We spent two days in Tana, where my improbable disease went as quickly as it had come. I used to associate gout with the ankles of a degenerate great-grandfather; I didn’t realise it could also afflict the wrists of the virtuous. Now I know better.
In the Immigration Department we effortlessly collected our visa extensions. Someone in Fort-Dauphin had efficiently despatched all that bumph by Air Mad and no one took it amiss (perhaps no one noticed) that for weeks we’d been illegal immigrants.
In the Aeroflot office we were informed that we could not travel home on the prearranged date because so many Malagasy students were returning to Moscow University on that same date. Perhaps the following week, said the tall unsmiling Russian – or the week after that … I detest pretending to be a VIP but on occasions there is no alternative. We didn’t have enough money to spend an extra week or two in Madagascar, appealing though the idea was. I applied the ‘famous travel writer’ pressure (my toes curling in my boots with embarrassment) and the Russian withdrew to an inner office to consult a person or persons unknown. He soon returned, crossed two students off the passenger-list and confirmed our bookings. Rachel was ravaged by guilt. ‘Poor students!’ she said. ‘We are mean!’ But, as I pointed out, the students were being stranded at home. Being an Aeroflot passenger dries up one’s milk of human kindness. It’s the survival of the fittest – or the transport of the toughest.
In the railway station we booked seats as far as Perinet (about half-way to the coast) on the daily train that departs for Tamatave at dawn. The forest around Perinet is an indri lemur reserve. From Perinet we planned an eighty-mile trek on Route Nationale No. 2; this would take us to Brickaville, where English friends run a sugar plantation and we could rejoin the train for Tamatave.
The Tana–Tamatave one-metre-gauge line would be no less famous than the Darjeeling or Quito lines had not inaccessibility deprived it of that glory which is its due. In 1897 it was planned by a member of Galliéni’s occupying forces, a commandant of engineers with a bold imagination. Like East Africa’s railways, it was built by immigrant labourers, many of whom afterwards joined Madagascar’s colonies of Indian and Chinese traders and shopkeepers. The line was completed in 1913. It climbs from sea-level to 4,225 feet in sixty miles and the difficulties of laying it on very steep gradients, through dense rain-forest, were compounded by the activities of fahavalo – bands of guerrillas who in this area continued for years to oppose the French conquest. Many of the station buildings look like small forts, which once they were. During the 1947 Uprising the line was repeatedly cut by latter-day fahavalo, who thus effectively isolated the capital from the coast.
In 1912 the Tana–Antsirabe line was built, as a link in a Tamatave–Tana–Fianar–Manakara system. But the work interrupted by the First World War was never resumed and Madagascar was left with two unconnected rail systems. To ensure that the Tamatave–Tana line would pay for itself, the French deliberately limited motor-traffic by neglecting the maintenance of Route Nationale No. 2 – a major mistake, say some experts. This policy greatly increased the cost of imported goods in the Highlands and made the industrial development of that region even more impractical.
Our carriage was packed, though not overcrowded. A pensive-looking Merina gentleman, aged perhaps forty, sat opposite me. He spoke accurate but rusty English and his choice of seat was not, I suspected, mere chance. In Tamatave, where he was working as an engineer, opportunities to practise English must be few.
Mr Ralambondrainy was unusually confiding, for a Malagasy; he dreaded going back to work because his Betsimisaraka staff resent a Merina being boss of their department. This, we later discovered, is a not uncommon problem in Tamatave, Madagascar’s nearest equivalent to an industrial city. It is an awkward fact of Malagasy life that the Merina and Betsileo are far more skilled, as engineers, technicians and mechanics, than any other tribe. Attempts to ignore this fact, by ‘discriminating positively’, usually have disastrous economic consequences. Most inter-tribal friction, according to our new friend, is found at the managerial level. When there is no competition for ‘top jobs’, Merina families settled in other tribal territories almost always live happily with their neighbours.
We recounted the Aeroflot incident, which prompted a vehement condemnation of the government for so foolishly allowing hundreds of young Malagasy to be exposed to Soviet indoctrination. ‘The families of these students hate them going to Moscow,’ said Mr Ralambondrainy. ‘But free higher education in Europe is very tempting for poor people who can’t send children to France. Parents feel they shouldn’t block this advancement. Then they are disappointed when young people come home with degrees that Malagasy employers don’t trust. Our employers always prefer a French training. By now they have learned how poor the Soviet training is – though maybe this is partly because Moscow University gets the less bright students. Not many Merina go there!’
Mr Ralambondrainy hinted that although the government is now genuinely struggling to be non-aligned it is finding it hard to escape from the Soviet sphere of influence. ‘We are lucky that now Russia doesn’t have enough money to bribe us. Madagascar has got so run-down I don’t see how we can improve things without some help from outside. When a country is falling apart it isn’t easy to stay non-aligned. But we are lucky in our President. He is one of the few leaders acceptable to all our peoples, which is his greatest strength. He comes from Tamatave but he went to Tana when he was twelve – to a Roman Catholic school. He is brilliant. He can hold his own with anybody and we are proud of him. But perhaps he has too many ideals that can’t become realities overnight. We have tried to change things too quickly. Decentralisation is a good idea, but when it means giving power to villagers with no training it has bad effects. This is why corruption has become so bad throughout the lower levels of the administration. These people abuse power. Yet it is not fair to blame them: too much was expected of them too soon. A government minister detected in corruption would lose his job at once under President Ratsiraka. But the President can’t control and supervise what goes on in every little town.’
Route Nationale No. 2 and the railway are never far apart. Usually the ‘road’ is visible, sometimes only yards away, sometimes miles – rambling down another heavily forested mountainside, or crossing a deep distant cultivated valley. Even I – no great connoisseur of engineering works – was awestruck by the things this railway does. For sheer dizzying melodrama it comes a close second, in my experience, to the Guayaquil–Quito line. And then there is the sudden joy of encountering what feels like a new world, as the Hauts Plateaux are abruptly left behind. Travel within Madagascar has the flavour of changing countries within a continent; the contrast between the flat arid Spiny South and the lush precipitous east coast is at least as great as any within Europe.
In 1977 – Mr Ralambondrainy told us – the Chinese launched in Madagascar one of their apparently altruistic ‘Aid to the Undeveloped’ projects. (He saw it as part of a global anti-Soviet campaign.) The object of their attention is Route Nationale No. 2, which they are rebuilding in style from coast to capital. This project is being ‘played down’, officially; our friend had been unable to find out the estimated cost, or how many Chinese were working on it. (He advised us to take no photographs, during our trek, in areas where construction teams were active.) The Chinese keep very much to themselves and, in their six years on the job – which may well take another six (or twelve) years – they have made no efforts to indoctrinate the local populations, ideologically. But they do try to inculcate the Chinese work-ethic as they train their Malagasy teams in the skills of road-maintenance as well as construction. They seem to believe that the reincarnated Route Nationale No. 2 can survive their departure. And of course, as we say in Ireland, there’s no harm in hoping.
As we approached Perinet, Mr Ralambondrainy drily pointed out that during all the decades when road-transport was cheaper than rail, there was no Tana–Tamatave motor-transport to speak of; but now, when costs are reversed, there will be (at least for a time) an excellent road service. ‘And if the people can’t afford petrol to use it, then there will be no taxes to mend it – and soon it will be gone and the poor Chinese will be sad!’
