THREE
Burning baobabs; death of children
Madagascar’s west coast is very different from the rainforests of the east. A 6–8 month winter without rain means the forest is deciduous—brown and partly leafless in winter, buzzing with birds and mammals and insects in the summer. Lemurs have diverse ways of surviving the winter, ranging from actual hibernation (fat-tailed dwarf lemurs) to subsisting on low-energy mature leaves (lepilemurs) or tree-gum (fork-marked lemurs), even to actual carnivory of smaller lemurs and birds (Coquerel’s mirza lemurs).1
Not surprisingly, the western forests are very slow to grow back once cut. Have you ever seen a poster of Madagascar showing the magnificent baobab alley of Morondava? A double line of towering trees with a road between, variously crowded with oxcarts, tourist buses and film crews? The flat land on either side, though, was once forest—all but the baobabs themselves have gone.
From the early 1980s, a Swissaid scheme attempted to find a way to log this kind of forest sustainably, based on good research. This was in the Kirindy, south of the Kirindy river. Ten years of intensive effort eventually showed that there is no commercially sustainable use, though the Swiss are still trying to engage the people in participatory conservation. Trees are just too slow-growing for forestry in this climate. Some only seed at six- or ten-year intervals after a cyclone.2
As for the local tavy, to paraphrase what the Swiss foresters told me, ‘After burning the forest the ground is sown to maize without further preparation. A crop is grown for 1–3 years on the same area. There may be a return to the cleared field after 5 years. The second burning eradicates all seedlings of forest trees which may have sprouted and finishes off any large trees that survived the first clearing. After the second treatment, the soil is barren. The worst area is around the village of Beroboka where people have savaged the forest with an apparent will to destroy it.’ Beroboka lies in the middle of a vast swathe of the forest cleared for sisal in the 1960s around an ever-flowing river: a failed plantation.3
Just after the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit to Beroboka and his speech to the conference on Conservation and Sustainable Development, photographer Frans Lanting and I also turned up at Beroboka to write our conservation article for the National Geographic. We stumbled into a slice of village life I never hope to see again—what happens when poverty and polluted water combine to murder children. Enough to forever douse the naive outsider’s view that village life is romantic.
October 13, 1985. Beroboka. The plantation manager fears poison.
Landed just south of plantation house, with gleeful children running to watch us arrive in the Amoco helicopter.
We sit in the high-ceilinged concrete dining room of the old plantation house at Beroboka. Table holds a kerosene lamp which lights the faces, while a mosquito coil on the floor partly protects the ankles. The faces lean into the light. Ferdinand de Campe is the plantation manager for the de Heaulme family, with black brow and mustache and one red vein standing out in his eye. He is voluble, intense—and vulnerable. He talks and talks and gestures, as all do who have guests at last on a lonely plantation in the bush. He is indeed committed to the preservation of the forest, to the point of having arrested the chief local rabble-rouser of people to destroy the forest. He had to drive the police to arrest the man in his own car. Even then it took eleven of them with guns to make the arrest, confronting one fellow with a stick.
‘Rabble-rouser’ isn’t quite the right word. This was the local radical politician, who argued that the French de Heaulme family had abandoned the land and the people should take possession—especially of the forest. They got him arrested, anyhow.
Then de Campe held kabary, a traditional consultation, with all the locals, including the President du Fokontany Beroboka Sud (Beroboka community), Étienne Gilbert. Everyone agreed that de Campe should ask the de Heaulmes to uproot the bulbous bases of old sisal and plow and harrow permanent land for maize and peanuts. De Campe has the seed to sow, but no tractors capable of preparing the land. The locals feel betrayed, and so indeed does de Campe, because the season when they must work the land is right now. The fokontany, seeing no tractors, has applied for the right to clear 1,000 hectares of Water and Forest Ministry forest land instead of the sisal-studded ex-plantation. The permission was granted a day or so ago, Oct. 10 or 11, then apparently rescinded October 13. Now pending developments.
In this highly seasonal climate they must clear now to burn later, and plant late November or early December. Otherwise they miss the rainy season.
Meanwhile de Campe has his food and drinking water watched, and goes armed in the forest. There is not only the traditional Beroboka village of local Sakalava, but a whole group of Tandroy, brought here from the south as sisal workers when the plantation was running. They have settled in a kind of forest-edge linear slum. ‘Ceux-la, je ne les ai jamais apprivoisés. Ils m’en veulent à mort, car j’interdis les brulis.’ (Those people, I have never tamed them. They want me dead because I forbid burning forest.)
