Light frost lay on the savannah next morning – ‘We might as well be in the Andes!’ muttered Rachel, struggling to fasten her rucksack with numbed hands.
Ten minutes later we had to remove our loads while climbing down and up the high steep banks of the stream in the glen. A strenuous ascent on rocky, erosion-ravaged mountains led to another red-gold plateau, broken only by three isolated, symmetrical ‘pudding-hills’. One would have assumed these to be man-made in a country with a longer history of human habitation. Here Tsiafajavona seemed close, beyond a grassy mountain at the far end of this plateau. Soon the cold wind was blowing again, stronger than ever. All morning we had to shout at each other above its steady howl.
By noon we were on the grass mountain, gazing into a dramatically deep and dark-walled ravine – all that now separated us from Tsiafajavona. Following an old cart-track, left over from the days before everyone took the Ambatolampy bus, we were astonished to hear confused shouting and the unmistakable creaking of wheels. We had seen nobody, and no stock or cultivation or dwelling, since leaving Blueshirt’s hamlet.
Around the next shoulder they appeared – four wild-eyed, ragged, yelling men, their faces weather-toughened and their hair shaggy, escorting a flat zebu-cart loaded with a granite slab measuring some four feet by fifteen. This explained why we had just passed a mysterious newly dug hole, at least eight feet deep and twelve feet square. Clearly this was a tomb-building team; there could be no other conceivable reason for dragging tons of rock to one of the highest points in Madagascar.
Several thick grass ropes had been tied around the slab and burn marks along its side showed that it had been quarried in the traditional way. For centuries the Malagasy have been detaching grave-slabs from mountains by burning dung along the length they wish to remove, then pouring cold water on the hot rock. Before Europeans brought the wheel to Madagascar, five hundred men were commonly employed to drag one stone up a mountain; these two zebu looked as if they could have done with similar reinforcements as they strained and heaved, pausing every few yards to gain breath. Their escort continually shouted hoarse abuse but never struck them. Sometimes a wheel stuck in a particularly deep rut and had to be dug out. All this fascinated the expedition’s photographer but we agreed it might be unwise to produce a camera; it seemed possible (even probable) that then and there vazaha were fady. The customary Malagasy smiles were missing and the men looked tense, distraught and curiously apprehensive. They also reeked of ‘ardent spirits’. As we scrambled off the track to let them pass they scarcely glanced at us, so absorbed were they in their evidently traumatic task.
Around the next corner we came on four more men, two sitting by the track swigging from a grimy bottle and two using crowbars to prise another gigantic slab off the mountain. The latter pair were dripping sweat, yelling at each other breathlessly and working with frenzied vigour – an approach to manual labour uncharacteristic of the Malagasy. The sitting men shouted at us questioningly (to shout was unnecessary, as we were passing within a yard of them) but we did not linger to chat. Obviously this tomb was not being built because someone had recently died; if a corpse is awaiting burial it is fady to make any noise while preparing the grave.
Soon after, we could see, some 1,500 feet below, the head of that long valley to which we had been walking parallel all morning. Sections of the track were visible, coiling steeply down to a hamlet on a half-way ledge; and an empty cart was slowly approaching to pick up the second slab. We would have liked to watch the loading process since it was impossible to imagine it – this whole operation recalled the feats of the pyramid-builders – but the five scowling men with the second cart strengthened our feeling of being de trop. The mere getting of an empty cart up that steep broken mountain was in itself a feat. We were to see many more carts, often heavily laden, travelling on preposterous tracks: but never again anything comparable.
The zebu reins consist of a rope tied around the base of the horns and passed through the nostrils, which sounds cruel but seems to cause no distress. Normally zebu-carts have four high wooden sides, gaily painted in the more prosperous regions, and some are covered wagons in which whole families travel from market to market. I do not understand why Malagasy carts can negotiate terrain that no Irish cart could possibly tackle. For some arcane reason their two huge wheels can act independently of each other, one happily rolling along in a rut three feet below its companion. (A Malagasy rut is like none other; not unusually, a so-called ‘rut’ in a motor-road will be four or five feet deep.) Meanwhile the two zebus often seem to be pulling in different directions, which plainly is not the case since the whole dotty equipage almost always arrives at its destination with load intact.
Our cart-track ended on a small half-moon ledge supporting the ruins of three hovels. Beside them were the foundations for two new houses; doubtless the new tomb was part of this same enterprise. Nearby grew rows of an attractive podded plant, about the size and shape of a mature gooseberry bush, with foxglove-like yellow blossoms. The dark green, shiny, stubby pods – about three inches long – contained presumably edible beans; we took a specimen to Antsirabe but no one there could identify it.
The tomb-builders were darker-skinned than most Merina and the hamlet to which we now descended also seemed un-Merina-like. Its cramped dwellings, surrounded by low trees and scrub, had ill-fitting shutters and dishevelled thatches. On this ledge – some two miles by half a mile – potatoes and maize grew in fields of rich volcanic soil, but there were only a few ill-maintained rice-fields.
Our descent was watched by a few women and children, carrying long sticks. They were herding four zebu, eight small brown sheep (the first we had seen in Madagascar) and two hulking spotted black and white pigs – possibly relatives of that carcass we had met on its way to Tana Zoma. Two dogs fled on seeing us and the humans did likewise when we turned towards them to ask the way. In a communal farmyard numerous toddlers and crawling infants were playing amidst chicken-shit, zebu-dung and vegetable refuse. Despite the region’s many springs, these were the filthiest children we saw in Madagascar. But we only glimpsed them: on our approach they disappeared like rabbits into burrows. A few frightened female faces then peered through doorways, before firmly shutting the doors.
Beyond a windbreak pine-grove we were overtaken by a middle-aged man with Merina colouring but slightly negroid features. He had observed our hesitant wanderings and felt it his duty to guide us to the valley floor – and to carry our full water-bottles. He also wished to carry both our rucksacks, the carrying of luggage being one of the courtesies traditionally extended to strangers. This benevolent character was probably a member of the village council; for all his destitute appearance, he had an air of authority. His guidance was invaluable. The going here got very rough, including a few lavaka which would have baffled us, so unlikely did it seem that a path to anywhere could traverse them.
