Top Quotes: “Muddling through in Madagascar” — Dervla Murphy

Introduction

“Raising your voice is against the law in Madagascar, and he was thrown in jail.”

“If the current growth rate of nearly 3 percent continues, just ten years from now Madagascar will have 30 million people. That is well over twice what it had when I first visited in 1993. The ballooning population will continue to put severe pressure on both human and natural communities.

Remarkably, poverty levels have declined substantially over the same period. In 2000, the per-capita annual income was less than $250. By the end of the decade, it had climbed to about $1,000, thanks to income from tourism and international development agencies. That number has begun to fall recently, but the rise improved the lives of the island’s desperately poor people, and gave them a much-needed dose of hope. Over the same period, the country’s external debt decreased to roughly $2.5 billion.

The upward swing began with the election of President Marc Ravalomanana in 2001. While that election was contested for seven months, with many Malagasy backing the incumbent Didier Ratsiraka, the victorious Ravalomanana gradually won over his people with progressive policies that helped the country’s GDP rise by an average of 7 percent a year during his administration. Tourism to the country increased by 95 percent in just six years, to 800,000 a year. All major roads were paved, and a middle class arose. Moreover, Ravalomanana, as noted earlier, pledged at the 2003 World Parks Congress to triple the country’s protected areas in six years. (He accomplished it in five.) The President promised that local people would benefit, by both helping to manage new or extended reserves and receiving assistance with schools and economic opportunities.

Because of Ravalomananas progressive thinking, in 2005 Madagascar became the first recipient of a grant from the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Established by the U.S. Congress in 2004, the MCC is an apolitical aid agency that provides grants to poor countries that excel on 17 indicators, including government effectiveness, civil liberties, and public expenditure on health. In April 2005, the MCC signed a four-year, $110 million agreement to raise incomes in Madagascar by helping rural people make the transition from a subsistence to a market economy. The grant helped farmers and others outside the cities to improve productivity of the land, help ensure environmental stability, and launch profitable cottage industries. Ravolomanana was relected in 2006, and in 2008, the MCC extended the agreement for a fifth year.

Sadly, a coup in 2009 toppled Ravalomanana, whom opponents had accused of corruption and authoritarianism, forcing him into exile in South Africa. The MCC terminated its agreement in August of that year due to the political turmoil, and the international community as a whole cut off aid until presidential elections.”

“It is certain that Malagasy culture has Malayo-Polynesian roots. The language belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian group though about twenty per cent of its modern vocabulary is Bantu, with a sprinkling of Sanskrit, English, French and Arabic.

At one time it was assumed that the proto-Malagasy had sailed straight across the southern Indian Ocean to Madagascar, a distance of almost 4,000 miles. Now the most widely accepted theory is that migrant traders, in large twin-hulled outrigger canoes, made the journey by comparatively easy stages: from Sumatra to the Andaman Islands, to Ceylon, South India, the Maldives, the Laccadives and so across the Arabian Sea to Socotra and finally (during the first century AD?) to Azania, now known as Kenya and Tanzania. There they found empty spaces, a good climate, varied trading opportunities and a sparse, undeveloped population on whom it was easy to impose their own culture.

During the next few centuries — according to this theory — more and more Polynesians settled on the African coast, then gradually moved inland, introducing new food plants wherever they went: taro, yams, bananas, coconuts, breadfruit. This novel notion of growing food, instead of merely hunting and gathering it, contributed to a Bantu population explosion, one of the causes of the eventual settlement of Madagascar. Another cause was Arab domination, by the tenth century, of Indian Ocean trade.”

“The exact origin of the Merina, the largest and most enterprising of Madagascar’s eighteen main tribes, remains a mystery. Scholars offer contradictory explanations for their light brown skin, straight black hair and impeccable Polynesian features. Some argue that they are descended from Malayan or Javanese migrants who landed on the east coast of Madagascar no more than seven or eight centuries ago and were never in the African melting-pot. Others maintain that their ancestors were among the earliest groups to settle in Africa, when there were few Bantu around, and that they married only within the tribe — making it taboo to do otherwise — during all those centuries when later settlers were being slightly miscegenatious. There are several other theories with which I won’t detain us. The ‘late arrival’ theory, favoured by the Merina themselves, seems to me the most plausible. But whenever and from wherever they arrived, the pioneer Merina evidently found it necessary, on reaching the plateau, to combine intermarriage with military conquest — a popular formula, throughout Malagasy history, for settling territorial disputes.”

“No sooner discovered than attacked. In 1506 and 1507 the scattered Arab trading settlements along Madagascar’s northwest coast were destroyed by the Portuguese, during a relentless campaign against their main rivals in the spice trade. Subsequently a few half-hearted efforts were made to explore the Malagasy coasts. But it quickly became obvious that the island was without precious metals, precious stones or rare spices, that the coastal fevers were exceptionally virulent and that the natives’ reactions to vazaha (foreigners) were unpredictable. So Portuguese attentions were returned to the African mainland.”