Our own party includes ornithologist and zoo director Georges Randrianasolo. Georges was the man who accompanied many many expeditions, including Dave Attenborough’s 1961 BBC film series Zoo Quest to Madagascar. He has grown thinner than ever as he ages, but no less voluble, like the parrots themselves. Photographer Frans Lanting fingers and twists the corner of his mustache or the near corner of his beard. Why is his hair so straight when his beard is frizzy? And why do I find a hair color of mid-yellow brown is illmatched to an icy blue eye? Anyway, since he can’t follow most of the French as Georges and de Campe get deeper and deeper and more repetitive about what’s wrong with Madagascar, he isn’t looking grim as usual. I’m feeling grim instead, at the endless conversations which start ‘Avant…’ Avant means before… before Independence, before the French left. Everywhere people compare present poverty with ‘Avant…’ but of course they never say the rest out loud.4
Finally, Hubert Randrianasolo, Frans’s assistant, tall with wavy hair, and a slightly plump smooth face. Hubert makes you think of flesh and skin and hair while Georges is bone structure and bright eyes. Hubert’s father was a noted artist. His grandfather was an MDRM politician who died penniless in prison, and wrote to the family never to become politicians again. Therefore intelligent, sensitive, tolerant Hubert owns cars, and is determined to succeed as a businessman. Probably only an artist’s son could tolerate work with Frans, and recognize that Frans’s arrogance is not for his ego, but for his art.5
Frans and Hubert go out to photograph the hand-raised fork-marked lemur till midnight. That means photo-ing an animal that keeps crawling down the back of their shirts instead of posing on the tree, all amid mosquitoes and lightning and lowering heat, and in the background village voices wailing the dead.
October 14, morning: A giant jumping rat problem.
Frans and Hubert up before dawn to drive to a spot where Frans foresaw a photograph of a huge red sun rising between two distant baobab trees. Frans got his photo.6
I wish I could like this forest better. It rained last night. The mosquitoes fasten like Sartre’s Furies. Sartre really missed out making the Furies that punish sinners into ‘The Flies’—they’re actually mosquitoes.
The baobabs are beautiful, but the stuff between mostly looks like second growth ready for the coupe-coupe.
And of course this is the wrong season. I keep reminding myself October here is the equivalent of the February thaw in my home town of Ithaca—bare branches where the sap is beginning to run, but it’s impossible to imagine summer-time. De Campe is lyrical about its beauty in March when the summer heat has abated but all the woods are still green and plumed.
Even now the birds are beginning to sing. I see Coua gigas, a giant coua, and Coua cristata, the crested coua, and a third, new to me—intermediate size, grey and pointy-tailed like cristata, rufus breast and ground-running like gigas. Georges says C. reynaudi or another.7
Frans and I go down to the Kirindy river (wholly dry, of course) where Georges has been setting traps for the giant jumping rat, Hypogeomys antimena, in hopes of bringing some back to Tsimbazaza Zoo. Giant jumping rats are among the world’s cuddliest-looking rodents: long pink ears like a young rabbit, pink woffly nose, upright sitting posture with the appeal of a pet gerbil. And they do hop, even at 10 in the morning when the road shimmers in the heat.
At noon, as we lunch off rice and yet another tin of corned beef, young Silvio Flueckiger, Urs Rohmer and Dr Sorg of the Cooperation Suisse drop in. They are doing lovely scientific work, planting seedlings in different months and then replanting them in the woods.
Their big problem seems to be the giant jumping rats. The seedlings, which have been well watered in the nursery, are of course greener than any other dry season stuff. With meter-high woody sprouts, the something comes back three nights running. The first night it debarks the sapling, and the second night cuts it down and eats the leaves, and the third night it digs up and eats the roots. It adapts beautifully to their 10 meter spacing out.
I congratulated Silvio warmly on his providing food for one of the world’s rarest mammals. He looked exceedingly mournful.
October 14, afternoon: Funeral of Monika, aged 3.
The old poacher, the ‘Père de Blaise,’ whom we’d thought might show us a lemur trap, has had two grandchildren die in the past three days—one here and one in Belo sur Mer. The wailing and chanting last night were to drive out evil spirits from the village. Three children have died here in a few days, and more are sick.
A funeral procession passed the plantation house. Hubert ran to ask if we might photograph. For a photographer, a village funeral was an unmissable opportunity, as long as the family agreed. Amid confusion at the sudden interruption the father said yes. Frans walked with the men. The rest of us—Hubert, Georges, me and about four local villagers followed in a 2-seater jeep. Hubert drove back for rum for our contribution—it is fomba gasy, Malagasy custom, for mourners to contribute rum. We reassembled with the funeral party in the woods.
