Top Quotes: “The Eighth Continent: Life, Death and Discovery in the Lost World of Madagascar” — Peter Tyson

“How is it that boas, for one, are found only there and half a world away in the Americas?”

“When the first people arrived on the island about 2,000 years ago, they found a real-world Jurassic Park. Flightless elephant birds, standing ten feet tall and weighing half a ton, thundered through the island’s wooded savannahs on legs like tree trunks. Lemurs the size of apes nibbled leaves high in rainforest trees, while Galápagos-sized tortoises and dwarf hippopotamuses grazed below. Sadly, these creatures and the rest of Madagascar’s so-called megafauna are now gone, rendered extinct sometime in those 2,000 years.

Yet countless other types of animals and plants remain to astonish the visitor. Madagascar is a place where lizards scream, giant cockroaches hiss, and a handsome beast called the indri sings a song of inexpressible beauty. Dozens of different kinds of lemurs, early models of primates that were the smartest living things 40 million years ago, live there — and only there. One is so small you could cup it in your palm. The fossa (“FOO-sa”), Madagascar’s stab at a mountain lion, slinks around the jungle at night, seeking to plant its retractile claws into unwary prey. In the trees, two-foot-long chameleons zap bugs with tongues as long as their bodies, while cryptic snakes with noses shaped like sharpened pencils slide through the branches, veritable twigs on the move. The vangas, just one of five families of birds found nowhere else, rival Darwin’s finches for diversity, and many members of the island’s phantasmagoria of invertebrates, epitomized in my mind by the truly freakish giraffe-necked weevil, might have come straight out of the bar scene in Star Wars.

Plants are just as singular. Eight out of ten of them grow naturally only on Madagascar. Like the animals, they are the dinosaurs of the plant world, relicts from a time long past. The traveler’s tree, a fan-shaped banana relative that serves as a kind of national symbol, counts its closest relatives in South America. The comet orchid, one of more than a thousand varieties of orchid that decorate the island, has a fourteen-inch spur. When Darwin saw this species in 1862, he predicted that a giant hawkmoth must exist with a proboscis long enough to take advantage of the nectar at the spur’s base; entomologists found it four decades later. Madagascar even has an entire floral ecosystem all its own, the spiny desert. A searing, otherworldly landscape in which virtually all the plants exist nowhere else on Earth, the spiny desert might have sprung from the imagination of Henri Rousseau. Here, the finger-like stalks of octopus trees wiggle at the sky below massive baobabs rearing overhead like vegetable elephants.

The human world is as exceptional as the natural. Though the island lies just over 250 miles off Africa, its people, customs, and language originally hail from Indonesia. “This strikes me as the single most astonishing fact of human geography for the entire world,” the physiologist and biogeographer Jared Diamond has written. “It’s as if Columbus, on reaching Cuba, had found it occupied by blue-eyed, blond-haired Scandinavians speaking a language close to Swedish, even though the nearby North American continent was inhabited by Native Americans speaking Amerindian languages.” Signs that the forebears of the Malagasy came from Southeast Asia are pleasantly rife throughout the island: terraced rice paddies, outrigger canoes, and ancestor worship, to nail just a few. While passing Malagasy people in the streets of Antananarivo, the capital, you might swear you were in Jakarta. Over the two millennia since the first Malagasy settled the island, a significant African component has blended in, so that the culture and people can seem at times a perfect mix of both. Africans brought the island-wide obsession with cattle, for instance, and the widespread regard for spirit possession. Malagasy society is also spiced with strong Arabian, South Indian, and European influences.

All told, there are 18 officially recognized tribes (the term “tribe” is not considered pejorative in Madagascar). Living in the center of the island in and around Tana, as everyone abbreviates the capital’s name, the Merina are the most Asian-looking of the tribes and the country’s political and economic leaders. Just to the south of them in the mountainous central highlands are the Bestileo (“the invincibles”), experts in rice terracing and wood carving. The largest tribe is the Sakalava, a cattle-herding people who range up and down the west coast. They owe their affinities primarily to Africa, as do the tribes that scratch out a living in the scorched south, including the Bara, Mahafaly, and Antandroy. The latter two build the island’s most elaborate stone tombs, huge painted monuments that are among the country’s most outstanding architectural treasures. Along the northeast coast lie the Betsimisaraka, Madagascar’s second most numerous tribe, who tend fields of sugarcane, cloves, and vanilla they have carved out of the rainforest. Farther south you’ll find the Antaimoro, who guard sacred theological texts known as sorabe (“great writings”) and claim an Arab ancestry.

