Snorkling was scheduled to happen at Moro-Moro, eighteen miles north of Tulear. At the bus station our Betsileo friend shouted an enquiry about onward transport and someone pointed to a ramshackle bus-truck, crammed with humanity beneath green tarpaulin. Less than five minutes after arriving at Tulear we were on the way to Moro-Moro. ‘This can’t be true!’ said Rachel. Moreover, though our remarkable vehicle took ninety minutes to cover those eighteen miles it did not stop once.
Sixty-two other adults were on board; we did not try to count the children. The conductor’s insistence on our going up front led to a marathon of apologetic climbing over everybody, inflicting minor injuries on their offspring and belongings – these being often indistinguishable, half-stuffed under the seats. Squeezed into a corner, embracing our rucksacks, we could see little of the landscape. Soon we had to close our eyes against the dust, but even then it was obvious that most of our fellow-passengers were filthy. Their natural skin colours varied yet within half an hour we were all a uniform grey-brown. Nobody talked. To do so meant inhaling ounces of Madagascar. When we stopped at Moro-Moro everyone looked understandably apprehensive and we did more unavoidable damage on the way out. The conductor could have helped by taking our rucksacks through the side but he clearly enjoyed the vazaha’s embarrassment. He was not a typical Malagasy.
In Antsirabe an ancient Frenchman had advised us to go to Moro-Moro for snorkling and sharkless swimming. He knew the owner of the hotel, which our favourite guidebook describes with enthusiasm:
‘Village Vezo “Moro-Moro”, Main Road No. 9 Manombo-Morombe. Manager: Mr Jacques Ducaud. 10 comfortable bungalows at the side of the lagoon equipped with complete sanitary amenities, twin beds, possibilities of having two superposed extra beds. Electricity 220 volts. Fish, shell-fish, barbecue. Bar – Swimming-pool – Diving-school – Submarine exploration with autonomous diving suit – Hire of canoe – Visit of the reef, etc. Charming site, very good welcome. Club atmosphere.’
This does not sound, perceptive readers may think, quite me – though curiosity about the nature of superposed beds and autonomous diving suits might possibly have outweighed the horrors of barbecue and club atmosphere. Our Antsirabe friend had however assured us that Moro-Moro is now tourist-free; and indeed Monsieur Ducaud viewed our approach with unconcealed amazement. He then thought it only fair to warn us, before we booked in, that snorkling would be impossible. (Alas! poor Rachel!) He pointed to the horizon, where a fringe of white marked the reef, and bade us listen. When you can see that surf, and hear the distant roar of the Indian Ocean, you can neither snorkle nor fish.
M. Ducaud’s hotel, planned by himself, is a civilised ‘tourist development’. He began by buying a grove of immense pines which sway and sigh in the wind from the sea like sentient beings. In their shade, on soft golden sand, he built ten one-bedroom huts, widely separated, and a long high-ceilinged open-plan chalet as dining-room and lounge-bar. Only local materials were used: wood, cactus, palm, bamboo. The chalet has no sea-facing wall so one eats within a bone’s throw of the wavelets when the tide is in. Even if Moro-Moro Hotel were packed, with superposed beds all over the place, it could hold no more than forty people for whom there would be an eight-mile beach. ‘Five humans per mile,’ as Rachel calculated.
In 1973 it seemed that Madagascar might benefit slightly from the world tourist boom but instead its limited tourist trade collapsed. M. Ducaud’s empty huts worried Rachel but he assured us that the position was not as dire as it then seemed; enough guests still trickle through to keep the shark from the door. Four German botanists were expected the following week – most vazaha visitors are scientists – and ex-colonists still resident in Tulear appreciate the restaurant. Rich Indians come too: nowadays almost the only Malagasy citizens who can afford a holiday.
One felt that this trickle satisfied M. Ducaud. He looked happy reclining under his pines, listening to Beethoven quartets as the crimson sun slid into the ink-blue sea. Like Roland he was a third-generation colonist, but one who had spent all his life in Madagascar and most of it near Tulear. He said, ‘This is my country, my only country …’ – the plaintive claim of so many ex-colonists. ‘Natives’ were not the only victims of colonialism. A recent fifteen-day visit to Paris, his first in ten years, was ‘fourteen days too many’. He considered himself lucky to be able to live so cheaply amidst such beauty. Fuel for the electricity generator (needed to power Beethoven quartets) was his main expense. Fish and vegetables for himself and his platoon of servants (‘How could I dismiss them? They need their wages!’) cost little. His bar-service revealed a trusting nature. The chalet was usually empty, yet he showed us a notebook on the wall, and how to open the refrigerator behind the bar, and asked us to jot down each drink we took. Even a Malagasy tourist boom would not, I suspect, make him a millionaire.
On our first afternoon the sky was completely overcast and the sea not too warm. Floating far out, I gazed back at the golden emptiness of our crescent beach, overhung by weird vegetation, and reflected that there can be few other ‘sea-side resorts’ where, at the end of July, two people could monopolise so much. Meanwhile Rachel was trying to snorkle over the off-shore coral reefs. But the heavy swell made even this too hazardous; open coral-wounds can be troublesome in tropical countries.
Moro-Moro introduced us to the fantastic botanical excesses of southern Madagascar. I use ‘fantastic’ deliberately. The long strip of vegetation that here stretches beside the coast, a few hundred yards inland, seems pure fantasy – something out of a sadistic, unfunny cartoon film. No serviceable similes come to mind. What grows in the Malagasy desert is like nothing else on earth – animal, vegetable or mineral. This forest (an inappropriate word, though commonly used) is colourless, dusty, desiccated, with powdery dirty-yellow sand underfoot. In winter it is a drab tangle of greenish-grey. There is no beauty here and the fascination of the place is undeniably morbid. Vicious plants, armed with burrs, spines, thorns, hooks and spikes, reach out destructively from every side – and from above and below, drooping out of the sky, hidden in the sand, coiling, springing, bending, dripping. The gross bottle-trees, like miniature baobabs, are the most normal-looking things around, their distended trunks tapering towards the top and producing a tuft of short branches bearing in winter great dangling fruits like tennis balls covered in brown velvet. Dominating all else are the didierea, not even remotely related to the cactus though any lay person would assume them to be at least second cousins. They grow to thirty feet, always at a slight angle to the ground, always bending south. Each slim, separate pillar of a clump is covered in steel-strong six-inch spikes, needle-sharp. Then there is the monstrous harpoon-burr, each growing far apart on an otherwise bare, thin branch – the only plant I have ever seen to which one involuntarily applies the adjective ‘evil’. It is in fact a mass of harpoons topping long wiry stems, all growing from one hideously shaped heart. The wound it inflicts takes three days to begin to heal. And there is also the insanely contorted latex tree, which flourishes no cutting weapon. Instead it drips a white sap on passers-by, causing skin-ulcers and sometimes total blindness.
For light relief at Moro-Moro we bird-watched, much more successfully than in the Highlands, despite the aridity. During one sunrise hour I spotted twelve ‘unknowns’.
We visited a few Vezo settlements up and down the coast, walking to them along Route Nationale No. 9 – ankle-deep in dust – and returning along the coral- and shell-strewn beach. The Vezo are best known for the eroticism of their tomb decorations. Some consider them a branch of the Bara tribe but to us they seemed a few shades darker and several shades shyer. They are Madagascar’s main fishing tribe and their settlements give the impression that they belong, in spirit, to the sea. Down the coast towards Tulear they live in tiny corrugated-iron hovels: intolerably hot, one would have thought, during summer. Up the coast towards Ankilimalinika their scattered huts are cactus-thatched, built of drift-wood and set in dreary patches of manioc or maize. High sand-dunes, sprouting a straggle of grotesque trees, shelter them from the south-easterly trade winds. Here we saw our first herds of Malagasy goats, unwisely imported to encourage rug-making; they may yet prove Madagascar’s last ecological straw.
The gale was inhibiting fishing activities but we watched two single outrigger canoes, with small square sails, venturing out to attempt, unsuccessfully, to lift lobster-pots. These vessels have remained unchanged since the migrations from Polynesia, though they are smaller than the double-outriggers used by the ocean-crossing razana. Vezo fleets fish the length of the west coast, as far north as Nosy-bé. Entire families take off for months in twenty-five-foot canoes and camp on shore, making tents from their sails, while drying and smoking their catch for the inland markets. It would be a mistake to deduce great poverty from their dwellings. They are rightly esteemed for their fishing skills and their trade is profitable. They may go ragged and barefoot but the majority have splendidly developed bodies, sound teeth, clear eyes and a general air of physical well-being that any affluent city-dweller might envy.
