In 1642, the Société Française de l’Orient was granted a monopoly charter by Cardinal Richelieu, and at once Sieur Pronis set sail with a small force of soldiers and a few traders to establish a French colony in Madagascar. This was just two years before John Smart and his doomed companions arrived on the other side of the island to establish a British colony. Pronis had made a wiser geographical choice. True, malaria and the Antanosy soon got rid of most of those pioneers, who settled some twenty miles north of Fort-Dauphin, at Saint-Luce. But the south-east coast is less inimical to Europeans than the thorny waterless lands of the Mahafaly; when the surviving French moved to the narrow and quite easily defended peninsula of Fort-Dauphin their colony held out for thirty years.
Thus Fort-Dauphin became the legal toe-hold which 250 years later enabled France to climb all over the island and conquer the summit, Tana. (But by the 1890s Fort-Dauphin was only important legally; as a port it was no help to the invading French troops.) By our standards Pronis was simply being silly when he raised the fleur-de-lys near the southern tip of an island still unexplored by Europeans and laid claim to the entire island on behalf of His Most Christian Majesty King Louis XIII. Yet two and a half centuries later his action helped to change the course of Malagasy history. During those centuries the mutual understanding between Europe’s rulers, and their common faith in the white man’s civilising mission, had survived countless wars and revolutions at home and abroad. It is inconceivable that a 1985 ‘Declaration of Annexation’, such as that made by France in 1665, would be accepted in 2235 as an important part of a legal argument for the take-over of a sovereign state by an invading power.
The French settlement grew around the fort built in 1643 and named after the child who had become king seven months earlier – though the colonists had not yet heard the news. Poor communications were always to be, and still are, among Fort-Dauphin’s main problems. Other seventeenth-century snags were diseases – particularly malaria – acute food shortages and the settlers’ Antanosy neighbours who after all did own the place. Their chief, Andriandramaka, had spent three boyhood years in Goa, as protégé of a Portuguese missionary, and spoke fluent Portuguese. He was a baptised though non-practising Christian and well disposed towards all Europeans. Quite a few Antanosy had Portuguese blood, infused over the generations by shipwrecked sailors, and at first many were more co-operative and friendly than might have been expected. But Pronis antagonised all the local people, much as John Smart had done, by deceptions and betrayals. He was another of those unsavoury types often attracted to such commercial-colonial adventures and his treacherous capture of seventy-three Malagasy, for export as slaves to Mauritius, had disastrous consequences for the future of the little colony. This idea had been suggested to him by the Dutch governor of Mauritius, then critically short of labour. It had such an effect on the Antanosy that for generations most of them fled into the mountains at the sight of any approaching vessel.
The colonists had looked forward to an ample supply of ‘black’ labour and were much taken aback to find the Malagasy neither black nor at all disposed to labour – even for themselves (beyond the minimum necessary for survival) never mind for the vazaha. What the Antanosy really enjoyed was lying in the shade observing French agricultural methods with detached interest. And they adopted towards the settlers – innocently, meaning no offence – those attitudes of kindly condescension considered appropriate to the slave class. It was plain to them that these soldiers and traders, unhappily tilling the soil as an alternative to starvation, were the slaves Pronis had sensibly brought with him.
The young colony was also handicapped by its own sectarianism. A minority, including Pronis, were Huguenots; the rest were nominally Roman Catholics, though their behaviour rarely suggested any form of Christian upbringing. Pronis had soon chosen one of the chief’s nieces as his mistress and some time later the chief demanded that he should marry the young woman. This he did, to the fury of his Catholic compatriots; they denounced the marriage as invalid and wasteful of public money. The latter accusation, at least, was justified. After the wedding, Pronis found himself responsible for maintaining droves of in-laws, in accordance with the custom of the country – which explains the chief’s insistence on a marriage. Andriandramaka was not, as some of the French had naively assumed, a stickler for propriety in these matters.
The settlers mutinied in 1646, putting Pronis in irons for six months. Then a Company ship brought a consignment of new settlers and the Captain released Pronis after he had promised the mutineers an amnesty. The promise was instantly broken; twelve of them were exiled to the then uninhabited island of Bourbon (now Réunion).
Meanwhile trade was being hampered both by the internal dissensions of the colonists and by the eating habits of the Malagasy. Wax and hides were the most lucrative exports – prosaic goods, compared to the rare spices, and precious stones and metals, once expected of Madagascar. But the Malagasy fancied wax with their honey (a taste I share) and cooked their baked meats wrapped in hides which they also ate. So Fort-Dauphin never really took off as a trading-post. Things might have been different had the Company regularly despatched from France cargoes likely to tempt the Malagasy not to eat all their exportable commodities. But Paris soon lost interest in this squabblesome little colony which seemed unlikely ever to come to anything, and during one five-year period no Company ship (and very few others) called to Fort-Dauphin. This neglect led to a drastic deterioration in Franco–Malagasy relations; to feed themselves the French were forced to go into the cattle-raiding business.
Treachery was not of course confined to the Europeans. One of the later governors was a military commander and religious fanatic – Champmargou – and Lazarist priests unwisely encouraged his zeal. Strenuous attempts were made to convert an important Antanosy chief, Andrianmanangue, who had nothing against Christianity but resolutely refused to accept Christian marriage rules. He was devoted to his many wives and very properly felt permanently responsible for them all; the idea of keeping only one, and rejecting the rest, seemed to him downright immoral. He said so to one of the missionaries, who promptly tore the chief’s sacred oly (talisman) from his neck and flung it in the fire. At their next luncheon party with the chief, three missionaries were poisoned. When only one reacted as planned, the other two were clubbed to death. The inevitable French punative expedition was ambushed by six thousand Malagasy and saved only by the arrival of the most extraordinary Frenchman then on the island. La Case had become a local prince by marrying the daughter of the King of Amboule and when this young woman inherited the kingdom she asked her husband to take over as ruler. He did so most successfully, soon endearing himself to his subjects and – what was even more remarkable–to his fellow-rulers. Without his repeated interventions as a mediator, the wretched Fort-Dauphin colony could not possibly have survived for thirty years.
