Our truck-driver was a tall young man with wavy hair, darkish skin, almond eyes, a fine high forehead, slightly flared nostrils and beautiful manners. He wore threadbare jeans and a new white T-shirt and his name, disconcertingly, seemed to be Rosy. Although without a phrase of French, he hugely enjoyed the sign-language game. His two mates were small, wiry, rather unwashed and very ragged, with decidedly crinkly hair and quick smiles. We regretted being the causes of their having to travel outside, balanced on a high load of crates, protectively hugging our rucksacks. Two mates were needed not to unload or share the driving but to help cope with any of the wide variety of mishaps that may befall a Malagasy vehicle as it goes about its business.
We left Antsirabe at 11.45 a.m. and during the next ten hours only two trivial mishaps befell us, each remedied by the performance of strange rites with pliers and wires. Rachel calculated that we were moving for just over eight of those ten hours, at an average speed of thirty-two miles per hour. (Later, we were to look back on that as a breakneck journey.) We went much more slowly downhill than uphill; the truck was spectacularly overloaded with a towering excess of beer-crates and Rosy gestured graphically to convey that our brakes were not to be trusted. For the same reason he always stopped when another vehicle was either approaching us or about to overtake us. He taught me how much more relaxing it is to have a good driver and bad brakes than vice versa.
In the scenically unpredictable Andrantsay region of the Betsileo country every twist of the road revealed another blue-gold vista of untidy mountains, near or distant. Here the rice-farmers are challenged by very narrow valleys and very steep slopes, a much tougher challenge than the broad valleys and plains of Imerina, where drained marshes and swamps have created fertile areas comparatively easily cultivated. However, in Betsileo country God has fitted the back – and the brains – for the burden. These people are renowned for their energy and the ingenuity of their terracing and irrigation works. (We had been puzzled by the lack of terracing in Imerina: the explanation is that so far the Merina have not needed to develop this art – but soon they may.) The terrain here discourages villages; we rarely saw more than two or three dwellings (Merina-style) together. Often these were perched on ledges in the cramped valleys, above or below terraced fields, some scarcely bigger than a hearth-rug. Yet this land – so awkward to deal with – is exceptionally fertile. After Independence, when various vazaha agricultural experts were invited to Madagascar, they recommended the Betsileo to grow potatoes, beans, carrots, sweet potatoes and cereals during the eight months of the year when their paddy-fields lie idle. We saw some signs of this advice having been taken but most fields were enjoying their winter rest. The extremely conservative Betsileo village elders wield more power than their counterparts in Imerina and object to any changes in land distribution or methods of food production. It does not of course follow that they are invariably wrong; the razana may have discovered centuries ago that the land hereabouts needs its rest. In some areas of Nepal, during the 1960s, rice-production dropped catastrophically as a direct result of taking foreign advice.
The Betsileo look almost as Polynesian as the Merina, whose passion for Western education they have always shared, sending the majority of children of both sexes to school; and those needed on the land sometimes learned to write and read from literate neighbours. During the nineteenth century Christian missionaries turned this region into their own sort of unedifying battleground and in the few little towns we passed through churches of both denominations faced each other defiantly. Statues of the BVM, protecting the entrance to and exit from each town, tell who won that engagement. While Tana was from the beginning the centre of Protestant missionary activity in Madagascar, Fianarantsoa (sensibly known as Fianar) soon became the Catholic centre. Most of the Betsileo seem not to have taken sides; they didn’t care who educated them as long as someone did.
In 1962 the Betsileo annual per capita income was estimated at $US30. Yet the people were not impoverished, the area being more or less self-sufficient with a long tradition of the migration of its more academic youngsters. By now however the population increase has caused many more to migrate in search of paid employment; there is virtually none in Betsileo country, apart from a few rice-mills and the wood-working industry of Ambositra, where generations of craftsmen have created a tradition of magnificent marquetry work, carving and furniture manufacture.
Rosy & Co. decided to eat at Fandriana, known as ‘the nursery of civil servants’. This small town has an unexpected number of imposing residences built by migrant Betsileo who prospered in the administration before retiring to their own region. We had invited our companions to share our picnic lunch, since Zanoa had provided enough for a platoon, but they looked at her meat-filled pastries and elegant sandwiches and dainty homemade biscuits with a suspicion that quickly turned to revulsion. None of that rubbish could compete with a foot-high mound of rice.
Beyond the cultivated land, Route Nationale No. 7 showed what French engineers could do in the years just before the First World War – assisted of course by many thousands of Malagasy involuntary workers. For miles we were corkscrewing up, crossing mini-ravines by bridges whose state of disrepair must be causing those engineers to spin in their sepulchres. The golden slopes were occasionally broken by smooth chunks of silvery rock or sparse eucalyptus plantations. Then we were over this massive barrier and amidst a seemingly endless disarray of darkly forested mountains: the result of colonial enterprise. The French Forestry Service experimented with hundreds of species before choosing the Mexican pine for long-term commercial timber purposes. This superb tree grows three times faster throughout the Malagasy Highlands than any conifer can grow in the northern hemisphere.
The French term for Central Madagascar – the Hauts-Plateaux – is even less appropriate in Betsileo country than in Imerina. For hours we saw no level ground and few habitations. The wildness of this region contributed to the easy Merina conquest of the Betsileo, whose scattered communities had little contact with each other. Thus they never achieved the sort of unity that came about quite naturally in the more open country to the north. When Andrianampoinimerina chose to expand southwards it took him less than a decade to secure the vast Betsileo territories. There was little fighting; most of the Betsileo chiefs amiably agreed to become Merina vassals and were allowed to go on ruling much as before. According to Betsileo folk-history, those chiefs came long ago from the Antemoro tribe of the south-east coast, the only Malagasy tribe to show a marked Islamic-Arabic influence. They arrived late in Madagascar, at the end of the fifteenth century, possibly from the Somali area of south-east Ethiopia where a tribe called Temur went missing at about that time. But in the Malagasy melting-pot they soon lost both their Muslim faith and Arabic language, though they are mainly responsible for the seepage of Arabic loan-words into Malagasy.
As the sun set, flooding the sky with a surge of crimson, we turned onto an open stretch of road just below the crest of a high ridge. Away to the west, beyond a shadowed jumble of lower hills, an unbroken chain of mountains stood out against the lingering fiery afterglow. And from their smooth summits, silhouetted against that incandescent horizon, rose scores of widely spaced, isolated, eroded rocks – sharp, twisted, angular, slightly sinister yet wondrously beautiful. They seemed not to belong to their mountain bases but to be mysterious additions, fantastic pranks of the Creator Andriamanitra that might have vanished by tomorrow. I woke the sleeping Rachel, who blearily peered westward. ‘No wonder they’re animists!’ she said – and slept again.
Soon it was frustratingly dark but I consoled myself with the thought that we would have to return by the same route. Happily I could not foresee that by then I would be in no condition, for a variety of reasons, to appreciate the landscape.
Rachel continued to sleep and Rosy was companionably silent, apart from reassuring shouts in response to alarmed yells. His mates on the load were often in danger of being dislodged by overhanging branches. Buses, taxis and private cars avoid this road at night but occasionally a truck came towards us, visible for thirty or forty minutes as it crawled up and down the black bulk of the mountains ahead, its lights waxing and waning according to the density of the forest. I realised that for all my addiction to solitary travelling I was enjoying the feeling of comradeship that enveloped our little caravan of intrepid traders (1980s-style). During the last two hours our weak headlights illuminated many weather-beaten French signs announcing some village ahead. But not even the tiniest hamlet ever appeared and these repeated announcements of non-existent places became a trifle eerie. Later we discovered the French mania for listing, and putting on maps, two or three minute dwellings – often some distance from the road – which they elevated to the status of ‘village’.
No distant urban glow marked the Betsileo capital. Suddenly, at 9.50, we were in it: a town completely silent and almost completely in darkness, its few fifteen-watt street lights merely hampering one’s night-vision. We stopped beside a cliff-like construction – next morning we identified it as the rear-end of a disused sports stadium – and Rosy explained that because of Fianar’s notorious gradients the loaded truck could go no further. He had however promised Gervais to escort us to a friend of Zanoa’s who was half-expecting us, though probably not at this late hour. Leaving his mates guarding the beer he led us off into the night, carrying both our rucksacks and every so often pausing to warn us about holes in the road. Ten breathless minutes later we were on level ground and Rosy plunged into a maze of rough laneways where our stumbling progress aroused a series of dogs who woofed half-heartedly. When he pushed open a wooden gate it came off its hinges and I fell over it. A turkey-cock gobbled – an invisible watchman challenged us – Rosy explained – I knocked on an invisible door and the watchman shouted. Long moments passed before the door opened and our hostess, wearing a lamba over her nightgown, welcomed us with a joy which cannot possibly have been genuine but seemed so. Before departing Rosy assured us that he would be back at 6 a.m. to escort us to the bus for Ranohira – the town nearest the Isalo lemur-reserve.