Usually such help would prompt a reward but in Madagascar one does not offer money or a gift in exchange for guidance. A Malagasy proverb says, ‘He who shows the right way saves life’, and it is fady to show a stranger the wrong track or refuse to show him the right one. The Ancestors taught that travellers in unfamiliar country have Andriamanitra (God, or the chief creative spirit) on their side. A stranger disappointed by his reception in a village is entitled to the inhabitants, causing Andriamanitra to punish them. Some vazaha are discomfited to think that Malagasy helpfulness may be rooted in fear – a possibility stressed by mean-minded missionaries in an attempt to explain away the fact that for centuries the Malagasy have been, in certain respects, more ‘Christian’ than many Europeans. Their argument is of course absurd. Fear has always played an important part in popular religions – Christian or otherwise – as a blunt instrument with which to enforce the rules. But why do the Malagasy have so many rules concerning hospitality, generosity, courtesy and consideration for strangers? The razana who established this code were obviously inspired by qualities deep within the Malagasy nature rather than by superstitious fears. Hence these particular rules are still being kept, long after many other fady, once equally powerful, have been discarded.
On the valley floor our guide pointed to a grey track ascending a red-brown mountain on the far side of the valley. Then – lest we might get lost again – he sat in the shade of a tamarind tree to observe our progress. This involved fording a river, undergoing another trial by dyke-ordeal and struggling up a steep slope where long tangled grass concealed small boulders with jagged protuberances. We turned occasionally to wave to our guardian-angel, who began his tough climb home only after we had reached the track.
Half-an-hour later we paused to ponder a ten-foot-deep chasm extending across the track’s entire width; even by the standards of Malagasy pot-holes this seemed excessive. Then we met an empty zebu-cart, escorted by cheerful youths carrying spades, and realised that earth was being taken from the chasm for brick-making. We still thought it odd to bisect the valley’s only track for this purpose: but Madagascar is rich in such oddities.
Winter is the building season – for sensible reasons it is fady to build at other times – and we passed several houses at various stages of construction. Bricks were being dexterously shaped and laid out to dry, thatching grasses were being sorted, cart-loads of stones were being collected for foundations, new walls were being plastered with zebu-dung, red-brown roof-tiles were being stacked, doors and shutters were being carved. Apart from one tin roof, we saw no non-local materials in use.
In traditional Malagasy villages, built without colonial interference, the houses stand at odd angles to each other. But this unplanned look is a result of meticulous vintana (destiny) calculations, determined by the ancient Malagasy belief that the world is square and horizontal. (In other contexts this cosmology has, we were often assured, been discredited.) The design and siting of houses are influenced by the points of the compass and the months of the year, according to the calendar which remained in general use until the French came. This provided twelve moons of twenty-eight days each, plus eighteen intercalary days – one at the end of each month as its vintana, one added to each of four months of the year and two set aside at the end of the year for a great annual festival: fandroana. As the resulting total leaves eleven and a half days over, the year began again on the same date every thirty-three years. The pre-colonial Malagasy were vague about birthdays and used this thirty-three-year cycle to guess approximately how old a person might be: if he could remember three cycles he must be about seventy-three.
Some building fady have common-sense origins, though alternative or additional explanations may be given by ombiasa. You must never build at the head of a valley if there is only swampy water available; or at the mouth of a valley where you are exposed to cold winds; or near a new landslide. Other fady seem purely animist, like those against building in the shadow of a steep dominant mountain peak, or near a waterfall or lake, or where a river forks. It is also taboo for a son to build a bigger house than his father’s and the digging of the foundations must be done by someone whose father has died. In a new house the owner’s father (or some other elder, if Father has gone to The Beyond) must light the first fire, from the fire burning in his own home. And neither the new householder nor his wife may prepare the first meal; that too Father must do, to give it a sacramental quality.
Winter is also the corpse-turning season and there was much activity around two large tombs, built on scrubland not far off our track out of sight of any dwelling. The men and women thronging around their razana paused to gaze at us and a few called friendly greetings. I longed to snoop but good manners prevailed. Although there were no warning-off vibes, it would have been crass to intrude on any stage of the profoundly significant famadihana ritual.
During these exhumation ceremonies corpses are removed from their tombs, wrapped in new shrouds and often made guests of honour at jolly parties in their descendants’ homes, before being returned to the spring-cleaned tombs with gifts of money and alcohol. This custom may startle when first encountered, yet to condemn it as ‘morbid’ is to miss the point. The Malagasy experience such a vivid sense of unity with the dead that maintaining contact with their corpses seems only natural – a recognition of their being alive and well and very powerful in the Ankoatra, ‘the Beyond’. This view of physical death as a transition to another form of life, in which one enjoys increased wisdom and power, is not a million metaphysical miles from the Christian concept of unity with God in Heaven and participation in the Beatific Vision. To the Malagasy our apparent forgetting of dead relatives after the funeral, while we concentrate on how to live happily without them, is incomprehensible. Thus they appreciate the Catholic custom of celebrating memorial Masses on death anniversaries, and setting aside one month of the year during which the dead are specially remembered. But they never could accept the barbarous doctrine of eternal punishment – a doctrine as illogical in concept as it would be unjust in practice, since no sin committed by a mere mortal, during his brief life-span, could possibly deserve a punishment without end. Many Malagasy laws and beliefs seem to us equally illogical and unjust: but they were accustomed to those.
Famadihana rituals take place every few years, according to a family’s wealth or its needs. A dead relative returning in a dream – an alarming event for the whole family – is a sign that the deceased feels cold, hungry, thirsty, bored and generally neglected; so a ‘turning’ must be organised as soon as possible. Other motives are a decline in family prosperity or general health, or a young wife’s infertility. The role of razana in conception is believed to be far more important than the husband’s role and during turning ceremonies the infertile wives bite off fragments of a parent’s or grandparent’s old shroud and eat them. Unless some such crisis demands an immediate famadihana, longer intervals are now being allowed between turnings because of the expense involved, though it is fady to let too much time elapse. Razana need to be kept in touch with their families and the families need to placate them so that they will use their enormous powers constructively; the few who neglect ancestral corpses are considered stupid, rash and dishonourable.
Each famadihana enhances a family’s reputation and often three or four hundred people (the extended family) are invited. Many zebu – which must be monochrome – are killed; incalculable quantities of rice and innumerable gallons of ‘ardent spirits’ are provided. Much money is also spent on new clothes, particularly for the women of the family, and on new bed-mats for the guests and other new mats on which to lay the corpses outside the tomb – and, if you want to keep up with the Joneses, on new lambas of hand-woven dark red silk for each corpse. (No living person may wear such a lamba.) In these hard times few can compete with the Joneses; at Tana and Antsirabe markets we saw only undyed cotton famadihana shrouds.
For three days and nights musicians play, sing and dance non-stop and the fees they demand are in proportion to the energy expended. These fees are not however considered an extravagance; the thunderous drum and shrill bamboo flute are needed to summon back to base any razana who may be away on a spiritual business trip. If the soul is out of the corpse during the festivities a lot of money is wasted as it will not ever know how much has been done to make it happy. Even today, many families spend most of their cash income on these feasts, just as they spend far more on a new tomb than on a new house. Everyone economically responsible for the famadihana must pay his fair share or incur excommunication from the family, from the home and – most devastating of all – from the family tomb. Andriamanitra, too, will punish the miser (or, nowadays, the sceptic), either with leprosy or lightning.
