TWO
Dancing in the rainforest
In 1985 photographer Frans Lanting and I set out to write a story for the National Geographic. Unusually for that time we weren’t just describing natural wonders. We intended to write about conservation.6
We started with the tallest rainforest at the lowest altitude, where the Masoala Peninsula plunges down near-vertical slopes to the Bay of Antongil. The slope goes straight on down into the deep water of the bay: here humpbacked whales migrate to bear their calves, sheltering behind the peninsula from the storms of the Indian Ocean. The forest above echoes with the roaring of red ruffed lemurs, improbably furry creatures the size of overfed tomcats. Wild red ruffs are almost wholly confined to the Masoala, although you may see them in zoos. Perhaps you have already cooed over their soulful yellow eyes and their bushy red fur, or ducked as they suddenly bellowed as loud as lions.7
We’ll return in the final chapters to the Masoala’s dreadful fate, but in 1985 the loggers and farmers were ordinary people, nibbling at the forest bit by bit for their own small ambitions. We travelled with a forester still trying to enforce legal authority over land long designated as a National Reserve, in order to meet just one farmer to represent here thousands of others like himself—poor, hopeful, and trying to feed his family.
Friday, Sept. 27, 1985. Masoala Peninsula. The illegal clearing. Martial Ridy may face a fine or penal servitude for cutting trees. It isn’t all because of us, but we rubbed their noses in his misdeeds.
As we chugged along in the African Queen (its motor says Petraka Petraka Petraka)8 we saw a new bare slope just behind Ambanizana village. Brown soil where light-loving plants hadn’t sprouted, and a mess of tree trunks higgledy-piggledy. David Ratiarson, our acute companion from the Maroansetra Water and Forests, had already been notified there was unauthorized clearing here. One of the reasons he was glad to come with us was to look into the matter. Of course he had no budget to hire a boat for himself.
We sailed along the roadless Masoala coast. The boat looked about as sturdy as son Arthur’s last home-made go-kart: paint peeling, and the top plank on the starboard side held on with rope. The motor stank of diesel. Our captain wore an enormous straw hat suitable for an English summer wedding, which curled up in front like a cavalry hat. His eyelashes curled to match. We’d first tried stopping at Hiaraka village, where I was marooned for a week in a storm ten years ago, but the slopes above it have since been cut bare with no forest left to fell. So now we were headed for Ambanizana.9
Landing was simple. The captain just ran the African Queen onto the beach. The crew put a home-made wooden ladder over the bow and we climbed down into warm water. Formal courtesies with the village president and then pressure from him and from forester Ratiarson. Martial Ridy, young and poor, had no choice but to show us his new-cut field.
Though frightened, Martial led us up through the rainforest, armed with ax and coupe-coupe and a sobiky with a new clove seedling and one coffee seedling to plant. It has taken him only four days to clear what the forester expertly sized up as 32 ares, or 0.32 hectare—on a 50 degree slope!10
I thought it might take me four days even to climb up it. Fallen tree trunks, interlocked fallen twigs, and underneath all greasy clay. Fortunately one great tree had been wrapped in lianas, so I did the Tarzan bit of rappelling up a liana— except with near-vertical ground below, not a standing tree.
Then, from the top, a panorama of sea, white beach in a crescent cove, the paddy fields below half-grown with emerald rice. (An overworked adjective, but what do you say about a jewel-bright green?) An isolated giant tree below the clearing drew a flock of vaza parrots—grey, awkward, social, drying elaborately fanned wings in the sun. Vaza means ‘parrot,’ but the word is very like vazaha, which means ‘a foreigner.’ When you come into a Malagasy village, all the little children rush out shouting Vazaha! Vazaha! Now the parrots were doing it. I grew distracted making up a jingle:11
The parrot is a silly bird
She squawketh as she flies.
She feedeth on the toughest nuts
That other birds despise
She liveth many decades
But every time she squawketh
Vazaha! Vazaha!
My ears begin to burn.