The married women knelt and squatted in a little circle, just inside the woods, around the coffin. Younger people of both sexes stayed across the road, well away. It was only a little coffin with a peaked roof like a house. They had a cross: two planks nailed together, with pointed top. Burned in angular letters:
MONIKA
MATY
10–10–85
Monika had been three, or three and a half. The box was wrapped in bright lambas, the outer one Independence Anniversary 1985, red and yellow and green. It was all a bright, bright scene—the gay little red and green coffin, the women in multicolored lambas, black Sakalava skin and white-barked western trees. They sat clapping and singing repetitive minor chants till one cried Sifaka! Behind, from a tall bare white emergent, a troop of white sifaka soared against the sky with their ballet grace—10 feet down to a lower tree and onward, branch after branch till they disappeared.8
The women began to pass home-made spirit—toaka gasy—around in a green plastic mug, bright as the lambas. A few stood and danced, the usual hip-swinging stamping in time to the clapping. One woman shouted angrily at vazaha attending (Frans snapping pictures with apparent phlegm). I looked at Hubert, but he kept his cool, declined to translate and figured internally when and how he might extricate us, if necessary.
A man came from the woods, sat in the circle of women, and said in ceremonial sing-song that the grave was nearly dug. He was passed some toaka, and returned to the woods. At last all the men came out (there were about 20 married men and 20 married women at the funeral). The whole group turned in procession down the path.
Only then we saw what the graveyard was. The path was lined both sides with graves. Many fresh—one child’s 12–9–85, just a month ago. Each child’s grave had a little hat on the cross: cloth store-bought hats, not local straw. Ten or fifteen were fresh, new, this year’s hats. Little graves with new hats. Many of the graves were adult though. Monika’s was inserted between others, perhaps 4–5 foot deep in the sandy soil.
They made a little fire in the woods to burn her few possessions. They lifted the coffin lid, and folded the three bright lambas—white, blue and white, red and green, and tucked them over the body. All the while the toaka cups passed round, as people grew loud and argumentative and laughing. I quoted my father’s remark about wakes growing jovial as wakes do, but Hubert was shocked—Not on the plateau, he said. First the father of the family, then later the women, offered me toaka. Even a sip hits you sharply under the left eye, with a twinge of pain up into the sinuses. Perhaps more of it is anesthetic.
And all the while the sun filtered down through the branches in the glaring colors of afternoon. Even the pile of yellow sand looked like something seen in Kodachrome in the National Geographic.
At last the women each stepped to the sand pile. They turned their backs to the grave. With a quick backward scoop of the left hand, they tossed sand onto the coffin, already running away, so that death should not follow them. Then the gravediggers set to with shovels.
The procession started back to the road. A few final ceremonies remained: washing the hands in water the women had carried on their heads in red and blue plastic buckets. They had started to dispute by now, angry with each other and with us. Hubert reached his cut-out point, and told us to leave.
October 14 evening. Death of lemurs.
Last night Frans and Hubert and Georges and I had an intense ethical discussion around the pressure lamp and the ankle-height mosquito coil. Should Frans photograph lemur poaching? Would we be sanctioning what was both illegal and, to us conservationists, deeply immoral? I am afraid I was the most hard-boiled. It happens anyway. It’s part of local culture. We would just be recording it. An old local poacher agreed to help us, but did we in fact share responsibility for the deaths of the particular lemurs he proposed to catch?
So this morning our ancient trapper and Georges and Hubert and Frans and I climbed in the jeep and drove to the Kirindy river. We started walking down the sandy streambed under the same parched woods. My ethics, or just plain squeamishness, evaporated. We weren’t egging on the old man to build a new lemur trap. He just took us to the one he’d already built over the past two weeks.
The trap was a runway of two cut trees, in all about 20 ft long and 5 ft above ground. The saplings rested in the crotches of live rooted trees. He’d cut all the other bushes for several feet around and lashed the runway together with strips of hafotra, or fibrous bark. Spaced along the runway were eight actual traps. Each had a trigger: the bent top of a still-rooted sapling. The sapling looped into a strap of more bark. He first bent the saplings into the straps. Then he cut 4 ft lengths of stick, and put them horizontally to hold the straps apart, top and bottom. Then he tied what looked like string to the triggers, in a running noose.