Rounding the base of a hill we were shocked to see our track crossing a narrow river by an ugly new concrete bridge. Further experience taught us that such irrelevant ‘communications improvements’ are a not uncommon feature of the Malagasy landscape. More poignant were the brand-new, never-opened schools to be seen throughout Imerina. We paused that afternoon to admire a handsome single-storey building, well-finished, with a roof of flat local tiles and a sports ground of beaten earth. Many such schools have been built by voluntary labour on the understanding that once the people had provided a building the government would provide teachers and equipment. But now there is no money for educational expansion.
Beyond the bridge straggled another hamlet and we rejoiced to see, by the side of the track, a wooden crate supporting a row of chipped enamel mugs and a few stale rice-flour buns in a glass jar. This coffee-stall was unattended; it must depend chiefly on market traffic. But an unkempt young man soon appeared, carrying an even more unkempt but beautiful baby and followed by his wife bearing a tin kettle of weak coffee. Wife quickly scuttled away while husband greeted us with the characteristic Malagasy blend of friendliness and formality. Then, still holding the infant, he filled two mugs, having first rinsed them in a shallow basin of opaque water standing nearby. (Eventually we were to have cause to ponder such washing-up methods with clinical interest.) Flies swarmed as we ate, pursuing the buns to our very lips. Cold, grease-sodden, sweetish rice-buns must be among the least appetising forms of sustenance known to man; but we were too ravenous to notice. On the opposite embankment several small children, shy but fascinated, stood observing us in a typical pose – legs apart, hands behind backs, heads slightly to one side. When I overpaid by 50 FMG the young man smiled as one smiles at a foolish youngster and returned the coins. As we were loading up, he tried to send us to Ambatolampy.
Soon after, we found a tomb-free campsite between a pine plantation and an expanse of feathery bushes stretching to the foot of a nearby ridge. There were no dwellings in sight – but suddenly, as we struggled with the peg-resistant ground, a man emerged from the bushes. He greeted us politely, in French, showing none of the surprise he must have felt on seeing and hearing two vazaha females swearing over tent-pegs. Coincidentally, he was the local Chief; when he had read Samuel’s letter he gave us permission to camp, if we insisted, but said he would much prefer us to be his guests.
On the way back to the hamlet Joseph (all we can remember of his name) carried our water-bottles and wore Rachel’s rucksack; he offered to carry mine, too, but that was a burden I would not have inflicted on my worst enemy. As a youth Joseph had served with the French army and in 1970 he was appointed a secondary school teacher in the nearest town, a few miles down the valley. This explained why he was, most unusually, wearing shoes – real shoes, made by BATA in Madagascar. He also wore a faded purple jersey, neat navy-blue trousers and a fashionable straw Homburg.
Joseph’s home was new, a posh six-roomed mansion of pale gold brick, with large windows, blue shutters and doors, a tin roof and wood floors – something rarely seen in the newer village houses of deforested Madagascar. All the floors, including the verandah, were highly polished; those Malagasy who can afford wood floors cherish them obsessionally, which explains why so much home-made beeswax is on sale in the markets. The whole house was Swiss-clean but sparsely furnished as compared to the same grade of home in most Third World countries. Its inexplicably cramped entrance made us aware of being much bulkier than the average Malagasy. A narrow doorway under the verandah led to a cubby-hole hall where turkeys roosted at night in two alcoves. Here one had to turn sharp left to ascend a steep ladder to the broad unrailed balcony; it would have been impossible to squeeze through the hall and climb the ladder wearing our rucksacks, which had to be held sideways.
Mrs Joseph came to greet us as we relaxed on a bench against the wall of the verandah-cum-sitting-room. She spoke no French but was as self-possessed as her husband. Her thick straight hair was parted in the middle and drawn back in a bun; she was barefooted and wore a neat, self-made brown and white check dress.
When Grandad appeared I stood up to be introduced; it would have seemed monstrous for a youngster of fifty-one to remain seated while being welcomed by a venerable gentleman of eighty-eight. (In Madagascar most old parents live with one of their children, preferably the eldest son, and like all non-Westerners the Malagasy are shocked by what they see as our callous neglect of the old.) Grandad was physically agile but very deaf. He had lost all his teeth while fighting in the trenches during the First World War and was equipped with exotic dentures made entirely of tin – including the palate. If one had met him in the street, one might have mistaken him for a Chinaman; in infancy and old age the Merinas’ Asian origin is much accentuated.
The balcony overlooked four smaller and much older thatched dwellings, and a neat clean communal farmyard. Outside two doorways women were husking the supper rice, steadily pounding the grain in ancient stone mortars with three-foot bamboo pestles. Directly below us the younger two of Joseph’s three sons – aged thirteen and eleven – were husking together with shorter pestles, their rhythmic movements marvellously co-ordinated, their double-thud blending with the women’s single thuds to create fitting background music for a fiery-gold sunset. Meanwhile Joseph’s two glossy zebu were being secured in their stockade and thrown a few armfuls of hay. And innumerable hens, ducks, turkeys and their young were being rounded up by small children and shooed into their respective shelters. Under the balcony Joseph’s youngest child, a girl of ten, was feeding three turkey hens and their much-loved, cheekily tame chicks. As she draped sacking over the roosts, her father summoned her to be introduced to the vazaha.
The strong current of affection running through Malagasy life is especially noticeable in father/child relationships. In many countries, the more procreative the menfolk the less interest they take in the results of that activity; but Madagascar seems to have an astonishing proportion (it looks like ninety-five per cent) of doting fathers. Two specimens were visible from the balcony, each cuddling a baby enchanting enough to melt even my non-baby-centred heart. (If, which Andriamanitra forbid, there were a baby competition analagous to Miss World, Malagasy babies would win it annually.) And this paternal interest does not stop at cuddling; Malagasy fathers are so good at practical child-care that not even the most extreme feminist could fault their role within the family.
The temperature dropped abruptly as that red-gold sunset melted away into darkness. Our host then led us by candlelight through the main bedroom, furnished only with a double bed, to the guest-room. This was both Joseph’s office and the eldest son’s bed-sitter; a narrow plank-bed occupied one corner near a window, with a low trunk beside it serving as table and wardrobe. An umbrella and a storm-lantern hung on one freshly white-washed wall and the ceiling was of rough-hewn planks.