I shall refer to our hostess as Madame T., partly as an exercise in discretion but mainly because her surname has nineteen letters. She was a portly woman and very small – well below five feet – with a round honey-coloured face, round dark eyes, thick lips and straight greying hair worn in a bun. Her slightly comical stature and girth were counteracted by an unmistakable air of authority, perhaps explained by her being an eminent member of the legal profession – what we would call a High Court Judge. (Judges were the senior officials of the Merina Court and throughout this century there have been many women judges in Madagascar.) Madame T.’s husband had died young and as her three children were all studying in Tana she lived alone – unusually for a Malagasy – in a large detached house jerry-built some thirty-five years ago. The hall door led directly into a high-ceilinged, meagrely furnished living-room occupying the entire ground floor; on the left, as one entered, a wide marble staircase with wrought-iron banisters led to two upper floors. (It turned to wood beyond the first landing.)
When we had insisted that we needed no supper we were shown to our spacious room, furnished with a double bed and a small table and chair. If there is such a thing as a five-watt bulb that room had it and the wall switch was in such a state of disarray that I approached it wearing a boot on my hand. In the nearby bathroom Madame T. showed us how to deal with the loo; after flushing, one had to spend some time manipulating a lever high up on an adjacent pipe. This operation eventually enabled the overhead tank to refill but there was an art in it: the lever had a temperament. As I coaxed it in the small hours I thought wistfully of our Antsirabe earth-closet.
At 5.30 I dragged a groaning Rachel out of her flea-bag; we had to be ready for Rosy by 6. Then we heard much confused shouting below our window – it was still pitch-dark – and moments later Madame T. knocked on our door. The Ranohira bus was leaving at 6, not 6.30 – we must hurry – there might not be another for days – Madame T. would accompany us to the bus station. The snag about rucksacks is that you cannot pack them both securely and quickly. I thrust my money-belt into Rachel’s half-awake hands and told her to go ahead with the rest to secure our seats; I would follow with both rucksacks.
When I lurched downstairs under my double burden the smiling watchman was waiting; he shouldered my rucksack and from the edge of the garden we descended a cliff-face by a ladder-like stairway carved out of red earth. This led to a motor-road and just opposite was the open-air bus station. We were half-running towards the relevant wooden hut (each destination has its own hut) when Rachel, Madame T., Rosy, his mates and several other interested parties – friends, it seemed, of the watchman – came strolling towards us. No 6 a.m. service was running to Ranohira as there were not enough passengers to fill a bus. Nor was there a 6.30 service. No bus would leave for Ranohira before 10 a.m. Rachel handed me our tickets; everybody except the vazaha was taking this situation for granted and we pretended to. Soon such pretence would be unnecessary; we were about to learn a lot.
Rosy and his mates then disappeared from our lives and Madame T. led us up the cliff with astounding agility. ‘At least this means we’ve time for breakfast,’ muttered Rachel as we reached the top – where the turkey-cock displayed his tail and made xenophobic noises.
Thus far we had had scant opportunity to become acquainted with our hostess, but now we realised that she was a heartwarming eccentric. Beaming kindly, she hastened into the cubbyhole kitchen off the living-room and drew aside a blanket lying over an object in one corner, to reveal a coop full of hens and baby chicks. Retrieving six warm eggs, she placed them in a large bowl and handed it to Rachel. She spoke no English and her French was incomprehensible to us both. But when she laid a packet of tea (real, not herbal) on top of the eggs and pointed to the hall door we got at least half the message. On the way in we had noticed the watchman’s tiny charcoal stove.
The watchman had gone to the boulangerie leaving an iron cauldron simmering outside the ‘Wendy house’ (bent branches overgrown with vines) in which he and the turkey-cock spent their nights. I lifted the lid and we gazed speculatively at scraps of brown vegetation floating in a few litres of water. ‘If I blow on the charcoal the water will boil and we can cook the eggs,’ said I, perspicaciously. Rachel protested that this would ruin the watchman’s tea but I was in a ruthless mood. To me breakfast is the most important meal so I oppressed the underdog by dropping the eggs in the water and blowing on the charcoal. Ten minutes later Rachel fished out the eggs with the watchman’s spoon and I threw half the packet of tea into the cauldron – at which point Madame T. reappeared, as though on cue, bearing a large enamel basin, containing at least a pound of sugar, into which we poured our brew. This basin was given a place of honour on the long, handsomely carved dining-table and our hostess ladled the scalding, strong, sweet tea into enamel bowls, while urging us to eat all the eggs. When the watchman arrived with an armful of long crusty loaves she insisted that we must take two of them with us. Then she had to go – she was hearing her first court case at 8.30 – but she instructed a bewildered-looking young manservant, who had just appeared, to cherish us.
We spent the next two hours climbing up and down steep flights of steps exploring ‘the town where good is learned’ – which is what ‘Fianarantsoa’ means. In 1830 Queen Ranavalona decided to make Fianar, then a small hilltop village, into her second capital. The French also favoured it as an administrative centre and a strong missionary presence, combined with the Betsileo dedication to learning, led to its becoming Madagascar’s intellectual centre. Yet it still feels as much village as town. At the foot of the mountain paddy-fields separate different sections of the shoddy colonial commercial quarter (pretty dormant for the now being), and the poultry and pigs busying about the residential areas seem more relevant to the present than those pompous French administrative buildings which dominate the town’s middle tier. Near the summit is an attractive tangle of ancient streets where the inhabitants’ average IQ is reputed to be way above normal and the genius of Ambositra’s wood-carvers is much in evidence. Churches abound – some handsome, none well-maintained – and one of the two small, battered-looking mosques (both built by the Asian trading community) is Ismaili. Most Fianar folk are a shade or two darker than their Imerina neighbours but equally agreeable. Rachel however developed an irrational prejudice against them after we had come upon a piteously mewing kitten tied by one (rubbed raw) leg to a stool outside a Zoma stall. She tried to buy it but the woman banana-seller protested that it was too thin. I hustled Rachel away before the implications of that judgement could sink in.
We had been requested to report back to our ticket hut at 9.30. So we did, to the surprise of the man who had made the request. He was a middle-aged, plumpish, well-dressed Betsileo, consistently courteous to us but sometimes snappy with his poorest customers. Six other would-be passengers were sitting on their luggage – bundles wrapped in blankets – on the dusty ground outside the hut. One family consisted of a grandmother, mother and two small daughters. The children continuously nibbled at sticky confections bought from a perambulating seller – a youth wearing a tray around his neck who insisted on giving us three pastries for the price of two because we were vazaha. That mother remains in my mind as the only Malagasy parent I saw being unkind to children. The younger girl, aged perhaps three, was afflicted by an open festering sore on one ankle and whenever she whimpered she was either shaken or struck – treatment of which Granny evidently approved, though otherwise she seemed to have many points of disagreement with her daughter and they quarrelled sporadically for hours. Obviously that family’s vintana had been messed up; maybe they lived in a house facing the wrong way.
The other would-be passengers were powerfully built young Sakalava police officers going home on leave to Tulear. From them we learned that the Ranohira bus is the Tulear bus; for the same fare we could have gone all the way to Tulear on the west coast, our post-lemur destination. In practice Route Nationale No. 7 expires at Fianar and because of southern Madagascar’s transport problems no bus owner will gamble on Ranohira–Tulear passengers replacing Fianar–Ranohira passengers: hence our having to pay full fare. When eventually we saw Ranohira we perfectly understood this reasoning; its inhabitants are not the sort who range far and wide.
By 10.30 our group had not grown and the ticket-officer announced that we would have to wait a little longer to fill four more seats. At 11.30 I asked my interpreter if he had really said four – or was it forty? Rachel raised her head from Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey – a suitably proportioned volume for Malagasy bus-travellers – and said it might have been fourteen … At 12.15 the ticket-officer, in response to a query from one of the Sakalava, said the Tulear bus would be departing at 4 p.m. but all passengers should report to the hut not later than 3.15.
We strolled back to the town, leaving our rucksacks in the hut, and decided to study up-market Fianar in the Hotel Moderne du Betsileo, opposite the railway station. There, had we recently won the Sweep, we could have bought a large bottle of Coca-cola for £4.80. The two customers in the bar were a young Frenchman and an elderly Gujerati, drinking coffee and vehemently denouncing import restrictions. Most of Madagascar’s Asian businessmen speak fluent French. We looked for the loo; the signs leading to it were not visual but olfactory and it was – and had been for a long time – devoid of water but not of other things.
Next we investigated the railway station which was deserted apart from a dog – remotely related to a red setter – who sat scratching himself by the ticket office. Fianar’s station serves only one town, the east coast port of Manakara. This line was built in 1927 when French colonists were planning to settle the fertile land around Fianar. Then someone discovered that Manakara port, being unprotected from the heavy Indian Ocean swell, is unable to take modern shipping. And so the Betsileo country was left to the Betsileo and the Fianar–Antsirabe–Tana railway link was never built.
The door to the platform was locked but through the large keyhole we could see a brand-new bright red pick-up van, with a green canvas cover, standing inexplicably on the track near a tree laden with scarlet blossom. Above the keyhole a prominent notice announced that tickets are on sale twice a week but only between 5.10 and 5.40 p.m. I was beginning to find the Malagasy obsession with precise timings morbidly fascinating. Why, for instance, had our ticket-officer asked us to return at 3.15? Rachel plausibly suggested that for most Malagasy time, in our sense of that term, does not exist. When such importations as bus and train services seem to require some hour to be specified, they simply mention a time at random.