At Perinet the up-train and down-train meet every day for lunch; it would be unfortunate if they met anywhere else. This single line system means that a delay to either train affects both. But delays are not extreme: rarely more than an hour or so. And meanwhile there is much, though not varied, eating to be done in shack hotelys clustered below forested slopes festooned in orchids. If you do not want a sit-down meal, rows of small tables offer strange buns, and even stranger bits of grilled or stewed innards – pigs’, we surmised, since this is not zebu country. And if you are rich you can lunch in the colonial spendour of the Railway Hotel’s restaurant.
This three-storeyed brick edifice, with a steeply pitched roof and exaggerated eaves, arose on the platform in 1938 and seems at first glance to be the station itself. In its youth it flourished; there were four passenger trains a day, Perinet was the base for a major French logging concession and also a regular stopping place for French troops, to-ing and fro-ing from coast to capital. Now the timber industry has dwindled – an ecological benefit but a social disaster – and few Malagasy passengers can afford Perinet’s Ritz.
For the past ten years an enterprising but by now disheartened young Malagasy has been renting the hotel from the railway company. We admired Manjo, who has not allowed demoralisation to set in. None of our fellow-passengers ate in the high-ceilinged, wooden-pillared dining-room, but a dozen tables were laid – just in case – with spotless linen and sparkling glasses. At one end an attractively panelled bar stocked Antsirabe beer, at the other a baroque French wood-stove was kept burnished. (Perinet stands at almost 3,000 feet and often has winter night temperatures of 50°F.) Only the area’s residual timber felling, and a local vazaha-run graphite mine – each industry employing about two hundred – keep the hotel going. Manjo blamed the savage exchange rate, more than any other single cause, for the fading of a tourist trade that was never brilliant. Happily Perinet still attracts an erratic trickle of scientists, many of whom spend weeks studying the endemic flora and fauna.
The senior waiter was a charming elderly Betsimisaraka, impeccably French-trained; his three junior colleagues, though equally charming, had a more individualistic approach to their tasks. One of these led us up a wide polished staircase, and down a long polished corridor to a small clean room with bathroom (of sorts) attached. Our large second-floor window overlooked many, many miles of forested hills, their nearby greenness shading away to distant blueness. Our door lock was broken, but locks are not important in Madagascar – except perhaps in Tana.
Unfortunately we did not have this room to ourselves. Beside the lavatory was a huge hole in the floor, part of the establishment’s ingenious plumbing. And through this hole, each night, came a family of the noisiest and most brazen rats I have ever met. When I first heard them I switched on my torch (we had found batteries in Tana) and saw one eating our loaf of breakfast bread and two sitting on their hindlegs by my rucksack, pulling a bar of chocolate out of a side-pocket. When I shone the light on them and shouted threateningly they did not bolt, like properly brought up rats, but squeaked abusively at me and continued to pull. They were incorrigible; we had to learn to live with them. For hours they scampered and squealed and twittered, fascinated by the vazaha possessions even when no food was accessible. Yet in appearance, if not in character, they were ordinary brown rats who had obviously entered the country as illegal immigrants – not an endemic species.
The indri is Perinet’s most celebrated ‘endemic species’. This three-foot-tall, black and white, leaf-eating creature is the only tail-less lemur. Its rain-forest home, now shrinking rapidly, extends no farther north than the Bay of Antagonil and no farther south than the Masora river, probably because in this region alone is found some exotic essential plant. Like most lemurs, it soon dies in captivity. There are many Malagasy legends and superstitions about the indri – the babakota, the ‘Man of the Forest’, which possibly inspired the cynocephalus story told by Marco Polo, though he located this ‘dog-headed man’ in the Andaman Islands. (His geography, unless he had been to a place, was always a bit shaky: something we have in common.) I had hoped that by listening we might find the indri ourselves; their song can be heard over a two-mile radius. But we were warned that as they tend to sleep eighteen hours a day in winter we would be unlikely to find them without a guide; and so it proved.
One expects rain in rain-forests, or at least humidity and low grey skies. Yet it rained only at night during our Perinet interlude and the sun was just pleasantly hot as we scrambled up and down steep slopes covered in dense undergrowth, looking and listening for the indri. At this altitude the east coast forest is quite unlike the popular image of a rain-forest; and even lower down the escarpment, where it is much wetter and more humid, Malagasy rain-forest trees (ninety per cent of them endemic) never attain Amazonian stature. Around Perinet the majority are tall, gawky and pale-barked, like unhealthy adolescents. Rare they may be, but they cannot compete aesthetically with the truly superb trees of our own West Waterford woods. However, this forest makes up in interest what it may lack in beauty. Every turn of the path reveals some new oddity amidst the orchids, lianas, tree ferns, bamboos, palms and thorny thickets like barbed-wire entanglements.
On our second day we admitted defeat. By then we had several times heard the uncanny wailing of the indri but it was obvious we would never see them without guidance. We were on our way to the Bureau d’Eaux et Forêts – slithering down a precipitous path, having been more or less lost for hours – when we met two friendly, ragged, dark-skinned boys, aged seventeen and twelve. They seemed quite used to finding vazaha wandering through the forest yearning for lemurs. Yet they were at first endearingly suspicious; firmly, though very politely, they demanded to see our permits. Their protective attitude towards the indri appeared to be genuine: if not, they were excellent actors. Moreover, their offer to lead us to the indri had no hint of doing a deal, no suggestion of looking for our ‘custom’. It recalled the helpfulness of the Ankaratra Malagasy who had appointed themselves our guides because the razana decreed one should help strangers. But of course they also enjoyed the excitement of tracking and the showing off of their skills – and of their close relationship with the indri, which was indeed remarkable.
‘Tracking’ is not really the mot juste; indri-finding requires patient study above all else and, once you know where and when to look, the groups living close to Perinet are easily enough seen. One has appointments with them, as it were, going to certain places at certain times. Our young friends instructed us not to talk and to move slowly and quietly. Then, on reaching particular trees, they made loud kissing noises and often the indri came to stare down at us with bright yellow eyes, apparently relishing our attention – alert, yet seeming aware that on these mountains of the Reserve they are at present safe. There are five in this family and we watched them eating, resting, grooming and jumping. They were much given to jumping backwards, great ten-yard leaps from tree to tree. But they cannot be described as hyper-active; when not asleep, most of their days are devoted to long munching sessions as they stuff themselves with leaves, picked deliberately – not just any old leaf, but the choicest within reach. Their hands and feet are enormous and their long muzzles give them a decidedly canine look. The general impression however is teddy-bearish, as they cling to slim tree-trunks, peering down – round, furry and cuddly.