Having closed the shutters, Joseph went to a small table (his ‘desk’) and for some unimaginable reason carefully copied into an exercise book our passport details and every word of Samuel’s letter. On the table stood a faded snapshot of Mrs Joseph as a plump little girl in startlingly familiar First Holy Communion clothes – no different from those worn in Ireland for the occasion. Her family, unlike most Merina, was Roman Catholic. But Joseph later explained that neither of them goes to church now, preferring to base their religious lives solely on razana traditions. Some Malagasy have come to see the abandonment of Christianity as an affirmation of patriotism, which reaction perhaps betrays a mild version of the feeling behind American Born Again-ism and Islamic fundamentalism.
As we unpacked, a singular odour prompted Rachel to whisper, ‘Drains!’ But alas! it was not drains. It was our supper.
Joseph carried a mountain of soggy rice; his wife followed with a hill of peeled boiled potatoes and two duck eggs. Moments later Joseph was back with the pieèce de résistance, a huge oval dish of rotten fried fish. Their eyes, fins, tails, bones and entrails were gradually revealed as one pushed aside a glutinous greyish sauce. We were reminded of the day our dog rolled on a long-dead hedgehog.
Rotten fish is a Malagasy delicacy, reserved for Festive Occasions or Honoured Guests, and this pungent compliment could not be discreetly smuggled away in a plastic bag or disposed of otherwise than by ingestion. I was hungry enough – just – to cope. But the sight of her mother filleting and swallowing those stinking chunks made Rachel retch and she insisted in a paranoid way that the potatoes had been cooked with the fish and were tainted. She ate only the eggs, undefiled within their shells. Poor Joseph was disappointed when he returned to collect the dishes.
Soon our host and hostess were back with Pierre, their handsome eldest son aged fifteen and by Merina standards tall. He was studying English and his mother persuaded him to read aloud so that we might correct his pronunciation. As he miserably negotiated a long list of difficult words his siblings giggled in the shadowy background and his parents gazed at him proudly, while Rachel sent him sympathetic glances of adolescent fellow-feeling. He did quite well in his struggle with the crazed illogic of the English language, once described to me by an Amhara student as ‘a crime against humanity’. We may laugh at people with kings called Andriamandisoarivo, Andrianamboatasimarofy, Andriantsimitoviaminandriandehibe – and so on. But the Malagasy can laugh louder at people who think about what they have thought but do not brink what they have brought.
At intervals during the evening barefooted men appeared silently in the doorless doorway, seeking chits from Joseph – the President of the local People’s Executive Committee. Apart from a worn rubber date-stamp, this decentralised government office had no official equipment, only a biro and an exercise book from which Joseph carefully tore half or quarter pages, as required.
By 8.30 Mr and Mrs Joseph had shaken hands and gone to bed in the outer room. Our lullaby was the sleepy cheeping of turkey chicks and Joseph’s gentle snoring. Lying beside Rachel on Pierre’s plank bed, I wondered about the observance of domestic fady in such a family. Would the conspicuously tall Pierre be expected to ‘buy’ his extra inches? The ancestors decreed that a boy taller than his superiors must ‘buy’ that advantage by presenting a fine lamba, or a zebu or cash-gift, to prove that despite his unseemly physical advantage he feels correctly submissive. The stability of Malagasy society still largely depends on a genuine respect for superiors. To a remarkable extent, civil order has been maintained throughout most of Madagascar’s history by individual family heads rather than by tribal chiefs – not many of whom ever got their law-enforcement act together – or by any centralised authority.
The dawn noises were creaking and jolting zebu-carts, and a mixed poultry chorus, and Joseph sweeping the balcony with a rush broom. Opening the shutters, I saw his old father already pottering about the yard: inspecting the zebu fodder, collecting turkey eggs, still happily involved in the daily routine. Beyond the houses a long line of pure white egrets was flying ritualistically up the river valley, caught in the earliest rays of the sun while the land below was still mist-veiled. Then suddenly it struck me that Grandad, being eighty-eight, was born before the French conquest of Madagascar. He was a living link with the Merina monarchy, a Malagasy who had started life as a subject of Queen Ranavalona III and, having spent sixty-four of his years under a colonial power, seemed likely to end it as a citizen of a Marxist-Christian Republic. I gazed down at him as he paused to converse with a toddler sitting on a doorstep eating a bowl of rice-gruel. If that toddler lived to be eighty-eight, he could boast in the year 2070 of having talked with a subject of the last Merina monarch, deposed in 1896 …
‘Why have you gone into a coma?’ asked Rachel peevishly. ‘Where have you put our pens? Why did you add so many of those beastly tablets to my water-bottle?’ She is never at her best before breakfast.
Soon we were confronting the statutory mound of rice, two hard-boiled eggs and two mugs of hot rice-water. I asked Joseph, ‘Your father was born in 1895?’ He smiled, ‘Yes’ – he pointed to a thatched dwelling on the far side of the yard – ‘he was born in that house, the year after it was built. We are Hova. We were never slaves, until the French came. But they did some good things, and many of them liked the Malagasy people.’
Pierre appeared then, shyly apologising for having to take a garment from his wardrobe trunk by the bed. When he is eighty-eight, how important will their brief colonial experience seem to the Malagasy? Not very, I suspect. Modern Madagascar is a very French ex-colony, in superficial ways. Yet the European intrusion, both British and French, seems already to have been absorbed and transformed.
Before we left, Joseph showed off his lavabary, the cellar below the house, clay-lined and waterproof, where last year’s abundant paddy was stored and Pierre was measuring ten kilos into a cotton cloth to be carried to market on his head. He and his mother accompanied us to Manalalondo (our first town since leaving Arivonimamo) and we had covered a few miles when one of the younger boys breathlessly overtook us, clutching two discarded Irish biros – presumed forgotten by Joseph.
Apart from our own equipment, we might, that morning, have been travelling in the reign of Queen Ranavalona III. As we walked along the market-busy wide red track, beneath a wide blue sky, green-flecked grey hills stretched for miles on our left and neatly ditched paddy-fields lay below on our right – some just ploughed, a few newly irrigated and borrowing blue from above. The sun was warm, the breeze cool, the light brilliant, the silence broken only by quiet greetings as friends met and by the groaning of traders’ wagons – brightly painted, with arched covers, like gypsy caravans. Most of the gaily dressed women were carrying loads on their heads and, if alone, babies on their backs suspended in a lamba. If father was present he usually carried the baby.