We mooched across paddy-fields and climbed a scrubby hill by a looping cart-track, passing several nineteenth-century Betsileo villas. As we rested on a rock – it was very hot – and were gazing west over an alluring expanse of low irregular mountains, Rachel suddenly asked, ‘Are you miz about taking buses? Do you wish we could trek to Tulear?’ She was evidently suffering from a rush of guilt to the heart, feeling she had become a blight on my travelling life.
‘Not at all,’ I replied, truthfully. ‘You can hardly call this “taking buses”, in the generally accepted meaning of that phrase. Anyway we couldn’t trek through the south – too many bandits and too little water.’
On the way down we admired a faintly Byzantine red-brick church beside an elaborate missionary compound – a school and hospital built around quadrangles. Then we dawdled back to the bus station via a very dormant colonial shopping street displaying the usual barren shelves. Fianar, as is to be expected of an intellectual capital, has a remarkable number of bookshops. But their stock is now reduced to sun-dimmed, fly-spotted tomes of ‘missionary press’ provenance – in both Malagasy and French – widely spaced in the windows to make a better show.
We found half a dozen additional passengers within the hut, most of them asleep. The ticket-officer was also asleep, sitting sprawled across his small shaky desk, but the vazaha voices caused him to jerk up, blink and smile. His smile quickly faded when we asked at what time – exactly – the bus would leave. (Madame T. had invited us to a meal at 4.0 if we were still around.) He silently conveyed that this is not the sort of question tactful people ask in Malagasy bus stations. The bus would leave when enough people wanted to go to Tulear. Given that obvious fact, it is tiresome to keep on asking ‘When?’ How could any ticket-officer be expected to mind-read and calculate at what hour forty-eight Fianar people would want to go to Tulear? Meanwhile all human (Malagasy) life was there in the bus station to keep us amused.
Leaving Rachel and Lytton Strachey reunited, I went on a food-gathering expedition. As the ‘departure when full’ principle applies to most bus services, hundreds of Malagasy spend thousands of hours in bus stations – which have, therefore, something of the character of nomad settlements. At Fianar the large ‘restaurant’ shacks around three sides of a dusty quadrangle seemed mere relics of more prosperous days; the majority were offering only a meal of rice or take-away rice-buns. But savoury smells led me to an exception, where four men were enjoying rice garnished with something which required extraordinary feats of mastication. Coffee too was available here and while considering my next move I drank a cup standing by the counter. At my elbow a fat infant in a brief vest sat thoughtfully playing with his penis. His mother and a friend were de-lousing each other’s heads, occasionally pausing to attend to a sizzling pan of frying offal or stoke the mud-stove. I decided against garnished rice and returned empty-handed to Rachel.
On the way I counted four ailing buses and ‘taxi-brousse’ receiving attention. (The latter soon became ‘bashies’ in Murphy-speak.) A pall of discouragement hung over the groups surrounding these vehicles; the Malagasy are a patient people but they do get tired towards sunset. And it is tough to have waited all day for a full load, only to find that your vehicle, when loaded, will not move. Most bashies are antique Renault 1000s with fifteen to twenty seats, or antique Peugeot 403 pick-ups in which seats scavenged from dead motor-cars have been screwed, more or less securely, to the floor-boards.
Rachel had startling news – ‘Tourists are going to Tulear! Two of them, on our bus!’ She had been snooping in the hut, reading the passenger list, and seen ‘Jamie’ and ‘Adrian’; our ticket-officer used only first names, possibly because most Malagasy surnames would not fit on his dockets.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘anyone trying to get from here to Tulear on a bus is not a tourist.’ I was right. Adrian and Jamie (just down from Cambridge: a mathematician and a geographer) belonged to that new breed of rather serious-minded young – the post-hippie generation – who like rapidly to sus out three or four continents before the age of twenty-three, travelling rough but never bumming and usually taking a concerned interest in ‘North–South’ problems.
I was sitting at the ticket-officer’s table, being given an unfruitful Malagasy lesson by a jobless Betsileo engineering graduate (Moscow University), when Adrian and Jamie discovered us – to their boundless astonishment. Jamie spoke fluent French, which in various ways as yet undreamed of was to simplify our lives over the next few weeks. (I mean no disrespect to Rachel’s French, but the Malagasy are unaccustomed to French As She Is Spoke in Irish schools.)
It was now 3.45 and a long time since anyone had seen the ticket-officer. Jamie passed on a rumour that no bus was going to Tulear that day and I rejoiced, not wishing to travel in the dark. But then our friend reappeared and announced, with an unjustifiably complacent smirk, that we would be taking off in a bashie at 4.30. When he pointed to a nearby Peugeot pick-up the boys shuddered. To us it looked pretty fit, as bashies go, but Adrian grimly drew our attention to its four completely bald tyres.
By 4.45 we were all aboard. At 5.0 our canvas cover was securely lashed down; from a bashie you can see nothing, by day or by night. At 5.10 we left Fianar, in a daze of incredulity. The front seat beside the driver took three adults and a baby. The ten seats in the back took sixteen adults, five children and three babies.
At 5.40 we stopped by a roadside coffee-stall.
‘I don’t believe it!’ muttered Jamie.
Adrian, the mathematician, began to calculate how long it would take to cover five hundred and eighty miles at twenty-five miles per hour if the bashie stopped for ten minutes every twelve and a half miles.
I untied the knot beside me, drew up the green tarpaulin and peered out. The driver and his male companions were sharing a bottle of colourless but not odourless liquid. The baby was being fed from a saucerful of what might have been mashed yam. Its nappy had been removed and by the light of the stall lantern I could see a small girl scraping its contents into the ditch with a length of firewood, preparatory to folding it neatly over for replacement.
A moment later we realised that our stop had a more serious purpose than baby-care. Another jam-packed bashie passed us, whereupon our driver (etc.) stuffed themselves back into the cab and followed it closely. Its health was so bad that the two bashies were to travel to Tulear in convoy so that ours could give first aid when (not if) necessary.
Soon a sturdy seven-year-old girl was asleep in my arms, her head resting on my left bosom. She had neatly braided hair which reeked of rancid coconut oil. The two-month-old baby beside me was frequently fed by its very young mother and as frequently puked over my rucksack, wedged half-under the seat. Moments after each spurt of vomit the infant wailed pathetically, causing its mother to look grief-stricken and make loving mooing noises while producing a breast from which it again sucked avidly – though with difficulty, because it had a cold in the head. ‘Too much milk of human kindness,’ diagnosed Adrian neatly, from behind us. Obviously the real problem was a stuffed nose, leading to too much air being sucked in. I tried to console the mother by explaining this: she looked about Rachel’s age and was almost in tears of anxiety. But she spoke no French and my attempts to deliver a Dr Spock lecture in sign-language merely provoked gales of laughter among our fellow-passengers. Gradually most of the inexhaustible contents of those balloon-like breasts seemed to find their way, via the baby, into my rucksack. (Hence those missing Antsirabe pages; my diary was in the direct line of fire.)
Meanwhile a nine-month-old baby was sleeping soundly across Jamie’s knees which, as the night wore on, became damper and damper, causing him to revise his views on fatherhood as a desirable future role.
I had cunningly secured a front seat, which allowed a few extra inches of leg-room. But soon I was repenting of this selfishness. Two tattered lengths of electric flex were hanging from the roof just in front of me – serving no discernible purpose – and whenever the bashie leaped over a particularly rugged bit of road these gave a display of miniature forked lightning and emitted showers of sparks. At last the milky young mother beside me lost her nerve and shrieked at the driver. A few minutes later a disembodied arm and hand emerged from the cab to wrap newspaper around the flexes and shove them into a convenient aperture. Adrian advised us how best to escape if a fire started; he reckoned not much brute force would be needed to dismantle the crudely welded tarpaulin-frame.
When our twin had its first puncture at 8.45 Adrian suggested a stroll. But there was no time; even in the dark the Malagasy change tyres or wheels with the speed that comes of much practice.
The engine complication that followed took longer to sort out. Someone needed to pee but we discovered that we were locked in and that the arcane knowledge required to release us was possessed exclusively by one of the men lying under our twin. Suddenly I got the giggles; the comic elements of Malagasy life have a cumulative effect. My mirth proved so contagious that soon our bashie shook with laughter, to the driver’s uneasy astonishment.
Scavenged car seats are rarely without blemish and soon terrible things had been done to the boys’ buttocks, less well equipped than ours to withstand metal protrusions. Around midnight Jamie’s left buttock, especially, became a major cause for concern – his concern. By then the laughing was over and we had each become too obsessed with his or her own exquisite discomfort to give a damn about anybody else’s.