“Before the French took over in 1896 primary education, especially in the villages, was left almost entirely to the churches. The Malagasy preacher was usually the teacher, too, and used the local chapel as his schoolroom. In 1880 the Prime Minister made elementary education compulsory for all children over seven, only a decade after it had been introduced in England and two years before it was introduced in France. Already some 40,000 pupils were regularly attending Protestant schools and by 1894 the number had risen to 137,000. To cater for this educated public the missionary printing presses, largely LMS-run and Merina-operated, produced a steady flow of textbooks, dictionaries, religious works, hymn-books, newspapers, monthly and quarterly journals and a scholarly Antananarivo Annual dealing with various aspects of Malagasy life. When the French took over, the vast majority of the plateau population, of both sexes, was literate and numerate, a fact which distinguished Madagascar from any other colony of the time.”

“Unfortunately the second Governor-General, Augagneur, was a rabid anti-cleric who at once announced his determination to separate Church and State. He banned teaching in churches, thus closing ninety per cent of the rural schools because few villages could afford a separate building. But no one could de-educate Antananarivo’s intellectuals, some of whom formed an anti-colonial movement long before such enterprising behaviour had been dreamed of elsewhere. During its early years this group lacked strength, cohesion and consistency, yet it contained the seed of today’s Malagasy nation.”

“To understand present-day Franco-Malagasy relations, it is necessary to think back to August 1896 when a law was passed in the French Parliament declaring Madagascar a French colony. At once General Joseph Simon Galliéni took over the island, with full civil and military powers and explicit instructions from the Prime Minister, André Lebon. The system — which consisted merely in exercising the protectorate over the dominant race — is now set aside. The authority of the sovereign power must now be applied by the authority of the chiefs of each separate tribe. The intention was immediately to downgrade the ‘dominant race’ since the Merina were the greatest threat to French control over the new colony; during the brief French Protectorate, Merina officials had been secretly organising widespread rebellion from Antananarivo.

However, General Galliéni soon realised that he needed the assistance of those people described by the Reverend William Ellis as ‘more numerous, industrious, ingenious and wealthy than those of any other part of the country ’— people who already had considerable experience of governing two-thirds of the island. The last Prime Minister, Rainilaiarivony, had set up an administrative hierarchy, with regional governors and deputy-governors, which was accepted by the majority of the population. So Galliéni ignored his own Prime Minister’s directive (colonial governors could get away with that sort of thing before the days of instant communication) and retained the existing structure, using as subordinates to the French district commissioners those Malagasy officials (usually Merina) who had been serving the monarchy. To expedite this bureaucratic dovetailing, he encouraged all French officials to learn the language and until the 1940s most senior administrators spoke fluent Malagasy.

Yet the Merina were gradually and inexorably downgraded, though not at once deprived of all senior positions. In the regional training schools set up to supply the junior staff for the administration, and overseers and accountants for the settlers’ plantations and commercial firms, no Malagasy were trained to take on senior posts. Also, admission to Antananarivo’s lycées was strictly controlled; given the high average intelligence of the Merina, it would have been dangerous to educate them en masse beyond primary level. Of the limited number of lycée students, only a few of the Merina élite — handpicked for political reliability, though the hand-picking did not always work — were allowed to study at French. universities. This restriction did much to inflame Malagasy nationalism, as did the dual judicial system: French laws for the colonists and a brutally unjust code, known as the indigènat, for the Malagasy. Under the indigènat district commissioners could sentence any Malagasy — without trial — to fifteen days imprisonment for not cultivating enough rice (enough, that is, in the estimation of the French authorities), or for not paying taxes, or for refusing to provide unpaid labour.

The Merina upper classes were most sensitive to educational and promotional restrictions. But the operation of the indigènat, the imposition of taxes and the much-abused forced-labour system were resented by every section of the population.”

“When Galliéni made a law, one month after his arrival, requiring every healthy male between the ages of sixteen and sixty to work for the French on fifty days out of each year, for nine hours a day, on minimum wages, he created France’s most intractable problem in Madagascar. Yet as the ruler of the new colony he had no alternative. A man of flawless personal integrity, he was far from being the worst type of colonial administrator; indeed, by nineteenth-century standards he seems almost benign. But the French Parliament was impatiently demanding tangible rewards to justify the colossal expenses, both financial and human, of the military conquest; and without forced labour there could be no rewards. The formal abolition of slavery a few years earlier — ironically, a result of the pre-conquest French Protectorate — had left the highlands without any dependable labour force; and the east coast had never had one.”

“Whether or not he became a French citizen, the educated Malagasy who was good at his job was accepted as an equal by his French colleagues and regularly invited to their homes — a situation almost unimaginable in British India and quite unimaginable in British Africa. Senior French administrators were rarely prejudiced in the crude, colour-conscious British way; intellectual parity was their main criterion for the establishment of social relations. And because the Merinas’ intellectual development had been conditioned by generations of contact with European educationalists, and by some experience of European universities and much experience of European literature and thought, the colonists found them easier to get on with than France’s Asian ‘subjects’, whose more sophisticated cultures were inaccessible to all but a few exceptional European minds.”