Manalalondo has seen better days; it is a memorial to the social upheaval caused by colonisation. Although a small town, it was prosperous in times past. The main street boasts an impressive double triumphal stone archway, vaguely Moorish and sprouting tufts of pale gold grass. Several fine houses, now decaying, still belong to Andriana or Hova (aristocratic or gentry) families who deserted the countryside after the conquest. The abolition of slave labour, and the introduction of taxes, made a career in the administration, or in the new expanding business world, more attractive than the life of a rural landowner obliged to pay both wages and taxes. Most such houses have a massive family tomb nearby, which is one reason for their not being sold. It is hard to obtain the necessary consent of the original owner’s many and perhaps widely scattered descendants, who by now may have divergent views about the ancestral property. Yet few mansions stand empty; Andevo (peasant) families occupy them and we were assured that in the new Marxist-Christian state such tenants no longer have to pay rent. The Andevo Merina are often a shade or two darker than their ‘betters’, with suspiciously crinkly hair. African slaves were not unknown in this region, and many women and children were captured and enslaved after battles against the Bara, Antandroy and Mahafaly – the main tribes of southern Madagascar.
Manalalondo’s shops – some quite large – were either closed or almost empty. In the market-place the few occupied stalls sold little more than rice, onions, eggs, rotten sardines and unidentifiable wizened objects – probably traditional ‘cures’ and ombiasas’ charms. Here, as in other areas during the weeks ahead, we got the impression that the rural Malagasy have reverted to a subsistence economy. Families depend on their own and their neighbours’ produce, often exchanged rather than bought, and the flow of imported foodstuffs and consumer goods, stocked in colonial and immediately post-colonial days, has dried up.
On the edge of the town we sought refreshment in a thatched ‘café’ so tiny that our heads touched the ceiling and we had to leave our rucksacks outside. The young couple crouching in the smoky interior, and their four children, looked wretchedly unhealthy and seemed half-afraid of us. Husband sat slumped in one corner, his eyes dull, holding a whimpering filthy baby. We shared his unsteady bench while wife cooked rice-buns on a grass-burning mud stove. Suddenly he was overcome by a paroxysm of coughing and the baby howled in sympathy; he handed it to a toddler and lay on the ground at our feet. In the firelight I could see sweat glistening on his forehead before he drew his lamba over his head.
Wife had ladled the rice-bun batter from a rusty tin at Rachel’s feet and was cooking two dozen at a time in a patty-tin used as a frying-pan. The eldest child, a girl aged perhaps six, continuously stuffed twists of grass, taken from a stack outside the door, into the flames. An even smaller boy was boiling coffee on a minute wood-fire in another mud-stove. Every few moments wife deftly turned the buns with a special wooden implement, adding a drop of grease to each ‘cup’ at each turn. We admired the skill with which she overcame all the limitations of her kitchen; the twenty-four buns were uniformly brown and crisp when she slid them onto a wooden tray. But hot rice-buns are only marginally less revolting than cold rice-buns. And the coffee was not coffee, though coffee coloured. If you use grass as fuel, you must know which berries serve best as a coffee-substitute.
Not far beyond Manalalondo a young couple, shy but smiling, caught up with us. When we had convinced them that we were not going to Ambatolampy they invited us to follow them on a cross-country short-cut and the next two hours had an endurance-test flavour. Our guides were a handsome pair, small and light-skinned, with compact muscular graceful bodies. Whether going uphill or down their pace never varied and we enviously compared their loads with our own. Husband’s was a zinc bucket containing a litre tin of kerosene and an earthenware jar of honey; wife’s was a head-basket containing two dozen oranges, one packet of biscuits and a small bar of soap.
We crossed three high grassy ridges, separating broad valleys. On the more precipitous slopes the narrow path was treacherous, its outside edge blurred by bushy red grass; a misjudgement here would have meant falling hundreds of feet. On the valley floors mini-chasms were spanned by dicey little bridges of thin sticks supporting loose sods of earth. From a distance we saw an isolated hamlet, on a hillside far above, and hoped for a brief pause. But our friends pressed relentlessly on, calling cheerful greetings to the inhabitants as we passed between hedges of tall sword-cactus. We glimpsed a six-inch orange and green chameleon while scrambling up long steep slabs of smooth rock, hot to the touch beneath the noon sun. Soon after we met a two-foot brown and green snake and the young woman shrieked fearfully, though no Malagasy snake is dangerous. At the base of another rock-slab mountain Rachel and I admitted defeat and let our guides, who were so evidently in a hurry, go ahead without us. We collapsed under a bush, our arms glistening with crystallised salt. Even in midwinter, and even in the mountains, it is hot at noon around the Tropic of Capricorn.
Five minutes later our friends were back, looking worried. No words were needed to explain the situation. They smiled at us, gently, and when we gestured to them to keep going they sat down instead and insisted on our eating two of their precious oranges. Again the young man offered to carry my rucksack. When I shook my head he picked it up, testingly, and registered comic dismay. On the next stage our pace was greatly reduced.
The granite summit of that mountain overlooked a deep valley holding an ochre track, a green river, many paddy-fields and our friends’ home. Beyond their village the track was a continuation of the motor-road we had followed out of Manalalondo, without then realising that it was meant to cater for the internal combustion engine. Had we not taken photographs, I would now doubt my recollection of this highway. Where it had been bisected by years of flood-damage, never repaired, the two-foot-wide central rut was four feet deep and accompanied by numerous relatively minor side-ruts. When it abruptly disappeared on a sloping ridge, amidst evergreen bushes and hummocks of brown grass, we circled the area in search of any kind of path – and then, incredibly, found smudged tyre marks between bushes and hummocks. An hour later, in the next populated valley, we were fascinated to see rafts of vegetation, some twenty yards by thirty, floating on a jade-green river – anchored with stones in midstream. These are artificial paddy-fields, created where there is an urgent need for extra land.
During the afternoon we swam in a tingling cold pool, between high grassy mountains, watched by a pair of ceaselessly circling buzzards. An hour later we were back in fertile country – too fertile, for the sun was declining and we could see no possible campsite amidst the paddy-fields. Snatches of song came from substantial houses above the track, groups of men were sitting around playing the Malagasy version of violins or guitars, children’s laughter sounded loud in the windless evening air. Not everyone greeted us and some chatting neighbours fell silent as we approached. But their reaction was understandable; few vazaha pass that way.
At last we spotted a low scrub ridge; the sun set as we pushed upwards through dense bushes, seeking tent-space. Suddenly an enormous ancient tomb loomed out of the dusk. Obviously it was no longer in use; equally obviously it housed razana of some consequence and vazaha camping in its vicinity might not be amiably regarded. We hastened on and five minutes later – it was then dark – reached a level site carpeted with some powerfully scented herb. But the razana were still too close for comfort; a zebu-cart on a nearby track prompted us to switch off our torches and (feeling more than slightly foolish) lie doggo by our half-erected tent. ‘Better to be undignified than got at by some ombiasa,’ remarked Rachel as we stood up. For supper we enjoyed Nomad Soup, poured onto surplus breakfast-rice smuggled away in our plastic bag.