From my diary I quote:
‘All night a rising fog of fine grey dust through the floorboards – not as pretty as red dust. Makes us cough. Why doesn’t it make the Malagasy cough? Also worries Jamie dreadfully as he thinks it may get into his rucksack (which it will) and spoil his clean shirt. Suspect him of dandyism. But he’s heroic with that baby though complains much of ‘ethnic pong’. With some reason. It’s very distinctive. Interesting to analyse: filthy garments, rancid coconut oil, inferior petrol, infantile effluent, homemade alcohol (cane spirits?), dust, rotten fish (no doubt a present for Someone Special), bad breaths, fresh sweat – only stale socks missing as all feet bare. Night air so cold no ventilation possible. Superb frosty sky – a glory of vibrant stars. Lots of time to star-gaze during other bashie’s breakdowns. One so severe needed help from big oil-truck coming from Tulear. Lucky it came when it did; little other traffic. Our driver quite good: only a few wild swervings when he seemed almost out of control. For long stretches he achieved about sixty bone-jarring miles an hour in defiance of horrendous corrugations. Elsewhere we crawled at fifteen or less over what felt like lunar surface. Stopped 1.45 a.m. to eat in mud shack in middle of nowhere. Everyone sits at long trestle table, lit by one candle stump, and gets a heaped plate of rice. Communal tin basin of fish-stew in centre. Everyone that is except the Murfs who’ve had fish-stew. Adrian gives me a fistful of his rice and I wander out to eat by starlight. Flat landscape. Soon after pass through Ihosy – only town en route. Stop twice not far beyond for small children to be thrust into cab from edge of pitch black roadside. Jamie wonders – “Is there a slave market in Tulear?” I wonder how four adults, two children and a baby fit in a cab made for two. At 3.30-ish we all walk a mile or so across a river-bed – only empty bashies can cope with that. Arrive Ranohira at 5.15. It took exactly twelve hours to cover 260 miles. The mathematician by then past doing sums but Rachel says we averaged about twenty-one mph.’
The bashies did not linger and as their engine sounds faded we walked slowly by starlight up Ranohira’s main street, between silent shuttered houses. Then a few men appeared, noiselessly passing us: no footwear to warn of their approach. The starlight emphasised their extraordinary height – extraordinary because we had become used to the smallness of the Merina and Betsileo. These seemed giants, striding out of the blackness. We were now in Bara country; and the Bara tribe, traditionally warriors and cattle-herders (and rustlers) are among the most African-looking of all the Malagasy. Those men, we later learned, were going to work on the new Fianar–Tulear road being constructed by a French company.
Beyond the main street the road turns sharp right and the houses become shacks. Here one could feel the immensity of the flatness all around; this was a new land. And not only topographically: the spirit of the place was quite unlike the Highlands. I wondered afterwards how this difference had come through so strongly, within moments of our arrival. Had we travelled from Fianar by day it might have been otherwise; our ‘Mystery Tour’, like an air-flight, allowed no adjustments to be made en route. Also, my completely sleepless night may have left me in that odd state of hyper-sensitivity sometimes brought about by lack of food and/or sleep.
On the edge of the town we sat facing east and breakfasted off bread and chocolate while awaiting the dawn. Within moments it came, memorably – first a mere draining away of the darkness and stars being quenched, then a strange murky yellow glow like a smoky bush-fire, then redness seeping into and finally conquering the yellow. And above it was suddenly blue, a mild silvery blue that soon would darken and harden.
Up and down the street doors now opened and from them, like an answer to prayer, came women bearing tall Thermos flasks. These were placed on roadside tables, soon to be joined by maize-flour buns and little bowls of bony fish. Ranohira profits from a steady flow of daytime traffic (perhaps three vehicles an hour), this being the only east–west road in the whole vastness of southern Madagascar. We made euphorically for the nearest Thermos. A dignified Merina woman shook hands and served us large mugs of excellent coffee, then called her teenage daughter who hurried out with a cloth-covered basket of hot brown buns. Most of the coffee-ladies, we noticed, looked more Merina than anything else.
Our next need was the Bureau d’Eaux et Forêts officer; he would register our presence, take our fee, see us through the police post and show us the path to the Reserve. Our coffee-lady spoke no French but when shown our permits directed us to the Post Office, far down the wide straggly street. Not surprisingly, it was closed at 6.15 a.m. (Later we discovered that it rarely opens.) We again showed our permits, to a tall haughty-looking youth wrapped in an ankle-length orange and white blanket and wearing a jockey-cap of the same material. He shook his head, bemused, and hurried away from us. Then, up a narrow laneway beside the Post Office, Rachel spotted a yellow sign fifteen feet wide and six feet long saying – PARO NATIONAL DE L’ISALO. On closer inspection this board’s significance was far from clear. It stood where the laneway faded out amidst a scattering of African-looking mud huts with thatched or tin roofs; and its bilingual small-print information was no longer legible. Irresolutely we surveyed the golden-brown landscape ahead, dotted with spindly top-heavy trees and banana-surrounded compounds. Then, from behind a tangle of thorny scrub, came another blanket-wrapped man – middle-aged, mahogany-coloured and moustached (unusual in Madagascar). He nodded knowingly at our permits and pointed to a group of three nearby huts.
The family were just getting up. Astonished children of all sizes came tumbling around us, rubbing sleep out of their eyes. I extended our permits to the eldest, a comely adolescent lass carrying a baby. She stared at it blankly, stared at us equally blankly – then suddenly began to laugh, louder and louder, leaning against the nearest mud wall and rhythmically slapping the baby’s bare bottom. Her siblings and cousins joined in (at least we hoped some of them were cousins) and this storm of hilarity brought distant neighbours to their hut doors. It was highly infectious mirth; I sat on the verandah floor of the biggest hut and succumbed to it. Only Rachel – not of an age to relish being laughed at – remained po-faced.
Mamma appeared then, short and fat and blowzy, tying a handkerchief around her tight curls. She seized the permit, thrust it into her bosom, grabbed my left hand, tapped my watch, held up seven fingers and pointed to the closed door behind me. ‘Bureau!’ she said – her only utterance. Appearances notwith-standing, she was a very with-it lady. A moment later we heard her shouting at (presumably) her husband who was (we assumed) the Forêt Officer. He was chuckling when he came around the corner, securing his trousers with a length of brightly coloured cotton. He shook hands vigorously, his eyes twinkling at us as though we were long-lost friends. (‘They’re all crazy around here!’ muttered Rachel ungraciously – but she had had less than three hours sleep.) Pappa was indeed the Forêt Officer, yet nothing could be done until the Post Master arrived at 7. Ours not to reason why. We laid our weary bodies full length on the verandah, using our rucksacks as pillows – to the squealing delight of the smaller children, now augmented by their contemporaries from far and wide.
As we had noticed in Tana, the Bureau d’Eaux et Forêts is uniquely efficient. At 6.55 the Post Master was beside us, breathless and beaming, his trousers ending six inches above his bare feet and his too-small woman’s shirt-blouse not meeting his waistband so that an area of darkness was visible between the two. He greeted us in French – doffing his straw Homburg to reveal iron-grey curls – then ushered us into a bare, cobwebbed office where our footprints on the carpet of dust proved how rare a species the Isalo tourist has become. The Visitors’ Book confirmed this; the signatures since 1972 filled less than a page. While the Forêt Officer slowly copied the details of our permits into a ledger, using my pen, the Post Master suggested that we pay on our return because he could not change my 5,000 FMG note. Isalo trekkers have to give a date of return and if they then fail to appear a search-party goes out – at least in theory. This precaution was instituted by the French because of the lack of paths and water.
The Post Master led us through the town – a mark of honour, we realised, as the populace (what there was of it around) saluted him deferentially. He had an odd gait, a shuffling trot that roused the dust. In a dismal deserted market-square behind the main street we stopped outside a fly-loud butcher’s shop. For ten minutes our guide talked earnestly to a sullen young woman who must have just finished disembowelling a carcass: she was blood to the elbows. The conversation was all about the vazaha – but why discuss us in such depth with the butcher’s wife? Then a small smudged notice on the door caught my eye; it revealed that this was the headquarters of the People’s Executive Committee.
Next stop, police. Beside a long colonial bungalow in a barren sisal-hedged compound rose the ruins of a radio transmitter, rusty against the sky. A French idea, our guide explained superfluously. It symbolised modern Madagascar for me: a country that has involuntarily sampled Hi-Tek and decided it is not worth the effort. After the Post Master’s third shout a tall, unsmiling Bara policeman came slouching along the verandah buttoning his tunic; he was still wearing pyjama-legs. He took our passports and permits gingerly, as though they might contain a letter-bomb, and gave them some thought. Then he disappeared. He had gone, said our guide, to look for writing-paper. What he found scarcely answered that description – a sheaf of filthy scraps that might recently have been wrapped around his breakfast. The Post Master sensibly abandoned us at this stage; his daughter was married to a policeman and lived in a nearby hut. When he returned some twenty minutes later the paperwork was nearly complete and the policeman looked strained and exhausted. He had been copying out verbatim the Irish Government’s request in Gaelic that everyone everywhere should treat us nicely.