During the indris’ siesta hours we explored Perinet village: not a time-consuming activity. It is separated from the railway by a mini-ravine containing a narrow brown river spanned by three bridges; one was designed for motor-traffic but as it now is I’d prefer to cross it on foot. It leads past a large rusty-roofed church to a few muddy shack-lined lanes. Both shops were well stocked with manioc but not much else. Tattered banana plants sprouted all over the place and half a dozen paddy-fields occupied a mountain ledge. There is virtually no agriculture hereabouts for the sufficient reason that there is virtually no cultivatable land. Beyond the village we walked for miles over thinly forested slopes and saw one Malagasy blue cuckoo and two kingfishers by a stagnant pond. In denser forest we saw several minute sun-birds feeding from the foot-long bell-shaped cream-coloured flowers of a creeper. We also heard the Malagasy magpie robin – rarely seen because very shy – which has what must be one of the most melodious calls in the whole bird-world.
Returning from one forenoon indri appointment, we met four absurdly noisy French would-be indri-spotters – all Tana residents – whose third Perinet visit this was. They had not yet seen any indri which in view of their behaviour in the forest did not surprise us. Clearly they were Persons of Importance (possibly even VIPs), and an elegantly attired Merina guide, provided by the Bureau d’Eaux et Forêts, accompanied them. He was peeved to discover that we with our ragged friends had been doing so well.
We were extraordinarily lucky to have met those boys. There was a most pleasing closeness between them and the forest and the indri – and, eventually, ourselves. This set me quite a problem on the eve of our departure. To tip or not to tip? I abhor the intrusion of money into such friendships, yet this was a special case. If the indri are to survive, they must be seen by their human neighbours as a precious asset. Those boys needed no financial inducement to protect their beloved ‘maqui’. But our tip would, we hoped, contribute to a general awareness throughout the area that ‘there’s money in tham thar babakota’.
Thirty per cent of all Malagasy live along the island’s forested east coast, a territory twenty to sixty miles wide, divided into small sub-territories by unbridged rivers descending from the escarpment. The majority of these coastal people are Betsimisaraka, who came together and acquired their name only about two hundred and fifty years ago, long after Madagascar’s other main tribes had established their identities. The east coast topography discouraged unity and for centuries each local ruler was independent, acknowledging no superior beyond his own boundaries. But Ratsimilaho changed all that and in so doing forged one of the most remarkable of Anglo-Malagasy links.
For some forty years, during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, scores of English pirates operated from Madagascar’s east coast, making the Island of St Mary, near the Bay of Antongil, infamous as World Piracy Headquarters – nowhere in the Caribbean could compete. In Madagascar Rediscovered, Mervyn Brown describes the pirates’ retirement years:
‘Several dozen pirates lived as princelings or village chiefs in little communities along the north-east coast or some little distance in the interior, owing their position to their martial reputation and their ill-gotten wealth which often enabled them to marry the daughters of Malagasy chieftains … The favoured area for settlement was the stretch of coast from Tamatave to the Bay of Antongil. For the average pirate, starting life perhaps in a riverside slum on the Thames and having survived years of brutality and privation at sea, his ‘retired’ existence among the bamboos and the coconut palms, surrounded by his Malagasy family and ample supplies of meat, fish, exotic fruits and potent home-brewed alcohol, must have seemed closer to Paradise than he ever expected to see.’
These virile settlers procreated so assiduously that their descendants were regarded as a separate clan: Zana-Malata, children of the mulattos. Red or brown hair, and blue or grey eyes, are still common up and down that coast though the Zana-Malata have long since been absorbed by the Betsimisaraka.
In about 1712 Ratsimilaho, aged eighteen, emerged as leader of the Zana-Malata. He was reputed to be the son of an English pirate whose name – Tom – comes as a considerable relief to harassed writers on Madagascar. Tom married Rahena, daughter of the Chief of Fenerive, and Ratsimilaho was their son. Soon after he took over as leader of his own clan, Ratsimilaho received an urgent appeal from the Antavaratra, the people of the coast north of Tamatave (and so his neighbours), who were being intimidated by the Antatsimo, a clan from the Vatomandry region. The Zana-Malata and the Antavaratra together defeated the Antatsimo, more by cunning than force. Then the various small tribes of the northern coast united and elected Ratsimilaho as their king; whereupon he changed his name, as is the intolerably confusing Malagasy habit on achieving a throne, and became Ramaromanompo. After several more minor wars, and a few marriage alliances and treaties, Ramaromanompo was acknowledged as leader of a confederation of all the tribes occupying the coastal strip for four hundred miles north and south of Tamatave. He called this group the Betsimisaraka – ‘the many inseparable’ – and it has retained its distinct tribal identity, though its political unity did not long survive the death of the only Anglo-Malagasy king. Today the Betsimisaraka – a people of unmistakably Malayo-Polynesian ancestry, though darker-skinned than the Merina – form the second-largest tribe in Madagascar.
We left Perinet soon after dawn, while wispy clouds still mingled with the forested crests and the indri were singing. For miles we could hear their regular morning recital: short songs, long songs, sometimes only one or two notes. In the distance these calls – aural links with a time before Man existed – have a curiously disturbing beauty, but heard close to they resemble the high-pitched screams of a terrified child.
Rachel seemed subdued and admitted to a ‘fluey’ headache. I too was without the tiger in my tank, but for that I blamed the gout cure. To have relieved me so quickly it must have been a very strong drug and I am suspicious of, though in extremis deeply grateful for, modern medicines. Briefly I wondered if we should turn back and take the train, but Rachel said no – perhaps because she knew how much I had been looking forward to this mini-trek after so many days on wheels. I reasoned then that we did not really need tigers in our tanks for the eighty miles to Brickaville; Perinet is only thirty-three miles due inland, though 3,000 feet above sea-level.
Yet that day’s eighteen miles were less downhill than we had expected. The muddy red track wound around, and occasionally up, a series of green mountains – some heavily forested, some covered in dense low scrub, all apparently uninhabited. But only apparently. Now and then a movement caught our eye – a glimpse of bright cotton – and we realised that quite a few invisible pathlets led steeply from the track to isolated huts standing on high stilts, embedded in the bush. These flimsy shelters, woven of bamboo and ravenala, are not made to last. This is ‘slash-and-burn’ territory, where after a few years each family moves on to fell more trees and weave a new home. Mountain rice, needing no irrigation, grows easily on this cleared and burned land, though the initial clearing is not easy for a solitary farmer with only his family to help. Soon such land must have rest: ideally, ten years rest, which now with the population growing so fast it rarely gets. And when tired land is planted the yield is poor. Less rice for more mouths … Beware, Madagascar!
At 3.15 we reached Beforona, the first village en route. All day we had seen only four vehicles (Landrovers or jeeps) struggling with a track so deep in mud that at times it was difficult even to walk on. In 1856 this same stretch prompted the Reverend Ellis to write: ‘The road here was frightful: the soil stiff clay, with deep holes of mud and water. I could readily imagine why, in 1826, some of Captain Le Sage’s men should have thrown themselves on the ground, declaring they would die rather than attempt to proceed further. It would require more than a lifetime to make even a passable road through this region.’
Beforona remains, as it was in 1856, ‘a tolerably large village, situated in a swampy hollow, surrounded by woody hills’. But in Mr Ellis’s day it was a regular staging-post between Tamatave and Tana, geared to looking after passing vazaha and their numerous porters and palanquin-bearers. Now vazaha travel by train and no one knew quite what to do with us. We had planned to walk on another few miles, having partaken of such refreshments as were available, and camp in a secluded spot. But as we drank weak coffee in a grotty hotely rain came with tropical violence. ‘No camping in that!’ said Rachel decisively, lest I might have forgotten our sodden night in the Ankaratra.