A new two-(wo)man tent for the Malagasy expedition had cost only £15 but was alleged to be waterproof. However, within an hour of the rain’s beginning at 9.30 p.m. pools were accumulating all around us. It was heavy rain, and steady. Rachel slept until midnight, muttering and squirming miserably as the chilly lake deepened. After that neither of us slept. My companion expatiated on the folly of parsimony at great length and with bitter eloquence. I curled myself into a soggy shivering ball and listened humbly, making occasional penitent noises. Wistfully I remembered the good old days when Rachel uncritically accepted the vicissitudes of travelling with a not very practical Mamma.
Towards dawn the rain dwindled and soon there was silence, apart from nasty squelchy noises caused by our slightest movement. As I unzipped the entrance the herbal aroma, intensified by the rain, acted on us (or at least on me) like a strong stimulant. Crawling out, I saw that we were in a slight hollow on the ridge-top, which restricted our view of the immediately surrounding terrain and emphasised the immensity of the sky. I stared in wonder at the still starry purple-violet zenith – a tinge belonging to neither night nor day. The stars vanished as I gazed. To the east lay distant chunks of mountain darkly colourless below a magnolia glow. To the west drifted royal-blue banks of broken retreating rain-cloud. I held my breath, waiting. Then the sun was up, behind the chunky mountain, and purple-violet changed to powder-blue – magnolia to the palest green – royal-blue to gold and crimson.
That was, I think, the most magical dawn I have ever attended. But when I remarked to Rachel that one wet night was a small price to pay for such an experience she merely grunted and went on wringing out her flea-bag. Perhaps at fourteen one’s aesthetic sensibilities are still latent.
We set off at 6.15, our loads perceptibly heavier, sucking glucose tablets for breakfast. Pathlets on which we met nobody led us for four hours through pine-woods and eucalyptus plantations, around bare red hills, over grassy ridges and across a wide cultivated bowl-valley where the soil seemed poor and the few inhabitants were timid and illiterate. Their illiteracy emerged when we produced Samuel’s letter as a preliminary, we hoped, to acquiring food by purchase or barter. It did not work in this area, serving only to increase the local fear of tough-looking vazaha.
While we rested in a tamarind glade, lying on feathery green-gold grass, the sun undid the rain’s damage. Its power astonished us; within thirty minutes even our thick flea-bags were dry. Here I heated our last Nomad Soup for Rachel and refuelled myself with our last fistful of peanuts.
‘How are we getting out of this valley?’ asked Rachel as we repacked.
Through binoculars I studied the apparently pathless southern mountain-wall. ‘There must be a way over,’ I decided, ‘even though we can’t see it yet.’
‘Why must there?’ demanded Rachel. ‘Who in their right mind would ever walk over that?’
‘People have to go from here to Antsirabe,’ I pointed out in my parent-being-patient-with-silly-child voice.
‘I’ll bet we passed the Antsirabe track ages ago,’ said Rachel, ‘at the junction where you would take this dotty little path. Maybe you thought your day would be spoiled by meeting one vehicle if we took the right track.’
I ignored this deserved taunt and persisted, ‘I’m sure there’s a path – we’ll ask.’
‘Ask who?’ enquired Rachel, sweeping the deserted valley floor with her binoculars. ‘Even if we do meet someone we won’t be able to understand them.’
Luckily this prediction was wrong. At the next hamlet a group of laughing women retreated into their hovels as we approached, then cautiously peered out when they heard me rather desperately shouting – ‘Antsirabe?’
‘Ambatolampy!’ yelled the eldest woman, pointing to the north-east. (Behind me Rachel muttered a word that was not in her vocabulary before she went away to school; is it for this that we court destitution to pay school-fees?)
Again I shouted ‘Antsirabe?’ The women conferred, then summoned a youth from within. He reluctantly advanced a few yards, pointing to a steep bushy slope rising above the hamlet. ‘Antsirabe!’ he affirmed, repeating the word while gesturing towards a distant cleft in the mountain wall directly behind the steep slope. There was no mistaking his meaning; to get to Antsirabe we had to climb that escarpment.
We found no path until reaching the top. Evidently those who use this route (perhaps not many, as Rachel suggested) have their own favourite ways up and down. One would not have chosen to tackle such a gradient on an almost empty stomach after a sleepless night and we often rested, collapsing where there was some boulder or ledge on which to lean our loads. At each halt the view was more spectacular, encompassing all of Imerina – and much more besides.
From the top we could see miles of undulating golden savannah unbroken by bush or tree or boulder, with mountain summits peering over the distant edges to remind us that we were, by Malagasy standards, at a great height. The faint path divided occasionally and sometimes an even fainter branch path seemed to be going more directly south. But we were following a trail of ‘ecological litter’, as Rachel called it – white wads of sugar-cane fibre spat out by villagers returning from market. At the far side of the plateau, after two hours fast walking, we might well have gone astray but for these clues. Here pathlets proliferated bewilderingly amidst hills, glens, spurs and ridges, some thinly forested, some entangled in thorny scrub, a few supporting potato-patches.
In the deepest glen we filled our water-bottles and bathed our feet in a rapid sparkling mountain stream that might have been Irish. Before replacing her boots, Rachel wordlessly extended her feet towards me. I looked – and recoiled. Uncooked steaks is the obvious simile. None of our plasters would cover the affected areas.
‘Why didn’t you say something earlier?’ I demanded, as though the whole thing were somehow her fault.
‘Well,’ said Rachel, ‘you can’t piggy-back me any more and we couldn’t just sit starving on a mountain.’
I gave minimal medical aid while repenting my earlier bitchy thoughts about the feebleness of modern youth. You have to be tough to carry a load for twenty miles on flayed feet. Luckily we did not then know how many more miles lay ahead.
Beyond that glen, several isolated houses and tombs stood out against the sky on far-away ridges. Fat-tailed sheep, small and dark brown, nibbled unattended beside the path in the shade of ancient, tall, unfamiliar trees: a sad fragment of Madagascar’s primary forest. Soon we had to cross a tricky, unexpected marsh and then came an anxious fifteen minutes; our fibre-trail disappeared, leaving us to the mercy of our compass on pathless green grassland – the only green pasture we saw in the Ankaratra. Here zebu were being tended by two small boys wrapped in lambas and holding sticks twice as long as themselves. They fled from us, abandoning their herd, and hid in bushes.