From the edge of Ranohira the low blue-grey Isalo escarpment looks deceptively commonplace: just another stretch of rock-mountain, about an hour’s walk away. As the only cleft in the wall was plainly visible we urged our guide to come no further, but he insisted on leading us down a manioc-planted slope and across a mile of scrubby flatness where tall unknown trees marked the course of a winding stream. Near the base of the escarpment our path vanished in dense, coarse, shoulder-high grass. The Post Master hesitated, looking both apprehensive and embarrassed, so I insisted on his turning back. He was an elderly man and clearly not very fit.
Deep fissures soon deflected us from what had seemed the obvious route into the cleft. We wasted scarce energy by climbing too high on one of its golden-grassed walls, scrambling between grey crags. Already the heat was fierce and my sleepless night began to tell; I reflected that I too am getting elderly. When the sound of running water led us back to the path we paused to shed the bashie dust in a cold clear pool, secluded among bushes. A small shiny black snake slithered away from us over the mud and swarms of tiny black flies tormented us as we dressed.
Fifteen minutes later we were climbing the escarpment, hauling ourselves up with the aid of rocks and shrubs, curious to see what sort of terrain lemurs favour as a reserve but unaware that we were approaching a frontier. Much may have been written in French about Isalo, but I had found only passing references in English to this eroded limestone massif, some 4,000 feet above sea-level and uninhabitable – by humans. French geologists invented a word to describe it: ruiniforme. Occasionally English writers appropriate this by knocking off the ‘e’ but it is not in any of my dictionaries. Reaching the top of the escarpment, we appreciated the need for a new word. A moment before, we had been in a normal though exotic environment. Here we might have been on another planet.
Half-an-hour later Rachel suddenly stood still, looked around and said – with perhaps a faint edge of unease to her voice – ‘This is a lost world.’
That evening I wrote in my diary:
‘Over the escarpment we found a weird expanse of flat rock surrounded on three sides by – you can’t possibly call them mountains. Or peaks. Or ridges. Or cliffs or hills. I’ve seen the work of erosion in many places but never anything like this. It is, literally, incredible. You don’t believe it. You think you’re hallucinating. And it gets more so. As we crossed the rock (fresh breeze: no longer too hot tho’ 11 a.m.) our boots were loud on the bare slabs – smooth here, with low thorny tufts growing in the crevices and a sly olive-green weed that filled our socks with almost invisible agonising barbs. Off the rock onto a thin carpet of razor-sharp red grass. Under a scattering of green trees lay green-brown fruit, hard and bitter. Then we faced a contorted silver rock-wall, friable and full of holes. Curved ‘handles’ of rock were left along the crest. We stared at a row of sculpted ‘busts’ in the near distance: an Egyptian Pharaoh, a tangle-haired caveman, a neat-headed woman. The hallucinatory feeling strengthened. How can wind and water have done all this? And the lichen colours! Sweeping splodges of yellow and red and green – some monster’s palette. Our ghost of a path ended here, at a narrow gap in the rock-wall. Below lay a flat square of land, some four miles by four: grey gravel with separate tall clumps of orange grass glowing like fires between misshapen scrawny green trees. And on all sides ridges covered with inconceivable distortions of rock. The hundred foot descent was eased by shallow holes conveniently placed in the sloping cliff – man-made? But inconvenient to break a leg here: thought I might do better without an unbalancing rucksack and rolled it down. We looked for a path but could find none. Saw many smallish termite hills and thick ground-spider webs. Slim three to six inch lizards scuttled hither and thither. Very few birds. A silence like nowhere else. Everything harsh, dry, grotesque – most things painful to touch. Only the sky looks familiar. A puzzling number of tall burnt trees – still standing, main branches intact, but completely blackened – macabre skeletons. Yet no trace of recent ground fires. Are these victims of pasture-burning long ago, or of lightning? Probably the latter; scores of Malagasy are killed annually by lightning. This region can’t ever have been grazed. People don’t even come here to gather fuel – deadwood lies all around. We camped at 3.30 where there were enough loose stones to build cairns for the pegs; impossible to find any patch of ground to take them. So a shaky tent. Sleeping under the stars not on: too many giant scorpions, and various species of ants, and flies that go bite in the night; not to mention the ground-spiders – the Malagasy say they dart out of their burrows and attack without provocation. This seems unlikely but am not disposed to increase the sum of zoological knowledge by personal experimentation.’
When I look into my memory, I find our Isalo days on a shelf entirely apart from any other mental souvenir of travel. On that first evening Rachel was asleep by 4.15 (a bad case of post-bashie exhaustion) and for two hours I walked alone through the strangeness – in a wide circle, lest I might lose the tent. The unique sense of isolation was inexplicable, with Ranohira and Route Nationale No. 7 only a few miles away. We are after all accustomed to far more remote regions, many days’ walk from the nearest town or motor-road. But in the Isalo Massif, though it may sound crazy to admit it, the isolation feels temporal as well as spatial. On levels other than the visual, this is an hallucinatory place. Something very odd happens to time. An eerie out-of-the-present sensation overwhelmed me in spasms; but whether the movement was backwards or forwards (or both) I never could decide. Beyond any doubt certain areas of this massif – so specially sacred to the Malagasy – have a richness of unremembered history; the atmosphere is saturated with more mysteries than erosion can conjure up. Such flawless solitude usually brings me tranquillity; but not, somehow, in Isalo. It is subtly sinister, although – if this can be imagined – enjoyably so.
We remarked next day on the illusion of immensity, despite the comparative smallness of this landscape’s scale. There are, by the standards of the world’s great mountain ranges, no vast expanses, no profound chasms, no awesome peaks. Perhaps this illusion has to do with being alone in a place now virtually abandoned by man.
In one day’s walk we found solitary symmetrical rock humps a quarter of a mile long – rocks sharp and smooth – rocks compacted and aerated – rocks in tidily arranged, multicoloured layers – rocks hollow and perfectly circular like small barrels – rocks underfoot in long pitted sheets – rocks overhead parodying huts and castles and skyscrapers – and acres of wavy rock on a gorge floor, like a stormy sea immobilised forever. Occasionally, too, we came upon a rectangular stack of very thin rock slabs, each stack some eight feet high, six feet wide and twelve feet long, partly overgrown by bizarre vegetation. These ancient tombs were the only visible traces of mankind and at first glance they seemed just another geological extravagance. Nobody now knows whose ancestors lie within.
We saw only two flowers, both peculiar to the massif. One had long waxy pinkish-orange petals on three spindly foot-high stems growing from a cactus of the same size and construction as a globe artichoke; the hard shiny outer leaves, curling away from the heart, were changing colour to match the flower. The second blossom belonged to a pale grey cactus, swede-turnip-sized, which felt hollow when tapped. At first I mistook it for a miniature baobab, yet another of those strange Malagasy mutations. It had a disorganised sprouting of thick stems one of which bore a solitary yellow flower no bigger than a primrose.
Early on our second morning the whisper of distant water led us through a maze of free-standing cliffs – all grooves and cornices – to the edge of a sheer-sided, winding canyon miles long and 300 feet deep. Ribbons of short green grass accompanied a clear stream along the canyon floor. Aeons ago, the massive plateau directly across from us had cracked slightly to form a side-canyon, its precipitous slopes densely forested. Here and there amidst that lush growth we glimpsed the sparkle of a waterfall. ‘That could be lemur territory,’ I said – and before Rachel had time to reply I saw a flash of white between two trees high on the cliff directly opposite our own.
Exulting, we flung off our rucksacks and settled down with our binoculars, legs dangling over the abyss. Soon we could see five lemurs: but for me there remains an incomparable magic about that first glimpse of white. All were sitting upright on the branches of small trees growing from the precipice; and all were facing east, to catch the first warmth of the sun which moments before had reached their cliff top. The Malagasy believe these sifaka lemurs to be sun-worshippers, because of this morning ritual, and for centuries to kill them was fady. But alas! the razana rescinded this taboo more than a generation ago when a rapidly increasing human population began to cause seasonal food shortages.
Our ecstatic study of the sifaka continued all day, facilitated by their thick, silky, pure white fur (apart from a red-brown ‘cap’). They needed no protective colouring before man came to Madagascar. While feeding, resting or grooming they keep their very long furry tails curled between their legs. But when they leap – covering enormous distances with arms outstretched towards their branch-goal, as in a gesture of welcome – those tails plume out like horizontal parachutes.
During the noon hours the sifaka disappeared into their forest and were still. We then set up a nudist colony on our cliff top; you can safely do that in Isalo, as on a desert island, and for some odd reason I felt much more at ease with this place when stark naked – apart from footwear. Our return to nature was not however very practical as that site provided an unprecedented level of camping discomfort. The only shade around was a meagre bush under which lived a city of savage ants. Merely to brush against any of the abundant adjacent vegetation, whatever its form, drew blood. To walk by the edge of the canyon invited a broken ankle or severed vein amidst a loose rubble of knife-sharp rock-fragments. The whole area was a masochist’s paradise. There was not even one tolerable seat, erosion having produced an eruption of small jagged points on every available boulder. And the many carnivorous insects – undesirable as bedmates – prevented us from sitting on our flea-bags. The least penitential resting place was a sloping slab that looked as though it might at any moment slide forward into the canyon. It was placed symmetrically between two fantastic rock formations: oblong, hollowed, shaped exactly like children’s coffins with the lids off. The longer I looked at these, the more possible it seemed that this had once been their function. Without a shred of scientific knowledge or evidence, I was beginning to suspect the presence of man in the Isalo Massif long before the first settlers arrived from Polynesia – or wherever. The Malagasy have an oral tradition that the Vazimba people were indigenous to Madagascar, a belief scorned by vazaha experts because the earliest archaeological evidence of human settlement dates from the ninth century AD. But maybe the Malagasy know best.