Often the early missionaries over-reacted, yet many did heroic work under tougher conditions than any experienced by their nineteenth-century successors. They were inspired and supported by St Vincent de Paul, who had unrealistic visions of Madagascar as a fruitful vineyard for Christian labourers, and they found the Antanosy as avid for education in the 1640s as the Merina were to be in the 1820s. The chiefs begged for schools – for girls as well as boys – and when the French withdrew in 1674, after enduring hardships unsurpassed in European colonial history, twenty keen scholars had to be abandoned in their boarding-schools.
This first sordid chapter in Fort-Dauphin’s story had a predictably tragic ending. On 27 August 1674 half the colonists were massacred and a fortnight later the survivors sailed away, having spiked the cannon within the fort. In three decades thousands of Frenchmen, including forty-five missionaries, had been killed by disease or the Malagasy. And the only tangible result was that fort which 310 years later we were deterred from examining by two surly young sentries armed with bayonets.
Yet there was one enduring gain: a book by a senior Company official who spent six years at Fort-Dauphin from December 1648, when he arrived to try to sort out the Pronis mess. The Chevalier Etienne de Flacourt belonged to an extinct breed; by now the frontiers of knowledge have been extended beyond the reach of any one mind. He was a scientist, a linguist, a humanist, an intellectual man of action – a final flowering of the Renaissance. He explored much of southern and eastern Madagascar, indefatigably taking notes on customs, language-variations, beliefs, historical folk-memories, medical lore, artistic traditions – and on the flora and fauna and geology and climate. For 150 years his Histoire de la Grande Isle de Madagascar remained the only reliable source of information about the Great Red Island and today scholars still find it useful.
The second chapter in Fort-Dauphin’s colonial story was no less sordid but much briefer. This time, however, the settlers’ leader caused an ecological upheaval throughout the whole of southern Madagascar.
Count Dolisie de Maudave was a French naval officer, a correspondent of Voltaire’s and one of the earliest and most fervent preachers of ‘la mission civilisatrice’. In 1768 he arrived at Fort-Dauphin full of high-falutin notions about running a colony without infringing on the chiefs’ authority. But the brutal realities of local life soon got the better of his ideals and he became an energetic slave-trader, thus provoking the chiefs to massacre most of the colonists. Within two and a half years the French had again sailed away.
This time, however, they left a meaningful legacy: the Mexican prickly-pear cactus, introduced from Réunion’s Botanical Garden by de Maudave ‘to embellish the sea-ward face of the fort and by this means make it impenetrable’. With uncanny rapidity this cactus (raketa to the Malagasy) took over the southern desert, replacing local vegetation wherever red clay prevailed. It raised the water-level so that springs and wells rarely ran dry. It proved invaluable as fencing-material, as zebu-fodder, as food for the Antandroy and many of the Mahafaly. A French military officer and botanist, Decary, calculated that in the early years of this century, in his Tsihombe district, fifteen tons of prickly-pear fruit were eaten daily throughout the dry season. The Barbary fig had become the staple diet for tens of thousands of Antandroy. Also, its leaves were the main source of water during drought, and juices were extracted, by pounding, from the trunk.
When required to do so, the raketa formed solid walls twelve feet high and – because of its mighty spines – utterly impenetrable. It defeated Merina attempts to conquer the south and made the French ‘pacification’ much more difficult. The Antandroy often blocked paths – already securely raketa-walled – with ten-foot raketa barricades a hundred yards long. While the French troops tried to clear a way through, enduring agonising injuries in the process, they were constantly exposed to spear-assaults from invisible warriors whom they could not pursue. Decary observed that these experiences proved the truth of a local proverb – ‘The Antandroy and the raketa are relatives’.
Then, as quicky as that relationship had been established in the 1770s, it was destroyed in the 1920s. To control the southern desert it was necessary to control the raketa and in 1925 the French introduced the cochineal beetle to Tulear. This Mexican insect, source of the crimson dye, is the raketa’s natural enemy which limits the cactus in their common homeland – where the beetle too has natural enemies. Without these, it spread so rapidly that by the late 1920s travellers were reporting being blinded and half-suffocated by swarming males. Everywhere the raketa died. As a direct result, tens of thousands of Antandroy and their zebu also died during the drought of 1931, and again in 1936, 1943 and 1956. Few people were aware of these calamities – even in Tana, never mind Paris and the world beyond. Then there were no TV camera-crews at the ready to jet to disaster areas and show us all what goes on. However, a few years before Independence French agronomists introduced beetle-resistant strains of spineless prickly pear, for use chiefly as zebu-fodder. As this is not self-seeding – each bush has to be planted by hand – it will never spread widely enough to raise the water-level and be a defence against famine and drought. Nor, of course, will it ever serve as a defence against armed invaders.
Fort-Dauphin is the only town to have been founded as a result of the several seventeenth-century efforts (Portuguese, French, English) to establish colonies on Madagascar. It is therefore the island’s oldest town; Tamatave and Majunga, now much more important ports, were not founded until the early and mid eighteenth century, respectively. Yet Fort-Dauphin’s geographical isolation, accentuated by a bay too shallow for modern ships and the idiosyncrasies of the Malagasy road-system, makes it seem strangely forgotten. It does not belong to the Spiny South beyond the mountains, nor does it feel very integrated with its own hinterland of the Antanosy. Transport up the coast to Manakara and the rail-link with Fianar, on Route Nationale No. 12, is hampered by the need to use ferry-boats across fifteen river-mouths. This road, by which we had hoped to return north, is now closed to motor-traffic and has been deleted from the newest maps; most of the ferries are not operating for lack of spare parts. (‘The pieces are missing’ – a phrase with which we were soon to become familiar.)
It is hard to believe that Fort-Dauphin has some sixteen thousand inhabitants. On the evening of our arrival it felt like another small town, as a kind young man led us around the bay by moonlight. (‘What are we going to do when there’s no moon?’ wondered Rachel. But by the waning of that moon we were well adjusted to nocturnal arrivals in unlit towns.)