The hotely was constructed of bamboo stakes and ravenala fronds. Its walls were decorated with heavy spider-webs, two feet in diameter, suspended between three 1981 calendars and several faded advertisement pages from French and English glossy magazines. The giggling and tongue-tied young woman who served us had rotten teeth – unusual in rural Madagascar – but our large following of excited children seemed healthy enough. At intervals passers-by peered in at us, then hastily moved away through the rain, looking uneasy. It was time to produce Samuel’s letter.
The spacious tin-roofed office of the People’s Executive Committee had an unglazed window and a broken concrete floor. (‘Why’, asked Rachel, ‘does Malagasy concrete always disintegrate?’ A rhetorical question; she does not expect her mother to explain such phenomena.) The ‘President’ – neatly dressed, barefooted, unsmiling – sat typing at a rickety table in the centre of the room. (Was it just coincidence that he was much the fairest man present?) Behind him stood an immense rusty filing cabinet. On benches around the wall sat eight men, ragged and dark-skinned and looking oddly on the defensive. The atmosphere seemed strained, and I felt had been so before our arrival. Nobody greeted us or even looked directly at us. The President took Samuel’s letter from me without raising his eyes and spent ten minutes reading it. Then, still without addressing us, he sent a youth to fetch Razafimahatratra – the village schoolmaster and, astonishingly, a fluent English speaker.
With Raza (as I shall take the liberty of calling him) we were back to Malagasy normal: smiles, handshakes, courteous greetings, warm welcomes. A tall young man from Moromanga, he wore smart clothes under a lamba but his feet looked as though they would hate shoes. The grinning scruffy youth who attended him carried both our rucksacks as we hurried through mud and rain, past a Post Office (pretty dormant for the now being) and a shack-like church, to another office. While Raza copied passport details into an exercise book the youth disappeared to organise our ‘chamber’; some time later we saw four men carrying a double bed into a long timber building, like a warehouse, on the far side of the street. From two fly-blown electioneering posters President Ratsiraka gazed down on us and around the wall stood tall filing cabinets containing – Raza informed us – the identity cards of all the district’s men, women and children. (‘I thought people kept identity cards on them,’ Rachel said afterwards. ‘But we’re in Madagascar,’ I reminded her.)
That wooden building was a warehouse, some hundred and fifty feet long, standing above the mud on piles and once used for the pre-export storage of bananas and coffee. Ours was the middle one of three ‘chambers’ – fifty feet by twenty, with a high sagging ceiling of frayed sacking which billowed in the draught from three large windows. Remembering the hotely’s cobwebs, I trembled to think what might fall upon us. This room was empty but for our double-bed in one corner – as things turned out, the wrong corner. Soon however a group of breathless small boys appeared, bearing a table and chair; Raza had taken note of my profession. The door did not shut, never mind lock, but unlike our Merina friends these villagers had no security phobia.
We went shopping, leaving the children who were swarming all over the room in charge of our possessions. In Beforona’s only visible store the Chinaman behind the counter was bent and stiff and wore a pigtail. He stocked dried beans, musty biscuits and a few bottles of that horrendous limonady which is our unhappiest memory of Ranohira.
At sunset Raza brought two candles and a box of matches and we talked about education and taxes. Our friend at the Railway Hotel had been fretting about his four small children, the older two already at primary school in Perinet – a waste of time, he said. Raza agreed that rural schooling is bad and rapidly getting worse; his ninety-three pupils were sharing twenty-seven textbooks – and one teacher. Clearly he himself was an idealist who could have had a good job in Tana. He said, ‘The French ran an educational system to suit the Merina: this nobody denies. Now everyone gets an equal chance but the resources are much less so standards have dropped. We have a whole population badly educated instead of a small group well educated. Except in the Mission Schools, education is free for all right through university – but what good is that when it becomes so bad? Maybe it is better if parents have to pay something? So many are so keen on education they would willingly pay for schooling to raise standards. Some think it was good to take the ten per cent poll tax off farmers in 1975 because it was a French system. But the result? The farmers don’t have more money but they work less – and produce less food. That way everything runs downhill – now we import rice which we used to export. And the government has less money for schooling. Free education for all is also a European system, like taxes – we are making a mistake trying to pick and choose which bits of a system we keep – we can’t only have the nice bits. We are damaged too by world changes in prices for our main exports – coffee, bananas, vanilla, cloves. But our most dangerous problem is the decline in French-speaking. This is a disaster for a modern state. Malagasy is not suitable for studying science and technology – you cannot translate textbooks. And it’s not only science and technology: we have few abstract nouns in Malagasy – our intellectuals as well as our scientists need French. For ten years we’ve been taught the importance of Malagasy and this is right – we must be proud of it. Yet President Ratsiraka himself always speaks French in public. We cannot pretend Malagasy is an adequate language for modern living. But now exam papers in all subjects are set in both languages and students can choose which to use – so there is not enough incentive to learn French well.’
To cheer Raza up, I told him something of Ireland’s ‘two-language’ problems. I also happened to mention that in London we could find no detailed map of this area, such as we had for southern Madagascar. As a result, the following letter was delivered an hour later.
INFORMATION
‘Dear Friends,
This is the village of Beforona, which is situated in the National Road Number 2 that connects Tananarive with Tamatave. Moramanga is 56 kilometres from here and Brickaville, about 95 kilometres. These are the villages you will see if you go to Brickaville: Marozeno, 8KM – Ampasimbe, 20KM – Antogobato, 35KM – Antsapanana, 65KM. (It is the village where you can see the road to Vatomandry and Matamoro, that means to the south part of the East Coast.)
The road is bad from here to Ranomafana and very good from about Antsapanana until Brickaville. You cannot see taxi in all of this part of the road.
There are Hotels in all of these villages except in Marozeno. I tell you that you can see only breakfast or lunch or diner in Hotels. But if you want to sleep, you would show the letter you’ve showed us to the chefs of the villages, so that they can make you beds and chamber (room).
Finally, no doubt about security. You can travel all the road in foot if you want. Don’t be afraid. Generally Malagasy people, chiefly these ones who live in country, are kind.
So I wish you good evening and good travel.
Please, ask if you want some help.
Yours sincerely, Razafimahatratra.’
For me, that letter somehow concentrated the essence of Malagasy hospitality. It more than made up for our unquiet night at Beforona.
In the next section of the warehouse, a large family lived in the corner beside ours and the partition was of hessian nailed to a criss-crossed wooden frame. Malagasy towns and villages after dark give the impression of a people who are all asleep by 7 p.m. But we have evidence, gleaned the hard way, that behind their tightly sealed shutters they enjoy long evenings of cooking, eating, gossiping, singing, laughing, gambling, drinking, teasing and playing stringed instruments. In Beforona all these activities continued until II. And, soon after, some misfortunate elderly wretch, lying on the other side of the hessian two feet from my ear, developed a persistent hacking cough.