Soon after three o’clock branches began to move in Lemurville: slight movements up and down the forested precipice. ‘This is very suspenseful,’ murmured Rachel, as we studied those small stirrings amidst the dense greenery. It seemed that tea-time might involve no more than sitting around invisibly (from our point of view) chewing berries. But soon the whole group – six including a baby firmly attached to mother’s chest – moved out into the main canyon where their forest overflowed onto the lower part of the yellow-grey wall. We rushed along our fissured cliff top, disregarding the various injuries inflicted on us en route by the environment, and about a mile upstream found an ideal vantage point – an outcrop of rock – from which to observe the sifakas’ main area of operations until their sunset bedtime.
There could be no question of erecting our tent on this site but we used it as an anti-insect double sleeping-bag, arranging the mosquito-netting windows over our faces to allow for star-gazing and ventilation. The least unsuitable ‘bed’ – a rock-slab clear of vegetation – sloped radically and had immovable limestone protuberances. We talked more than we slept, as the golden patterns of the constellations glided across a wide black sky. Around midnight some nearby creature – whether bird or beast I know not – called hoarsely, plaintively and persistently for about an hour. Examining each other’s bodies by the light of dawn, we saw that the night’s ‘rest’ had been a bruising experience.
Soon three of our Antandroy sifaka – found only in southern Madagascar – were again visible, just below their cliff top, awaiting the first warmth. I focused on them with affection; in that arid world of warped stone and hostile plants, of utter silence and immobility, those cheerful lively little creatures, in their lush inaccessible oasis, by now seemed close friends. Rachel was perhaps a trifle disappointed that the gorge always separated us, but I craved no greater intimacy. It was good that they slept and played and fed and sun-worshipped beyond the reach of man, as their ancestors had done for countless millennia before man existed.
Back in Ranohira, approaching the ‘Bureau’ to report our safe return, we were fascinated to see a young man standing on a table in front of the Paro National sign, meticulously repainting it. Already the Malagasy small print had been made legible and he was starting on the French side. Was this a direct result of our arrival? Had we revitalised Ranohira’s Bureau d’Eaux et Forêts, giving new hope and pride to all concerned? But despite this apparent resurgence of faith in its future, we left the Bureau half an hour later with heavy hearts. It is hard to believe that Madagascar’s conservation laws will be enforced in time to save the sifaka. Unlike some other lemur species – notably the popular ring-tailed lemur – sifaka do not survive in captivity. If the Malagasy cannot be induced to cross them off the menu, they will inevitably join the many other unique creatures, furred and feathered, who have comparatively recently become extinct in Madagascar.
To find onward transport from Ranohira you wait at the roadside for an unspecified period – an hour, a day, two days … No passing bus or bashie will have room for extra passengers, but so what? No Malagasy driver will scruple to increase the sufferings of his already tortured cargo.
At 2.30 p.m. we settled down on a carpet of small sharp stones close to a coffee-table and opposite the Catholic church – large, tin-roofed, newly white-washed, its neat tower and slim tin spire rising above the poinsettia and young pines planted by the resident Italian priest. As we wrote our diaries a dozen chubby toddlers sat cross-legged in front of us, solemnly staring. Then one of the coffee-ladies took pity on us and provided a seat of paper sugar-sacks in the shade of her cactus-hedge.
Twenty minutes later Roland from Amiens leant out of his new red Land Cruiser and invited us to stay at the nearby road construction base-camp. In a day or two, depending on the arrival of a spare part, a camp truck would take us to Tulear on its weekly mission to fetch food and fuel-oil.
The base-camp was a scattered hamlet of bungalows each with a mini-garden, plus a thatched bar open to the breeze on three sides, a communal dining-room-cum-kitchen-hut, and a three-roomed guest-hut with a six-foot-high refrigerator which did not work. The colony’s living conditions were austere but adequate; unlike American exiles, they had not attempted to re-create their homeland in the middle of nowhere.
During the next day and a half we were cherished by that odd little enclave of vazaha whose long exposure to the Malagasy way of life had left them with no alternative but to adapt to it – or become nervous wrecks. Presumably the building of 220 miles of road through semi-desert is, in the normal course of events, routine stuff for a major construction company. But when the course of events is abnormal it becomes virtually impossible. For the past two years, we were told, the Malagasy government had not paid their agreed share of the costs and there was some doubt about the Ranohira–Tulear stretch being completed. The 60-mile Ihosy–Ranohira stretch was almost finished; for three years 500 men had been working on it. The Malagasy machine operators (mainly Betsileo) were paid 45,000 FMG a month, the labourers (mainly Bara) 20,000 FMG. These were excellent wages, though with the rate of exchange at 650 FMG to the pound sterling they did not seem so to us at first hearing. Roland was gloomy because two days previously the government had announced its intention of buying from the USA 12,700 tonnes of rice, and 1,400 tonnes of cooking-oil, at a total cost of 2.1 million FMG – in his view a needless expenditure, entirely owing to the mismanagement of agriculture over the past decade. How much better if all those FMGs could have been devoted to road-building! And yet, he mused, is there much point in building roads when there is no evidence that anybody will maintain them when the builders have gone home?
Despite his Ranohira frustration, Roland – the director of operations, within a year of retirement – seemed to have no serious adjustment problems. He had grown up in Tamatave, the son and grandson of French settlers, and he loved Madagascar with a quiet, touching intensity. His bungalow was like a well-cared-for natural history museum, crammed with magnificent specimens of butterflies, beetles, birds, snakes, sea-shells, semi-precious stones, dried flowers and leaves, polished samples of rare trees and bits of Aepyornis egg-shells. (The Aepyornis was Marco Polo’s ‘Roc’) For him this last job, after a working lifetime spent in French colonial Africa, was a good excuse to be where he most wanted to be. His wife, however, felt otherwise. She had implacably retreated to Amiens after a year in Ranohira. It was not, we agreed, the sort of place where a middle-aged gregarious housewife could be expected to thrive. No other respectable Frenchwoman lived within 200 kilometres (we longed to hear about the unrespectable ones), letters to and from France took from four to six weeks and the only telephone link was with Ihosy: a town Madame Roland felt no urge to be linked with. Also, she was afraid to drive around on her own. Bandits abound in southern Madagascar. And there is no petrol station on the 112-mile stretch from Ihosy to Sakaraha.
Most of the vazaha workers had recently been recalled; because of the cash shortage there was no longer enough for them to do. Apart from Roland, only three Frenchmen remained on site: all unmarried and in their thirties with semi-resident local mistresses. The chief mechanic was a German-Bolivian whose English-speaking Brazilian wife had an effusive half-grown Siamese cat named Missee and a self-confessed dependence on valium. Only Roland took any interest in things Malagasy and he, as the Malagasy-speaker, dealt so indulgently with the superlatively inefficient Bara domestic staff that each meal-time became an impromptu farce. ‘You can’t be angry with them,’ he explained, ‘because they try so hard to please.’
One of the semi-resident young women, Annemarie, spoke some English and taught at Ranohira’s primary (and only) school. Her great-grandfather had been the Merina Governor of Ihosy under the Monarchy; in 1891, during a Bara raid on the small Merina garrison, he died for Queen if not for country. His son later served in the French administration under Colonel Louis Lyautey. Lyautey, appointed to ‘pacify’ southern Madagascar, attempted to obey orders from Paris by replacing Merina administrators with local mpanjaka (tribal chiefs). But soon the French Central Audit Office in Tana was making unreasonable demands, looking for things like ‘clear statements of forms of expenditure in the Bara country’. Having witnessed a few Bara mpanjaka trying to comply with these requests, Lyautey informed Governor-General Galliéni, and Paris, that Madagascar could not be administered without the Merina.
Annemarie, though born two years after Independence, was an ardent Francophile, rather naively dreaming of married bliss in France with her construction engineer. Having observed the couple together, we doubted if this dream would come true. In another exotic place, her beloved would almost certainly want another exotic mistress. She explained that her family would approve of her marrying an ‘educated’ Frenchman but would oppose any mésalliance with either an uneducated Frenchman or a non-Merina. Although I did not like to ask, I think we may take it that they would equally disapprove of an ‘uneducated’ (peasant: Andeva) Merina. But how would they decide between an ‘educated’ (though dark and crinkly-haired) Bara and an Andeva? Probably they would go for the latter, reasoning that you can educate a peasant but you cannot de-black a Bara. Colour-prejudice is not exclusive to us whites, though it has been remarked that the arrival of Europeans in Imerina at the beginning of the nineteenth century seems to have accentuated Merina class-and colour-consciousness.