The cool evening air was invigorating and after three days immobility the freedom to walk made my rib condition seem trivial. There is much to be said for arriving in Malagasy towns by moonlight. They are not, in general, beautiful places. But their settings often are and here the moonlight emphasised forested encircling mountains, miles of smooth beach and a calm radiant sea. Meanwhile, derelict colonial offices, functional tourist amenities and tin-roofed shacks lurked unseen in the romantic shadows. When I suggested a moonlight swim our guide revealed that other things lurk unseen: the beach is grievously oil-polluted. As he spoke we rounded a corner and saw three giant oil-storage tanks from which pipes like bloated serpents ran across the sand – conspicuous even by moonlight. As usual, few citizens were visible; after sunset the Malagasy seem pathologically allergic to the open air.
The imposing three-storey Hotel de France is Indian-owned and in practice (though not in price) is no more than an overgrown doss-house. It was jerry-built in the early 1950s when Fort-Dauphin seemed to have been suddenly swept into the mainstream of Madagascar’s industrial life. Uranium had been discovered not far away and as French experts and technicians converged on the town it made sense to invest in a sea-shore hotel with an arcaded façade and a shrub-filled patio – the sort of place to which the new arrivals would want to bring wives and children (or mistresses). But fortunately an abundance of uranium was soon after found in France’s Massif Central. When the French Atomic Energy Authority hastily withdrew all subsidies from the Fort-Dauphin project the locals were stricken but the razana must have smiled in their tombs. Had the project proceeded, many demoralised mining families might by now have been suffering the consequences – and wondering how they could have so enraged the razana that an epidemic of lung-cancer seemed an appropriate punishment.
We had the hotel to ourselves that first night. Entering the patio – stumbling over broken paving – we climbed two flights of concrete steps to a wide balcony. Several big rooms opened off it, their double-doors ozone-warped, their locks defective, their bile-green walls damp- and dirt-splotched. Our rooms each had two single iron beds with lumpy and smelly straw mattresses; but the sheets were clean. Electric light – much dimmer than a Malagasy full moon – was spasmodically available for a few hours after sunset. A corner cubicle contained one ragged dingy towel and a discoloured wash-basin from which the water splashed away through a hole in the sloping floor. At intervals this hole released what seemed like waves of poisoned gas; we did not need to be told that Fort-Dauphin suffers from a sewage-crisis of awesome duration and magnitude. There was one loo per balcony; no illumination was required to find it. However, the wild-life in our room (no extra charge) made up for a lot. Most of these creatures were unidentifiable; but while bringing my diary up to date I was distracted by a ferocious and long-drawn-out cockroach fight, worthy of a Norse saga. Size-wise it was a most uneven contest: one protagonist resembled a large mouse, the other a small mouse. Roland’s museum at Ranohira contained preserved specimens but I never expected to have the good fortune to witness them in action. Eventually David won and chased Goliath – limping perceptibly – under my ‘desk’, a roughly made cupboard which was the room’s only furniture.
On our first day we spent some time looking for the town centre before realising that Fort-Dauphin does not have one. Surely, you think, there will be some semblance of a main street round the next corner. But, delightfully, there never is. The few short streets that look as though they might be the beginnings of a town – lined with run-down Indian shops – never come to anything. Fort-Dauphin is in fact a village sprawling all over a very beautiful peninsula, plus several large government buildings, two enormous Christian churches, two enormous Christian colleges and a neurotically guarded military post surrounding the original fort. Sandy laneways serve as roads and the sea seems to be everywhere. The mountains, rising almost sheer from the bay, look higher than they are; St Louis, the highest peak, is only 1,500 feet. Most dwellings are cheerful little shacks surrounded by untidy little gardens and built in long rows on miles of sand-dunes. Anti-gale stones weigh down the thatched or tin roofs and strange things grow in the gardens. The natives are friendly.
Here, as in Antsirabe, many of the older generation frankly admit they wish the French had stayed. While their children accept Fort-Dauphin as it now is, they recall how beautiful it once was. It is the old, sad story. Inevitably, a European settlement will only look good if European standards are maintained. Had Fort-Dauphin been built by the Malagasy for their own purposes, using their own materials according to their own designs, it would I have no doubt be even more beautiful, because more in harmony with its surroundings, than the colonial town of thirty years ago.
While queuing one day at the Post Office (those letters never got to Ireland), I met an English-speaking Merina from Tana. A middle-aged woman, she had studied nutrition in the USA and was now doing a survey (‘Probably futile’, she admitted) of southern diet deficiencies. ‘I’m just another expert,’ she said gloomily. ‘And for twenty-five years Madagascar has had teams of foreign experts from dozens of countries and organisations doing “surveys” – and then disappearing. You could build a dam with their reports. But they only change things in one way, by selling their fleets of jeeps and Landrovers before they leave – usually at a good profit.’ I had already noticed a few of these vehicles, decorated with the emblem of one of the more notoriously corrupt international agencies.
My companion sighed when I quoted the UN complaint that it is difficult to help those who do not want to be helped. ‘True – we Malagasy hate work. The few officials who take their jobs seriously get high-blood-pressure and ulcers because they are not used to pressure – it’s not part of our tradition – to us the work-ethic is a meaningless concept. So the few who do work are regarded as eccentrics and their colleagues leave it all to them.’
By this stage we were drinking coffee at a stall in the covered market-place: and we had exchanged names. ‘Here in the south,’ said Rebecca, ‘so much more could be grown with irrigation! But nobody’s interested in new schemes. They don’t think about the next drought and famine – they can’t think ahead. And then we have our taboos. The country is over-run with poultry but it’s fady for pregnant women and small children to eat eggs. Mothers beg vitamin pills for their one-year-olds but it’s fady to feed them with carrots or beans or bananas till they’re two. Zebu give almost no milk but it’s fady to cross-breed to provide dairy produce. The size of the hump is all-important – the razana would never forgive them if they bred cattle with a smaller hump – and suppose the hump disappeared …!’