Many customs boggle the Western mind. In wild celebrations known as famadihana (“turning of the bones”), the Merina and several other tribes regularly disinter and re-enshroud the bodies of their dead relatives (whom all tribes consult on important events in their lives). The Sakalava specialize in tromba, during which the ancestors speak to the living through entranced mediums. Many Malagasy in remote areas believe that white-skinned Westerners are mpakafo, or “heart-takers,” who have come to the island to kill Malagasy, especially woman and children, and eat their vital organs.”

“The island is not only old but big. The world’s fourth largest after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo, it is 1,000 miles long and 350 miles across at its widest point. In length it would stretch from London almost to Gibraltar, and at its widest point from London to Cork. Madagascar’s enormous size is only the most obvious of several reasons, including its exceptional diversity of habitats and species, why some observers feel the island could justly be called the world’s eighth continent. Oriented to the northeast — a sacred direction for the Malagasy, as it turns out — its shape has been likened to a brick, a left foot, even a badly made omelette. To me, the island has always looked like an upended side of beef.”

“Though it lies so far south that its southern end dips into the temperate zone, Madagascar is very much a tropical island. It is a land of humid rainforests and hellishly hot semi-deserts. There are no glacier-clad peaks, indeed no evidence that the island was glaciated anytime in the past million years. While temperatures in the austral winter can drop to near freezing in the central Highlands, Malagasy who have never left the island have never seen snow. Within that essentially tropical climate exists a range of subclimates, however. Beyond sheer size, this is due to the island’s long north-south orientation — Madagascar stretches from 12° to 25½° South — and to its geographic layout. A rugged mountain range running down the island’s spine east of center neatly divides Madagascar in two. East of the range lie the island’s rainforests, west of it savannah, dry forest, and in the deep south, the spiny desert. (The one exception to this east-west split is the northwest coast in and around the island of Nosy Be, which a climatic anomaly lends a humid climate and tropical forest.) As befits a mini-continent, the island supports a host of other habitats as well, from mangrove forests to alpine heath to coral reefs.”

“The earliest signs of humans on Madagascar have turned up on the southwest and northeast coasts. The admittedly scanty archeological evidence suggests that no one lived on the island prior to the Christian era — an astonishing fact considering Madagascar’s enormous size and its proximity to the cradle of humankind in nearby Africa. Very little is known about the first settlers. Were they pure Indonesians who came directly from Southeast Asia in one or more migrations across the Indian Ocean? Or were they Indonesian-Africans whose Asian ancestors lived and traded along the north coast of the Indian Ocean before arriving on the northeast coast of Africa, where they intermarried with black Africans? No one knows.

What is known is that an indigenous Malagasy fishing and cattle-herding culture developed on and near the coasts through the first millennium A.D. Arab merchants began trading along the northern coastlines about the ninth or tenth centuries, though they apparently never penetrated into the interior. It wasn’t until the thirteenth century that the first Malagasy even reached the high, mountainous central region around Tana, which today represents the heart of the Malagasy nation.”

“Marco Polo, while traveling through Arabia on his return from China in the thirteenth century, heard these tales as well and penned his own description of the island. His account was equally devoid of fact— the island bore lions and camels, he said, as well as elephants that were lifted into the sky and devoured by giant birds — but it includes the first known use of the name Madagascar.

Scholars believe Polo’s misnomer is a corruption of Mogadishu, a town on the East African coast that Polo would likely have heard of. Certainly it is not a Malagasy word. The Malagasy language does not have the letter combination sc, for one thing, and all words end in a vowel. When the first European missionaries arrived on the island in the nineteenth century, they found that the Malagasy had several names for their island. Some called it Nosindambo or “Isle of the Wild Boars.” Others used the more lyrical Ny anivon’ny riaka, literally “The (land) in the midst of the moving waters.” Most Malagasy, however, traditionally called it simply Izao rehetra izao, This All, or Izao tontolo izao, This Whole. Nevertheless, the name that stuck was one bestowed by a European who never laid eyes on the island.