Georges promptly showed me how to make the string. You slice off more hafotra, split off half-inch-wide strips, split that in two, sit down on the ground, and pull your blue jeans up from your safari boots to reveal a length of bony skin. ‘Je reviens à mes ancetres’ (I’m turning back into my ancestors) grunted Georges. In a second’s rubbing on the shin the hafotra is transformed into a length of twisted string, as regular and strong as commercial nylon.
‘Lets go see what the old codger is up to,’ said Georges. The old man was posing with his spatulate fingers at the traps while Frans and Hubert deployed silvered mirrors in the forest to light up his profile.
Hubert seemed to know surprisingly well what was coming next. At last he admitted he’d made just such traps as a boy in Morondava. In fact, everybody can make traps like that. He didn’t actually say he’d caught any lemurs, but certainly plenty of birds!
I could see, as if it was happening, how a female rufus lemur would be garroted, dangling with broken neck from the sprung trap, her fur red in the spotted sunlight and the surprised look of her white eyebrows now set in the surprise of death. Or worse, a male caught round the waist, screaming small lemur screams until the old man walked back to finish him off—or the crows and kites got there first.
Even counting an old hunter’s time as worth nothing, the effort can hardly be worth the meager return in protein. People just like to hunt. The incalculable part is finding your lemur troop and learning its routes. This season is the soudure, the hungry season between harvests for lemurs as for humans. There is almost no fruit left, and no new growth. The rufus lemurs react by doing nothing all day, and sortie-ing for an hour or so at dawn and dusk. This means your watching must be only at dawn and dusk. And the region is 10 km from the old poacher’s home!
Then building the trap takes a full day.
Then finding bait. You go locate a lepilemur.9 If its nest-hole is accessible, you catch it with a brush-ended stick twisted in its fur. If not, cut the tree down. We stepped over a tree that fell across the Kirindy, about a foot in diameter, felled to get one lepilemur. You kill the lepilemur and take out its intestines, which you smear on the runway: this is the favored bait. Flashback for me to Jersey Zoo, and that Mayotte lemur female with the mouse intestines dangling from her jaws, while her yearlings jumped and snatched at them. ‘I never heard they liked lepilemur tripes!’ exclaimed Georges. ‘It’s new to me!’ So much for vegetarian scientists.
Fortunately we were too late to go through this and contributed bananas for bait instead.
October 14, night. Death of children.
So home. Dinner with de Campe—tomato salad, and chicken in fresh ginger sauce, and sliced green mangoes, served by smiling Mama in that dismal dining room. And me all the while hoping we’d not have to do the next bit with the lemur trap.
We didn’t. Hubert and Georges went off to the village to see if there would be more spirit chasing for the next child who died just after Monika’s funeral. Came back an hour or so later shaking.
The child’s family were Christians. The older brother, even with tears in his eyes, said they’d hold a traditional rather than a Christian wake, since we were here to see it. Georges and Hubert were sat condoling with the family. Meanwhile a charette (oxcart) is bringing down the body of another child who died in Belo. (Even the body of Monika was perceptibly rank. I don’t like to think about a body that spent two or three days in the sun in an oxcart.)
As Frans and Hubert sat with the family the news came that yet another child was dead. One old man has lost three grandchildren this week. The family excused themselves— could we please stay away?
Hubert nearly cried himself. His own son is 6, his daughter 4. He said he tried to be tough, but he couldn’t be with children. He couldn’t stand it. Was there anything we could do to help the family—or the village?
October 15. Fancy ice cream cake and dirty water.
Dawn. Packed. Down that blasted road to the Kirindy. Into the woods to the lemur trap. No lemurs, thank God.
Another child has died. That makes three last night.
And then through a guarded gate and chain-linked fence into Alpha 2, the Amoco Oil base camp.
I thought it would be a town. Instead it is linked trailers made into offices, and a giant prefab hangar. Everything is temporary, ready to move to New Guinea or Chad if there’s no oil here. And everyone speaks American. I put the case for airlifting a doctor to Beroboka village this afternoon.
And then they airlifted me to Tana.
And at 8 p.m. I went to dinner with the Greers (head of Amoco in Madagascar) with crystal glasses on the table and a Pakistani pierced wooden screen behind and a silk Persian rug on the wall. Chatted with the Egyptian ambassador, who had to tell me about the current international crises from scratch. Funny that an Italian cruise ship can be hijacked by Palestinians and an Egyptian plane hijacked by Americans in the past week without people in Beroboka noticing.