Rebecca’s main objective was to enlist the aid of the more liberal ombiasa in a campaign against those fady which frustrate health-education and the practice of preventive medicine. This, she argued, could be done without undermining essential religious beliefs or seeming disrespectful towards the razana. Many taboos have already been eroded by twentieth-century requirements or developments. Rebecca gave as an example the postal system which, however ineffectual and little used, has weakened the fady against telling one’s name and address. Also, the common-sense element within basic Western education has to some extent made its mark on most regions. Fifty years ago the Antandroy believed it necessary to burn a house in which someone had died, a fady that probably started as a health-precaution. Then one day a dying twelve-year-old boy asked to be moved outside, so that his parents might be spared the trouble and expense of rebuilding. His request was interpreted by the ombiasa as a message from the razana, rescinding this fady, and gradually the news spread that there was no longer any need to rebuild after a death.
‘The ombiasa are not all bad men,’ said Rebecca, looking at me rather accusingly as though I had condemned them. ‘The French and the missionaries always treated them as enemies, greedy crooks terrorising the villagers for their own gain. But it’s more complicated. There are all sorts of ombiasa, good, bad and indifferent. And of course there are the men who practise black magic, as you would call it, but they are another sort. The good ombiasa have always tried to protect their people from exploitation, so the vazaha said they were bad. The fanatical ones did a lot of harm, urging the warriors on to fight when they had no hope of winning against European weapons. But even they weren’t the sort of cynical megalomaniacs the missionaries liked to write about. It’s not possible to have cynical manipulators growing up in these tribal communities in the middle of nowhere, never having been in contact with the outside world. Even the bad ombiasa weren’t just playing on the superstitious villagers. They shared and still share most of those superstitions – they are sincere, they are part of the communities, not parasites on them. But the Malagasy have flexible minds – we are not fanatical by temperament. We are adaptable. So it should be possible to co-operate more with the ombiasa in my sort of work. A big problem’ – continued Rebecca – ‘is bad relations between the southern tribes and the people from Tana. Too many Malagasy officials have treated the tribes with contempt and tried to bully them, even more than the French did. Or at best they know nothing about conditions here. The 1971 trouble started because the government kept the high tax on cattle after half the herds had died in a drought. Local leaders tried to co-ordinate the uprising but of course that didn’t work. In some towns tribesmen raided the gendarmerie barracks for arms and took over the buildings. In a few places they killed all the gendarmerie. When troops and police were sent out from here some gendarmerie shot up whole villages in revenge, though the army behaved well. But there are many memories still – much resentment. And the corruption – the Antandroy hate it. Now President Ratsiraka is dismissing hundreds of corrupt minor officials but there are lots left. You have seen what the roads are like – and when local leaders complain they are told by government officials they must pay for road improvements with so many litres of bush-alcohol. And some demand the use of village girls – and so on. All that makes it hard for outsiders like me to be accepted. But southern hospitality is wonderful when you are trusted. Maybe it’s easier being a woman! They try here to give me armed escorts but I know I’m safer going alone.’
Then Rebecca had to leave me, to drive her own jeep on a non-road to some village north of Ambovombe. She was, I suspected, a very long cactus-thorn in the flesh of quite a few bureaucrats.
Fort-Dauphin’s Malagasy name – Taolankarana – means, according to our guidebook, ‘sites of dreams’. But for me, much as I liked the little non-town, ‘sites of nightmares’ would be nearer the mark. These came under four headings: medical, legal, financial and climatic. (The last was of course a shared nightmare.)
Our first task on our first morning was to find something to hold me together and expedite rib-knitting. The collapsing hospital had nothing: no bandages, no plasters, no doctors and (apparently) no patients. Eventually however we tracked down a roll of wide French sticking-plaster, in the Pharmacie du Tropique. This was not just what the doctor would have ordered at home; but when Rachel had bound me tightly I felt able to tackle the next, legal, nightmare.
According to the Malagasy Embassy in Paris, renewing our visas would be no problem in Tana: a mere matter of form, plus another vast sum of money. The snag was that we were very far from Tana when those visas expired and en route we had heard chilling rumours of visa-less vazaha being deported at twelve hours notice. The problem was familiar; in many countries immigration departments work on the assumption that travellers remain always within easy reach of the capital city. In Peru we had been arrested, and deported, under almost identical circumstances. I am therefore hyper-sensitive on this subject and had decided to touch the hearts of the Fort-Dauphin gendarmerie with a sob-story about broken ribs having delayed our return to Tana. My bandaged left hand would strengthen this alibi. (The sorts of pain produced by broken ribs and a severed tendon are so different that in an odd way they seemed to be cancelling each other out.)
My sob-story was never needed. We wandered from office to office, across miles of sand-dunes, trying to persuade someone to take an interest in our status as illegal immigrants. Unfortunately none of those concerned spoke a language that Rachel recognised as French. (Even Jamie might have had problems.) With increasing desperation we presented our expired visas to gendarmerie officers, to a woman clerk at police headquarters, to an important-looking jet-black gentleman in the Post Office, to the Chef of this and that Bureau and Department. They all shook hands, welcomed us warmly, invited us to sit down, took our proffered passports and wondered where Ireland was. When I pointed to the date of expiry on our visas they peered and laughed and said Paris was in France.
We made a third visit to police headquarters, still hoping to chance upon an adequate French-speaker. The whole place was empty – a substantial colonial building atop a sand-dune, surrounded by shacks and poultry and patches of manioc. As we penetrated to its inner offices, in search of some sleeping policeman, I noticed a yellowed bilingual notice nailed to the back of a door. It listed Malagasy visa requirements and revealed that the local gendarmerie were empowered to issue visas. True, it was exactly twenty years out of date and Christian Marxists might like to do things differently. But it looked useful as a starting point for action.
We returned to the entrance and sat on the doorstep. In the fulness of time a fat wheezing elderly officer appeared from one of the shacks; he had obviously just woken up and yawned at us in astonishment. I took him by the arm, led him to the notice and pointed to our visas. He laughed nervously, shook his head and vanished.
Again we sat on the doorstep. Twenty minutes later Wheezy was back with the woman clerk and two more officers whom we’d met earlier in the day. All four studied our visas, read the notice and were thrown into a state of confusion painful to witness. In a small front office they argued among themselves with impassioned eloquence at extraordinary length. Then they told us to go away and return at 5 p.m.
