Madagascar. Another snag is the impracticality of camp-fires; one stray spark could cause disaster.
Soon our tent was up on the soft golden grass of a wide ledge semi-encircled by graceful tamarind trees. Below us a clear amber stream raced through a glen and beyond rose another ridge, higher and sparsely wooded; the nearby head of the glen was dominated by a knot of stony mountains.
Rachel’s blisters had burst satisfactorily during the afternoon and having replastered them I sat for a moment to relax my throbbing shoulders before cooking a dehydrated ‘Nomad Supper’ on our minute pocket-stove, fuelled by pellets. All around us the savannah glowed copper in slanting sunlight, while overhead tamarind leaves shivered against a sky still vividly blue. A pair of dark brown birds with fierce beaks (Malagasy buzzards?) glided slowly in wide circles, observing us. Their loud harsh calls – like a raven’s much amplified – and the distant whisper of the stream, were the only sounds. To the west, as I stirred our supper, high streaky clouds flared to crimson and a strange carmine radiance briefly filled the valley. Then the sun was gone: and instantly, as though a switch had been pressed, the brighter stars were out. We ate gazing upwards, watching the constellations swiftly taking shape.
During that magical evening, far from the distorting pollutions of Technological Man, it was easy to understand the link between the Malagasy and their Great Red Island. There must still be an animist in each of us, however respectably inaccessible, and such experiences of beauty and solitude restore animist reverence to its proper place in the scheme of human emotions.