Our plank bed was thinly strewn with loose hay but eighteen-inch gaps between the planks made this a rather mobile mattress. (There were similar gaps between some of the floor-boards, which is why I remained on the bed; who knew what eight-legged endemic species might emerge at dead of night from beneath the boards?) During a coughing respite I slept briefly, then awoke to find my head firmly wedged between two planks where the hay had fallen through. And Rachel seemed to be tickling my torso – curious behaviour, but then we both tended to become rather juvenile on these distinctively Malagasy occasions. I giggled feebly, as one does with a wedged head, and asked her to help me unwedge. But she was still asleep; the tickling sensation was being caused by romping rats. They continued to romp all night, squeaking shrilly as they chased each other up and down the hessian wall and across the floor and bed. Playful creatures, Malagasy rats. As more and more hay fell through, Rachel too woke up. We rose before dawn and were leaving Beforona as a wave of orange-red light broke on the eastern horizon.
All day the sky remained clear and soon the sun was slightly too hot. After the night’s rain the ankle-deep mud somehow contrived to be at once sticky and slippy. Not far below, on our left, a mountain torrent foamed between smooth giant boulders – often more a waterfall than a river, so steep was the slope. We crossed four roaring tributaries, on bridges in varying states of disrepair. We met nobody. This was an inviolate region; its gradients have successfully defied even the hungriest of the ‘slash-and-burners’. All around us cliffs and slopes and river-banks and ravines displayed an overwhelming abundance of rain-forest exotica. Immense trees supported surreal creepers and sprouted ferns of the most wondrous variety and delicacy. Bananas grew wildly in every direction, as plentiful (but not as accessible) as blackberries in Ireland. Giant ferns sprawled across precipices – nothing was bare, no inch of space not overgrown. We counted four species of bamboo. The giant forty-foot stands had arm-thick bases; a slender-plumed bamboo looked like bouquets of feathers; a single-stemmed arching bamboo looked like magnified croquet hoops; a creeper bamboo reached from tree to tree to tree above the track. All was green – a thousand shades of green, it seemed – but for the pale glow of tree-orchids, like dim torches hanging in the shadows, and the long orange spikes of Buddlea Madagascarensis.
Then we rounded a mountain to be shocked by two colossal bright yellow Chinese excavators, each at least ten times the size of the huts they were rumbling past. This was the tiny village of Ampasimbe; despite the mud, we had covered twelve miles in four and a half hours.
In the hotely – a two-roomed hut on stilts – we ate tepid gluey rice and scraps of cold gristly chicken. The proprietor warned us to be careful where we walked; the bamboo-stake floor was collapsing under the bamboo matting. He had a wispy beard (unusual for a Malagasy) and fifteen children (not unusual for a Malagasy). The youngest, aged one, was on his knee, being fed rice-water off a spoon out of a dirt-encrusted mug. It looked improbably healthy and very happy. Under our table lurked a fat puppy, evidently already aware that guests found the local chickens largely disposable. On the far side of the churned-up track three young women sat outside their shack on matting, expertly delousing one another. The coffee matched the chicken. There was nothing else to drink in Ampasimbe.
Beyond this ‘main street’ – the farthest point of the Chinese advance – we were watching a road being born. Several detours were necessary as the giant machines ruthlessly remoulded Madagascar to their will. We passed a Chinese camp, bigger than most Malagasy villages and sealed off from the natives by (suitably) a twelve-foot bamboo fence. The high traditional ceremonial entrance, square and gaily painted and hung with coloured lanterns, looked pleasingly pre-Mao. But when we greeted Chinese workers, or waved to them in their high cabs, they repeatedly snubbed us.
At Ampasimbe the landscape broadens out, though remaining very broken, and for several hellish miles we were on a half-made surface of loose sharp chips – much more trying than the mud – while on either side new raw red embankments reflected the fierce noon heat. Then, mercifully, Route Nationale No. 2 and the Chinese Highway diverged, where the former tackles a gradient that made no sense to the Chinese engineers. We rejoiced to be back on our muddy friend, in greener, cooler country, though here savoka has replaced the rain-forest on most slopes.
Savoka is what happens when the land must be allowed to go fallow after the rain-forest has been felled and the first rice crops grown. Given a chance, it regenerates into secondary forest, of which there was a great deal in this area. But after repeated burnings the completely impoverished soil is taken over by the traveller’s tree, giant ferns, and thickets of low, heather-like scrub. Then it is doomed; it can never again be made cultivable.
To vazaha eyes, the Betsimisaraka version of ‘agricultural land’ seems no more than beat-up wilderness. Mighty hardwood trees lie where they were felled on the steep slopes. Mountain rice will grow anywhere, anyhow – given sunlight – and is sown around those tree-corpses too unwieldy to be coped with by one Betsimisaraka family possessing only basic implements.
Amidst the tangled savoka (beautiful in its way) grow twenty-to twenty-five-foot robusta coffee trees, looking like wild coffee – as well they might, for their owners give them no attention of any kind. Many are now more than forty years old and should be replaced. But why bother replacing a still-yielding tree? Young trees yield nothing for four or five years and few Malagasy look that far ahead. The local treatment of the coffee cherries also lowers profits. These are dried on a mat, then mortar-pounded to extract the beans; extraction with a huller, or by soaking the cherries in water, gives much higher-quality coffee.
Coffee was introduced to Madagascar from Réunion in the early nineteenth century and became commercially important in the 1930s. By 1939 Madagascar was the world’s largest producer of robusta but production dropped disastrously during the chaos of the Second World War and the even greater chaos (for Madagascar) of the 1947 Uprising. The enormous east coast coffee plantations, then still being cultivated by forced labour, saw the worst of the 1947–48 violence and destruction. The national yield never fully recovered yet coffee remains the Betsimisarakas’ most important cash-crop, each farmer owning a few trees. Some eighty-year-old trees are still fruitful, causing experts to suspect that the Betsimisarakas may after all be right; in the Malagasy environment perhaps forty years is not the limit of a coffee tree’s useful life.
We rejoined the new road near a bridge in the making, a long high bridge ambitiously spanning a river gorge. From the mountain far above we noticed that the little blue-clad figures were moving much more briskly than the little brown-skinned figures. Even without their uniforms, one could easily have distinguished the Chinese from the Malagasy workers.
A sweaty, thirst-tormented climb took us over a pass – a wasteland of heath-savoka – from where the old road descended steeply to Antogobato. Near the village we again joined the new road, in the form of a brash utilitarian concrete bridge, just completed and looking painfully incongruous. It was 3.45 and we had covered twenty-two miles. We shed our rucksacks in Antogobato’s only store – Chinese-owned, of course, and stocking Antsirabe beer. Clouds were building up; when we had quenched our thirst we would look for lodgings.
Rachel went to investigate the river’s swimming possibilities (nil) while I sat outside the shop drinking fast and listening to the echoing boom of distant dynamite explosions as another hunk of Madagascar was ‘developed’. Our last close-up view of Chinese road-building was in Gilgit, in December 1974, when the Karakoram Highway was being constructed. Only eight years later a friend of mine returned prematurely from the Western Himalayas. He could not complete his journey; he was too stricken by the multiple pernicious effects of that road on a region he had known and loved in its ‘undeveloped’ state.