That visa-quest used up three to four hours on each of four consecutive days. It involved long waits in offices that turned out to be the wrong ones, and abortive journeys to police headquarters (usually nobody was present at the prearranged hour), and much queuing for a special sort of stamp no longer available in Fort-Dauphin, and a long search for a passport photographer who charged £4 for each of six prints. (Our ‘spares’ had fallen foul of my melted chocolate.) An aura of make-believe surrounded the whole enterprise. Clearly none of the officials concerned took visas seriously, though they were prepared to go through any number of puzzling bureaucratic hoops to satisfy the vazaha’s incomprehensible lust for getting papers in order. Luckily our acclimatisation to Madagascar was by then complete. The main psychological adjustment required of Western travellers has to do with one’s attitude to time. When that has been brought into line with the Malagasy attitude, life is fun. But a failure soon to achieve this adjustment can expose the traveller to very real hazards, like ulceration and dementia. Had we attempted to fit our visa-quest into busy sight-seeing days we would soon have needed sedation. But for us it became a pivotal part of the Fort-Dauphin experience – and it had many rewarding moments, as when a wandering turkey-hen perched on the edge of a police officer’s desk and shat accurately onto an open ledger.
In the end, not to our surprise, we left Fort-Dauphin still visa-less. During the last round of negotiations we were instructed to write a letter each (in French) to the relevant government Minister. Those letters, and our photographs, and the Permit-to-Emigrate forms we had filled in in quintuplicate (in lieu of visa-application forms) would, we were assured, be forwarded to Tana where we could collect our renewed visas on arrival.
We were returning from one gendarmerie session when a pair of attractive adolescent girls approached us, giggling shyly and urging each other to do the talking. Finally one of them greeted us in French with the information that their father was our friend – a bewildering declaration until we discovered him to be one of the police officers dealing with the visa crisis. We were invited to meet Mamma and led up and down several densely inhabited dunes. Often our companions shouted to acquaintances, drawing attention to their vazaha guests. This whole area was remarkably litter-free – and stink-free, unlike the Hotel de France. Primitive but well-cared-for ‘sanitary equipments’ are far preferable to defective mod cons.
The tin-roofed, two-roomed wooden shack was raised above the ground on short stilts. Mamma appeared on the narrow balcony, smiling and waving a welcome in response to her daughters’ excited summons. She was very tall, very fat, immensely gracious – almost a regal figure in a billowing magenta gown, calf-length and sleeveless, that looked quite splendid against her glowing brown skin. She invited us to sit on a single bed just inside the door, apologising for the lack of chairs; given ten children to educate, there was no spare cash for furniture. Her explanation was matter-of-fact, offered with no trace of either embarrassment or self-pity. Some children had been, others were being and the rest would be educated at the Lutheran Mission College, a fee-paying school. This was a very Malagasy order of priorities: few possessions, but the best possible education for five sons and five daughters. The frames of both glazed windows and the inner walls were painted apple-green; the only visible luxury was a transistor radio, hanging uselessly on a wall because of the battery shortage. Presumably most of the children slept on the floor; the bed we sat on, and a double bed in the inner room, were supplemented by stacks of bedding neatly folded and piled almost to the ceiling.
Mamma was a seamstress, which explained why all the visible children (six) were so well dressed. She told us, when asked, that she worked seven days a week. (Can it be that Malagasy women are less work-shy than their mates?) We found it hard to believe that she was forty-nine; she looked about thirty-five, her thick tight curls un-greyed, her broad plump face unwrinkled. She had lost four babies in infancy – dysentery, we gathered. The living ranged in age from twenty-five to three. On hearing that Rachel was the only fruit of my womb, Mamma registered appalled sympathy. As we talked the younger children were playing in the cactus-hedged ‘garden’, a huge sloping sand-pit. The whole family looked happy and healthy and radiated mutual affection. Opponents of birth-control would have found them first-rate propaganda ammunition. But as we walked away down the dunes, past many similar groups of young Malagasy, I thought twenty years ahead and wished the Tana government would do something now to reduce the birth rate. Madagascar still has time – just – to keep its population at a level suited to its size and resources.
Paying for our visa photographs brought my third Fort-Dauphin nightmare to crisis point. We had left our surplus traveller’s cheques in Antsirabe, taking only what seemed like ample cash for the southern journey, and I had miscalculated so badly that now we were indigent gentlewomen. The solution might appear simple: telephone Antsirabe and ask our friends to transfer cash to a Fort-Dauphin bank. But in Madagascar one has to survive without reliable modern communications, which is partly why I fell so hopelessly in love with that country. We were as cut off from the highlands as Pronis was in 1647 and our situation would have been serious but for the boys’ comparative wealth. Having listened attentively to their financial discussions I knew they could afford to lend us our fares to Antsirabe, where we planned to go our separate ways. Never before have I had to borrow from fellow-travellers (and in any circumstances I am allergic to borrowing) so I needed an extra swig of uninhibiting hooch before going to the boys’ room. That was on the evening of our third rainy day and they, poor things, were sitting shivering on their beds, wrapped in blankets, their sodden clothes hanging all over the place and their floor two inches deep in rainwater. They had, as it happened, been discussing the Murphys’ obviously indigent state and were about to offer us a loan.
One thinks of islands in the Indian Ocean as places of perpetual sunshine where calm blue seas lap palm-fringed beaches and tropical blossoms scent the languorous air. But one is quite mistaken. Fort-Dauphin’s weather, during our first three days, can only be compared to mid-winter on the Aran Islands. Even within that sheltered bay the ocean frothed and pounded, sending towering breakers roaring landwards to crash and spume on the cliffs below the fort. A gale drove sheets of cold rain across the peninsula, lifting roofs off shacks and almost lifting us off our high balcony as we struggled, drenched to the skin after some marathon visa expedition, to turn our key in the rusty lock. By night the noise of the storm kept even me awake; by day the dark low racing clouds made it hard to read in our room. After three days of this the younger generation all had streaming colds; I escaped infection, possibly because of a considerable intake of pain-killing hooch. We did not then have a dry garment between us and group-morale was lowish. However, Rachel and I at least had a dry room; the boys’ seaward window was broken and their ceiling leaked badly. In Fort-Dauphin during mid-winter three-day gales habitually alternate with several days of sunshine.