During our last walk we collected a more precious souvenir (and easier to carry) than anything tangible. At sunset we were wandering across flat grassland where the wide jagged crowns of nearby pines seemed black beneath a green-tinged sky. Then we turned towards the invisible shore and saw, on higher land, an intricate frieze stretching for miles against an apricot glow. Now they were beautiful, those didierea, giant aloe, sword cactus, euphoria, latex trees and writhing leafless vines, merged into a single eerie pattern in the fading light. But then it seemed the light was strengthening – and a half-moon sailed free of the woodlands to the east, while still the afterglow lingered in the west, apricot turning to copper. Moments later Venus too became visible, as I have never seen her before – not merely outshining her companions but distinctly an orb, pale gold and brilliant, defying the moon. This was a magical confluence of light, an excitement of loveliness that heightened as we reached the shoreline, to walk home by a luminous sea through a silver-black mesh of tree-shadows.
In such places one becomes very aware of the quiet soul of Madagascar. For all the talk of bandits, it was impossible ever to feel threatened. We did not doubt the bandits’ present pervasiveness in the south, but atmospheres have their balances and in Madagascar the benign far outweighs the malign. The bandits have not yet made their psychic mark; let us hope the razana ensure they never do.
That evening will be my most abiding memory of Moro-Moro. Rachel’s perhaps will be the three lemurs – ring-tailed siblings, born in the hotel – who co-existed peacefully with a smug fat cat and two grey-muzzled labradors. In the chalet this lemur trio played tag among the rafters or hide-and-seek between the hessian walls. At frequent intervals they paused to urine-mark their territory (i.e. the whole hotel), causing our host to mutter insincere apologies. As we diary-wrote they sat on our table, helping themselves from the sugar-bowl and ‘stealing’ our drinks. But at meal-times they were banished. Before bringing our plates the grinning waiter waved a catapult at them – the sort used by herdsmen to control zebu – and they bounded outside to sit in the nearest pine tree looking hard-done-by. A fourth lemur lived in the trees, on excellent terms with everyone but unwilling to enter any building: he had been born free.
Tulear stands eighteen feet above sea level; as a port it is pretty dormant for the now being. Since Independence, Indians have come to dominate what remains of its commercial life. It has about forty-eight thousand inhabitants and is the capital of a region covering a hundred thousand square miles, with a population of a million and a quarter humans and countless million zebu. It did not exist as a town before 1895 and there are not a few who feel it should have stayed that way. During most of the year it is crucified by the sun (we were lucky, the south-easterly was still blowing) and the climate evidently atrophied the inventiveness of the French architect who created it. (His name escapes me which does not matter too much; it would be unlikely to ring many bells.) The gridiron effect is alleviated only by a graceful kily tree – the tamarind, sacred in Madagascar – growing at each intersection. The dreary look-alike administrative buildings, now being inexorably dismantled by the climate, seem ludicrously pompous. A few would-be with-it hotels mark what passes for a sea-front. Behind them stretches an expanse of grey sand-cum-mud (this is the beach) which serves as the town latrine. Nearby is the port, where the rusting hulk of a merchant ship is anchored beside a disintegrating pier. But the people are a delight: friendly, smiling, courteous, helpful. In Madagascar the Malagasy redeem every situation.
There are superficial resemblances between Tulear and some small coastal town in south India – heat, dust, flies, piss’n’shit smells, roadside foodstalls, palm trees tall against a very blue sky, rickshaws, bullock-carts, dark skins, run-down colonial houses and gardens, shanty-settlements on dog-infested wasteland (these are the refugees from banditry). But there are far fewer people, much less motor-traffic, much less merchandise in the shops and market, much less malnutrition; and there is no enthralling architecture. Of the six Malagasy towns on our route (there are only two others of any size) Tulear seemed the least capable of ever developing a character of its own. It is a blatant colonial imposition on occupied territory, pointless in relation to its surroundings.
Anglo–Malagasy relations first blossomed in the Tulear region, centuries before the LMS pioneers – or any other European – had set foot in Imerina. During the seventeenth century British East India Company ships regularly took on supplies along Madagascar’s west coast, mainly from the Bay of St Augustin, twenty-two miles south of Tulear. In 1636 the Courteen Association, a short-lived rival of the East India Company, had ambitions to establish a colony there under the seventeen-year-old Prince Rupert of Bavaria. His sensible mother, Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, who by that date had more than her share of worries, opposed the idea. She observed cannily, ‘I thought if Madagascar were a place either worth the taking or profitable to be kept, that the Portugalis by this time would have had it, and having so long time possesst, most right to it.’ (A revealing glimpse of the expansionist ethics of the time; it occurred to no one that the Malagasy had ‘possesst’ it longest of all.) That first scheme fell through for lack of funds but by 1644 it had been revived and a colony of 120 English men and women settled on the coast under an unsavoury character called John Smart. He tried to live up to his name in his dealings with the Malagasy, who had received the settlers amiably, and Anglo–Malagasy relations soon deteriorated. A year later twelve survivors left for home; the rest of the colony had either been killed or died of starvation. (Easily done, in these parts.) One of the survivors, Powle Waldegrave, wrote: ‘I could not but endeavour to dissuade others from undergoing the miseries that will follow the persons of such as adventure themselves for Madagascar … from which place God divert the residence and adventures of all good men.’
A happier experience was described by George Buchan, one of the passengers on an East Indiaman wrecked on Tulear’s reef by the south-easterly in August 1792. Forty were drowned, the other 240 made their way to the court of the King of Bara, near Tulear harbour, and were generously entertained and protected for seven months, until rescue came – by which time ninety had died of malaria and heat-stroke though all the ten women survived. Vezo fishermen brought up the ship’s treasure and gave it to the king, whose legal property (as salvage) it now was. At once he returned it to the ship’s officers, who later expressed gratitude for ‘such disinterested attention as would have done honour to the most civilised Christian’. In due course the East India Company acknowledged the king’s help with a suitable gift. George Buchan’s account of this adventure records:
‘The king, though held in habitual reverence and, so far as we saw, promptly obeyed, cannot be considered wholly despotic; for in the event of any undue severity, his subjects will leave him and migrate to another state … The practice which seems to exist of making all weighty questions matter of public deliberation, must have a powerful effect in upholding independence and elevation of mind. I remember being quite struck with the fluency of speech and oratory which we sometimes heard … I think I may call them, among themselves, a social and happy people … They enjoy apparently much domestic harmony. Polygamy is allowed but is far from being generally practised. Their kindness to their slaves is quite remarkable … Their general turn of mind appears that of lively quickness, accompanied by a thirst for knowledge. The king seemed to be about 25 years of age; not tall, and rather slimly made, but well-proportioned. His complexion was remarkably white, approaching copper colour. When occasion required it, he appeared with a good deal of what might be called in their way magnificence, but he did not seem fond of the royal state, and generally went about with very few people.’
Even after seven months as the king’s guest, Buchan makes no attempt to transcribe his host’s name. But this Tulear King of Bara was presumably a Masikoro chief who at that date would have been a tributary of the powerful Sakalava King of Menabe. It is interesting that Buchan remarks on the king’s fair colour, though he also reports that most of his subjects were dark-skinned Vezo fishermen. This was before the first Merina effort to conquer the south. But the comments of Buchan, and of other early travellers who observed life around the Malagasy coast, reveal that the chiefs and nobles of many tribes were lighter-skinned than their subjects, if not as purely Polynesian as the Merina. The observation about ‘migrating to another state’ indicates an unusually developed sense of what we would now call ‘nationhood’. At the same period, it would have been unthinkable for an African tribesman who disapproved of his chief to push off to another territory just like that. But the Malagasy, sharing a common language and culture, felt free to migrate to any part of their island, at least in theory. In practice, temporary political/military conflicts, and climatic extremes, must have limited their movements. Yet in spirit they were already Malagasy.
