FOURTEEN
The village of the fig tree
We are Tanala, which means the people of the forest.
We are like the lemurs: the forest is our home.
Lord Ravanomasina, July 1, 1993
July 1, 1993, Ambodiviavy village near Ranomafana.
I sit with Bob Brandstetter, head of the USAID Evaluation Mission of Ranomafana National Park, and Jean-Marc Andriamanantena, of USAID, in the house of the Mpanjaka Zafy. Mpanjaka means king: Zafy is traditional king of the village of Ambodiviavy, ‘the village of the fig tree’. Rain pelts down outside and runs off the thatch, as usual. Three out of the four village nobles are seated on a rolled-up straw mat, which raises them maybe three inches above the rest of the crowd jammed into the mud-walled room, but we visitors have real chairs. The three men are studies in rosewood-colored skin, high cheekbones, short-cropped graying hair. The Mpanjaka retains only two yellow teeth. Next to him his representative, Zanaka, is in strong-built middle age. He is the most outspoken: his role as representative is to speak. The third, the oldest, Ravanomasina, says only the phrase I quoted above as a coda to close our session. He is actually the ancient royalty of the region, whose title dates from before the Islamicized influx of four centuries back. This silent, ancient king is called ‘Andriana,’ ‘Lord,’ the newer one ‘Mpanjaka’ or ‘King’—a dual royal lineage, carried on through generations of men who sit huddled against each other on the same mat.
These three nobles are wrapped in lambas, checkered cotton cloths, none too clean, that drape with fluid majesty. Now as they sit they are converted to carved square shapes like that classic statue of the scribe from the earliest Egyptian dynasty, topped by the rosewood heads. A fourth enters later, a huge man with long black limbs, dressed in traditional woven raffia shirt, woven palm-leaf rain vest, and square palm-leaf cap. He is Lesonina, the scribe of the village, who can read and write. He keeps books of village work hours in copperplate hand—they have a detailed, written system of work-sharing and benefit-sharing. Finally, further back among the crowd, sits a visiting Mpanjaka called Raymond from another village.
Why is there a park? After the usual protracted courtesies, Bob Brandstetter begins with the crucial question: ‘What does the new National Park mean to you?’
Zanaka fires back: ‘Nothing. We don’t know what it means.’ Very well, if he is stonewalling, we will circle round to other subjects, and return until we understand him.
Ambodiaviavy is a cluster of mud huts, only twenty minutes’ walk from the potholed Route Nationale. It looks like a timelessly isolated Tanala village, but the old king did his military service in the capital, another man ran a small business in the town of Fianarantsoa, and all have relatives on the plateau above. Several villagers have mixed marriages, not with other Tanala but with Betsileo from the plateau, where people do only settled paddy farming, not slash-and-burn like the forest-edge Tanala.
We ask who has left the village and seen what life is like in other regions where people have abused the ecology and lost the fertility of trees and soil. They indicate Raymond. He went on a study tour organized by the Ranomafana Park Project. He traveled all the way down to the coast, over bare, denuded grasslands, to see what it means to live without forest. Raymond is now the authority. Bob questions him. Raymond says it is miserable to live without trees. Trees are the savor of the earth—trees give the earth its taste, and fertility for cultivated crops. Since his return the villages have started reboisement, tree planting. What do they plant? Eucalyptus and fruit trees… We didn’t press them, and it is not too clear that this is actually happening. But Raymond wants to start a tree nursery. Why? Not too clear… But it is the right answer. Still, Raymond wonders. They have been told that with no trees there is no rain. When they look on the plateau, there is still rain, and there are still crops.
I explain that there is less rain, not no rain. This is a terrible problem where I work, in the South, where your tongue goes dry with thirst. Here at Ambodiviavy there will still be rain. (Indeed, I can scarcely remember what it was like not to have rain in Ranomafana.) The real problem here is erosion and silting of rice fields. Uphill on the plateau, the problem is wood itself. They have to use only mud and brick for houses, have to buy a few timbers for the roof. The problems that come from deforestation differ in each region, but there are always problems. Gabriel, the Park Project education officer, volunteers that it costs 50 francs for three sticks of firewood in Tana now. The Tanala look a bit skeptical… I don’t think they want to imagine a place like that.
Zanaka, the king’s representative, turns out to be not only outspoken but willing to contradict. Raymond may say trees are the savor of the earth, but he, like Raymond, has seen places where people live without trees. If they live without trees on the plateau and the coast, the Tanala could live without trees right here!