On the morning of our fourth day all was stillness and brightness as I set out for the bus station at 6 a.m., leaving Rachel snuffling in bed. It was my turn to bashie-hunt; each day one of us made enquiries every few hours. Fort-Dauphin has no formal bus station but the little traffic that enters and leaves usually stops and starts near the market-place. There is no regular Fort-Dauphin–Fianar service comparable to the weekly Tulear–Fort-Dauphin Merk. Nor is there any central ticket-office, or any person or persons with authoritative fore-knowledge of vehicle movements. In the market-place one simply wanders around, asking questions on the off-chance that someone might have news. Rumours of course abound. A mini-bus might be leaving on Friday morning, a bashie might be leaving on Saturday afternoon, or maybe at midnight on Sunday, or it could be at dawn on Monday. Vehicles depart when enough people want to go somewhere and that might be twice a week or once a month. Hence our constant enquiries. Getting away from Fort-Dauphin is even harder than getting to it and none of us could afford to be too long delayed. The boys wanted to explore the north of the island, we wanted to explore the east.
From my cliff-top track the dawn was tumultuous: great banks of plum-coloured cloud poised above a long strip of lemon-yellow, then a change to hectic pink and molten gold – while below the sea still heaved uneasily, made sullen by churning sand.
In the market-place I was greeted on all sides. We had become familiar figures and were subjected to much leg-pulling about our hopes of getting to Fianar in the foreseeable future – an ambition which seemed to be regarded, with some reason, as unrealistic. (Among the Malagasy such teasing is not always as straightforward as it seems; in an odd way it can be a test of the vazaha. Responses to it in the same vein of humour are much appreciated, but a failure to see the joke may be taken badly.) If anything was going to Fianar that day nobody knew about it. After half-an-hour and several cups of coffee I ambled off, feeling rather relieved. My ribs were mending nicely but seemed not quite ready for an unknown number of days on Route Nationale No. 13 – which, we had been reliably informed, is twin brother to Route Nationale No. 10.
Group-morale was up that sunny morning and we planned to join the boys on Lebanon beach after running the last lap of our visa marathon. Returning from police headquarters we passed the sandstone bulk of the Italian-run Catholic College – rather like a handsome military barracks, with nine hundred pupils. Suddenly an outburst of hallooing and yelling came from a bungalow garden: nothing to do with us, obviously, yet we looked around as one does. Two gesticulating figures were literally jumping up and down with excitement – and, unmistakably, they were beckoning us. Rachel recognised them first – ‘Our Aeroflot friends!’ And so they were: the elderly Italian father, the young Malagasy mother, the three endearing boys. The parents rushed to embrace us and their joy at this reunion did even more for our morale than the sunshine. They escorted us into a neat little living-room, furnished from Italy, and produced coffee and banana-cake and explained that Mario’s nephew was a priest-teacher at the College. Would we join them next day on an expedition to a leper colony? We would: the appointment was made for 9 a.m.
Lebanon beach is everything a good beach should be: crescent-shaped, sheltered from the oil-polluted east by a wooded promontory, its deep water shark-free, its golden sand innocent of those crustacean hazards which, according to our guidebook, make ‘bear-feet’ inadvisable on almost every other Malagasy beach. It is cedar rather than palm-fringed and behind rise grassy undulations on which the ‘Centre Touristique’ is inoffensive – ‘Six comfortable bungalows with complete sanitary amenities, riddance, terrace’. ‘Riddance’ baffled us, but no doubt it is a useful extra amenity. The sun was not too hot for tan-acquiring, the breeze was not strong enough to blow sand around, our fellow-swimmers were not too numerous and mostly attractive young Malagasy – high-spirited children and teenagers, doing acrobatics on the sand and stunts in the water. There was however one snag: several sleek young Indian males on noisy, smelly motor-bikes. Rachel recognised one of them; twice he had pursued her to the market-place and tried to chat her up – behaviour unimaginable on the part of a Malagasy youth.
Those Indians were, objectively, no more or less tiresome than any other macho motor-bike freaks. But as they snarled around the grassy dunes, swerving between the cedars and yelling challenges, it was possible to sympathise with the intense though subdued Malagasy dislike of their ‘Indian’ compatriots. (In fact more than half of these settlers came originally from what is now Pakistan.) With the Malagasy unable to obtain petrol for essential journeys, or spare parts for ancient vehicles, one could not help resenting those insolent youths on their trendy machines. Given the state of the non-roads for hundreds of miles around, such machines could serve only one purpose: to flaunt an affluence based on the exploitation of the Malagasy.
For generations Madagascar’s retail trade has been largely controlled either by Chinese merchants (in Tana and along the east coast) or by Indians, many of whom have been settled on the island since the beginning of the nineteenth century. (Their sort of imperialism is more durable than the European variety.) Both groups also act as money-lenders, yet their reputations are very different. The Chinese are said to be tough and shrewd but fair and honest; the Indians are accused of slyness and ruthless dishonesty. There must be many exceptions in both communities, but this is how most Malagasy see their minorities. The Indians rarely intermarry with the Malagasy, the Chinese often do. Numerically Indians form a tiny, aloof fraction of the population but their financial power is enormous – and growing. President Ratsiraka’s austerity campaign has made it much more obvious, creating as it does ideal conditions for Black-Marketeering. The Indians have proved by far the most efficient operators of this system and when criticised they point out that but for their resourcefulness Madagascar would be even more destitute and chaotic – which to an extent is true. They fly to Réunion and organise the illegal import of everything from motor-tyres to toilet soap, on all of which their average profit is forty per cent. Their Black Market charge for one new Landrover tyre in 1983 was £300. Having accumulated substantial capital over the generations, Indian merchants were best placed to ‘use’ the austerity era. The smaller Malagasy merchants, without any capital, could not begin to compete and many have recently been forced out of business. Mario’s wife, Rabado, is sister to a Fort-Dauphin general stores merchant who in 1982 had to shut up shop. Indian ‘cornering’ also infuriates the Malagasy. Tinned milk – the only sort available in this country of umpteen million cattle – disappeared in Fort-Dauphin for a year, then reappeared in every Indian shop at more than double the old price. It is not surprising that the Indians are now being blamed for all shortages. In early 1983 sugar was unobtainable in Fort-Dauphin for three months. Then news filtered through that an uncontrollable surplus existed at Majunga, one of Madagascar’s main cane-growing areas. Mountains of sugar were lying outside the refinery stores, exposed to rats, birds and weather: and at once the Indians were blamed for conspiring to create an artificial shortage. In that case however lack of transport was the problem. There were no vehicles in Majunga sound enough to get the sugar from one end of the island to the other – an explanation which did not even slightly strain my credulity. We had remarked on the odd colour of Fort-Dauphin’s sugar-supply: neither white nor brown. Pessimists said it came off the exposed mountain and was stained by rat-piss.