The first European to do so was a Portuguese sea captain named Diogo Dias. While sailing round the Cape of Good Hope on his way to India in the year 1500, Dias was blown off course in a storm. On August 10, he landed on a coast he assumed to be that of Mozambique. When the land ended in the north, he realized he’d discovered a large island. He promptly named it St. Lawrence, after the saint on whose feast day he had sighted the island, but the name eventually melted away with all the others.

Within a few years, the Portuguese, followed by the English and French, set about trying to establish trading settlements on what they saw as rich virgin turf. In a gushing 1647 pamphlet, an English merchant named Richard Boothby declared Madagascar “the chiefest paradice [sic] this day upon Earth” and urged his countrymen to build plantations on the island without delay. Many would heed his call, yet all such early attempts at colonization ended in disaster, mostly from disease, starvation, and constant battles with the local Malagasy.”

“In the only attacks the Malagasy people are known to have ever made on another land, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Betsimisaraka and Sakalava tribes made annual slave-raiding assaults on the neighboring Comoros Islands and even the African coast. The largest expeditions boasted up to 500 outrigger canoes and perhaps 18,000 men. The most significant pirate contribution, however, came in the form of Ratsimilaho, the son of a European pirate and a Malagasy princess. Born in 1712 and educated in London, Ratsimilaho succeeded in unifying the many disparate tribes along some 400 miles of the northeast coast, who subsequently took the name Betsimisaraka (“the many inseparables”).

While the Betsimisaraka never managed to form an actual kingdom or state, the Sakalava of the west coast did. Just as the Betsimisaraka owe their rise to pirates, so the Sakalava owe theirs to trade with foreigners, particularly Arabs, along the west coast. “The independent Sakalavas seem to have no needs,” wrote a European in the mid-nineteenth century. “So long as the Americans or the Europeans bring them, from time to time, rifles (English models), powder, a little cloth … as a luxury, a few pieces of glass for necklaces, and alcohol, they have no other desires.” Yet it was just these supplies, particularly the weapons, that helped the Sakalava become the most powerful kingdom Madagascar had yet seen. In the early eighteenth century, its empire stretched from Tuléar on the southwest coast to the northernmost tip of the island. But its far-flung nature and constant infighting among its various subtribes eventually led to its dissolution in the mid-1900s.

The kingdom that had the most lasting impact on Malagasy history and culture was that of the Merina. The most light-skinned of the 18 tribes, the Merina are thought to have arrived in the highlands in the early part of the sixteenth century. Over the next two centuries, they consolidated their power around Tana. The “city of a thousand” became the Merina capital in the late eighteenth century during the reign of Andrianampoinimerina, arguably the greatest Malagasy ruler in the island’s history. Andrianampoinimerina, whose name means “the prince in the heart of Imerina,” built the extensive rice paddies that make Imerina, the region in and around the capital, the breadbasket of Madagascar. (He once famously said, “Rice and I are one.”) Andrianampoinimerina established the fokonolona, the village committees that still run community affairs to this day. Through skillful diplomacy and enlightened leadership, he succeeded in greatly expanding the Merina kingdom, including subduing the Betsileo tribe to the south. But it wasn’t enough for him. On his deathbed, the king told his son and successor, “Imerina has been gathered into one, but behold the sea is the border of my rice-fields, O Radama.”

Radama I, who assumed the throne in 1810, took up his father’s challenge. With the help of the British, whose emissaries began furthering their nation’s trade interests in Madagascar by 1820, he managed to unify most of the island. The only regions he failed to conquer before his untimely death at age 36 was the far west under the Sakalava and the far south inhabited by the hotly independent Bara, Mahafaly, and Antandroy tribes. In return for the military assistance he received from the British, Radama opened the country to English missionaries, who built churches, reduced the Malagasy language to a written form, and spread the Christian faith throughout the island. Through the person of James Cameron, a brilliant Scottish engineer, he also launched a miniature Industrial Revolution that featured the construction of an aqueduct and reservoir, the manufacture of bricks and soap, and the advent of the first printing press in Madagascar.