By the end of the eighteenth century the use of English names, and some knowledge of spoken English, had become quite common up and down the west coast, but particularly in the Tulear area. The King of Bara’s wife was Queen Charlotte.
Now the main vazaha influence is American, chiefly through the Lutheran Church Mission. But we also saw several long, wide, vulgar American automobiles being driven at high speed and looking as out of place as a strip-tease artiste in a monastery cloister. Our missionary friends explained apologetically that these belong to an oil-seeking team that for years has been unsuccessfully busy in southern Madagascar. We had passed their headquarters outside the town and recognised it as ‘a little bit of America’.
Both Roland and M. Ducaud had been discouraging about our chance of getting to Fort-Dauphin, on the south-east coast, by road – mainly because there is no road, which sounds logical enough. People fly from coast to coast, at vast expense. Air Mad is a paragon of efficiency, compared to any form of Malagasy land transport, and it was murmured that a free flight might be arranged for a travel-writer. But flying defeats the main object of travel-writers, which is to see where they’re at. So we continued to enquire about transport across what Nigel Heseltine has described as ‘a large area of sclerophytic bush dominated by endemic Euphorbiaceae’ – which indeed is just what it looks like.
Ruth and David reassured us; their base was at Fort-Dauphin so they knew the route well. True, there was no road. Yet a brave mission vehicle occasionally did the trip and sometimes they used the weekly truck-bus service. David escorted us to the appropriate bus station and organised tickets (£15.50 each) guaranteeing our eventual arrival at Fort-Dauphin, though no arrival date was specified. Departure time was 5 a.m. next morning. Later, in our doss-house, we were told that the Indian tycoon who operates this service pays protection money to bandit leaders in three villages en route. I felt sceptical; such an arrangement assumes a degree of sophisticated organisation rarely found in Malagasy government departments, never mind among tribal bandits. But perhaps the bandits are smarter than the bureaucrats.
In daylight this bus station was a half-hour walk from our doss-house; in darkness it was a good deal further. At 4 a.m. the moon had just set, there was no street lighting, we had no torch batteries and Tulear’s deserted streets – long, wide, straight – seemed shorn of all their carefully noted landmarks. Soon Rachel was limping badly; at Moro-Moro she had cut her foot on a giant razor-clam embedded in sea-grass. (As our guidebook so frankly points out, ‘There are many pearls on Madagascar’s see-shores’.) When a solitary woman appeared ahead we momentarily terrified her by looming out of the night – two sinister rucksack-misshapen figures – but she forgivingly went a mile out of her way to guide us. At the bus station there was not a trace of a truck-bus. ‘Told you so!’ said Rachel, who had seen no need to rise before dawn.
Several bashies were preparing by lantern-light for short journeys to such places as Ankilimivany and Ambohimahavelona. We were told that our vehicle is loaded elsewhere and there seemed to be a warning note in our informant’s voice. Smiling coffee-ladies stood behind lamp-lit tables and we breakfasted well on enamel bowls of strong black coffee and long French loaves bought hot from a nearby bakery.
At 5.40 our Mercedes arrived: a singular vehicle, ingeniously adapted for a singular task. We came to respect it profoundly. Although cruelly uncomfortable, it was mechanically sound. You cannot take chances when only one vehicle regularly crosses a hundred thousand virtually uninhabited square miles of ‘sclerophytic bush’. As this weekly service represents the entire coast-to-coast public transport system, for both goods and passengers, it was no surprise to find Adrian and Jamie already aboard.
Our home for the next few days merits a pen-portrait. Luggage was roped to the roof under a green tarpaulin, tightly secured by night but rolled up by day to allow an excellent view between the widely-spaced wooden side-slats. Entry was by a strong permanently attached iron ladder at the back, leading up to the roof. The arched hessian ceiling, on wood and iron struts, gave a covered-wagon effect – as though we were about to open up The West. The main cargo was many – very many – sacks of Portland cement. These had been loaded first, being tightly packed, one-deep, over the entire floor space. Then the front two-thirds was equipped with old metal bus-seats, expertly wedged between the sacks, three on each side with a narrow aisle where small sacks of grass provided for an extra passenger in each row. The seats were backless, apart from an iron bar at shoulder-blade level. An average of nine passengers (excluding children) occupied each row of seven seats. Up front, facing the rest, sat ten passengers whose knees were permanently jammed against those opposite. In this death-row only the two at the ends had anything to hold onto during times of acute disequilibrium – which were not infrequent. But it was the mass of humanity occupying the seatless one-third space at the back who had it roughest. There the cement sacks were four deep, with a top layer of other sacks containing a hard knobbly unidentifiable substance (or objects), covered by raffia matting. The back side-slats had no gaps, which at least meant the five hens and three ducks could not easily escape, and the general situation recalled Doré’s depiction of devils forcing the damned into a crowded pit exhaling sulphureous fumes. (Only our fumes were diesel.) I am no stranger to Third World motor-transport but this ride was something else again. My diary tells all:
‘We moved off at 6.45, towards an opening fan of pink-gold effulgence above Table Mountain. Our first thirty miles, on Route Nationale No. 7, took us to Andranovary where a track turns south. The map (Paris-printed in 1964) describes this track as Route Nationale No. 10 but I maintain it can never have been more than a gleam in the eye of some French engineer. Jamie, however, argues that a lot can happen to a Malagasy road in twenty years.
‘Andranovary is a sad small town: it would seem a village anywhere else. Had we known we were to stop there for an hour and a quarter we could have explored. But Fotsy, our driver, made a point of giving no such information; he is one of Nature’s bully-boys who didn’t improve (or not much) on acquaintance. Aged perhaps thirty-ish (Malagasy ages are hard to guess), he evidently belongs to one of the south-east coastal tribes who have Arab blood. (Antanosy? Antesaka? Antefasy? Antemoro? – I’ll never get that lot sorted out.) His crinkly hair looks good with a dark copper skin and he has a fine straight nose and a thick moustache, neatly cultivated. Tallish, well-built, well-dressed: a handsome fellow and aware of the fact. We soon realised that he enjoyed having us all – however many we were – at his mercy for 390 unique miles. His too-prominent eyes flashed angrily whenever anyone was slow to obey orders – and a lot of orders were given at Andranovary. Leaving Tulear, we’d marvelled at the numbers on board. But that was for starters. A queue awaited us at the junction and Fotsy walked around the truck, peering through the slats, pointing to unfilled inches and yelling orders as more and more grinning men and chuckling women came through the back. Such a journey would be intolerable with any other travelling-companions; Malagasy good humour and good manners seem indestructible. Then we had to wait for late-comers – and for several sacks that arrived on a zebu-cart in the fullness of time.
‘Judging by colour, about half the passengers were of highland extraction. I suppose only the élite have occasion, or can afford, to travel Inter-City. Among the unfortunates facing us from death-row were two adolescent girls, their brother aged nine or ten and a toddler sister. Four very lovely faces, the colour of dark honey. The boy, especially, sitting immobile on a sister’s lap, had an extraordinary beauty. An oval face of ethereal innocence, framed in short slightly curly hair, with a high domed forehead and wide tranquil eyes. A Coptic saint in a classical Amhara painting. When the going got really rough I anaesthetised myself by gazing at that face. It enabled me to forget that I was numb from the waist down and in agony from the waist up.
‘We all had to sit immobile. Rachel was wedged between Adrian and a skinny Merina daddy with short-cropped hair, clad only in what appeared to be a long-sleeved nightgown and nursing a bare-bottomed infant. Between him and me, on the grass sack, sat a timid, weedy (luckily for us both) young man wearing a natty linen baseball cap; sun-glasses hung from an elegant brass chain around his neck. On my right side was an amiable but regrettably stout elderly man (Betsileo with one slave great-grandmother?) whose most cherished possession seemed to be an object made of zebu-hide, resembling a giant brief-case. This treasure, “superposed” on the cement sacks at our feet, totally inhibited my leg movements. Beyond this gentleman, a hefty Bara youth with tragically long legs and an engaging smile was squeezed against the slats. He read for hours on end, as did several of the passengers, from dog-eared paperbacks of missionary origin. We were privileged, having a seat each. In front of us four substantial young women shared three seats and beside them rose a juvenile pyramid: a little girl holding a toddler holding a baby. For all the sweetness of the Malagasy child-nature, that situation got a bit fraught at times.