Bob tries a variant of his first question: why has the Park been declared? Zanaka answers that it is a park for vazaha—foreigners. So be it. There is land outside the park which they have been told is still accessible. However, to do slash-and-burn (tavy) even on this land they have to travel all the way to Ifanadiana for permits from the Eaux et Forêts forester—hours on foot, expensive by taxi-brousse. When you look across the valley and up the other side, perhaps forty minutes’ walk, the top third of the mountain is beautiful high forest, shaved off sheer, like commercial clear-felling at the sharp edge. There is second-growth below, but only 4 meters high at most—too short for sustainable fallowing, though we did not ask. No way should they be cutting the primary forest for further tavy—but they quite reasonably say that they are the people of the forest. They say they know how to manage forest, what trees to leave, how to burn, how to rotate the tavy when it is no longer fertile. One has to sympathize that they are now treated like children who cannot know as much about their own forest as a bunch of foreigners. ‘Foreigners,’ incidentally, includes the Water and Forest Department, who are mostly plateau people.
Biodiversity. I ask about lemurs, as the one group where my knowledge of biodiversity might exceed theirs. They name four of the twelve kinds hereabouts. The simpona, the chocolate and white ballet-leaper, and its nocturnal cousin the avahi, do no harm. The varika mena eats their bananas (they are classic opportunistic raiders). The varibolo, or bamboo lemur, eats the new shoots of their mountain rice, and is a real pest.1 I follow up enough to be sure this is the common gray bamboo lemur, not its rare congener, the greater bamboo lemur, or the ultra-rare golden bamboo lemur. Only a dozen or so individual golden bamboo lemurs are known to exist—all in this national park.
Land tenure. I ask how far the villagers have to walk now to get forest products. It is only half an hour for construction wood, but four hours to gather the medicinal herbs that grow in the high forest. Bob asks if they ever go into the Park. They say no. He says ‘Just between us, you still do’… to which they give the only possible answer: ‘No, we are too afraid of the law.’
The Park is forbidden, although the land of their ancestors extends into the Park. Furthermore, there has been a cadastral (surveying) team here two months ago, which tried to establish boundaries of personal property. This is DDRA, Direction de Reform Agraire, fruit of François Falloux’s World Bank dream of 1987. They are apparently only surveying rice fields whose ownership is already clear, and not touching the tavy fields, whose stabilization was Falloux’s original goal. The villagers confirm this, which increases their fear that the invading government will leave them with only bottomland, which is not enough to live on. Furthermore personal property is against all tradition: the village lands should be registered in the name of the king. The notables murmur assent, especially Mr. Outspoken Zanaka. Jean-Marc of USAID is indignant. The ethnographer in him rises up at this breach of tradition by the directorate of land reform.
It wasn’t till later that I thought to ask just whose interests are represented, and found out that Mr. Outspoken is not only the representative but the inheritor from the king, and the notables are essentially all the king’s men. Most of the village are related, but it is a question in my mind whether this means distribution to all. It seems there is a second group, called vahiny, or visitors, who have only been around for a few generations… Heaven help those who try to sort out land tenure, including the peasants themselves.
Women of Ambodiaviavy. The Women’s Association is represented by one older woman of intricate oiled knotted braids (Rahasoa, whom anthropologist Paul Hanson jokes really runs the village) and one young mother, the lord’s daughter, with a nursing baby who has a round butter-soft face and huge baby seal eyes and a little string knotted through her ear where she will wear an earring. I spend some time ‘alone’ with these two women plus interpreters. I try for questions but they are far more outspoken than the men. We need medicines. Could I treat elderly Rahasoa? Village health aids have no legal right to buy drugs for dispensing, except chloroquine, by order of the Ministry of Health. The grounds are that they would not know how to prescribe them. There is a Unicef pharmacy in Ranomafana town which sells drugs at 20 francs a pill. Individuals can only buy the drugs with a doctor’s prescription, and then only one course at a time. Meanwhile the women point out that there are people with dysentery in the village. They know all about common diarrhea and oral rehydration therapy, of course. This season of cold, continuous rain brings true bloody dysentery. They are well aware that for dysentery they need tetracycline. Could I please not ask them all the questions all the other visitors ask, which takes a lot of their time, unless I can do something concrete about keeping my promises. In any case Rahasoa announces firmly that she has had no children of her own, only adopted children, so she can’t enlighten me about family planning. It makes me think of a minister receiving his fifteenth World Bank Mission of the month.