During our banana-cake session Mario had likened the role of Indian businessmen in Madagascar (or East Africa) to the traditional role of Jews in many societies. Indian traders have a capacity for hard work and long-term planning, a well-organised mutual support system, an inborn ability to induce profits to breed more profits, a nose for new opportunities and a flexible conscience about how to use them. All those traits, said Mario, are alien to the Malagasy character. As he spoke I thought of my coffee-lady friend at the covered market near our hotel, a youngish woman with five helpful children and a rheumaticky grandfather. Every morning I went to her stall with our big Thermos and bought half a dozen crispy fried pastries. And every morning she added a gift cup of coffee to the Thermos and a gift seventh pastry to the pile – with a loving though incomprehensible phrase and a squeeze of the hand. She is unlikely ever to save enough money to buy a little shop.
We were not the only vazaha on the beach; at the base of the promontory cliff five missionaries were picnicking. When I swam to that side of the bay, using a sedate breaststroke suited to my condition, I recognised Ruth and David, just flown in from Tulear. The Norwegian-American Lutheran Missionary Society (from Minnesota) has had its base in Fort-Dauphin since 1888 and Ruth’s baby is the fourth Madagascar-born generation. Will he carry the torch into the twenty-first century? Few pupils remain at the Fort-Dauphin school, once thronged with the children of missionaries – when these were thick on the ground throughout southern Madagascar – and with young Malagasy Lutherans. In Independent Madagascar missionaries are not actively opposed, but neither are they encouraged. And perhaps after a century’s heroic effort even these single-minded people are beginning to realise that among the Bara, the Mahafaly and the Antandroy, Christianity – in any recognisable form – is for the birds. Yet a Lutheran pull-out would be a tragedy for those tribes; no one else at present in view is likely to put so much disinterested work into the establishment of rural health-centres.
At sunset it was again my turn to bashie-hunt, again unsuccessfully. Returning by the main coast road, my passport was demanded – for the first and last time in Madagascar – by an aggressive young policeman carrying a lantern. (It was very dark, the moon not yet risen.) Our having spent so much time at police headquarters made his attitude all the more irritating. His inordinate stupidity strengthened my impression that the gendarmerie do not represent the finest flower of Malagasy manhood and helped to explain Fort-Dauphin’s ‘security paranoia’ stories.
It seems the local security forces are obsessionally afraid of a South African invasion, with some odd results. A few months previously a party of primary school children had been taken by their teacher to camp near the summit of St Louis, overlooking the town. Before retiring, they used camp-fire torches to signal to their friends at home – a pre-arranged game. On descending next morning they were surrounded by the army and accused of having signalled to an enemy submarine: ‘Time to invade – town abed!’ They and their teacher were then imprisoned, for half a day, while the school authorities, supported by the leaders of both churches, argued with the CO – who must have known that his men had behaved like lunatics but was reluctant to admit it.
Still odder was the story of one of Fort-Dauphin’s remaining colonists (there are quite a few) who found a box of ship’s flares at the back of a cupboard and decided to try one out. It worked perfectly, landed in the middle of the market-place and caused not only total panic in Fort-Dauphin but nationwide alarm. The Tana press reported it as a probable bomb-attack from either Japan or the USA (why not South Africa?) and Madagascar’s television network (which covers the whole island but is ninety per cent invisible) flew a cameraman to Fort-Dauphin to film the damage.
These stories disturbed me. They reveal how credulous and unsophisticated are the majority of Malagasy – and how excitable, beneath their calm, easy-going exterior. That combination leaves a country open to the most devastating mischief-making by Foreign Powers who wish to influence its destiny.
Mario’s sense of time has survived marriage to a Malagasy; by 9.05 we were en route for the leper colony in a twenty-three-year-old Landrover, already as full as a bashie when we joined the merry throng in the open back. All Rabado’s younger relatives seemed to have come along for the ride and four women sat in front with (or on) Mario, laughing uproariously at each other’s jokes and tickling each other in the ribs – a freedom which I envied them. The family tendency to run to fat perhaps explains Mario’s eccentric driving. Route Nationale No. 12 (now deleted from the maps but still used as far as the first ferry) was equally eccentric; I tried to hold my own ribs together as we bounced for fifteen miles through a riot of lush vegetation, past two wide lakes and several hamlets of palm-thatched bamboo huts from which children spilled by the score to stare at the passing vehicle.
At the unmarked turn-off to the colony there is a sense of moving into an emotionally or psychologically ‘restricted zone’. Numerous fady are still associated with leprosy though the knowledge that it is curable, and not infectious on sight, is spreading among the east coast tribes – its main victims in Madagascar. It has never been widespread on the island but is persistent throughout the rain-forest.
The track wound through a gold and green world – sun flooding between pines, palms, eucalyptus, lychee, and a variety of medicinal shrubs whose Malagasy names I was told but did not take in. To the west, very close, rose a roughly crested ridge of the Anosyennes range: sheer, densely forested, inaccessible, a refuge for plants and insects and tiny mammals found nowhere else on our planet.
At the wooden reception-hut a seventy-seven-year-old French priest greeted us; he has spent forty-seven years in Madagascar, most of them here, caring for lepers. One felt he had opted out of Time: he might have been one of the original Lazarist missionaries despatched to Fort-Dauphin by St Vincent de Paul. Not so however the youngest of this colony’s eight Sisters of Mercy, a twenty-five-year-old Fillipino who guided Rachel and me. She told us that among the Antanosy villagers marriage is virtually unknown and a woman may have seven children by seven different fathers. ‘The men tend to drift off when a woman becomes pregnant,’ she explained cheerfully. ‘But the children are always much loved – and maybe God thinks love the most important thing? We can’t know!’