In Antogobato I realised with a despairing kind of agony that yet again we had come on stage during a last act. The Tana–Tamatave track has become Route Nationale No. 2 since Sergeant Hastie from Co. Cork took Madagascar’s first horses along it – and since the first LMS missionary (a sad pioneer, leaving his wife and baby buried near Tamatave) struggled towards the plateau – and since Mr Ellis in 1856 described villages and customs that today may be observed unchanged. But, being a Cinderella Route Nationale, it made little impact on the area’s ecology. If however Madagascar ever develops industrially, and heavy truck traffic on the new Chinese Highway replaces the comparatively innocuous two trains a day, the impact will be incalculable. Air pollution, vibration, noise – their effects on such a unique region are not yet understood. ‘Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.’ Yet there is still hope. As an island, Madagascar is far less vulnerable than the Western Himalayas. And given the ferocity with which the elements will repeatedly attack this Chinese road, it may never replace the railway. Its scarring bridges will survive, as many French bridges have done, but these are mere visual defacements. Nature, backed up by the Malagasy temperament, may succeed here in at least defending itself against modern technology, though it cannot prevent the ravages of the ‘slash-and-burners’.
The store-keeper’s wife was half-Chinese, half-Merina, petite and elegant; quite a startling sight hereabouts – as incongruous, in her way, as the bridge. She responded to Samuel’s letter by inviting us to be her guests instead of directing us to the chief. Her elder son Joseph (aged seventeen, very tall, entirely Chinese-looking) then led us down a muddy laneway to the guest-annex, a one-roomed hut. On a little table in the centre of the floor lay two curled-up spider corpses the size of golf balls. I tried not to look at the walls while spreading our tent on the bed as a sealed sleeping bag. There were cobwebs like hammocks in the corners, and wide cracks between the planks through which any number of new recruits might enter during the night. ‘You look quite pale,’ said Rachel as we walked back to the store-cum-dwelling.
This was the only substantial building in Antogobato, a long two-storeyed wooden house with a pretty little front garden, symbolically overlooking the village’s huddle of shacks from its commanding position near the bridge. Up and down the east coast, from Diego-Suarez to Fort-Dauphin, the Chinese dominate the local economy. Like Madagascar’s Indian community, they have shown remarkable tenacity and adaptability in surviving the coming and going of a colonial power, the advent of Malagasy Independence and the evolution of Christian Marxism. They keep their heads down and get on with trading and money-lending, avoiding politics and obeying whatever set of laws happens to be in force. To them the Betsimisaraka bring all their coffee, bananas, lychees, cloves and whatever other cash-crops they may grow. (It would be more correct to say ‘find growing’; apart from mountain rice for family consumption, crops tend just to happen in this prodigiously fertile region.) The Chinese buy everything, regardless of amount or quality, at prices fixed by themselves. Until the recent ‘austerity’ crisis, they also supplied simple consumer goods in their stores, and extra foodstuffs that would not otherwise be available in places like Antogobato. As money-lenders they provide both short- and medium-term credit and most peasants are permanently in their debt; when farmers deliver a coffee crop they are rarely in a position to look for cash. But cash has never been important to them, so this is not perhaps as iniquitous a system as it sounds. It does however mean that by Malagasy standards the Chinese are very rich indeed, as was apparent the moment we entered the Chan-Dines’ home.
Tamatave craftsmen had made the fine chests, cabinets and tables, using rain-forest hardwoods unknown outside Madagascar. The bottled-gas cooker, three-piece-suite, carpets, wineglasses and pure white poodle were French. The several transistor radios were German, the cameras Japanese. (But no films were obtainable, so next morning we left behind those of ours that fitted.) The food was Sino-French and that meal was one of the best we ate in Madagascar. There were two Betsimisaraka house-servants, who sat down to dinner with us: a pleasing touch.
Monsieur Chan-Dine was away in Tana on business. His great-grandfather, Madame Chan-Dine informed us, had settled in Tamatave; she made a point of stressing that he had not been ‘imported labour’ but was himself the son of a merchant. Her own Chinese grandfather had first settled in Tana, then moved to the coast. Aged forty-two, Madame Chan-Dine looked not much older than the eldest of her five children, a nineteen-year-old married to the son of a Chinese restaurant-owner in Tamatave and the doting mother of a four-month-old baby. Joseph and a thirteen-year-old daughter were at school in Tamatave; two other children were being educated in France. All the family were trilingual – Cantonese, Malagasy, French – though none could write Chinese.
This family clearly saw itself as having more in common with the French than with the Malagasy, despite Mamma being half-Merina. Before dinner the girls showed us a collection of French-language Peking-produced glossy magazines, depicting China’s natural beauties, artistic treasures and recent industrial and scientific advances. They were understandably proud of their Chinese inheritance. Earlier, Rachel and I had been speculating about the relationship between the road-builders and the settled Chinese. During dinner I cautiously approached this subject, but my antennae told me it would not be tactful to proceed.
The Chan-Dines were a happy and loving family with a strong sense of hospitality; Joseph was ever on the alert to fill the goblet again. We had a choice of Fianar Rioja-like red wine and homemade white rice-wine. Having allowed both to gladden my heart to its core I felt quite nonchalant about spiders as we hastened to our guest-annex through torrential rain.
Beyond Antogobato we had the Day of the Ravenala, twenty-one miles dominated in memory – if not quite in fact – by the traveller’s tree, Madagascar’s most famous plant, now incorporated into the seal of the Malagasy Republic. Ravenala madagas-cariensis is such a familiar sight in ornamental and botanical gardens all over the world that many are unaware of its origin in the rain-forest of eastern Madagascar. A cousin of the banana, it has long since appropriated the deforested regions of this coast. It thrives where nothing else will, partly because its brilliant blue seeds are fire-resistant, partly because it apparently requires no nourishment from the soil.
We were now near sea-level and all day the heat was intense; for me this sufficiently explained our need to rest every few miles. We had left Antogobato at 7.15, after a scrumptious breakfast of packet toast, tinned butter and tinned marmalade, yet within an hour we were glad to stop where free bananas were available. In a ‘lay-by’ cleared of vegetation green hands were stacked by the ton, awaiting some Chinese truck, and dozens of ripe bananas lay discarded on the ground amidst hundreds of rotten fruit. Rachel sat in the shade of a red cliff sprouting miniature ferns while I scavenged – and tested a jack-fruit, which was unripe. As we ate, we wondered about the tall, leafless, blossom-laden trees that flamed nearby, soaring above the varied greens of coffee, bamboo, ravenala and banana. Was this the flame tree Hildegardia erythro-siphon, which flowers at the end of the dry season and is found only in Madagascar? I had understood it to be endemic to the west coast, but perhaps its appearance here is another symptom of the fast-changing ecology of the deforested east coast.
At 10 we stopped again, thirstily, at the long-drawn-out village of Ranomafana, surrounded by gentle savoka-green hills on which we saw our first clove-trees: tall, compact, cypress-shaped. Those were the property of individual farmers; the main plantations – many millions of trees – are on the coast north of Tamatave. Cloves were brought from South-East Asia in the 1820s and became the second most important Betsimisaraka tree crop. The Malagasy economy was badly damaged by the invention of synthetic substitutes in the 1940s; now the main demands are from India, for cooking, and from Indonesia, for mixing with cigarette tobacco.