Farewells. As we leave, the most ancient lord concludes with that phrase: ‘We are Tanala, the people of the forest. We are like the lemurs: the forest is our home.’ Our little group treks uphill to the beautiful two-roomed house the village built for resident grad student ethnographer Paul Hanson. We admire through the silvery rain-streams Paul’s view of the square rice fields of the valley, and the high forest towering above tufted tavy cuttings. Rahasoa, the older woman, walks uphill with a pot of steaming sweet floury manioc. It tastes like roasted chestnuts. Only chestnuts are never a sign of such warm and welcome hospitality.
Afterthought on the mud trail back. These are not such poor peasants as Malagasy go. Several girls had gold earrings, and the young head of the Women’s Association, the Andriana’s daughter with the beautiful baby, sported two gold teeth. They still have a little fertility in their soil from the forest, and cattle pastured in hiding in the forest. Simultaneously, almost, Bob Brandstetter remarked that he has visited countries from Mali to the Sudan, and never seen poverty like Madagascar.
July fourth? or fifth or sixth?… Time blurs in Ranomafana. Zanaka has requested a formal and private interview with Bob and me. There were so many project people in the village that he could not talk freely—in spite of my dubbing him Mr. Outspoken.
We meet privately, then, with Paul Hanson to interpret, in the Hotel n’Kanaka. This is a cubical shed of corrugated iron with open spaces for door and windows, large enough for five wooden tables. Zanaka has a fine blue rain slicker that may derive from the Park Project, and whose hem is just low enough to make him seem otherwise unclothed.
He comes straight to the point. The Park is treating villagers wrong. They have their own structures. The Park should give them money for fertilizer and seeds, not loans but gifts. They would buy seeds of pineapples and potatoes, and little fruit trees, for the fallow rice fields and the tavy fields. Bob asks, ‘What would they do with $100? And Zanaka shoots right back, ‘Buy pigs!’
However, any gifts of money should go to the Mpanjaka for the whole village community, not to individuals. You should always give village money to the king, but it should be done formally, in front of everyone, with the sum stated loudly and clearly and the bills shown in front of the general village council. Then it is a village pride, and the king shares properly according to work done or village priority. It would be baraka—shameful—in such circumstances, for one individual to keep it all.
Zanaka has come to make a formal request, as well, for medicines. Nothing has yet been accomplished. He did not wish to state this in front of everyone, as it would be baraka to request that which might not be given, and which it would shame us not to give.
Bob Brandstetter returns to that strange answer he gave before to the one central question, that he does not know what the Park means. Zanaka insists it is true. The Park team came and had a meeting, but they gave no real explanation of what the Park means. Furthermore, he has relatives in most of the villages on the eastern side of the Park, and he can testify that none of them knows what the Park means.
What he does know is history. He tells us the story of their ancestors’ land. Ambodiviavy is the fourth village. The first, Ambatofotsy, was beside the road. The land was delimited and claimed by a French colonialist, so they were moved. The second, the same. The third, on a hillcrest within sight of here, where the school stands now, was burnt by the French in 1947, and many were killed in a razzia. (Razzia is an Algerian word for a raid into enemy territory—the French borrowed it for what Americans later called ‘search and destroy.’) The survivors hid in a cavern in the forest, a sacred site now out of bounds inside the Park. They stayed for four months, sneaking back at night to gather rice from their village fields. Then, in 1948, they came and settled here. Ambodiaviavy means ‘the village of the fig tree’—but there is no fig tree. That grew in the site they lost, the third village, which was burned.
Would it take only an hour or a year with this forthright man to find out what he thinks the Park means? There is terror of the land surveying and the boundary posts that mark out only permanent rice fields, not tavy, and even those all wrong as belonging to individuals, not clans. There is the Park that promises help but does not bring medicines or seeds or fertilizer, which he knows they need. There is the history of colonization. Maybe the reason he does not think we have said what the Park means is that we talk about trees and lemurs and a future fifteen or twenty years away, when their tavy will have destroyed the whole forest if they do not stop cutting. Perhaps Zanaka is waiting for us to admit the one central fact the villagers do know… that once again they have lost their land.
Zanaka walks away down the road: long brown bare legs, shiny wet blue jacket, rain pearls on his grizzled hair, back toward the village of the fig tree.2
1. Simpona, Milne-Edwards’ sifaka, Propithecus edwardsii. Avahi, eastern woolly lemur, Avahi laniger. Varika mena, Eulemur rufus. Varibolo, gray bamboo lemur, Hapalemur griseus.
2. For another view of an ICDP from the bottom up, and the subsequent confusions up to the present day, this time in Mananara Nord, where Eleanor Sterling and I saw the aye-aye, see G.M. Sodikoff, Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere (2012).