‘Beyond Andranovary green bushes speckled a flatness of brown grassland, merging into sparse forest. Then, dramatically, there was a new world ahead. Far below, filling the distance for hundreds of hot grey miles, lay the lands of the Mahafaly and the Antandroy – conquered only on paper, unexploited because there is nothing to exploit. Sharply one felt the strangeness and separateness of this territory, where only the tribes who belong – and their zebu – can survive.
‘We seemed to be groping along the edge of that wooded escarpment, seeking a way down. Then our track of unstable earth, rocky and vividly red, began a steep descent in a series of tight bends – the only conventional test of Fotsy’s skill and he passed with distinction. (Thereafter he needed stunt-driver skills.) As Adrian commented, no Indian merchant would entrust a bad driver with an irreplaceable “Merk”.
‘Lunch-break happened at 11.30 in Tongobory, a friendly village of straw shacks and mud huts in an oasis of fine leafy trees – including banyans. Nearby the broad Onilahy, one of Madagascar’s biggest rivers, wound towards the Bay of St Augustin below a long scrubby mountain. Obviously our Merk’s arrival was the event of the week for Tongobory. Laughing women and children crowded around the truck selling whole grilled fish, baked manioc, boiled corn-on-the-cob and my favourite local delicacy – maize-buns boiled in oil. I was among the many passengers too faint-hearted to struggle out. Already I had a guilt-complex (later to become a severe neurosis) about my nailed hiking-boots. These must have seemed like lethal weapons to our fellow-passengers as I scrambled to and fro over their defenceless bodies. They often had no alternative but to tread on each other, always with profuse apologies as they stepped lightly from shoulder to buttock to thigh to forearm. Had I stepped on anyone bones would have crunched. But I enjoyed my freedom of movement when Mr Brief-case and Mr Long-legs went out.
‘Seeing Mr Brief-case crawling back across the knobbly sacks at the rear, I stood up and moved – half crouching – towards the aisle (the juvenile pyramid was still out) in a rather hopeless attempt to ease his seatward progress. Unfortunately one of the substantial quartet was simultaneously returning to the row in front of us, bearing on her head a large round basket of newly purchased manioc. Tripping over the timid young man, she fell heavily on me crushing my ribs against the nearest iron seat-back. Mr Brief-case also stumbled and to his intense embarrassment found himself with an arm around my neck and his hat (marvellously like Paddington’s) over one ear. You have there a typical vignette of life aboard Merk during halts.
‘We moved on at 12.50, Rachel carefully noting the time so that she could do her end-of-journey “average mph” calculation. For some reason I now had a smallish sack of assorted footstuffs on my lap. It seemed to belong to Mr Long-legs, who himself was hugging a much larger sack, and it meant that soon I was being strangled by the straps of my binoculars and shoulder-bag. The timid youth had been demoted to the Inferno at the rear and beside me sat a stout party carrying something bulky under her lamba. This object pinioned my left arm; for hours I couldn’t even look at my watch. And the padlock on the zebu-hide brief-case was pressing into my right shin. Earlier the heat had been bearable but now the sun shone directly onto our side. Suddenly I realised that the chocolate in my shoulder-bag had melted. Fearing for this precious note-book, I got stroppy. To free my left arm, I forced the stout party towards the Merina daddy. Then I frantically licked the chocolate off note-book, maps, camera, pens, mug, torch. This provoked such widespread merriment that we felt the mini-calamity had been worth while; people needed cheering up by that stage.
‘Our wedged state was a safeguard as Merk lurched and lumbered, like some crippled prehistoric monster, along what seemed to be a dried-up river bed but was still – I suppose – Route Nationale No. 10. For much of the way we were going below a normal walking speed; twice a spear-carrying tribesman effortlessly overtook us – the only humans we saw all afternoon. Merk stalled repeatedly on the way out of rocky gullies and Fotsy rose rapidly in our estimation. Patiently he would back and twist and coax while Merk roared and shuddered and displaced hundred-weights of desert, before yet again sticking fast. For Fotsy however this is a twice-weekly (there and back) routine and eventual defeat is Merk’s lot. I said as much, causing Jamie (again a martyr to his buttocks – both this time) to express the view that there must be a limit, which might at any moment be reached, to the endurance of even the most superior Mercedes truck. “In Germany,” he pointed out, “designers don’t plan for roads” – his lip curled – “like this.”
‘I was the only vazaha to draw solace from the landscape. Hour after hour of “endemic Euphorbiaceae and Dideriaecea” seemed, inexplicably, to depress the others. Broadly speaking – very broadly: hundreds of miles broad – this was the vegetation we’d met in Moro-Moro. But much of it was on a bigger scale and with giant baobabs added, some specimens visible for miles across the flatness. The density varied, from a threadbare blanket of low scrub and cacti to impenetrable forests of didierea and aloe and all the rest – often swathed in leafless vines.
‘Tea-break happened at 4.30 in Ejeda, which seems an urban sprawl on the map but is almost invisible. Adrian said it sounded like an Irish swear-word – true enough if pronounced phonetically. But alas! nothing in Malagasy is phonetic. Here Jamie, out on a buttock-soothing stroll, discovered that we would be spending the night at Ampanihy where Fotsy keeps a mistress. By the time we got there I reckoned he’d earned her.
‘Beyond Ejeda Route Nationale No. 10 pulls itself together and Merk sped along, covering the next thirty-one miles in two and three-quarter hours. A tribesman would have had to run to keep up with us. My below-the-waist cramps had long since been replaced by a blessed numbness; I didn’t even register the interesting fact that the padlock was rubbing the skin off my shin. By moonlight – the whitest I’ve ever seen – that landscape was a botanical lunatic asylum. I stared in dazed wonder at all those looming black shapes which somehow looked as though they might at any moment attack us. And then they did. We’d left the track to skirt some impassable gully and as Merk forced a way through the vegetation those nearest the slats were assaulted by viciously lashing barbed whips. Poor Mr Long-legs yelped with alarm and ducked down behind his sack. Someone shouted a plea to have the tarpaulin lowered but Fotsy had more pressing concerns. Once he misjudged and Merk was held fast between a baobab and something else. As we backed there was a rending sound overhead and I congratulated myself on having had the foresight to keep my rucksack within – for which privilege Fotsy had unsuccessfully tried to charge me an extra 8,000 FMG (about £12!).
‘Ampanihy had of course gone to bed when we arrived at 8.15. But the moonlight illuminated what looked like a major cathedral; the desert does odd things to one’s sense of proportion. As we came to rest in the enormous dusty market-place I felt I needed a drink quite badly and went on my first Malagasy alcohol-hunt. Local hooch was my quarry; one couldn’t hope for beer in Ampanihy. Desperately I quested through a maze of low-roofed eating-house shacks around the market-place. Most were closed. The rest, lit by tiny oil-lamps, were innocent of hard liquor. “Just as well,” said Adrian. “Have you ever smelt it?”
‘Jamie is travelling without a flea-bag – silly boy! – so we enquired about lodgings: any doss-house, however “ethnic”. There was none; odd when Ampanihy is a regular stopping-place, but Madagascar is like that. The travelling Malagasy are too sensible to waste money on lodgings. Many of our fellow-passengers were settling to sleep in the truck. Others were sleeping under it, a few were camping beneath trees. As there were only three of those we booked one – a tamarind in the centre of the market-place – before eating. The advantage of being under a tree, instead of just lying around anywhere, is that you can wedge your possessions between your sleeping self and the trunk.
‘Jamie had found a cramped eating-shack run by a young Merina woman, friendly and gracious, who spoke excellent French (according to Jamie; we couldn’t judge). The others ate rice and zebu stew with very hot chilli sauce. I wasn’t hungry. By then I knew Madagascar had become the fifth country in which my ribs have been broken. I’d been trying to ignore the evidence; pain usually goes away if not encouraged by being brooded on. But not always. In our ill-lit “restaurant” I began to feel slightly faint and was glad of the shadows. Drinking endless cups of sweet herbal tea, I consoled myself with the thought that cracked ribs mend quickly – though our present life-style isn’t very therapeutic. On the way back to our tree we passed the substantial quartet and their offspring, sitting around one of several camp-fires now enlivening the market-place. They were roasting manioc.