Modern Malagasy marriage taboos can be confusing for the vazaha. Often class barriers seem higher than tribal barriers, yet among the Merina and the Betsileo it has always been taboo to marry anyone with the faintest trace of negro blood. When making such genetic judgements hair-type is taken more seriously than skin-colour; long, straight, silky black hair is a hallmark of Polynesian ancestry that cannot be disputed or feigned. The merest hint of crinkliness is assumed to betray slave blood – rather illogically, given the Malagasy’s probable history en route to Madagascar.
The fact that the Malagasy Republic now feels like a united nation must be attributed to one of its citizens’ most attractive characteristics: forbearance. I first fully appreciated the unifying power of Malagasy culture in Ranohira, where the tribal mix is so evident: Merina and Betsileo peasants crossed with Bara, Sakalava, Mahafaly and Antandroy, to mention but a few of the possibilities. Such unity seems even more remarkable when one remembers how recently certain tribes – the Bara, for instance – lost their independence.
During King Radama’s reign (1810–28) the Bara tolerated the Merina occupation of their capital, Ihosy – which we had passed through in hours too small to tell us anything about it. Yet these warriors never considered themselves to have been conquered and as the Merina expanded south the Bara maintained their own expansion to the west, founding a new capital – Ankazoabo – in 1838. At intervals they resisted further Merina encroachments and in 1873 thousands of troops were sent from Imerina to suppress a major ‘rebellion’. The renowned commander of this force was Ravoninahitriniarivo, later Queen Ravalona’s Foreign Minister. He wore a velvet glove, paying lavishly for all supplies and releasing prisoners instead of enslaving them. The Bara submitted to him within weeks, but despite such temporary victories the Merina found it impossible to keep a firm grip on Bara territory. It was effectively conquered only by the much more ruthless French, in 1900.
After our close encounters with Isalo’s rare insects I was in a pitiable state that night, either dementedly scratching or applying ineffectual ointment to a mass of inflamed welts and running sores. At 2.30 a.m. I decided to try a cooling shower but there was no water. Rachel too scratched almost incessantly, yet never woke.
Next (Sunday) morning we found Ranohira’s two churches quarter-full. Both were urgently in need of repair and without interior decorations, apart from a garish Italian Stations of the Cross. Schoolchildren made up fifty per cent of the congregations and from the porches we enjoyed their enthusiastic hymn-singing, our presence within having proved too much of a distraction. Everyone was spruced up for the Sabbath but the relationship between colour, class and creed was striking: Protestants fairish and mildly prosperous, Catholics darkish and obviously poorer.
No one would voluntarily linger in Ranohira yet I was glad Fate had arranged this glimpse of small-town life in southern Madagascar. The contrast with what we had seen of small-town life in the poorest region of Imerina was instructive. Compared to Ranohira, Manalalondo, though virtually inaccessible to motor-traffic, seems like Paris: the reverse of what one would expect, Ranohira being on a National Highway. Certain features are of course shared. Neither area has electricity or a medical service (no health care is available in Ranohira, and very little anywhere else between Fianar and Tulear). Yet life expectancy in Imerina is fifty-six years, as against forty-two in southern Madagascar. The Merina have a high traditional standard of public hygiene – their villages are conspicuously clean and tidy – and a more hardworking population on more fertile land means a better diet.
However, we saw no extreme poverty in Madagascar. The Ranohira people were reasonably well dressed and seemed adequately fed and housed. Their dreary domestic architecture was obviously French-inspired – or uninspired – but the town must have looked less dismal when regularly white-washed, as in colonial times. (Several disused official buildings proved that the place has lost some status since Independence.) The only attractive houses, built a little way beyond the town on dusty plots growing sugar-cane and banana plants, were Betsileo- or Merina-owned. Thatched and golden-walled, some had a kitchen-replica of the dwelling nearby – small, but not so small as the four-foot-high hen-houses, also replicas of the family home, which stood by many gable-ends. As Rachel remarked, the dwelling, the kitchen and the hen-house, all identical in design and materials, created a Three Bears effect.
Ranohira has no market, the population being only two thousand and the surrounding area virtually uninhabited. We investigated its shops in depth, searching with wild optimism for portable food. The two main stores, having no room for customers to enter, displayed their goods in tin basins by the roadside: a little rice, maize-grain, sugar and salt. The cloth-merchants sat in cubby-holes lined with cotton bales. Two other shops were so small and dark you could easily miss them and it would not matter if you did. They stocked only the ubiquitous and dubious tinned zebu, a few rusty tins of Nestles milk, a few bars of mouldy chocolate and a few packets of nauseating biscuits. Ranohira’s three hotels are pretty dormant for the now being. One was previously owned by a French couple responsible for the town’s conversational and distinguished-looking cats, all bearing signs of Siamese forebears.
After church, some worshippers stopped on their way home to buy a fistful of small fresh fish or large prawns, being sold by the coffee-ladies. These delicacies arrive on vehicles passing through from Tulear. Less virtuous types had been celebrating the Sabbath by spending their road-construction wages on home-distilled spirits. We passed three young men wavering down the main street at 10 a.m. and Rachel charitably concluded that for them this must be the end of Saturday rather than the beginning of Sunday. Later we asked Roland how the majority spend their high wages – on more zebu, he said, for their families’ herds.
At the end of a long walk across the pastures that form Ranohira’s agricultural hinterland – vast expanses of coarse red-brown grass – we returned dehydrated to the town. The local water is to be avoided, even after the treble treatment of boiling, filtering and pilling, and we were feeling guilty about our depletion of the camp’s precious supply of Coca-cola and Antsirabe fizzy orange. So we made desperate efforts to be self-sufficient and were directed to one of the defunct hotels. Five minutes of battering on the locked door roused a grave, poised young Merina woman wearing a nightgown under her lamba. She sold us her remaining stock: two bottles of Coca-cola and a bottle of limonady, costing £2.50. These came from a non-functioning refrigerator, once gas-powered. The limonady was so sickly that we had to try not to taste while swallowing it. I felt sorry for that young woman; one sensed that she was enduring a considerable degree of unaccustomed hardship. Such people are hardest hit by Madagascar’s economic collapse. The land-owning peasants can get by; the small hotelier or craftsman or merchant or bashie-owner suffers a cruel decline in living-standards when there is almost no flow of cash or goods.
We left Ranohira at 7 a.m. under a strangely beautiful sky; no blue, all white and dove-grey in wavy layers – a gentle dreamy canopy over the wide harshness of the Bara country. At dawn Ranohira had had its first rain – a five-minute sprinkle – in several months.
Our truck averaged twenty-seven mph over the hundred and sixty miles to Tulear. But that figure is misleading. For the first sixty-eight miles, to Sakaraha, the speedometer needle rarely went above twelve mph. Then the road became broken tarmac, the needle soared and we were glad to be tightly wedged in the cab as the empty oil-tanker swerved at speed around yawning craters – or on occasions (still worse) did not swerve in time. The driver was a Betsileo, his mate a dusky Vezo from a village near Tulear, where we paused for him to deliver to his wife a sack of charcoal bought cheaply en route. Both men were uncommonly large: the Betsileo very fat, the Vezo very long. Life in that cab was sweaty.
It would be easier to enjoy Madagascar’s terrain if one were an ecological innocent. Just beyond Ranohira another aspect of the Isalo is revealed as Route Nationale No. 7 – here gruesomely weather-mangled – winds through the edge of the massif. Isolated silver crags, tinged red, yellow and pink, rise gauntly from a flat plain, golden-brown and sparsely grassed. Unsteady-looking stacks of rock-cubes, a hundred feet high, have brown whiskers of leafless scrub. And here too are many sculptures; the driver pointed out a wind-carved figure known as ‘The Queen’ who is so greatly revered that many travellers place money in a crevice near her ‘feet’. Between these scores of limestone outcrops a few zebu graze. Only a few, nowadays, because on this grossly abused soil nourishing grass is being fast replaced by the inedible bunch-grass of which we had seen so much within the massif. This freakish aristidia flourishes where no other grass will grow, propagating itself by underground fibres instead of seeds and never sending up succulent young shoots to tempt zebu. As it needs no organic nutrients of any kind it thrives on cracked bedrock, or on savannah where over-burning and over-grazing have reduced the soil to sterile dust. Aesthetically it is pleasing yet my heart ached when, beyond the massif, we crossed an immense undulating plain on which aristidia has almost completely taken over from what the zebu need. Solitary palms, standing far apart, broke the monotony of this plain. Some were lanky medemias, others smaller and wider – wind-torn, looking like so many tattered fans. Many medemias had been snapped in two by those cyclonic winds which devastate Madagascar during the rainy season. Many telegraph poles had also been snapped. The French used to replace damaged poles after each cyclone; the Malagasy do not. Hence the limitations of Ranohira’s telephone service.