“With the establishment of the French Union in 1946 all France’s colonial subjects acquired French citizenship and equal rights — again, in theory. In practice, Madagascar’s post-war difficulties meant that forced labour actually increased after the system had been legally abolished. This continuing dependence on ‘conscripted workers’ is believed to have been one of the main causes of the 1947 Rebellion. Another was the extreme hardship inflicted on the Malagasy by rampant black-marketeering and the corruption of the official Rice Marketing Board, to which all farmers were compelled to sell surpluses at artificially low prices. A third factor was what we would now call a ‘fundamentalist revival’ among the ombiasa and their followers — especially in the south. These heathen sorcerers, as the Reverends Ellis and Matthews called them, had never ceased to resent the intrusion of European ideas and Christian practices, to which they rightly attributed their declining power.

At that time of transition — a year after the creation of the French Union — confusion prevailed throughout Madagascar. The peasants’ loyalty to their French district commissioners had been irreparably damaged by the Allied occupation; the political parties were far from united; the indigènat and various other restraints on political activity were gone; many settlers were resisting proposals to lessen their privileges by introducing some degree of ‘power-sharing’ in the new National Representative Assembly (NRA). Many colonial administrators were also protesting against being made accountable to local Malagasy politicians — the time could not have been riper for anyone interested in promoting rebellion.

The Rebellion broke out on the evening of 29 March 1947, the day before the first meeting of the newly elected NRA. Strangely, the organisers have never been clearly identified, perhaps because most were soon killed and nothing had been put on paper. Many Malagasy cherish private convictions about exactly who was responsible where: but nothing can be proved. Certainly the Rebellion was carefully planned. It broke out simultaneously in such widely separated places as Moramanga, Diego Suarez and Manakara — and anyone with experience of Madagascar’s communications problems will appreciate the significance of that. For some unknown reason the capital’s rebels cancelled their plans at the last moment, but elsewhere their comrades soon had about one-sixth of the island under control, mainly in those areas where land and labour disputes had been endemic for half a century. Guerrilla warfare continued for about a year, with little evidence of any centralised command. Scattered groups of peasants, meagrely supplied, opposed the French troops with spears, axes, slash-hooks, shotguns; they had only a few modern weapons stolen from military bases. In October 1947 several units of the Foreign Legion and thousands more Senegalese troops arrived as reinforcements. This extra Senegalese ‘input’ was, to say the least, unfortunate. During that historic night of 29 March, when Moramanga’s army camp was attacked by some two thousand men armed with slash-hooks and spears, scores of Senegalese soldiers were surprised and killed before they could reach their guns. The survivors massacred a never-established number of the local noncombatant population, which surprised no onenghies Senegalese — a permanent part of the French garrison had long since gained a reputation for unprovoked deeds of random savagery. It was only to be expected that when provoked the slaughter would be hideous. To have loosed these troops on the entire island, for eighteen months, with a mandate to repress rebellion, was the most dreadful crime committed by the French in Madagascar.

In December 1948, when 558,000 surrenders had been registered, the Rebellion was declared officially over.”

“Most Malagasy are gentle, peaceable people brave enough when necessary, but with no warrior-cult, no tradition of glorifying war. Their happy state of geographical isolation means that, apart from their own ritualistic slave-hunting tribal wars (which by definition involved few deaths), they have enjoyed a comparatively unbloody history. Never before had they experienced anything like the horrors of the twenty-one-month repression of the Rebellion.”

“Tsiranana was a Tsimihety from the Ankaizina region in the north-west, a schoolteacher from a poor peasant family, like so many of Madagascar’s political leaders.

A man of high intelligence and by nature a reconciler, he had always believed that Madagascar should move gradually towards independence in friendly co-operation with the French. In 1954 he founded a new political party; at first based in his native province, it soon spread to include all the coastal peoples and some Merina moderates. In January 1956 he was elected to the French National Assembly as representative of the Malagasy people of West Madagascar. A year later he was leading a coalition of coastal parties, which had reduced the Merina parties to a minority in the Malagasy National Assembly. This proof that the workings of democracy could protect the majority from any reassertion of Merina dominance was a necessary condition for the granting of full independence. Tiranana was a close friend of André Soucadaux, a Socialist with a real affection for the Mala-gasy, who was eager to do all he could to assist in the establishment of a stable republic.

On 15 October 1958 Soucadaux appeared before the Malagasy National Assembly and declared — The Government of the French Republic solemnly recognises the establishment of the state of Madagascar, and the abrogation of the Law of Annexation of August 6, 1896. During the next twenty-one months, Soucadaux and Tsiranana continued to work as a team to bring about an efficient transfer of power.”

“Independence had been patiently negotiated with France, not wrested from a reluctant government by force. The Malagasy leaders had not just emerged from jail, or from guerrilla hide-outs in the bush, to take control. The Ministry of the Interior was the first to be staffed entirely by Malagasy, with only a few French advisers, and by Independence Day the armed gendarmerie, the civil police and the security services had been under Malagasy control for eighteen months. By that date too almost all French senior civil servants had been withdrawn and the ‘Accords Franco-Malagaches,’ dealing — among other things — with the status of French residents in Madagascar, had been signed on 2 April 1960. Most of Tsiranana’s ministers were ex-civil servants, with years of experience in the senior ranks of the administration, and in 1960 he invited three famous nationalist leaders, who had been unjustly exiled to France after the 1947 Rebellion, to return home and accept ministerial portfolios. This was a moving gesture because in the past he and they had been implacable political opponents. All three came home and two — Ravoahangy and Rabemananajara — became ministers. Only the seventy-four-year-old Raseta declined the invitation.”