Radama’s widow and successor, however, was to reverse much of her late husband’s work. Ranavalona I has been likened to a female Caligula, who “waded to the crown through streams of blood.” Since her claim to the throne was weak, her first act as Queen was to have all rivals to the throne, including her mother-in-law, put to death. Her killing didn’t stop there. In 1835, she abolished Christianity — its practices, she argued, “are not the customs of our ancestors” — and ordered the slaughter of all who would not renounce their Christian beliefs. The first martyr, a young woman named Ralama, was speared to death in 1837 as she knelt in prayer. Hundreds more met a gruesome end in the following years, a time Malagasy Christians would long remember as ny tany maizina, “the time when the land was dark.” Ranavalona’s most ruthless attempt to eradicate the foreign faith came in 1849, when she had 2,000 adherents arrested. Most were fined, but more than 100 were flogged and sentenced to life in chains and hard labor, and 18 were killed. Fourteen of them were thrown off “the place of hurling,” a sheer cliff below the Queen’s Palace in Tana, while four of noble birth, including a pregnant woman, were given the “honor” of burning at the stake.

Later in her 33-year reign, Ranavalona cut off all foreign trade and made forced labor for the government a requirement even of soldiers. She revived the abhorrent customs of killing babies born on unlucky days and of forcing people suspected of crimes to drink a poison from the tangena tree. If they survived, they were innocent; most didn’t. In the end, few Malagasy were sorry when she finally died in 1861.”

“When Radama Il succeeded his mother, he was true to the memory of his namesake and nullified all Ran-avalona’s edicts. He reopened contacts with the West, including welcoming back the Christian missionaries and their religion. In fact, Radamas short-lived reign – he was assassinated a year after taking office – marked the beginning of a decades-long rivalry between the English and French churches in Madagascar. Neither gained the upper hand, and today most Malagasy towns feature two churches, one Protestant and one Catholic, staring each other down across the main street.

Madagascar had three more queens – Radama Il’s widow Rasherina assumed the throne in 1863, Ranavalona Il in 1868, and Ranavalona IlI in 1883. But power during their reigns lay in the hands of the prime minister, a calculating man named Rainilaiariony, who married each of the queens in succession. Rainilaiarivony did great things for his country, including overseeing the construction of buildings and roads, improving education, and increasing medical services and the training of Malagasy doctors. He even managed to negotiate treaties with both England (1865) and France (1868).

But Rainilaiarivony could not hold back the juggernaut that was France, with its desire to add Madagascar to its collection of African colonies. Britain had never evinced an colonial interest in the island, and in 1890 it signed a treaty with France recognizing the French protectorate over Madagascar in exchange for France’s recognition of the British protectorate over Zanzibar. With its only possible rival out of the way, France made its move.

French troops began their assault in December 1894 with an attack on Tamatave, a port on the east coast, followed two months later by another on Majunga on the west coast. The latter expedition marched all the way to Tana, surprising Malagasy military commanders, who had expected an assault from the much nearer east coast. On October 1, 1895, the French took the capital with little resistance. Astonishingly, they lost but 20 men to fighting during the entire campaign (though nearly 6,000 perished from disease). The French commander forced the Queen’s representatives to sign away the country as a protectorate, and the following year the French Parliament voted to annex the island as a colony.

To France’s credit, it helped usher the country into the modern world during its six and a half decades of official control. The French unified the whole island for the first time, thereby finishing the work Andrianampoinimerina had begun in the eighteenth century. They vastly improved the country’s basic infrastructure by building roads and airports and installing a communications system. In 1927, they formed the first nature reserve system in the African region in Madagascar. Most important, they established the administrative, military, and economic framework of a modern nation state. As colonizers, however, the French were no better than most. They instituted a dual judicial system – French laws for colonists and a mercilessly unjust code known as the indigénat for the Malagasy – and a forced-labor mandate that had all Malagasy men between the ages of 16 and 60 work for the French for 50 days a year at minimal wages. Not surprisingly, the Malagasy took exception to such racist policies, which essentially left them second-class citizens in their own country. During World War I, while 46,000 Malagasy fought beside the French in Europe (and more than 2,000 died), some of their compatriots launched the first of several rebellions against French rule. It failed, but in the early 1920s a Malagasy schoolteacher named Jean Ralaimongo, who had shared a room in Paris with Ho Chi Minh, began stirring things up again.

World War II, in turn, interrupted Ralaimongo’s efforts and those of other nationalists. Attention was drawn both to Europe, where 34,000 Malagasy soldiers were serving in France by June 1940, and even to the coasts of Madagascar itself. In May 1942, the British navy attacked and took control of Diégo Suarez in the far north; four months later another British force overwhelmed Majunga on the west coast. The British wanted to keep control of the Mozambique Channel, a strategic passageway for Allied ships that was frequented by German U-boats.