Sullen clouds filled the sky as we climbed to a broken plateau covered with brown scrub, like winter heather. Our spirits rose when we saw a café-shack in the distance – but it was deserted. Then, without warning, we were on a wide cart-track, deeply eroded yet unmistakably going somewhere of importance. It began (or ended) just like that, in the middle of nowhere, for no particular reason. ‘This is the maddest country I’ve ever been in,’ reflected Rachel, intending no pun.
Moments later we met three men returning, as we later realised, from Ambohibary market. One carried a new iron blade for his plough, another carried a can of kerosene, the third carried nothing but was wearing a pair of brand-new blue jeans. Rachel deduced optimistically, ‘If they sell jeans it’s a big town, with lots of food!’
Soon the track could be seen for miles ahead, dropping into a broad valley before climbing high on the flanks of a long, multi-spurred mountain. The whole wide expanse of countryside beneath us was thronged, as people turned off the main track to go to their hamlets in the fertile valleys to east and west. After walking in solitude for ten hours, this bustle of humanity seemed quite urban.
We developed a guessing-game: identifying various improbable head-burdens from a distance. An empty tar-barrel – a pair of new shoes – a wooden bench – a ten-foot roll of raffia matting – a tower of dried tobacco leaves – a Scotch whisky crate full of vociferous fluffy ducklings – a basket of long French loaves. (Our mouths watered as we caught a whiff of that fresh crustiness.) Only cocks and hens were not carried on heads but tucked under arms. We were moved by the number of poultry-owners who were talking soothingly to their burdens, sometimes stroking them gently with one finger. Even more moving was the fact that almost everyone stopped to shake hands with us and murmur a greeting. They were all chewing cane and soon our hands were as sticky as theirs. No one tried to question us about our identity or destination; those greetings were brief, gracious – and unforgettably heart-warming. Apart from the Tibetans, I have never travelled among a people as endearing as the Malagasy.
While ascending the multi-spurred mountain we met many descending zebu-carts, which frequently left the track because the ground on either side was less difficult to negotiate; they were covering not more than half-a-mile per hour. The introduction of the wheel to this region was perhaps a mistake. Why, since horses flourish around Tana, has equine transport never become popular in Imerina? A similar returning-from-market scene in Ethiopia’s highlands would have contained many speedy horsemen and nimble pack-mules.
At 4.30 Rachel rejoiced to see Ambohibary in the centre of a wide flat paddy-plain far below. But mountain distances are deceptive and I had my doubts about reaching it before dark. Three linked wooded hills still stood between us and the plain and our progress was being slowed by all those pauses to exchange courtesies. Yet the traffic also helped; we took several short-cuts that would have seemed imprudent, or impossible, had we not seen people using them. On such severe slopes, tiny children were carried up or down. Otherwise they walked sturdily for miles, hand-in-hand with a parent or older sibling. It was an odd sensation, being the only people – among all those hundreds – going towards Ambohibary.
As the foot-traffic thinned the slower cart-traffic increased and our imaginations boggled wildly at the thought of zebu-carts crossing these mountains by night. The town still looked very far away when sunset came as we were descending the third hill. In the twilight we passed an elaborate tomb on the edge of a pine-wood; its porch-like façade offered shelter from the probable nocturnal downpour but Rachel declined to share accommodation with corpses. I did not argue, her feet being my only reason for proposing this risky intimacy with the local razana. Here we were briefly able to follow the glimmer of wheel-marks, where the earth had been compacted and polished. Then total darkness came. Not a star shone through the heavy clouds and as all our batteries had been victims of the tent-flood we were reduced to cart-speed by the deep ruts and high tufts of grass. The blackness of the plain puzzled us; even from a non-electrified town one expects some faint glow after dark.
Without warning we were in a hamlet, astray amidst houses and trees occupying various shelves on the hillside. As we stumbled between the dwellings, none showing a light, one door opened and the oil-wicks flickering within seemed brilliant. Three men emerged, laughing loudly, and we decided to show them Samuel’s letter. Unfortunately they were drunk; not very, but too much so for us to communicate in sign-language in the dark – not a particularly feasible scheme, when you come to think of it, even had they been sober. My query – ‘Ambohibary?’ – loosed a torrent of Malagasy from all three simultaneously. Then an elderly man appeared at the open door, shouted, ‘Route Nationale No. 7!’ and pointed downhill. This was not helpful; we already knew our way led downhill. As the door was closed, and firmly bolted, the trio surrounded us, exhaling fumes reminiscent of the cheapest grade of Russian petrol. Gripping our arms, they led us down a twisting path apparently criss-crossed by tree-roots, all the while continuing to address us animatedly in Malagasy. On level ground they triumphantly chorused, ‘Route Nationale No. 7!’ Then they groped for our hands, regarding impenetrable darkness as no excuse for a breach of etiquette, and having completed their farewells left us to make what we could of Route Nationale No. 7.
‘This can’t be a national highway!’ said Rachel ten minutes later. Already she had tripped over three chunks of rock and I had turned an ankle in a cavernous pot-hole. We continued with linked arms, for mutual protection.
The clouds parted slightly at an opportune moment. We were only ten yards from a rubble-filled chasm that had to be climbed into and out of – an exercise for which meagre starlight provided unsatisfactory illumination. By this time we had covered at least twenty-eight miles and I suggested sleeping by the wayside. Rachel however was determined to make Ambohibary, and food, though she admitted to needing a rest. I pointed out what seemed a suitable boulder-seat but unhappily it proved to be a prickly-pear cactus. For some reason (unclear in retrospect) this provoked us both to uncontrollable mirth and we sat in the middle of the road and laughed until our ribs ached as much as our shoulders.
The cloud gap closed as we continued and instinctively one listens more keenly when unable to see; otherwise we might have ended up in the wide, fast irrigation channel that soon after crossed the road. It took time to find a bridge of wobbly planks in an adjacent field.
Fifteen minutes later we became aware of tall houses on both sides of the track – Ambohibary, we presumed. It was only 8.15, yet there was no sound, no light, no movement. A Merina proverb advises: ‘Do not arrive in a village after dark for you will be greeted only by the dogs.’ Here not even dogs were registering our presence; the place might have been abandoned a century ago. ‘Let’s keep going,’ said Rachel, ‘this is just a suburb.’ As she spoke five men materialised nearby, their leader’s flaming resin-torch swaying like the mast-light of a ship on a stormy sea. They were much drunker than our three guides. When I asked, ‘Hotely?’ the leader belched (more Russian petrol fumes) and the others began to giggle and sing. ‘We’d better push off,’ said Rachel impatiently, ‘before they all feel they must shake hands.’ But she was at the end of a tether that for hours had been stretched to breaking point. Although the spirit was still willing the flesh had to be supported by me as she hobbled the next few hundred yards – which took us back into open countryside. We had merely passed through a village.