“It had all been very civilised. No French residents felt it necessary to leave Madagascar abruptly; however they may have deplored their loss of top-dog status, they knew they had nothing to fear from the new régime. There were no disconcerting changes in the commercial life or administrative structures of the country and more than twenty years after Independence Madagascar still has several thousand French residents, most of whom have become Malagasy citizens. By now there have of course been many changes — not only disconcerting but, according to the French ‘old guard’, catastrophic. Their children and grandchildren do not see Madagascar as a country with a future; very few of them remain on the Great Red Island.”

The Journey

“Rachel was then aged six and a half and had much enjoyed her three-month mid-winter ride through the Karakoram on a retired polo pony, though we lived mainly on dried apricots and the night temperatures often dropped to minus twenty degrees. Three years later she and I trekked some twelve hundred miles with a mule through the Peruvian Andes: also quite a rough journey. Now Rachel was fourteen and a half.”

“The weedy Englishman behind the desk – exhausted by all those suitcases – scowled at our ‘Aeroflot to Antananarivo’ tickets. ‘Blimey! Somewhere else no one ever heard of!’ He disappeared to find out the code letters and the restive queue behind me wondered why Aeroflot can’t check in its own passengers. I smirked inwardly. Travel snobs enjoy this sort of thing when everyone around them is labelled for dog-eared destinations like New York, Hong Kong, Karachi, Lagos.”

“We landed at Moscow in brilliant sunshine. Beside the runway, peasant women wearing headscarves were languidly raking hay in golden meadows; if there is a production target for haycocks it was not bothering them. Ninety minutes and several long queues later we were in the nearby Airport Hotel, a gaunt glass and concrete block which for transit passengers like us, staying overnight without visas, is literally a prison. All its doors are guarded twenty-four hours a day by armed men, impassive but alert in smart green uniforms. Others of that ilk supervise one’s fifty-yard walk from the bus to the hotel entrance, and back again when departure time comes. Any passenger who steps out of line provokes a yell and a scowl from the nearest guard. The general effect is of a neurotic mistrust holding the Soviet psyche by the throat.

While waiting for a lift to the eighth floor we enjoyed the English version of a multilingual notice: ‘Each room is smoothly supplied with water, heat, light, ventilation and other communal services … Hotel personnell cleans without violating passengers’ tranquillity. We glanced around us. ‘Tranquillity’ seemed not the mot juste.”

“Overbooking on the Aeroflot scale can only be described as an unnatural vice and we were surrounded by passengers at various stages of bewilderment/rage/despair/ hysteria — people who had thought they were about to leave for London, Lima or Ulan Bator but found that instead they were condemned to two, three, even four days in the Airport Hotel without their luggage and without access to their country’s diplomatic representative in Moscow.

Our room was not supplied, smoothly or otherwise, with soap, towels or lavatory paper. The sheets were clean but torn and damp, the electric light was too dim to read by, the ventilation was nil and the wall-long window locked.”

“During the seventeen-hour flight five meals were served, between four long refuelling stops; these combined quantity with quality and what we couldn’t eat I squirrelled away for future reference.

At Simferopol in the Crimea the midnight air was balmy but the dreary cramped transit lounge had only one ‘Ladies’ and one ‘Gents’, which caused a few catastrophes among abruptly awakened junior passengers.

At Cairo we had to stay put because the Soviet and Egyptian governments have fallen out; armed uniformed men strolled casually to and fro on the tarmac while our plane was receiving attention.

At Aden the 6 a.m. heat savaged us even as we descended the steps; within moments sweat was visibly streaming off everyone. In the squalid transit lounge, stinking of stale piss, the ceiling-fans were not working and much of the nasty plastic seating had disintegrated to expose dangerously inflammable guts. The fly-blown cafeteria, the enormous duty-free department and the Soviet-stocked bookshop were closed. Women in yashmaks queued patiently at an unattended bank counter, the ragged airport staff went mad with lust when they saw Rachel, and the Norwegians’ camera was confiscated because they tried to photograph each other under a notice in Arabic. Seeing them verging on tears I intervened and successfully bullied the bullies.

At Nairobi the temperature was perfect, the sky grey, the breeze cool, the airport buildings First World-ish. An abundance of duty-free goods and folk-art souvenirs was tastefully displayed on both sides of a high-ceilinged circular arcade, freshly painted and spotlessly clean.”

“It was 4.05 p.m. and an international flight had just arrived. It is illegal both to import FMG (Malagasy francs) and to change money outside a bank. Yet the airport bank had closed at 3 p.m. and the nearest alternative was fifteen miles away. For the Malagasy passengers, all met by jubilant relatives, this did not matter, and it would be uneconomic to keep a bank open to serve six vazaha; so this contretemps was part of the price to be paid — willingly, in our case — for an almost tourist-free country.”