‘I slept fairly well on the soft sand; perhaps the sacred tamarind helped. Luckily there were no insects; we had lent Jamie our tent to use as a sleeping-bag. I might have slept even better but for the group of half-drunk young men who had gathered round Merk as we painfully disembarked. (I wasn’t the only cramp-victim; that disembarcation scene recalled an ambulance being emptied after a minor rail-crash.) The young men’s behaviour was a little unsettling and in my sleep part of me remained alert. Ampanihy (population about 3,000) is the Mahafaly capital and among the French had a reputation for xenophobia. This “Spiny South” has always been an ombiasa stronghold and anti-vazaha feelings can still erupt unpredictably in defence of the old razana traditions unadulterated by Christianity.
‘Once I woke when the moon was high and saw three UFOs gliding low overhead – soundless ebony shapes some four feet across. A dream, perhaps? Then I remembered that Ampanihy means “the place of many bats” – many Pteropus refus, Madagascar’s giant fruit-bat with fox-red fur and often a five-foot wingspan.
‘Fotsy had announced that we would depart punctually at 6 a.m. This seemed unlikely, given the nature of his social engagement at Ampanihy, but just in case I roused my companions, with some difficulty, at 5.30. We struck camp by the last of the moonlight and at the first shack to open ate cold rice-buns while a quiet lemon-pale dawn seeped up from the east. The yawning younger generation pointed out reproachfully that none of our fellow-passengers was yet stirring. I know when I’m not loved so I wandered off to the conspicuous disused well in the centre of the market-place and peered into its accumulation of scum, very far below. In Moro-Moro we’d been told of its extraordinary history, to illustrate the difficulties of “developing” the Spiny South – which doesn’t in the least want to be developed.
‘Ampanihy’s last district commissioner was a colonial “goody” who had spent a lifetime serving the Malagasy in the least salubrious corners of their island. When he took over Independence was near and he longed to provide Ampanihy with an enduring and practical memorial to the colonial era. A permanent supply of pure water was the obvious parting gift; the town had only a rudimentary well, dry as often as not. He supervised its enlargement, had it lined with dressed stone and designed a covered fountain. When his Tana superiors objected to the cost of an American petrol-powered pump, he contributed some of his own savings to the project. Two specially trained young Mahafaly mechanics were put in charge, the pump did all that was expected of it and the town enjoyed an endless flow of clear, cold, pure water. Then one morning the automatic cut-off failed, either because of damage done on the transatlantic voyage or because the machinery had been abused through ignorance. The mechanics descended the steel ladder to investigate and were overcome by carbon monoxide fumes. Cruelly, it was the district commissioner, walking to work, who found their bodies and yelled for help before himself descending the ladder – from which he was rescued, unconscious, moments later. He paid for the funerals (one Protestant, one Catholic, both expensive). When the necessary repairs had been carried out, and the well drained and cleaned, the fountain again went into action. But by that time the local ombiasa had made it fady to use the well; its water-spirit, outraged by sacreligious vazaha meddling, had drowned the Christian mechanics to punish their lack of respect for the razana. No Mahafaly man or woman has ever since approached that well. Quarter of a century later the Ampanihy folk are still going to collect opaque water from the pitiable trickle of the local river; or, when that disappears, to scanty water-holes far away in the bush. The machinery and fountain superstructure have long since vanished. Only the massive stone-lined well remains, deep and dark and shunned.
‘I leant on its cut-stone rim (a very un-Malagasy construction, solid and precise) and watched Ampanihy’s weekly market getting its act together: not a speedy process. Slowly too things were happening around Merk as people shuffled off their somnolent coil and drifted away towards secluded corners. (Unlike many races who lack “sanitary equipments”, the Malagasy are shy performers.) Of Fotsy however there was as yet no sign.
‘One bashie appeared and a newly slain zebu was carried to the tin-roofed concrete meat-market close to the well – the only other colonial amenity in sight and not a very good idea without nearby water. Traditional meat-selling, under a shady tree by the river, would be healthier. Small, blood-spattered boys hacked at the warm flesh with blunt choppers and customers gathered quickly. So did the flies. But soon several dogs had reported for duty as public hygiene officers.
‘A dozen covered zebu-wagons made up the rest of the market traffic. When the zebu had been unyoked and given cactus breakfasts the carts were parked in a neat row at the far end of the square. Most of their cargoes could easily have been carried on one human head. Rachel and I strolled between little groups of women and children squatting on the sand selling or bartering eggs, hens, marble-sized tomatoes, purple onions not much bigger, manioc, maize-grain, dried beans and peas, dried fish of various sorts and small bunches of green leaves that seem to be on sale throughout Madagascar as a salad vegetable or flavouring. The only fruit available was de-thorned prickly pears – the Barbary fig, sweet, juicy, pippy. We bought five for the equivalent of a penny from an ancient wrinkled woman with a wonderful smile – the sort of smile that stays with you all day. Rachel wondered why people pay for this fruit which grows wild everywhere like blackberries in Ireland. The answer is that the slighest contact with the plant produces violent pain and itching; one pays not for the fruit but for the risks involved in collecting it. Roland warned us that the wind-borne minute hairs of the ripe fruit often get into people’s eyes and the irritation drives some unfortunates to true hysteria. Occasionally those hairs cause permanent blindness. Yet it seems this new strain is harmless compared to the old Mexican prickly pear, known in Madagascar as raketa – of which more anon.
‘We met a young woman carrying a sewing-machine on her head and a long bale of cotton material in her hands – the ultimate in self-confidence! Then we noticed a gaunt elderly woman staring at us with a startled sort of hope. We realised why when we saw the wares at her feet: a small pile of the famous (comparatively) Ampanihy mohair rugs – white or brown, with mysteriously sophisticated traditional tribal patterns. She looked as though she’d sold nothing for years and we hurried past wishing we could afford to cheer her up.
‘I’d like to be able to spend a few weeks in Ampanihy, and thereabouts. Instead of the highlanders’ poised charm, the Mahafaly have their own sort of untamed dignity. They seem strong and fierce; I’d hate to quarrel with one. But there is much kindliness too in those fine dark faces. Our first unfavourable impression – the inebriated young men – was cancelled out by those three hours in the market. And we found the boys felt the same.
‘Our fellow-passengers, unlike the vazaha, had not been enthralled by their unscheduled exposure to Ampanihy Zoma and Fotsy had a disgruntled cargo when we departed at 8.50. But quietly disgruntled: there is a marked lack of aggression in the Malagasy make-up. We jolted past dingy, almost empty Indian shops, and stone hovels, and dejected two-storey colonial villas, once white-washed, and another assertive church. The Catholic church has two towers, the Protestant church one. But the Protestants – despite this architectural handicap, at one time taken very seriously – are said to have most influence among the Mahafaly especially since Independence.
‘Soon people were admitting that the delay had been worth while. With many fewer sacks and five fewer passengers, the rear Inferno had been transformed to Executive Class. We envied those remaining there, now able to move their limbs quite freely and release their hens and ducks which Rachel fed with prickly-pear skins. Our own agony was not much reduced. But at least it was possible to look at one’s watch and scratch one’s dust-irritated nose. And Mr Long-legs had shed his sacks and Mr Brief-case had been persuaded to turn the padlock away from my shin.
‘Between Ampanihy and Tranoroa (twenty-five miles) humanity abounded. We must have seen ten or twelve people. A glint of metal would catch the eye, moving above thickets of grey thorny scrub. Then perhaps the spear-owner would emerge to cross some open expanse of stone-littered red earth. A handsome, lithe, muscular figure, clad only in brief cotton shorts – the modern equivalent of the loin-cloth – and ignoring Merk’s clumsy, noisy, dust-stirring travail as though such crude intrusions were beneath his contempt. Elsewhere in Madagascar, as in most countries, cattle-herding is a task for boys armed with sticks and slings. In the lands of the Mahafaly and the Antandroy it is man’s work – warrior’s work.