Only one of Ranomafana’s shops was open on this Sunday morning and from a grumpy old Betsimisaraka we bought two large bottles of violently coloured ersatz fruit-juice; it had queasy-making and prolonged after-effects. Another enormous Chinese camp lay behind the main street and we passed several of the senior Chinese staff and their wives, out for a relaxing stroll in immaculate Sabbath boiler-suits, all carrying bouquets of the local flame-of-the-forest.
For miles the road switchbacked through low barren foothills, once covered in rain-forest of which the traveller’s tree is the only survivor. Centuries ago these superb plants became the Triffids of the east coast, extending their power over hundreds of miles as all other trees vanished and playing an increasingly important part in the daily lives of the inhabitants. The ravenala’s store of pure water is released by cutting deep into the thick base of the six- or eight-foot leaf-stalk some six inches above the junction with the trunk. (For this you need a spear, not a camp-knife.) Each stalk yields about two pints of the only pure water locally available. Apart from being a reservoir, the ravenala provides most of the building materials for east coast huts; leaves for roofs, stems for walls, bark for flooring.
Wherever we looked, between Ranomafana and Antsapanana, the ravenala’s glossy bright green fans were standing erect, sometimes thirty feet tall, against the dark blue sky – on ridges of red clay, quartz rock or golden-brown heath. In many places it also grew level with the road, its giant leaves just perceptibly stirring and whispering in a small breeze from the coast. And occasionally it grew below the road, allowing us to look down on seed-pods each holding about thirty beans wrapped in a silky blue fibre. Travellers without ecological worries could walk through this region as Mr Ellis did, reflecting that ‘the prevalence of this tree imparts a degree of almost inconceivable magnificence to the vegetation of the country.’ But travellers aware of the causes of this prevalence cannot wholly enjoy the magnificence.
Antsapanana consists of little more than four Chinese hotelys yet being a road-junction it has an important air; an illegible much-collided-with sign-post points south to Vatomandry and there were two bashies and a truck parked in the ‘main street’. It was long past lunch-time (3.15) and Rachel settled down to rice and very greasy stewed pork: singularly untempting fare, I reckoned, in the middle of that sweltering afternoon. I had three litres of beer, for which the young Chinese hotely-owner under-charged me because we are vazaha. From his powerful transistor radio on the bar-counter came a commentary in Malagasy on an African international championship soccer match but the locals seemed to have little interest in their country’s fate. Only a few youths lounged on the verandah, or drifted in and out of the bar wanting to know the score. They bought no beer; it is too expensive for the villagers who in any case prefer rum – if they can afford it – or hooch. Hereabouts the latter is also made from cane and smells a great deal better than the gout-giving potions of the Spiny South.
Not far beyond Antsapanana the roads diverged for the last time. We turned onto the final stretch of Route Nationale No. 2 and were in the blessed shade of a remnant of rain-forest, preserved by the intractability of the terrain. On either side of a long narrow ridge lay long narrow ravines, already shadow-filled and crowded with oil-palms, bananas, bamboos, cane, raffia-palms, ravenala and countless ‘unknowns’. By 5.15 we had accepted the inevitability of sleeping on the track. Then suddenly the ridge widened, presenting us with a level grassy campsite, tree-encircled – a perfect farewell gift from the razana, to mark our last night’s rest on the bosom of their Great Red Island.
This pocket of uninhabited land is in one of Madagascar’s most heavily populated areas, yet after sunset nobody passed our site. Although we did not then know it, we were close to a seriously haunted village; the ghost – half horse, half woman – savagely mauls anyone foolish enough to wander around after dark. But throughout that night we were troubled only by heavy showers and at such a low altitude one can sleep quite well despite being sodden. The real inconvenience was felt next morning when our water-logged loads seemed double their normal weight.
Soon after sunrise we were on the move and within an hour had reached sea-level, where endless flat miles are given over to that cane-plantation whose manager we were on the way to visit. This was a built-up area; every ten or fifteen minutes we passed a hamlet of shaggy shacks and friendly people, some much taller than the Betsimisaraka. These, we later learned, were the descendants of the Mahafaly and Antandroy who fled north from the droughts and famines of the 1930s.
Here the humidity was beyond anything in my previous experience, yet the locals imagined they were enduring a cool spell of mid-winter weather. At 7.40 we stopped in a hamlet almost big enough to be called a village and had a litre of beer each, as in Tudor England, which made us feel happily depraved. (The only alternative was limonady.) Vazaha are no novelty hereabouts but our life-style seemed to puzzle the locals. The sort of vazaha who run plantations do not suddenly appear mud-covered out of the forest, carrying bulky loads, and sit around shamelessly swigging beer for breakfast.
With so many wage-earners in the population business was brisk for that little shop, though the amounts being purchased were minute: just enough for immediate use. Before the next meal the shoppers would be back; they have nowhere to store food safely, even if they were inclined to think ahead. Three men bought small bottles of rum and set off for work drinking on the wing. Not that we could afford to criticise as we went on our merry way, frequently saving each other from overbalancing; we weren’t in fact drunk but the track had been churned to a quagmire by giant plantation tractors. In the fields on either side foremen holding long lists were shouting roll-calls and we were surprised by the numbers of women and children workers. Several brief heavy showers cooled us slightly and then a spectacular double-rainbow appeared ahead – the two arcs so broad, and their span so immense above the flatness, that the effect was quite flamboyant. Even the colours of the prism seem different in Madagascar.
For hours we plodded on muddily through the cane-fields. There was no shade along the track, though lush green groves surrounded each hamlet or village. We enjoyed two more beer-stops, the number restricted only by opportunity. At the second of these our host-to-be, Nick White, was well known to the young woman behind the counter. She called him ‘Mr Wet’. As we neared Brickaville the villages became much larger and more substantial. By noon we were about two miles from the town – and then my left rucksack strap broke, ripping away from the canvas. When I swore at the shoddy quality of modern goods Rachel pointed out that ‘rucksacks aren’t meant to be mobile libraries!’
What would have been a disaster elsewhere seemed here a deliverance from heat-stroke; we now had an excuse to sit down and wait for motor-transport. All morning we had seen only tractors but within two minutes of our collapse a Peugeot van appeared – the timing was extraordinary – and we were rescued by Frank Wright, the Englishman in charge of the plantation machinery and a next-door-neighbour of Julie and Nick White. He left us on their doorstep at 12.50 p.m. ‘Just in time for lunch,’ said Rachel crudely.
The Whites’ kindness was not confined to three days of lavish house-hospitality. They also insisted on driving us to one of the east coast’s few shark-free beaches at Mahambo, some thirty miles north of Tamatave. After a night at Le Recif, a Moro-Moro type hotel, we planned to continue up the coast by bus-truck to Foulpointe and Fenerive. We would see enough of Tamatave itself on the day before our departure for Tana, Moscow and London. We had learned that the bigger the Malagasy town (Tana excepted) the less time one wants to spend in it.