“We bought bananas at a stall where the price was clearly chalked on a piece of wood. When I offered the correct number of coins the merchant laughed and shook his head and handed me back 50 FMG. Bananas go cheap after dark.”

“Shaking hands is important in Madagascar — something more than a formality. To omit this little ceremony can be construed as a deliberate insult.”

“This was a down-market market; none of the traders had motor-vans and the bulkier goods — second-hand furniture, bales of hay and the like — were piled high on speedy two-man-power rickshaws. These are pulled by one runner and pushed by another who on level ground uses only his forehead, keeping his hands clasped behind his back. The Malagasy call these vehicles pousses-pousses because when ascending steep hills the puller repeatedly urges his mate to ‘Pousses-pousses!’ (push-push!).”

“It is one of the precautions taken to ward off the possible ill-effects of a stranger’s presence and the Chief decides where guests are to stay. Those who seem to merit VIP treatment are not expected to muck in with a family; they must be given a house to themselves and when the Chief has chosen the most suitable its owners have to move out ‘for the now being’ — it is fady to dispute his decision.”

“For some reason (some fady?) this was not on. Augustin protested frantically that no vazaha could sleep in meagre fleabags on an earthen floor throughout a winter night. The Chief’s agitation made him look quite haggard and he was unsoothed when I showed him the space-blankets under our fleabags — admittedly not the sort of equipment likely to impress Malagasy peasants. Finally I was driven to announcing that everyone in Ireland always sleeps on the floor, whatever the weather — and in a flash of inspiration I added that for us beds are fady. That settled the matter. Five minutes later Rachel was asleep and I was diary-writing.”

“Rachel has not yet fully recovered from the shock of discovering that in most parts of Madagascar baked cat is a delicacy — though among the Sakalava tribe to eat them is fady. On this topic Hilary Bradt wrote to us: ‘We were having a conversation with a tribal family in the eastern rain-forest and after we’d talked for quite a while about conservation and lemurs the father said, “Yes, and they certainly taste good!” “Taste? — what do they taste like?” “Oh, rather like cat.” End of conversation. End of conservation.”

“The strong current of affection running through Malagasy life is especially noticeable in father/child relationships. In many countries, the more procreative the menfolk the less interest they take in the results of that activity; but Madagascar seems to have an astonishing proportion (it looks like ninety-five per cent) of doting fathers. Two specimens were visible from the balcony; each cuddling a baby enchanting enough to melt even my non-baby-centred heart. (If, which Andriamanitra forbid, there were a baby competition analagous to Miss World, Malagasy babies would win it annually.) And this paternal interest does not stop at cuddling; Malagasy fathers are so good at practical childcare that not even the most extreme feminist could fault their role within the family.”

“At intervals two chatty little cowherds came to sit close beside us — dark-skinned and bright-eyed and clad in what seemed to be the ragged remains of nightshirts. They scrutinised with amusement and amazement our white skins and my diary-writing. Hilarity took over when we tried to teach each other how to count up to ten. A fisherman then intervened, under the mistaken impression that they were being a nuisance to us. Soon after they realised that their zebu had wandered too far into the pines and away they scampered, waving their long sticks and yodelling weirdly — evidently a satisfactory method of communicating with zebu, for the animals at once returned to the grass by the water. I thought then how horribly different our encounter would have been in a ‘tourist spot’ — how those boys would have begged instead of chatting, and whined instead of laughing, and sniggered at our scantily clad bodies instead of stroking my bare white shoulder wonderingly with small black fingers. The distortion of human relationships, rather than the building of Holiday Inns or the sprouting of souvenir stalls, is the single most damaging consequence of Third World tourism. And let no one believe that those children’s families would be better off if Antsirabe were ‘developed. They would not. But a lot of already rich Malagasy would be even richer.”

“At 5.30 I dragged a groaning Rachel out of her flea-bag; we had to be ready for Rosy by 6. Then we heard much confused shouting below our window — it was still pitch-dark — and moments later Madame T. knocked on our door. The Ranohira bus was leaving at 6, not 6.30 we must hurry — there might not be another for days.

When I lurched downstairs under my double burden the smiling watchman was waiting; he shouldered my rucksack and from the edge of the garden we descended a cliff-face by a ladder-like stairway carved out of red earth. This led to a motor-road and just opposite was the open-air bus station. We were half-running towards the relevant wooden hut (each destination has its own hut) when Rachel, Madame T., Rosy, his mates and several other interested parties — friends, it seemed, of the watchman — came strolling towards us. No 6 a.m. service was running to Ranohira as there were not enough passengers to fill a bus. Nor was there a 6.30 service. No bus would leave for Ranohira before 10 a.m. Rachel handed me our tickets; everybody except the vazaha was taking this situation for granted.”

“We had been requested to report back to our ticket hut at 9.30. So we did, to the surprise of the man who had made the request.”