‘The few women – in loose cotton gowns – were balancing on their heads ugly tin jerry-cans or plastic buckets: shapely earthen pitchers are no more. An occasional roadside settlement consisted of a dozen or so flimsy huts of woven straw with tousled thatches. Their size varied; all were small, some were minute. A son cannot own anything equal to – never mind better than – his father’s. So three grown-up generations means grandson being restricted to a large dog-kennel. (Vazaha experts complain that this fady prevents a forward-looking young man – not that there are many of those around – from getting the most out of his land or herd.) But accommodation for the living is unimportant to these southern tribes. Tombs are what count and these are stunningly elaborate and gaudy. Some are surrounded by spacious walled ‘gardens’ in which hundreds of up-turned zebu horns (from the beasts killed for the funeral feast) replace flowers. The concrete or stone ‘garden’ walls are also brilliantly painted and look insanely incongruous, amidst a wilderness of scrub, near hamlets of the most primitive dwellings I’ve ever seen. Neither these tombs nor their decorations show any highly developed aesthetic sense, but they make it believable that in this area 80% of the average family’s income is spent on the dead.
‘Tombs apart, the day’s only colour came, infrequently, from a ten-foot weirdie – its monstrous leaves brown and drooping, its immense, pointed, flame-red flower like a lighted candle in a tarnished candelabra. The roadside baobabs were clearly dated and numbered – by whom? These are a precious water-source in extremis: we saw a man drawing fluid from one through a bamboo pipe. Being very shallowly rooted they are easily felled in times of drought and famine; when stripped of bark they provide the zebu with both liquid and solid nourishment. (To the outsider it may look like permanent drought here, yet it’s disastrous when the annual two inches of rain doesn’t fall.)
‘As Merk heaved free of yet another gully, I wondered why camels have never been introduced to this area. Not enough trading and travelling? Or everyone always too zebu-obsessed? I wondered too why there are so many ducks and geese, as well as hens, around the hamlets; it’s no life for a web-foot in these parts.
‘We accomplished the twenty-five miles to Tranoroa in two hours and forty minutes – “Pretty nifty!” as Adrian said. But then we stopped for an hour and fifty minutes, to the further annoyance of the passengers. This straggle of stone and matting shacks had nothing to spare; a Merkful of hungry travellers brought forth no food-sellers. I too got a bit restive; my ribs kept me in my seat and the action on Tranoroa’s main street consisted only of two donkey-carts – the first donkeys seen in Madagascar – pulling tar-barrels of water. (Just as they did in Lismore during my childhood.) Rachel and Adrian went food-hunting – both give the impression of being forever on the brink of starvation – but found only technicoloured boiled sweets which they devoured with revolting enthusiasm. Jamie had Mally-belly and, being long and thin to begin with, looked like one of El Greco’s more troubled apostles. Rachel explored further and met a tame lemur. Rumour attributed a Tranoroa mistress to Fosty but I discounted that. He reappeared looking rested, his moustache and hair newly combed, and had obviously been recovering from his Ampanihy exertions.
‘Soon we had again left Route Nationale No. 10 to its own chaotic devices and were weaving through bush/forest along Fotsy’s own special route, designed to make life easier for Merk. Then our ceiling of sacking began to disintegrate, showering us with detritus. I told myself that the only dangerous creature in Madagascar, a poisonous hand-sized spider, is almost certainly not an indoor animal. “This is the beginning of the end,” decided Jamie. “I knew it couldn’t hold together.”
‘Over that seventy-three-mile stretch we averaged fourteen mph – coincidentally, my average cycling-speed. I remarked on what a civilised rate this is, allowing one to appreciate the details of the landscape. But my companions, having long since had the landscape, disagreed. We didn’t stop once, apart from those stops occasioned by Merk’s method of negotiating various geological obstructions. Luckily the dry heat and the shortage of drinking-water obviated bladder-problems. This region seems virtually uninhabited, though wayside tombs prove the existence of hamlets hidden away in the bush. Yet our map – a novelty much in demand among the Malagasy – gives the impression that southern Madagascar is more densely populated than Holland. There is scarcely room on the sheet for all the villages it marks – places with names like Ampanimiongana, Antsakaoamitondrotsy, Ambohidnrandriand and Ambatomandmbahatso.
‘By 5.30 we were within an hour of our destination for the night: Tsihombe, a metropolis (according to the map) which is only seventeen miles, as the Aepyornis didn’t fly, from the southernmost tip of Madagascar. Perhaps the ocean’s nearness had something to do with that sunset – from horizon to zenith a sheet of orange-red light – no clouds, no break or variation – just a vast brief flare of colour above a flat uncoloured wilderness. In silhouette two distant baobabs and a nearby giant candelabra cactus. Then suddenly all around us a forest of didierea – the tallest we’ve seen – and for moments nothing existed but that arc of light, darkening to crimson, and those black criss-crossing multitudes of sky-probing, thorn-studded stems. Jamie, putting away his camera, said, “The Spiny South does offer some rewards!”
‘The full moon had risen when we arrived at Tsihombe where an oddly turbulent crowd mobbed the passengers as they stiffly descended into the central market-square. When the vazaha emerged the crowd became almost delirious, jostling us, laughing at us and shouting questions in challenging rather than friendly tones. A peculiar atmosphere, not reassuring by moonlight; we couldn’t see faces clearly enough to judge what emotions lay beneath all the hubbub. Unlike our Ampanihy reception committee, no one seemed drunk. And no one was trying to sell anything, or tout customers for hotels since none exists. Many were welcoming relatives or friends (evidently long-lost) but that didn’t explain the hectic feeling in the air. Possibly it had something to do with the full moon. Or perhaps life in Tsihombe is so boring that Merk’s arrival simply drives everyone wild with excitement. In Ampanihy Jamie had been told that if we slept out in Tsihombe we would certainly be robbed and possibly murdered. I deprecate such alarmist warnings and had been dismissive; now I decided I’d really rather not camp out within reach of this lot.
‘Jamie – the fluent French speaker – searched for lodgings while Adrian guarded the boys’ luggage and Rachel and I stood in the middle of the market-place being viewed like something from outer space – which I suppose we are, psychologically, in Tsihombe. Jamie did well; the local Indian trade rep for Merk’s owner invited us to be his guests. By the almost artificially brilliant Malagasy moonlight we were led through a maze of backyards to a large bare room, mud-walled and -floored but neatly swept, with two comfortable double beds, freshly sheeted, and a squat-over loo in a corrugated-iron shed across the yard.
‘In an astonishing restaurant – small, clean, efficient: it had clearly known better days – an elderly Merina lady provided our best meal (almost haute cuisine) since leaving Antsirabe. Two slightly drunk Indians sat on a wicker couch in the tiny “bar”, drinking their own smuggled bourbon. They longed, to “help” us by changing money at black-market rates. We politely declined their kind offer. Madagascar’s currency regulations are extremely strict and, unlike most Malagasy regulations, are rigorously enforced.
‘Tsihombe looked more beautiful than it is as we walked back to our room through silent laneways where angular black shadows lay solid-seeming on gleaming pale sand. At nine o’clock all those rowdy citizens were abed and I felt vaguely ashamed of my earlier unease. But this routine of arriving after nightfall in an unknown town – usually in an unknown tribal territory – doesn’t make for easy social intercourse with the unintelligible inhabitants. We passed Merk on the way, full of sleeping passengers. Fotsy had ordered us to reassemble at 9 a.m. so I warned the others I’d be missing – exploring – when they awoke. There were conflicting rumours about this late departure. Some said Fotsy keeps his favourite mistress in Tsihombe, others said his wife and family live here.
‘Tsihombe by dawnlight – a ramshackle little town, built on golden sand, with an unexpectedly ex-colonial air. For almost half a century, until 1946, it was an important French military post: which explains that hint of haute cuisine. I drank good coffee at a food-stall run by a bent old woman – her dark skin loose and crumpled like a garment, her smiling eyes still young. On the sand nearby three small girls sat around a tiny woodfire eating golden boiled-in-oil buns and sharing a saucepan of coffee – drinking from it in turn. They were filthy and cheerful, with broad dark brown faces, curly but not crinkly hair, wide sparkling eyes and sturdy little bodies. Like most of their tribe, they looked vigorously healthy. The Antandroy have a high-protein diet – as well they might, possessing at least three zebu per person.