Also the head of Fraise & Cie, who commands the vanilla market, and his wife who wears silver armored eye shadow. Also an Englishman from Mombasa who does all the heavy marine transport this side of the Indian Ocean, and laughed at my jokes.
I kept myself together till the ice-cream cake arrived for desert. The cake was left from the Greers’ 2-year-old daughter’s birthday party the day before, about the time we were burying Monika.
So I gave Eva Greer the whole story. And God help me I was pleased when she started crying into her ice cream. I guess Beroboka will get its medicines—and maybe some other villages too.
Home to bed.
October 16.
I guess this was Sunday, sleeping and washing underwear and trying to write all the feelings away. I can start to Fort Dauphin tomorrow with a cleaned-out brain, and my hair washed.
Dinner in the Colbert: salade verte, magret de canard à l’orange, pommes nouveaux, fromages de France, and two bottles of beer.
October 17.
Update on Beroboka. The Amoco doctor flew in, in a big 212 helicopter 10 minutes before Frans, Hubert and Georges had planned to leave. They trooped off to the local nurse (whom they’d already met) in the Poste Sanitaire. This is a hideous mud hut, filthy. The new dispensary has been built but never opened.
The nurse and the traditional healer and a midwife who’s a close colleague and the Amoco doctor all agreed on diagnosis. It’s not measles, but diarrhea brought on by drinking the polluted water left at the end of the dry season. The cure is simply oral rehydration: a liter of boiled water, six teaspoons of sugar and a half-teaspoon of salt to make a solution no saltier than tears, continuously spooned into the sick child’s mouth. The sugar makes the gut absorb enough water to counter diarrhea. Unicef is now promoting oral rehydration all over the world.
One mother had even taken her baby to Morondava, had the same diagnosis, but was ‘too poor’ to buy salt and sugar, so the baby died. (I suspect she didn’t trust the simple remedy, hoping for a curative injection.)
One family whose child died on a Sunday made funeral preparations on Monday, and waited through Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, which are fady (taboo) for burials. The whole area stank, of course. Meanwhile they killed two zebus to feed the assembled family. As Hubert said, ‘When you’re that poor, you really need a party at times.’
Anyway, Frans and Hubert rushed round and bought 8 kg of sugar and 2 kg of salt. At Hubert’s suggestion the nurse mixed them in the proper proportions so they wouldn’t go into coffee or rice. They held a Kabary, assembling all the mothers they could find. Frans waving his tablespoon and his teaspoon, and everyone explaining and explaining.
1. Fat-tailed dwarf lemur: Cheirogaleus medius; lepilemur or sportive lemur: Lepilemur; fork-marked lemur, Phaner furcifer; Coquerel’s lemur: Mirza coquereli.
2. J.-P. Sorg, J.U. Ganzhorn et al., Forestry and research in the Kirindy Forest Center/Centre de Formation Professionnelle Forestière (2003); C. Dirac, L. Andriambelo et al., ‘Scientific bases for a participatory forest landscape management in Central Menabé’ (2006); J.U. Ganzhorn, ‘Cyclones over Madagascar: fate or fortune?’ (1995).
3. The plantation was old Monsieur de Heaulme’s pledge of faith in newly independent Madagascar. After he bought it, just before 1960, when other companies fled, he felled a huge hole in the forest and planted sisal. The plantation functioned until 1979, when his son Jean de Heaulme was briefly jailed by a government determined on further nationalization. A. Jolly, Lords and Lemurs: Mad Scientists, Kings with Spears, and the Survival of Diversity in Madagascar (2004).
4. Tsimbazaza Zoo, in the capital, Antananarivo. The zoo is in a lovely botanical garden, founded by French scientists in 1927 beside a traditional sacred lake. It has its ups and downs, depending on foreign aid and a government policy that generally treats keepers as no better paid than road sweepers.
5. Mouvement Démocratique de la Rénovation Malgache. A pro-independence political party of intellectuals founded in 1922, and forcibly dissolved in 1947 during the French repression of Madagascar’s ‘insurrection’ or war of independence.
6. That photograph is one of the iconic Madagascar images. Many other photographers have copied the idea since then, but no one has Frans’s precision of dramatic vision.
7. The couas belong to an endemic Malagasy bird subfamily, the Couinae, related to cuckoos.
8. Lambas: wrapped cloths. White sifaka: Propithecus verreauxi.
9. Lepilemur are sometimes called sportive lemurs. An odd joke, as they sit immobile for most of the day and night, conserving the meager energy from their mature leaf diet.