“By 10.30 our group had not grown and the ticket-officer announced that we would have to wait a little longer to fill four more seats. At 11.30 I asked my interpreter if he had really said four — or was it forty? Rachel raised her head from Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey — a suitably proportioned volume for Malagasy bus-travellers — and said it might have been fourteen … At 12.15 the ticket-officer, in response to a query from one of the Sakalava, said the Tulear bus would be departing at 4 p.m. but all passengers should report to the hut not later than 3.15.”

“The door to the platform was locked but through the large keyhole we could see a brand-new bright red pickup van, with a green canvas cover, standing inexplicably on the track near a tree laden with scarlet blossom. Above the keyhole a prominent notice announced that tickets are on sale twice a week but only between 5.10 and 5.40 p.m. I was beginning to find the Malagasy obsession with precise timings morbidly fascinating.”

“It was now 3.45 and a long time since anyone had seen the ticket-officer. Jamie passed on a rumour that no bus was going to Tulear that day and I rejoiced, not wishing to travel in the dark. But then our friend reappeared and announced, with an unjustifiably complacent smirk, that we would be taking off in a bashie at 4.30. When he pointed to a nearby Peugeot pick-up the boys shuddered. To us it looked pretty fit, as bashies go, but Adrian grimly drew our attention to its four completely bald tyres.

By 4.45 we were all aboard. At 5.00 our canvas cover was securely lashed down; from a bashie you can see nothing, by day or by night. At 5.10 we left Fianar, in a daze of incredulity. The front seat beside the driver took three adults and a baby. The ten seats in the back took sixteen adults, five children and three babies.

At 5.40 we stopped by a roadside coffee-stall.

‘I don’t believe it!’ muttered Jamie.

Adrian, the mathematician, began to calculate how long it would take to cover five hundred and eighty miles at twenty-five miles per hour if the bashie stopped for ten minutes every twelve and a half miles.”

“A moment later we realised that our stop had a more serious purpose than baby-care. Another jam-packed bashie passed us, whereupon our driver (etc.) stuffed themselves back into the cab and followed it closely. Its health was so bad that the two bashies were to travel to Tulear in convoy so that ours could give first aid when (not if) necessary.

Soon a sturdy seven-year-old girl was asleep in my arms, her head resting on my left bosom. She had neatly braided hair which reeked of rancid coconut oil. The two-month-old baby beside me was frequently fed by its very young mother and as frequently puked over my rucksack, wedged half-under the seat.”

“Gradually most of the inexhaustible contents of those balloon-like breasts seemed to find their way, via the baby, into my rucksack. (Hence those missing Antsirabe pages; my diary was in the direct line of fire.) Meanwhile a nine-month-old baby was sleeping soundly across Jamie’s knees which, as the night wore on, became damper and damper, causing him to revise his views on fatherhood as a desirable future role. I had cunningly secured a front seat, which allowed a few extra inches of leg-room. But soon I was repenting of this selfishness. Two tattered lengths of electric flex were hanging from the roof just in front of me — serving no discernible purpose — and whenever the bashie leaped over a particularly rugged bit of road these gave a display of miniature forked lightning and emitted showers of sparks. At last the milky young mother beside me lost her nerve and shrieked at the driver. A few minutes later a disembodied arm and hand emerged from the cab to wrap newspaper around the flexes and shove them into a convenient aperture. Adrian advised us how best to escape if a fire started; he reckoned not much brute force would be needed to dismantle the crudely welded tarpaulin-frame.”

“Back in Ranohira, approaching the ‘Bureau’ to report our safe return, we were fascinated to see a young man standing on a table in front of the Parc National sign, meticulously repainting it. Already the Malagasy small print had been made legible and he was starting on the French side. Was this a direct result of our arrival? Had we revitalised Ranohira’s Bureau d’Eaux et Forêts, giving new hope and pride to all concerned?”

“I could hear their laughter as I crossed the long strong French bridge high above them, the only surviving bit of Route Nationale No. 10. That laughter reminded me of an Alison Jolly quote from a UN Report on Agricultural Development in South-East Madagascar — “We find it extremely difficult to introduce economic improvements because the Antandroy seem to be happy.””

“The women found my ornithological activities quite side-splitting; one of them was so overcome by mirth she had to remove her load and sit on the embankment to re-cover. The men were less happy about such inexplicable behaviour and looked relieved when a policeman overtook us during one bird-watching pause.”

“He curtly informed us that he and Merk were going no further. It would be easy, he said, to find transport for the last seventy miles to Fort-Dauphin.

Bemused, but resigned by now to pretty well any fate, we collected our kit and said good-bye to Merk — I felt almost tearful on leaving this home from home. We were surveying the few unpromising vehicles on view, wondering how long our vigil would be, when Fotsy reappeared and handed each of us a 1,000 FMG note. He had sold us Fort-Dauphin tickets, he explained, so he owed us money. We were too pleasantly shocked to thank him coherently. It would have occurred to none of us — long since made punch-drunk by the vicissitudes of Route Nationale No. 10 — to demand a refund.

The 390-mile journey had taken three days and two nights, travelling at an average speed — Rachel tells me — of twelve miles per hour!”