The other seven nuns are elderly Frenchwomen for whom it may not be easy to find replacements; and if these missionaries were not caring for the lepers nobody would be. The Lazarist order has been locally involved since the 1670s; the first Malagasy nun was a Sister of Mercy who ran the girls’ boarding school at Fort-Dauphin, having begun her association with the vazaha as mistress to one of the French colonists. Her lover’s early death so affected her that she became first a Christian and then a nun.
The colony’s ‘estate’ covers broken land: ‘split-level’, as Rachel said. We walked down to a little reed-fringed lake where the less crippled patients fish from home-made dug-outs, and then cook their catches for themselves in their own individual thatched-hut kitchens. On other levels they grow vegetables and fruits; on the highest level graze cross-bred zebu cows who yield enough milk for the colony. It is self-sufficient too in poultry, eggs and meat; the patients get beef twice a week. In the well-equipped rehabilitation centre women are taught how to weave and crochet with their maimed hands, while men learn how to make shoes for maimed feet. In the hospital section we watched a weeping and homesick newcomer being comforted. Her face had been badly affected and one of the oldest nuns sat beside her on her bed, stroking her hair. In the out-patients department, catering for those well enough to live in their own huts, we watched dressings being changed and rejoiced when those with mere stumps left at the end of their arms unselfconsciously shook hands in accordance with Malagasy tradition. That, to me, was the greatest of the colony’s many achievements.
Most cured patients are reluctant to leave and some become hysterical when told they must go home, despite the emphasis on self-help during their stay. One can understand why; the outside world offers nothing comparable to the emotional and material security provided by the nuns – with an extra saintly input from the aged priest.
That leper colony is a special place; one does not often encounter the combination that inspired the Garden of Eden legend – a fusion of natural beauty and human goodness. Back in the Landrover, I whispered to Rachel, ‘If this is Christianity, I’ll buy it!’ But alas! it is only one aspect of Christianity. Another is the condemnation of birth-control by Christian leaders who should be exerting all their moral authority to help save the human race from the consequences of its own fecundity.
We stopped at the entrance to the Mandena Forest Station, where Mario wanted to show us the Malagasy pitcher-plant. But the Station was closed. This small corner of Madagascar has a wondrous number of ‘exclusives’. The triangular palm flourishes nearby, over an area of some ten square miles, and is found nowhere else on earth. The very first Michelin tyres were made from the intasy – one of the local Euphorbiaceae – but as it refused to be cultivated commercially interest switched to the Brazilian rubber tree. The ‘leukemia periwinkle’ also evolved as a rare weed on a mountain overlooking Fort-Dauphin. It was first sent abroad, to Paris, in 1655, and soon spread all round the world – becoming, in Alison Jolly’s words, ‘a miracle drug of folk medicines, prescribed by herbalists on every continent’. Since 1958 scientists have been using an extract from this ‘rosy periwinkle’ in attempts to cure childhood leukemia but at present it achieves only a two-year remission and its side-effects are the destruction of natural immunities, degeneration of the nervous system and – sometimes – baldness. Yet Dr Jolly points out that:
‘The Madagascar rosy periwinkle is going strong. Medically it is used in moderation and in combination with other drugs as one of the major weapons in the modern armoury against cancer. Biologically, it lets us probe deeper and deeper into the structures of life. Chemically, new compounds are still being discovered, and the known compounds are so complex they defy artificial synthesis. As a chemical factory the weed is still ahead of the biochemists … After 300 years cultivation and twenty years intensive analysis, the rosy periwinkle remains partly an unknown. Six species of the same genus still grow only in Madagascar, each with its own secrets. Twenty years ago the curative powers of the rosy periwinkle were a superstition of local healers. Twenty years from now perhaps we shall trace discoveries as important as the rosy periwinkle’s to one of those related “unknown” species. Saving the wild is saving what we do not yet understand: the working ecosystem.’
Mario and family insisted on our lunching with them in a small restaurant near the market-place: rice, excellent casseroled chicken, less excellent casseroled beef and a superb selection of fresh salads. But during the meal my appetite was taken away by an item of news casually mentioned – the possibility that the multinational company, US Steel, might soon show renewed interest in the extraction of titanium north of Fort-Dauphin. This element is found in the territory of the mouse-lemur, the smallest of all primates.
None of the Malagasy understood my distress – nor, indeed, did Mario. If US Steel brought dollars and jobs to Fort-Dauphin, and improved roads and communications, was not that the most important thing? Why fuss about a minute animal that no one ever saw, a creature not even useful – like its bigger cousins – as a tasty dish or a tourist attraction?
I said nothing: the argument is too complicated for such an occasion. And ecology is so new as a set of ideas that we are all easily confused, in our different ways, by its psychological spinoffs. Some people, myself included, are more genuinely upset by the extinction of a rare reptile, bird, mammal or plant than by news of a major earthquake in Turkey, or a famine in Ethiopia, or a cyclone in Bangladesh. The destruction of something irreplaceable, a product of Nature’s genius working over millions upon millions of years, can arouse an angry, helpless grief far more intense than any emotion provoked by human tragedies in far-off places.
This is an uncomfortable fact to think about, let alone discuss. Yet it is a fact. And it needs scrutinising. And Madagascar, more than anywhere else I know, forces one to scrutinise it. What is this feeling? Is it sheer muddled sentimentality? Or is it linked to that First World callousness which allows us to support the nuclear arms race and the global arms trade with our taxes and votes while millions throughout the Third World needlessly suffer and die? I used to feel guilty about my own apparently disproportionate reaction to news of yet another ecological atrocity in Amazonia or New Guinea – or Madagascar. But for me Alison Jolly has sufficiently explained and justified that gut-reaction in the concluding words of her superb book:
‘The conservation of nature is not simply the conservation of our past – that which we did not create. It is also the conservation of our future. It is the conservation of all the forms of life that have not yet evolved, and of the understanding that we have not yet achieved, which may one day become mankind’s reality.’