That’s actually a canard about the parrots learning little: when a whole flock meets up in a tree, they hold what for all the world sounds like conversations. Another tree held bulbuls, warbling through their yellow beaks, and there was one gleam of iridescent blue from a sunbird with his brown mate.12
Above us on the hill behind rose the tiers of rainforest, with its cool darkness and the smell of damp leaf mold that intoxicates biologists the world over. At the clearings’ edge, a ramy stump a whole meter across gives way to the desolation in front.13
All right, show us how it’s done. Martial was understandably loth to demonstrate. Ratiarson, the forest agent, took me aside and said don’t talk about authorizations, and certainly not in French. I asked if Ratiarson could ask Martial why he chose to cut primary rainforest on this steep slope, but that didn’t get translated—I just got the forester’s opinion of the insanity of the choice.
Martial finally agreed to pose for photos, whacking at an already severed tree that wouldn’t fall down, held up by its treetop lianas. This took Frans an hour to shoot. Martial will have to wait a year for the trunks to disintegrate a bit before he burns and plants—perhaps more, because this is a sunny slope and the trees rot faster in forest shade. I’m glad he thinks it’s sunny. It rained and rained for us.
Why did Martial do it? We went to his house afterwards. He’s not rich enough yet to get married but he has a pretty young fiancée and a son of three. The boy is one of the worst-nourished kids in the village—not only potbellied, like so many, but with the blond temples of kwashiorkor.14 Martial has a salary—the minimum wage of 21,000 francs (= $33.33/month) as an assistant in the coffee nursery. However, he has no land, only a rice field 30 km from here that his father gave him. Relatives tend it; he gets only some of the rice. The clearing was his bid for freedom. But he could have asked permission. And perhaps even received it.
Saturday, Sept 28: Ambanizana Village
Ambanizana has 91 households, according to the careful census notebook of the village president. The school has 150 kids in three classes from the 91 households—that’s about half the kids in town. For each child the parents pay 160 francs/month × 70 lots of parents, or a total of 11,200 francs/month (= $17.77). The majority of the kids look to me to be potbellied with malnutrition and worms.
This is in a town with good rice fields, fish in the front yard, and saleable cash crops. The wide main street has maybe twenty houses a side, most with corrugated iron roofs. There are three traders with multi-roomed houses who sell candles, matches, cooking oil, kerosene, rum. There are cattle corrals fenced in bamboo, with black- or toffee-colored humped zebu bulls, a rope wound through their noses and behind the horns. One elaborate house has even got barbed wire! And lush fields of rice down to a wide river flowing from a panorama of forest-clad mountains, cloud in wisps like veils over their faces.
My chief contact is the vulgarisateur de café, the extension officer for coffee and clove seedlings. He speaks easy French, writes a neat hand, and showed me his geography textbook from 5th grade so we could see where I live on the East River in New York.
We wade the shallow half of the Ambanizana river and take a pirogue for the last 50 yards.15 The nursery is laid out with shaded pavilions, perhaps 100 seedlings under each. The plants are in plastic bags (imported), green and healthy. They come free to the vulgarisateur, but he sells them at 10 francs/coffee plant and 15 francs/clove tree. Little clove trees are pompoms, like trimmed box trees but taller—new leaves are yellow frosting on the tree. Clove trees are adorable as babies as well as half grown—darker green cores, then yellow leaves, then sprigs of pinkish-rose. Clove buds are crimson. That’s what we eat.
It is strange working with Frans Lanting. He can be infuriating. He spotted a picture-worthy family having lunch and made them pose for the next forty minutes, the two-year-old holding a spoonful of rice stuck half-way to his mouth. That’s nothing: he spent three hours on a leaf-tailed gecko, its red mouth agape. The problem is that he is an artist of truly extraordinary vision, and nobody can get in his way. Not even a hissing leaf-tailed lizard. He rewards his (human) subjects with Polaroid portraits. Everywhere he goes, forty or fifty of the village children skip behind him giggling and screaming with delight. A pied piper in khakis with an oversized camera case.
Saturday, Sept. 28: Party!
Party! The moon rose full behind the highest peak of the Masoala Peninsula. A few white clouds on the top like an orator’s head of white hair, brilliant in the moonlight. Or like lines of breaking waves, gleaming in the night, breaking silently and still on the mountain crests.