“What the Antanosy really enjoyed was lying in the shade observing French agricultural methods with detached interest. And they adopted towards the settlers — innocently, meaning no offence — those attitudes of kindly condescension considered appropriate to the slave class. It was plain to them that these soldiers and traders, unhappily tilling the soil as an alternative to starvation, were the slaves Pronis had sensibly brought with him.”

“Transport up the coast to Manakara and the rail-link with Fianar, on Route Nationale No. 12, is hampered by the need to use ferry-boats across fifteen river-mouths. This road, by which we had hoped to return north, is now closed to motor-traffic and has been deleted from the newest maps; most of the ferries are not operating for lack of spare parts. (‘The pieces are missing’ — a phrase with which we were soon to become familiar.)”

“The wildlife in our room (no extra charge) made up for a lot. Most of these creatures were unidentifiable; but while bringing my diary up to date I was distracted by a ferocious and long-drawn-out cockroach fight, worthy of a Norse saga. Size-wise it was a most uneven contest: one protagonist resembled a large mouse, the other a small mouse. Roland’s museum at Ranohira contained preserved specimens but I never expected to have the good fortune to witness them in action.”

“‘Here in the south, said Rebecca, ‘so much more could be grown with irrigation! But nobody’s interested in new schemes. They don’t think about the next drought and famine — they can’t think ahead. And then we have our taboos. The country is overrun with poultry but it’s fady for pregnant women and small children to eat eggs. Mothers beg vitamin pills for their one-year-olds but it’s fady to feed them with carrots or beans or bananas till they’re two. Zebu give almost no milk but it’s fady to cross-breed to provide dairy produce. The size of the hump is all-important — the razana would never forgive them if they bred cattle with a smaller hump — and suppose the hump disappeared …!’”

“The common-sense element within basic Western education has to some extent made its mark on most regions. Fifty years ago the Antandroy believed it necessary to burn a house in which someone had died, fady that probably started as a health-precaution. Then one day a dying twelve-year-old boy asked to be moved outside, so that his parents might be spared the trouble and expense of rebuilding. His request was interpreted by the ombiasa as a message from the razana, rescinding this fady, and gradually the news spread that there was no longer any need to rebuild after a death.”

“Luckily our acclimatisation to Madagascar was by then complete. The main psychological adjustment required of Western travellers has to do with one’s attitude to time. When that has been brought into line with the Malagasy attitude, life is fun. But a failure soon to achieve this adjustment can expose the traveller to very real hazards, like ulceration and dementia. Had we attempted to fit our visa-quest into busy sightseeing days we would soon have needed sedation. But for us it became a pivotal part of the Fort-Dauphin experience — and it had many rewarding moments, as when a wandering turkey-hen perched on the edge of a police officer’s desk and shat accurately onto an open ledger.

In the end, not to our surprise, we left Fort-Dauphin still visa-less. During the last round of negotiations we were instructed to write a letter each (in French) to the relevant government Minister. Those letters, and our photographs, and the Permit-to-Emigrate forms we had filled in in quintuplicate (in lieu of visa-application forms) would, we were assured, be forwarded to Tana where we could collect our renewed visas on arrival.”

“On the morning of our fourth day all was stillness and brightness as I set out for the bus station at 6 a.m., leaving Rachel snuffling in bed. It was my turn to bashie-hunt; each day one of us made enquiries every few hours. Fort-Dauphin has no formal bus station but the little traffic that enters and leaves usually stops and starts near the marketplace. There is no regular Fort-Dauphin-Fianar service comparable to the weekly Tulear-Fort-Dauphin Merk. Nor is there any central ticket office, or any person or persons with authoritative foreknowledge of vehicle movements. In the marketplace one simply wanders around, asking questions on the off-chance that someone might have news. Rumours of course abound. A mini-bus might be leaving on Friday morning, a bashie might be leaving on Saturday after-noon, or maybe at midnight on Sunday, or it could be at dawn on Monday. Vehicles depart when enough people want to go somewhere and that might be twice a week or once a month. Hence our constant enquiries. Getting away from Fort-Dauphin is even harder than getting to it and none of us could afford to be too long delayed.”

“For generations Madagascar’s retail trade has been largely controlled either by Chinese merchants (in Tana and along the east coast) or by Indians, many of whom have been settled on the island since the beginning of the nineteenth century. (Their sort of imperialism is more durable than the European variety.) Both groups also act as money-lenders, yet their reputations are very different. The Chinese are said to be tough and shrewd but fair and honest; the Indians are accused of slyness and ruthless dishonesty. There must be many exceptions in both communities, but this is how most Malagasy see their minorities. The Indians rarely intermarry with the Malagasy, the Chinese often do. Numerically Indians form a tiny, aloof fraction of the population but their financial power is enormous — and growing. President Ratsiraka’s austerity campaign has made it much more obvious, creating as it does ideal conditions for Black-Marketeering. The Indians have proved by far the most efficient operators of this system and when criticised they point out that but for their resourcefulness Madagascar would be even more destitute and chaotic — which to an extent is true. They fly to Réunion and organise the illegal import of everything from motor-tyres to toilet soap, on all of which their average profit is forty per cent.”