‘The town slopes down to the left bank of the Manambovo; a major river, but now its wide sandy bed holds only a few pools of stagnant water. Zebu were drinking, women were filling tins with half-gourds – a slow operation. But what’s the hurry? I could hear their laughter as I crossed the long strong French bridge high above them, the only surviving bit of Route Nationale No. 10. That laughter reminded me of an Alison Jolly quote from a UN Report on Agricultural Development in South-East Madagascar – “We find it extremely difficult to introduce economic improvements because the Antandroy seem to be happy.”
‘Beyond the bridge I turned onto a narrow red cart-track with foot-deep ruts, yet in much better shape than Route Nationale No. 10. (Later my map informed me that this is the motor-road to Itomampy on the coast – I could believe it.) Tsihombe marks the margin of the desert and under a sky of broken pearly cloud the air felt slightly humid – silky with moisture after the rasping dryness further north. There had been a heavy dew and tentative inches of wiry green grass gave an illusion of fertility to wide flat cactus-hedged fields – the soil poor and stony and at this season uncultivated. In five miles I saw five new birds; it seemed strange that none was singing to greet the crimson sun, climbing fast above tamarind-fringed Tsihombe, beyond the river’s ochre cliffs.
‘I revelled in the silence and solitude; I needed to be alone with Madagascar. Yet I wasn’t really alone: the razana were everywhere. This whole area of green scrubland parodies an affluent suburb, with meticulously maintained tombs standing like fine houses in spacious grounds. I looked furtively around before approaching each extraordinary construction – no two alike. (Who knows what the local fady/vazaha/razana situation may be?) Most tombs look new – until the array of zebu horns, grey and cracked, reveals their age. Many have massive double doors, and small windows, and vivid paintings on all four sides depicting the activities of the residents in this life – herding, reaping, fishing, marketing, fighting with spears or guns. The Mahafaly specialise in wood carvings, some of great beauty. If a man served in the French army or colonial police, his wooden statuette, often perched on an intricately carved pole, wears the appropriate uniform and headgear. (In this undefined border territory between the Mahafaly and Antandroy lands, both tomb traditions are represented.) The majority of paintings and carvings express that happiness which defeated the UN experts. They are high-spirited, comical – the creations of people who believe the Hereafter can also be fun. The Christian crosses that surmount some tombs have a perfunctory look; they seem mere nods in the direction of a more sombre theology.
‘On the way back I joined two young women head-loaded with prickly-pear fruit for the Sunday market. Eight men followed, some carrying spears, some sticks – or so it seemed. On the bridge each stick became a spear when the owner produced a spear-head from under his lamba and fixed it in place. The women found my ornithological activities quite side-splitting; one of them was so overcome by mirth she had to remove her load and sit on the embankment to recover. The men were less happy about such inexplicable behaviour and looked relieved when a policeman overtook us during one bird-watching pause. This scowling young man in torn shorts and a stained uniform jacket – swinging a heavy truncheon – was not a vazaha-lover. He surveyed me with a mix of insolence and suspicion and seemed about to confiscate my binoculars when the women, between bursts of laughter, explained their purpose. Judging by their tones and gestures, they were diagnosing me as a harmless lunatic. The policeman however was not so easily deterred and two of the men seemed to be egging him on. Then suddenly one woman stopped laughing and pitched into all the men. If there is a Malagasy equivalent of “male chauvinist pig” I would guess she used it. In theory Malagasy women must be subservient to their husbands, in practice they are a robustly liberated lot. The policeman fled. The other cowed males fell back, and silently followed us at a little distance. (As Rachel said when I told her the story, “Their shouts were worse than their spears.”) Meanwhile the bird in question – thrush-sized, crested, black with red wings – was no longer available. I saw the policeman later in the market, lounging under the kily, still scowling. I’m glad he didn’t detect me photographing the tombs. That walk aggravated my rib condition; I could no longer cope with a rucksack and had to unstiffen my upper lip and admit I was a casualty of Merk-travel.
‘Tsihombe’s main market is on Friday and the Sunday display was even sparser than Ampanihy’s, though the small crowd seemed more animated. Yet I found this town’s atmosphere less congenial. The people look a mixed lot and not all the fairer-skinned are Merina. Over two generations a strong European military presence makes itself felt – and, subsequently, seen.
‘The rival sets of church bells rang out simultaneously, soon followed by zestful hymn-singing. We found the large Protestant church in a dangerous state of disrepair and only quarter-full. The equally large Catholic church had been recently painted – pale pink and white, like a birthday cake – and was three-quarters full, its congregation listening attentively, when we arrived, to a young Spanish priest new from Europe but eloquently preaching in Malagasy. Some efforts – certainly foredoomed – are now being made to straighten out Malagasy Catholicism. There were never as many priests as churches, so village catechists greatly influenced the adaptation of Catholicism to suit local tastes. As the Malagasy are great music-lovers, hymn-singing soon came to be, for most Christians, what church services are all about. Madagascar’s Roman Catholics could indeed be described as pioneer liturgical reformers. At a time when the liturgy of the Mass was rigidly standardised all over the world they abandoned Latin, no doubt because of competition with Malagasy-language Protestant services; and gradually the Mass was transformed beyond recognition, each rural parish developing its own version.
‘We departed quite punctually (10.40) and did the forty-two miles to Ambovombe in two hours on a track that might accurately be described as “motorable”. Over one stretch we could see it for miles on a dark green ridge: straight, narrow and red, like a surgeon’s incision. This was a more conventional landscape – still lots of botanical weirdies, but also eucalyptus plantations, fields of manioc and potatoes, two small flocks of brown sheep (how hot they must get!) and many more humans, dead and alive.
‘Ambovombe is bigger than Tsihombe: but still small and at siesta-time on the Sabbath not lively. Fotsy parked in the miniature bus station, then curtly informed us that he and Merk were going no further. It would be easy, he said, to find transport for the last seventy miles to Fort-Dauphin. Bemused, but resigned by now to pretty well any fate, we collected our kit and said good-bye to Merk – I felt almost tearful on leaving this home from home. We were surveying the few unpromising vehicles on view, wondering how long our vigil would be, when Fotsy reappeared and handed each of us a 1,000 FMG note. He had sold us Fort-Dauphin tickets, he explained, so he owed us money. We were too pleasantly shocked to thank him coherently. It would have occurred to none of us – long since made punch-drunk by the vicissitudes of Route Nationale No. 10 – to demand a refund.
‘By then my priority was a drink; the upper lip needed stiffening. In Tsihombe I had foreseen this rib crisis-point and bought a half-litre of hooch (unlabelled, colourless but cloudy) from an Indian shop that stocked little else. Unscrewing the top, I tried not to smell the fumes and took a swig. “Strewth!” said Jamie, holding his nose. Rachel viewed me with that austere distaste peculiar to fourteen-year-olds who feel a parent is letting the side down. “Why don’t you bring pain-killers from home?” she asked irritably. “You know you’re always breaking your ribs!” I took another swig, and was aware of a dual effect; my stomach was heaving but my upper lip already felt stiffer. There is no describing the dreadfulness of this hooch. It surpasses by light-years the most repellent alcohol I have ever met elsewhere. Beside it, the raki that blinded me for twenty-four hours in Nepal was like Jameson’s Fifteen-Year-Old. But it worked. “Let’s look for tickets!” said I, all brisk and cheerful, turning towards a wooden hut little bigger than a sentry-box.
‘Our arrival had attracted an ebullient crowd of delightful children – curious, friendly, amused: no begging – plus a sprinkling of amiable adolescents and one charming ancient crone. These all followed us to the ticket office, where a sober young man sat silently behind a tiny table being harangued, between hiccups, by a very drunk young man. A third young man, unmistakably one short of the shilling, sat on a bench by the wall, laughing quietly at nothing in particular and clutching a two-kilo chunk of fresh raw beef. Two young women (wives?) were peering apprehensively through the small unglazed window, only their heads visible. As Jamie bought tickets for the next vehicle going to Fort-Dauphin (at some unspecified time), Mr One-Short tried to sell us his beef. A slight speech defect didn’t deter him from expatiating at length on the excellence of zebu-meat. He had a happy smile and was altogether a most endearing character. “Two thousand?” he suggested. And then, “Fifteen hundred?” And then, pursuing us out of the hut, “One thousand?” The crowd awaiting our reappearance laughed at him, but not unkindly; we had the impression he was regarded with some affection, as a “card”.