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Here we sleep, come hell or high water – probably high water. Even if we could get to Ambowhatsit, it’s too late to find food.’
Starlight revealed a roadside trader’s stall: four crooked branches supporting a sheet of corrugated iron. Beneath it I cleared a space of loose stones and spread our flea-bags on the bumpy iron-hard ground. Less than five minutes later Rachel was asleep.
I was too hungry to sleep; the lack of food for sale en route had taken me unawares. I reproved myself for being so illogically inhibited by the peasants’ refusal to sell food to travellers – I often enough condemn the transfer to other societies of the standards and principles of our own. On the previous evening we should have sought hospitality instead of camping; we could then have eaten our fill and started the day with substantial breakfasts. Again, at the foot of the escarpment we should have explained that we were very hungry; no Malagasy peasant would have to go without to feed us. Yet my inhibition was not entirely based on a reluctance to cadge. Another factor was the extent to which, in rural Madagascar, daily life has a fixed and formal pattern governed by fady. It is a friendly and generous but not a relaxed or spontaneous society. And the complexity of local inhibitions about vazaha reinforces the vazaha’s own inhibitions.
To outsiders the Malagasy submission to ancestral decrees can seem absurd – even neurotic – yet that afternoon we had been impressed by some of its effects. If an old man is heavily laden, any young man catching up with him insists on carrying his load for some distance, though they may be total strangers. And young people ask permission before overtaking their elders on the track. Is it a measure of the uncouthness of the modern West that we marvelled so to observe these courtesies?
At that point in my ruminations a dog approached, sniffed curiously around us, then took fright at the vazaha smells (as anyone might have done, that evening) and ran away yelping shrilly. Otherwise nothing moved until 4.50 a.m. when two men passed, chuckling and chatting. They did not notice us. It rained lightly for a few hours: harmless straight-down rain – we were only dampened around the edges. I might have slept eventually but for the decibels of a corpse-turning party obviously intended to summon ancestors from Outer Space. This ceremony began at 8.45 p.m. and was still going loud and strong when we left the area. Luckily Malagasy music is pleasing to the ear, if a trifle monotonous.
An overcast dawn showed Ambohibary scarcely a mile away. Most windows were still tightly shuttered as we hastened towards the town centre, through lanes piled with morning-after-market refuse. Malagasy litter is ninety per cent edible and scores of truculent ganders, pompous geese and bumptious goslings were on garbage-disposal duty. Never have I seen so many geese in one place; at that hour they seemed to own the town.
A few café-stalls were open in the market-square and we devoured so many rice-buns so quickly that the attractive young woman who was serving us called her mother to watch. As we ate, other stall-holders began to light their charcoal-stoves and display rice-buns – to be bought in bulk and taken home for breakfast, a habit perhaps picked up from the French.
A short-cut over a eucalyptus-planted hill took us to the real Route Nationale No. 7 and we realised why Ambohibary’s market is so important. A link road that once was tarred is still capable of taking truck traffic to Ambohibary from Route Nationale No. 7, the Tana–Antsirabe highway. Our bizarre ‘road’ of the previous evening is a continuation of this link, going to Arivonimamo via Manalalondo. But it is not, as we had seen, conducive to a free flow of goods throughout the Ankaratra.
The junction is marked – and marred – by a pretentious new ‘bar’-stall of pale varnished wood, designed to attract passing motorists. Sadly, the beer bottles lining its shelves were all empty. Here we relished a second breakfast of slightly sweet crisp fritters, fresh from the pan, while a plump gentle dog sat hopefully at our feet – his girth proving that his hopes were often fulfilled – and minuscule ducklings splashed ecstatically in a nearby puddle. Opposite the bar a barely legible kilometre-stone said ‘Antsirabe 33’ and we decided to walk on but take the first available bus out of consideration for Rachel’s feet.
During the next four hours withdrawal symptoms afflicted me: inevitable on exchanging mountain-tracks for a motor-road, however light the traffic. I could not agree with our Air Mad guidebook – ‘The Tananarive–Antsirabe road is bituminized, and the trip very nice.’ But that was sheer prejudice; by normal standards the trip is ‘very nice’, as Route Nationale No. 7 undulates through miles of mature pine-plantations or densely populated farmland. Our guidebook explains:
‘From the economic point of view, it must be stated that Antsirabe is at the centre of a rich agricultural region which produces: rice, beans, sweet potatoes, corn (maize), taro, soja, potatoes: all vegetables grow wonderfully. The vineyards give 350,000 to 400,000 litres of wine. Let us mention that the harvest of wheat has begun. Also to be found is a very wide range of european and exotic flowers. For stock farming let us mention: cattle, sheep, numerous pigs, also poultry and horses.’
In the woods government foresters were manhandling trimmed trunks onto decrepit trucks. Private enterprise was also active. Youthful entrepreneurs had gathered small branches into neatly bound bundles for sale to passing city-dwellers. And larger branches were being loaded into motor-vans by Antsirabe fuel-merchants.
In the ‘rich agricultural region’ traditional Merina dwellings were interspersed with colonial bungalows or dainty two-storey residences half-smothered in flowering shrubs. Yet even along this motor-road there were symptoms of economic collapse: rows of recently abandoned wayside market-stalls (the local equivalent of a supermarket), and derelict petrol-pump stations, and two colonial restaurants now used as vegetable depots.
Light showers refreshed us during the early forenoon but by midday the sky had cleared, the heat was brutal and Rachel was limping very badly. We sat in a wooded glen, overlooking a narrow river in a wide river-bed, and waited for a bus. From afar we could see a ludicrously sophisticated skyscraper flour-mill, to cater for the ‘harvest of wheat’; we later learned that it is having severe (though hardly surprising) problems to do with maintenance and fuelling.
During the morning three buses had passed us, all preposterously overloaded. The fourth was no less so but two men gave up their seats to the vazaha. Large baskets of vegetables and small children standing on laps restricted our view of the approach to Antsirabe. Most of our fellow-passengers were well-groomed, wearing clean, brightly coloured lambas over neat shirts and pants or blouses and skirts. Their appearance did not match the state of their conveyance; I have never travelled in a more beat-up vehicle. As there was no door remaining, and not much floor, the dust-intake from the ‘bituminized’ road was considerable and both conductor and driver wore scarves around their noses and mouths. The driver sat crouched and tense and frowning, using accelerator and brake equally violently. Every few hundred yards he swerved acrobatically to avoid either straying livestock or a mini-crater. Mere pot-holes he took as they came and each jolt jarred us breathless. At the end of that ten-mile journey Rachel mused, ‘What are we going to feel like when we’ve covered a few thousand miles in Malagasy vehicles?’