Suddenly we were overlooking an inhabited green oasis where dense foliage marked the course of a narrow river. The truck splashed and lurched through the foot-deep water – bridges are an unknown luxury hereabouts – then stopped to refresh its engine. A tall leafless tree, laden with russet bobbles, overhung a group of huts crudely assembled from wooden stakes, sheets of iron and strips of raffia matting; they had neither doors nor windows. ‘Nobody here is afraid of bandits,’ I remarked to Rachel. ‘They probably are the bandits!’ she retorted. Three women sat outside one shack, wrapped to the ears in gaily coloured blankets; for them this was a chilly morning. Black pigs, white geese and scrawny brown hens swarmed happily amidst the glossy riverside growth. An ibis and several cattle egrets flew past. A long-haired chocolate-coloured cat dozed on the edge of a table beside manioc-flour buns; there was no coffee. An old blanketed man squatted on the beige earth slowly stirring a large black pot on a small charcoal fire. A toddler in a short pink skirt cuddled a tiny white puppy; both had bloated bellies. ‘They’ve given each other worms,’ noted Rachel gloomily. Nobody took any notice of the vazaha: we were just another manifestation of the road-building team. When the driver had washed down a plate of mashed manioc with a swig of cane-spirits we rattled on, allowing the mantle of silence to fall again on that microscopic community.
Our map would not tell us whether that was a real river or merely a watercourse. In this area there are many brief emergences above ground of what is, apparently, quite a plentiful underground water supply. Our stream in the Isalo entrance canyon was one such; long before reaching Ranohira it had seeped back into the earth.
Soon we were among low hills clothed with the remains of the deciduous forest that once covered western Madagascar from Tulear to the northern tip of the island. One-fifth survives, but for how much longer? Even today, twenty-five per cent of Madagascar’s surface is deliberately burnt each year. This is what Rachel Rabesandratana, lecturer in botany at Tulear University, has described as ‘Our suicide by fire’. Yet there is still hope, in western Madagascar, if the annual firing of grasslands can somehow be controlled. The deciduous woodland, unlike the east coast rainforest, is an efficient self-regenerator if given a chance. But how to convince the Malagasy of the need – their need – for fire-control? By temperament they are disinclined to look more than twenty-four hours ahead, on any issue. Nobody has stated the problem more succinctly than Dr Alison Jolly, one of Madagascar’s most valuable vazaha friends. In A World Like Our Own she wrote:
‘It is a question of balance. If there are the right number of cattle, they find rich hay in the western savannahs and feel no need to invade the forests. In the dry season they live on the ‘green bite’ (the new grass shoots that spring up when fires pass). Some fire, and some green shoots, are clearly necessary in a balanced cattle economy. [But] this fragile equilibrium can be destroyed by human population increase, by increase in the cattle herds, and by some forms of increase in the market economy. As usual, all the factors relate to one another. More people want more cattle and more cash. Cash crops in this region means shifting cultivation of peanuts and therefore cutting the forest for fields, or else irrigated cotton on black alluvial soil in the streambeds. In turn the cotton fields involve keeping the cattle out of what was once rich pasture and forcing the displaced herds to put still greater pressure on the drier grass and woodland … The loss of woodland in the long term affects the water-supply and drainage, so cattle and people may find themselves in a tightening trap as a consequence of their own attempts at expansion.’
As we were descending a forested hill – our road visible for miles, ascending the next hill – a dark wave came flowing over the crest ahead. We stared in wonder at this herd of zebu, apparently hundreds strong. When they were about two miles away the truck stopped, obeying a local rule of the road, and we took out our binoculars. Zebu were still pouring over the crest, not at the easy amble of Irish cattle but trotting purposefully, aware of being on a long journey. Here Route Nationale No. 7 is accompanied on each side by a zebu-track wider than the road and now this triple highway was flooded with a river of splendid beasts – many only half-grown – their hoofbeats like muted thunder, their horns tossing, mouths frothing, tails swishing. They were not at all put out by the stationary truck and as they surged past we realised that they numbered thousands rather than hundreds. We saw too that they were divided into eight separate herds, each with its own herdsmen who worked hard to prevent any accidental mingling. So many animals travelling together might seem impractical but there is safety in numbers. In this territory cattle-rustling remains, as it has always been, Big Business: the region’s only large-scale enterprise. These beasts, representing the total wealth of several Mahafaly villages, were escorted by about forty young men – dusky-skinned and handsome, finely proportioned though not very tall, wearing ragged shorts and traditional blankets. Each carried a long sharp spear that glinted in the sun: my first sight of spears in use, as it were – not mere romantic relics of bygone times. A few also carried ancient shotguns that might be envied by a War Museum. And one carried a battered-looking rolled-up umbrella, whether as a third weapon or as a sunshade I know not. Their intent expressions were those of men on a difficult and dangerous mission, yet big smiles flashed in response to our shouted greetings. As we moved forward I watched through the rear-mirror and saw the herd turning off onto a track leading south. It saddened me to think that those zebu and their owners, representing an unbroken link with Madagascar’s pre-European past, should also be the greatest threat to Madagascar’s post-European future.
Sakaraha seems important on the map, for lack of competition, but is no more than a large, dispirited-looking village. Yet it has two resident vazaha, an American missionary couple whom we later met in Tulear on their monthly shopping expedition. In their mid-twenties, with a nine-month-old baby, Ruth and David lived in a fortified mud hut, sans telephone service, postal delivery, electricity or any reliable water-supply. One bucket of nappy-washing water had to last three days. Ruth did all the cooking and baking on a tin charcoal stove. In lieu of radio batteries (available only on the Black Market, eschewed by missionaries), David had devised a solar panel – and it worked. The police had lent them a gun each for protection against bandits, their immediate predecessor having been speared in the neck and lungs in the course of a robbery. They had been forbidden to open their door after dark, whatever the appeals to their Christian charity. While pregnant, Ruth had been advised by her local friends to take extra care as some ombiasa, far out in the bush, still like to get hold of unborn babies; the sun-dried heart and eyes of the unborn are added to their necklaces as particularly powerful charms. This sounds like an extract from one of the more luridly heathen-bashing chapters of the Reverend Matthews or the Reverend Ellis. Yet when I recalled the faces of a few of those Mahafaly herdsmen it seemed not entirely impossible that in certain areas such customs survive.
Ruth and David, and two other American Lutheran missionary couples working elsewhere, had ambitions to set up village Health Centres, concentrating on preventive medicine. They had made a start in Sakaraha and the government was ‘observing’ their activities but not yet helping. David’s work often took him away for four or five days, on solo bullock-cart journeys to remote villages. For these trips he dressed in threadbare garments as your modern bandit finds smart clothing an irresistible temptation. Neither the local Lutheran pastor nor any other Malagasy would accompany him into bandit territory and when his return was delayed by a day or two, as occasionally happened, Ruth prepared herself for the worst. ‘But,’ she said, ‘you become used to the waiting, as part of life.’ And she meant that. She and David were untainted by any awareness of their own heroism – which is not, I think, too strong a word. They had of course been bred to the job, born and brought up in southern Madagascar as the children of missionaries. Ruth could just remember the days when Tulear’s shops were well stocked with every sort of French import, not unreasonably priced. It is hard to imagine an American-bred couple of their generation, however full of missionary zeal, adapting so uncomplainingly to life in the Sakaraha region – or being so sympathetic to the Malagasy temperament and traditions.
Ruth and David confirmed our Betsileo driver’s information about the few wretched villages between Sakaraha and Tulear. Over the past several years thousands have fled to the city, from these and many other villages, to escape the bandits’ regular night-raids. Men armed only with spears cannot hope to defend their cattle and homes against the new type of bandit, who has somehow recently acquired guns. In Tana we heard many rumours that either the CIA or the South African government (or both) were supplying the guns in question, by way of helping to de-stabilise President Ratsiraka’s too-Socialist regime; and stranger things have happened under the influence of Cold War emotions. Whatever the cause of this situation the security forces are finding it hard to control and much of southern Madagascar has reverted to its previous status of ‘unpacified’ territory, with petty thieving as a new and alien complication. Previously this was ‘not done’ by the best bandits; like the old-fashioned Mafia, they had their own perverse code of honour. They were cattle-rustlers and proud of it; they did not enter a man’s home and sneak away with his non-bovine possessions. (But was this only because such possessions were then almost worthless?) Now they behave like boring common criminals; a week before our meeting, David had had his tape-recorder stolen from the living-room one afternoon, while he and Ruth were tending the baby in an adjacent bedroom.
Beyond Sakaraha we passed two small trucks untidily loaded with cotton and saw it being picked in the ill-tended remains of a colonial plantation. The cotton trade explains why once upon a time Route Nationale No. 7 was well maintained between the port of Tulear and Sakaraha. Descending to the coast through hilly spiny desert, we noticed how much poorer and less healthy the peasants looked than their highland cousins. Yet their gaily decorated tombs – some adorned with many zebu horns arranged on tall ‘totem-poles’ – were larger and more elaborate than any seen in Imerina. Most were freshly painted and looked from a distance like solid new bungalows, in astonishing contrast to the flimsy shelters which house the living. When a strange shape appeared on the horizon, a high rectangle miles long and flawlessly flat, I had become so bemused by these tombs that I fancied for a moment this must be yet another – honouring perhaps some mighty king. It is in fact Tulear’s only landmark, prosaically known as ‘Table Mountain’. And now, between the grey hills ahead, we could also see glinting slivers of blue – the Mozambique Channel. Rachel cheered; she hoped soon to be snorkling over coral reefs.