Main street roofs gleam—full moon is the only light that flatters tin roofs. Coconut and banana palms shimmer as though they were carved in silver foil.
Main street is full of gleaming people. White lambas (printed cotton cloths) and blankets wrapped round, and little children in a shirt with one button and the shorts below the belly. All whitened with moonlight. The drummer arrives: the agricultural assistant in white shirt and trousers, his drum a tree slice covered both ends with cowhide.
The president’s aide calls the throng with the official trumpet—a conch shell, blown to the rhythm: COME ON ALONG! COME ON ALONG! ALEXANDER’S RAGTIME BAND! (Its lowing tone called the people earlier to announce the dance tonight, and the next day serves as church bell.)
The children begin first, led by an adult—’Didier! Didier! Didier Ratsiraka! Didier is our father and our family!’16
The drummer is encouraging them with a beat going Petraka—Petraka—Petraka. The beat like a runner’s heart which says faster—faster—faster. Only thirty or forty of the children know the songs from school, with movements to match, the six- and seven-year-old girls jigging and raising their arms and twirling in unison. Approximate unison—a four-year-old little sister who’s also in the front row provides counterpoint.
The drummer whips them into marvellous rhythms (he’s also the Catholic youth group leader). A lead singer takes over, piercing soprano, about harvesting hectares of rice for the revolution, as the children back her chanting Tsigomaha, Tsigomaha, hypnotic as Wimoweh.
But all this was warm-up. A great shout as the betsa-betsa came in on the shoulders of three strong men. Two whole plastic jerry cans and a demijohn in burlap, with a great tin washbasin to dip out of. Betsa-betsa is made of fermented sugar-cane juice, strong as wine, not distilled. Not sour, like African millet beer, but dry and very sweet together. The name means ‘you swallow large bowlfuls’ but the gathering was held in check by having only two small bowls between them, one of them mine. The servers dished up a bowl at a time and passed it into the throng, not excluding tastes for the children—it took at least half an hour for a round. One elderly lady brought her stool down and put herself in front of the inner ring. When a wine server bent down obscuring her view, she smacked him smartly on the bottom of his patched shorts.
The drummer, refreshed, set to, and a few older girls began to dance. The commerçant, the wholesale supplier for the shops, stepped in. In this solo style the women scarcely move but their heels hit the ground to the drumbeat so hard the ground trembles. The man danced far more suggestively, arms out at girls’ waist level, knees bent, bottom out and side to side.
The drummer asked for rum, knocked back half a glass like Russian vodka, picked up his drum and danced to the beat, kicking wildly. He then intercepted a glass meant for three woman dancers. The last was his downfall. Literally, taking Frans’s tape recorder with him. He staggered out of the crowd and started a fight on the outskirts until half the men chased him down the street. Ratiarson the forester was disgusted at this behavior in a government official.
A second less fevered drummer took his place. The dancing went on. And on. At last they came to ancient songs— ‘when my mate is gone, how lonesome, lonesome.’ The lead singer took over that one, simultaneously singing, dancing, nursing her baby.
When the moon stood at 11 p.m. over Main Street and the rum was gone and the betsa-betsa too, old forester Ratiarson and I went home. Frans said the dancing went on till midnight, everyone in it by the end, in lines and in pulsating circles, adults on the inside, children in a wider circle around.
But I found the beach deserted at last with no one likely to come, the waves breaking luminous on warm sand.
So I went swimming.
6. A. Jolly, ‘Madagascar, a world apart (1987).
7. Red ruffed lemur: Varecia rubra or Varecia varecia rubra.
8. J. Thurber, ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.’
9. Jolly, A World Like Our Own.
10. coupe-coupe: machete; sobiky: straw basket.
11. Lesser vaza parrot: Coracopsis nigra. Cf. the ancient English folk song, ‘The cuckoo is a pretty bird.’
12. Madagascar bulbul: Hypsipetes madagascariensis; Souimanga sunbird: Nectarinia souimanga.
13. Ramy: Canarium madagascariense.
14. Kwashiorkor: protein malnutrition.
15. pirogue: the word for a dug-out canoe throughout francophone Africa.
16. Didier Ratsiraka, president of Madagascar 1975–93, 1997–2002.