The main attraction around Mahambo is not the shark-free swimming, enjoyable though that is, but the vegetation. In the inland rain-forest ninety per cent of the species are endemic; along the coast – open to botanical influences washed up by the Indian Ocean – that figure is down to twenty per cent. Yet to our eyes everything growing along that shore-line looked gloriously outlandish; there are for instance about forty different species of narrow-fronded palms and pandanus. We also met the Cycas thouarsii of unhappy memory, which looks like a palm but is not. Alison Jolly has described it as ‘one of the cycad group which links ferns to flowering plants, a kind of coelocanth of the vegetable kingdom’.
When the time came to sit by the roadside, awaiting onward transport to Foulpointe, neither of us, oddly, felt like leaving Le Recife. We are not natural beach-hogs and there was no snorkling, yet I only wanted to stroll through the endlessly fascinating shoreline forest, play Scrabble on the sand with my feet in the sea and swim four times a day. Rachel did not even want to swim – much. Normally she is a keen long-distance swimmer but here she stayed close to the shore like a nervy toddler. For some reason this goaded me to vicious irritability and I accused her of laziness. My temper seemed to be getting as short as my energy. Rachel retorted – ‘I wish you wouldn’t go out so far! How do the Whites know it’s safe here? It’s irrational,’ she added morosely, ‘to go pale about spiders and be so careless about sharks.’ I realised then that filial devotion, rather than laziness, was part of her problem – and guilt made me even more irritable. Later I discovered that she had been reading too much Alison Jolly:
‘There was a French lady who thought wading might be safe, so she tucked up her skirts and stepped in, only to have a shark sever her foot at the ankle. Eleven species including the real maneater, the great white shark, patrol just offshore along Madagascar’s east coast … The beach shelves rapidly to deep, poorly inhabited waters. The sharks hang off the lagoon mouths, waiting for Malagasy endemic mullet, or perhaps an unguarded toddler, to stray out into the waves …’
It says a lot for the strange beauty of the Mahambo region that we so enjoyed our three days there, despite unusual outbreaks of mother–daughter friction. We got to know the village quite well; a decrepit but friendly little place, pervaded by tropical take-it-easiness. Its inhabitants made the other Malagasy we had met seem positively dynamic. Mahambo is about two miles from the hotel, across weirdly vegetated dunes and through superb forest. Our frequent visits there were thirst-inspired. Le Recife hotel – not run (so’s you’d notice) by anyone, and owned by an absentee vazaha named Frantz Cowar – charged vazaha double for Antsirabe beer on the rare occasions when there was anybody around to serve the guests.
We left for Tamatave early one morning in an antique and unique minibus: unique because only half-full at Mahambo, though that happy situation soon changed. I remember little of our journey on ‘the nylon route’, so called because it is a normally maintained stretch of tarred road. An alarming lethargy was afflicting me; I could not keep awake. Rachel too was dopey, though less so; and she seemed to be developing Mally-belly.
We arrived at 9.30 a.m., which left us more than enough time to admire: ‘the autonomous port of Tamatave which has just been enlarged. The wharfs have increased in number, some warehouses have been blown down and replaced by more modern and functional ones, the protection dam has been extended, the plat-forms are well equipped and the hoisting engines numerous.’
First however we had to find a doss-house and buy train tickets for the next day. We consulted our Air Mad guidebook and ruled out the Hotel Neptune – ‘10 air-conditioned rooms with registered music, bath and WC. 10 new rooms expected soon. All the specialities of the French Midi region’. Then we decided to get our tickets first and on the way to the railway station chanced upon an Indian-owned doss-house where Rachel went to bed while I ticket-queued. Afterwards we both investigated Tamatave, though not in depth. The Malagasy suffer from a mass-illusion about this place; all over the island we had been told that whatever else we missed in Madagascar, we must not miss Tamatave. Yet even had we not been taking a jaundiced view of things we could have found little to admire in this decaying port, apart from a group of monumental banyan trees. And let us also mention – as our guidebook would say – that pervasive aroma of cloves which flavours the entire city and becomes quite dizzy-making as one passes certain ‘functional warehouses’.
Rachel retired at sunset. I found a nearby bar-cum-brothel where I drank beer, which made me feel ill, while writing my diary. During the night Rachel vomited three times and my temperature soared. Yet I slept heavily, almost as though I were drugged, and had a series of vivid nightmares about ombiasa putting a spell on my publisher’s office, which had moved from Picadilly to Fort-Dauphin, and bare-footed men with typewriters under their arms taking over my home in Ireland and telling me it was now a People’s Executive Committee office. As we loaded up and set off for the railway station at 4 a.m. I had to face the fact that both Murphys were not merely off-colour but extremely ill – and getting iller by the minute.
This train was as overcrowded as Merk at his worst and none of the opaque windows would open. Acute nausea was one of our new symptoms and we realised that we could not possibly endure fourteen hours of what Jamie had so rudely described as ‘ethnic pong’. We therefore sat on the floor at an open door between carriages, our legs dangling over the track. Twelve other seatless passengers, plus their luggage (much of it alive, as usual) were crammed into that tiny space. This meant that once we had taken up our positions – admittedly the most advantageous available – we could not move between Tamatave and Perinet, or between Perinet and Tana. It also meant that people tended to sit on us, not through any lack of consideration but because they had no alternative. In such situations everybody either has to sit on somebody or be sat upon. I was comparatively fortunate; the youth sitting half on my left shoulder and half on my rucksack cannot have weighed more than eight stone. The man sitting half on Rachel’s shoulder and half on his wife’s looked much heavier. He spoke enough English to remind us of our Southern friend, the Antandroy youth who unbuttoned my shirt. At intervals he tapped me on the head and when I looked around stared hard into my eyes and said, ‘You man, yes? You engineering man?’ My denials caused him to rock with laughter while Rachel and his wife winced. ‘Yes, yes!’ he insisted, ‘I know you engineering man!’ We decided that my bush-shirt, with its quasi-military look, must have created the engineering illusion. As the day wore on we both developed severe pains below our right ribs – and raging thirsts. Yet when I fetched two bottles of beer from the Railway Hotel at Perinet neither of us could drink it.
Between Perinet and Tana something went wrong with the engine and we stopped for over an hour on the side of a precipice. It was after 9 p.m. and Tana was abed when we walked very slowly up the long Avenue de l’Indépendance to the Hotel Lido.
Back in our now-familiar room, I decided the time had come to study urine-samples. Mine was the colour of Guinness, with a good head of green foam. Rachel’s was the colour of Newcastle Brown Ale, with a less impressive head of yellow-green foam.
‘Blackwater fever!’ said Rachel.
‘Probably not,’ I judged. ‘More likely hepatitis.’
And so it proved.
Next day – our last in Tana – Rachel stayed in bed while I toured the city saying good-bye to friends. I had to walk gingerly; the vibrations caused by each step seemed to send red-hot pokers through my liver.
Gervais from Antsirabe called to our room that evening with a farewell gift of a magnificent solitaire set – the board of some exotic wood, the pieces of polished variegated semi-precious stones. He could have chosen nothing more appropriate than those naturally beautiful products of his country.
Yet my most precious souvenir of Madagascar is a small packet of red earth such as the Malagasy take with them when they go abroad. They take it to ensure their eventual return to the Great Red Island. I took it for the same reason.