‘The younger generation went in search of lunch, leaving me guarding the rucksacks. I had another swig and beamed benevolently at the excited throng of vazaha-fans. Mr One-Short tried again, taking advantage of a woman on her own. He dangled the chunk so close to my face that I could see white grubs hatching out in its crevices. “Five hundred?” he wheedled. I shook my head. “Three hundred?” – here a dozen giggling children each held up three fingers. But again I shook my head; and then one of the young women intervened, perhaps fearing the Sunday joint was about to be given away. Sadly Mr One-Short tucked the chunk under his left arm, shook my hand with a bloody paw and wandered off.
‘The others rejoined me looking queasy. They had attempted rice and turkey-stew at the only functioning food-stall but even Adrian and Rachel couldn’t stay the course. We moved to the shade of the ticket-hut, where several Fort-Dauphin passengers were waiting. Rachel went on another food-hunt. Jamie mooched about with his camera at the ready; occasionally a spasm distorted his face – no doubt turkey-stew being recollected in agitation. Adrian sat beside me, reading a Graham Greene paperback. The children got bored and dispersed. On my other side an elderly man, looking unusually depressed for a Malagasy, sat on a wicker coop from which protruded the heads of many ducks, hens and cocks. Jamie drifted back and expressed an uncharacteristically sadistic wish to see him being pecked on the bottom. Rachel returned to report no fruit, no buns, no chocolate. In despair she had bought what looked like two bamboo chair-legs – thick hard lengths of sugar-cane. She was already gnawing at one with the pathetic frenzy of a famine-victim and assured me they eventually yielded sweet juice. This proved inaccessible to my elderly fangs so I took out a razor-sharp camping-knife and began to hack. A moment later I was looking at the gleaming white bone of the lower joint of my left thumb. The inch-long cut had severed the tendon and blood spouted with gay abandon. I began to giggle; there’s something in the Malagasy air that makes almost everything seem funny – especially after several swigs of hooch. Adrian raised his head from Graham Greene and stared at my thumb with horrified fascination. “You can see the bone!” I chortled. “But for God’s sake” – said Adrian – “you can’t just sit there laughing at it!” And he shifted his position slightly to get beyond blood-range. Jamie and Rachel were drawn back by my hilarity. “The woman’s mad!” said Jamie. “Yuck!” said Rachel. “It’s a nice clean cut,” I pointed out, licking off the blood so that they too could see the bone. But they weren’t really interested so I got out our First Aid box and applied a tight bandage which soon looked like a small chunk of raw beef.
‘Then we noticed several of our ex-Merk fellow-passengers beckoning us: we were to join the Fort-Dauphin vehicle at the edge of the town. But near the edge it passed us – a remnant of a mini-bus, already crammed – on its way to the bus-station. As we turned back I felt sorry for the depressed elderly man with the poultry on his head, and still sorrier for myself. Face to face with this vehicle even we, battle-hardened as we are, concluded there must be another going to Fort-Dauphin; the addition of four vazaha and five Malagasy seemed against the laws of physics. But the conductor politely ushered us aboard, asking people to give seats to the vazaha. We realised too late that we’d have done better without seats; most were collapsing and my lot was an outside one-third, with a broken metal arm pressed firmly against my broken ribs. This arm’s extraordinary angle made me feel like (among other things) a baby tied into a car-seat. A man was sitting on Rachel and me: half of him on her left shoulder, the other half on my right shoulder, his feet on the knees of someone behind us. Another man was sitting on the nearest window ledge, his torso outside the bus, his hands gripping the roof, his feet in the lap of the man on Rachel’s right. At the back passengers lay on each other, piled to the roof. Luckier folk stood jammed all down the aisle. Adrian and Jamie were lost to view. Rachel fears no reader will believe my accounts of Malagasy vehicles, but we do have two English-speaking witnesses.
‘At 2.30 we moved off – then thought better of it and backed into the shade of a tamarind for twenty-five minutes while the engine received attention and there was a debate about fitting two late-comers into the driver’s cab which already held four passengers. From somewhere Adrian’s voice reported that one of the new arrivals was a ravishingly beautiful Chinese girl, dressed to kill, whom the driver was understandably reluctant to leave behind. “Dressed to kill” seemed an unfortunate choice of phrase for a prospective sixth passenger in a driver’s cab designed for two. Then we really were off – the Chinese girl probably on the driver’s knee, could we but see – and the next three hours made Merk-travel seem sybaritic. I alternately licked my relentlessly oozing blood and sipped hooch. As the tarred surface of this road is in its death-throes, the noisome liquid tended to dribble down my shirt-front – eventually causing the invisible Jamie to shout, “Is your damn bottle leaking?”
‘We’ll be seeing Ambovombe again, en route from Fort-Dauphin to Tana. Route Nationale No. 13 (what does that hold for us?) runs west from Fort-Dauphin to Ambovombe, then turns north to join our old friend Route Nationale No. 7 at Ihosy. I’m, glad we’ll be returning, let us hope in less discomfort – though there is no rational basis for this hope – along the Ambovombe–Fort-Dauphin stretch. We didn’t see much of it yesterday.
‘We stopped outside an isolated hotely at the foot of a pass over the Anosyennes range, which separates the Spiny South from the lushness of the east coast. Here, within five miles, there is a change of climate and vegetation akin to – but even more dramatic than – that caused by the Humboldt Current on the Ecuadorean–Peruvian border. We all got out, most of the able-bodied through the glassless windows. The hotely was selling baked manioc and fresh fish, being fried to order on an open charcoal fire behind the hut. Steep forested mountains rose directly above us; some smooth-crested, some wearing grotesque limestone crowns. We watched a bus-roof drama as we ate our manioc. An escaped duck was waddling across the luggage, playing hard to catch, quacking distractedly and drawing much comment from her companions within the coop. The two imprisoned cocks were crowing defiantly and being answered by the hotely cock, standing on a pile of zebu horns and bones, flapping his wings and boasting of his freedom. Five passengers left us here, including the young man who’d been mainly outside. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to go but maybe they just couldn’t take any more. Although this did nothing to lessen our physical torment, we were now able to see something.
‘Slowly we ascended that pass, equally slowly we descended. This was our first alarming Malagasy mountain-road: very narrow, with a skiddy surface and drops from the verge into lethal depths. Over the watershed, ‘normal’ grass replaced weirdies on the steep slopes. On one side of these mountains the average rainfall is 200 m. a year, on the other side it is 2,500 m. Down at sea-level all was damp extravagant fertility; rows of generously spreading leafy trees, small paddy-fields, ditches and ponds of stagnant water – we could hear the mosquitoes even above the engine noise.
‘At a cluster of palm-thatched shacks, huddled among mango-trees, a young Tulear woman and her beaming small daughter got off after fond farewells – we had endured much together. The pair were rapturously greeted by everyone in sight (three women) and I last saw the little girl bounding like a kangeroo towards one of the shacks. Throughout we’d marvelled at the patience and fortitude of the junior passengers. Not one of them – and there were very many – added to the sufferings of their seniors. Even the babies were virtuous beyond belief, only whimpering genteelly for food at reasonable intervals. In many countries docile children make me uneasy; I suspect them of being underfed or unduly repressed – or both. But here the average child is so full of fun and energy that their stoicism as travellers must be owing to the happy temperament and innate good manners of the Malagasy.
‘Now the moon was floating silver in a royal-blue sky, above a black fretwork of tree-tops, while behind us great masses of cloud, still gold-tinted, shifted swiftly over the mountains. At the next brief stop we were offered a strange fruit called a “wood-orange” which resembles the real thing but is virtually inedible. Soon after, the moon gleamed on an Antanosy tomb: a boat carved in stone for the voyage of the dead.
‘Suddenly, away to the left, we glimpsed a wide sheen that could only be the sea. Then a bulky row of unmistakably colonial buildings stood out on the sky-line. Moments later we stopped in what seemed to be a small subdued shanty-town – revealed this morning as the throbbing heart of Fort-Dauphin’s commercial life.
‘We crawled out, numbed mentally as well as physically. Fort-Dauphin had become fixed in our collective mind as a sort of Holy Grail, a place you go towards without believing you’ll ever get there. To have arrived felt almost dismaying. It was 6.15 p.m. The 390-mile journey had taken three days and two nights, travelling at an average speed – Rachel tells me – of twelve miles per hour.’