“The youngest of this leper colony’s eight Sisters of Mercy, a twenty-five-year-old Fillipino who guided Rachel and me. She told us that among the Antanosy villagers marriage is virtually unknown and a woman may have seven children by seven different fathers. ‘The men tend to drift off when a woman becomes pregnant,’ she explained cheerfully. But the children are always much loved — and maybe God thinks love the most important thing? We can’t know!’”

“We have found a bashie, of course by chance. This afternoon, miles from the market-place, I noticed a newly painted red and white minibus parked outside a row of shanty-shops. It somehow had the air of a vehicle gathering itself together for a long journey. The cab doors were open, one man lay asleep across the front seats and another lay under the chassis doing mechanical things. I tried to waken the sleeper but he was in an alcoholic stupor. I bent to make enquiries of the mechanic but he merely jerked his legs convulsively in reply. I consulted the watching shopkeepers, who thought it quite likely the bus might leave for Fianar within the next few days. If I returned at sunset, they said, tickets might be on sale. A locked hut, between two of the shops, was the ticket-office.”

“Suddenly Minnie was swerving from verge to verge, apparently out of control. When she jolted to a stop in the middle of the track Andy and several male passengers began to argue excitedly while Randy scrambled out and dived under the chassis. He emerged five minutes later brandishing a length of Minnie’s guts. The steering had gone — he would have to return to Fort-Dauphin for a spare piece. We vazaha looked round in wild surmise. How did he propose covering those 120 miles? Since Ambovombe we had had the track to ourselves. No problem — a truck from Ihosy would appear because today is Saturday. But, persisted Jamie, how and when would Randy get back from Fort-Dauphin? Naturally nobody had thought that far ahead.”

“In the middle of my performance a young man of about twenty came to sit beside me; I have adult spectators, too, though they pretend to be less interested. He’s been around since we arrived, often staring at me intently; obviously dim-witted, but genial. Now I discovered his worry: he’d been told I was a woman but couldn’t believe it. He spoke a few words of French, one of which was lait. Unfortunately the top pockets of my bush-shirt are full of passports, notebooks, maps, sunglasses and other solid objects which strengthened his suspicion that I was lying, that no lait-producing facility lay within. He shook his head and repeated, ‘L’homme!’, at the same time unbuttoning my shirt. There was nothing at all offensive about this action; he was merely conducting a scientific investigation while incidentally causing paroxysms of hilarity among the population, young and old. But as he discovered ‘Une femme!’ poor Rachel could take no more and fled the scene. Fourteen is a sensitive age in those areas. I, being at the other end of the spectrum, could afford to remain unmoved. At fifty-one it is quite safe to let puzzled young tribesmen peer down one’s shirt-front; they are unlikely to be inflamed by what they see.”

“Thus far we’d all been admirably restrained, our protests never exceeding muted exclamations of terror or condemnation. But now we’d had it. Everyone tumbled out, shouting and screaming and abusing the drivers. We were badly shaken, in more senses than one; that crescendo jolt had unmended my ribs. Torches were produced and when we saw what had happened we were even more shaken. Curiously, a sudden silence fell. Minnie’s right wheels were suspended in the air over a gully — the drop scarcely nine feet, but onto sharp rocks. She was jammed on the concrete parapet of a bridge — a typical French parapet, just high enough for us to have sliced off the top six inches by the force of the impact.

The eruption of fury that followed our odd little silence quickly became an argument about how best to rescue Minnie.

But every Malagasy situation is saved, sooner rather than later, by pure comedy. My rage evaporated when Minnie II emerged out of the night at walking speed, for the very good reason that instead of headlights she had two men with small torches walking half-backwards some fifteen paces ahead of her. ‘Half-backwards’ may seem not to make sense but it precisely describes their method of progress.”

“The next two and a half hours were spent trying to start Minnie. Isoanala is on a hilltop and the drill was to push her down the slope, hoping the engine would do whatever engines should do before she stopped. When it didn’t, everyone — except Randy (being asleep) and me (being disabled) — had to push her backwards to the top of the hill to try again. Where she habitually stopped I sat beneath a magnificent unknown tree and admired the road. Suddenly Route Nationale No. 13 was a reformed character, a wide smooth red-earth highway. When/if Minnie started, I reckoned we’d have no more problems.

But the likelihood of her starting seemed increasingly remote; the engine’s occasional weak strangled noises sounded more like a death-rattle than anything else. Watching her being pushed backwards for the fifth time, I marvelled at our fellow-passengers’ good-humour. For three nights and two days they had had little sleep or food; they had escaped injury or death by a parapet’s breadth; they had often been required to contribute man-power (and now woman-power as well) to assist Minnie — in our effete society people win medals for enduring much less. Yet they remained cheerful and relaxed. Perhaps Adrian is right and they actually enjoy journeys like this — or do they not realise that journeys can in fact be quite different?”

“There were no bridges and Minnie stalled at each attempt to escape from the rough riverbeds. Everyone out, much pushing — off again.”

“During 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.”

“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.”

“In the inland rainforest 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.”