The end of the war brought renewed nationalist activities. These culminated in a fierce rebellion in 1947, which began simultaneously in several parts of the country. The French succeeded in quashing the insurrection, and estimates of the number of Malagasy lives lost range up to 80,000. But the rebellion made a return to independence only a matter of time. During a visit to Tana in 1958, Gen. Charles de Gaulle pointed to the Queen’s Palace and proclaimed metaphorically, “Tomorrow you will once more be a State, as you were when that palace was inhabited.” Madagascar finally regained its independence on June 26, 1960.

Initially, independence proved to be in name only. The first president, Philibert Tiranana, was pro-Western, and France continued to oversee trade and financial institutions, and maintain several military bases. But after a series of coups between 1972 and 1975 – one president was shot dead six days after entering office – Didier Ratsiraka took control in 1975 and established a paradoxical Christian-Marxist state. (He even wrote his own Mao-inspired Boky Mena or Red Book.) He nationalized banks, insurance companies, and other institutions without compensation, and launched a bevy of social and economic reforms based on Communist models. Even as he turned his back on the West, he began currying favor with Communist nations, particularly the Soviet Union and North Korea. He booted out the last of the French administrators, and most other French citizens left as well, taking with them much-needed technical know-how. Rumors circulated of up to 20,000 “disappeared” Malagasy. The economy began a long decline.

When Communist states began to fall in the late 1980s, a savvy Ratsiraka made an about-face he had begun in 1979, when he had introduced an “all-out investment” policy of industrialization, and tried to court the West. But it was too late. The economy had collapsed, and his desperate people were up in arms. In 1991, they rose up in largely peaceful demonstrations, calling for Ratsirakas resignation. It was a long time in coming-and many Malagasy died in the process – but he was finally ousted in a general election in 1993, ending 17 years of despotic rule. Several weak democratic governments followed in the mid-1990s before, astonishingly, Ratsiraka was voted back into office in early 1997.”

“As of 1999, the Republic of Madagascar faces an uncertain future. The population is over 14 million strong, with more than half of the Malagasy under the age of 15. With a growth rate in 1998 of 2.8 percent, the population will double by 2025. This is not good news for a country that is already one of the ten or 12 poorest nations on Earth, with a per-capita income of less than $250 and an external debt exceeding $4 billion. With little industry and eight out of ten people farmers, there is little chance that Madagascar will ever earn enough to pay off such a crushing debt load.

Throughout Madagascar, the farming and herding way of life is spelling doom for the environment, a crisis that the lemur expert Alison Jolly deems “a tragedy without villains.” The island shows how perilously close human beings can come to eating themselves out of house and home. Rampant deforestation over the centuries, coupled perhaps with certain natural forces, has left most of the island a sterile grassland, which Malagasy herders burn every year to bring forth the “green bite” for their livestock. If you fly over the island in October, you may be hard-pressed to see the land below for the smoke filling the sky. So denuded is the Great Red Island — a sobriquet born of Madagascar’s iron-rich soil — that in wintertime the island looks in many places like the surface of Mars. With few trees to hold the red soil in place, huge erosion gullies gouge the hillsides like suppurating wounds; when the rains come, the soil runs like blood into the seas. Astronauts orbiting overhead have said that Madagascar appears to be bleeding to death.”

“Though only twice the size of New York’s Central Park, Lokobe Reserve is just such a gem, a patch of rainforest teeming with rare plants and animals, most of them endemic to Madagascar and several endemic to the reserve itself.”

“Raxworthy has had to roll with the fady, or taboos, that dictate virtually every act in rural Madagascar. While working in the Tsaratanana Mountains in northern Madagascar, he agreed not to wear solid-black clothes, not to do anything on Tuesdays, and not to climb the island’s highest peak without taking along a white chicken as an offering. He has worked in areas where cattle thieves are hunted down and shot, and where tribes have killed foreigners whom they believe are “heart-takers.””

“All told, biologists estimate that eight out of ten of all living things on Madagascar exist only there in all the world. How did this come to pass? Where did the island’s distinctive menagerie come from, and when?”

“Chameleons exploded, radiating into 62 separate species, which represent over two-thirds of the world’s complement. Madagascar’s vangas, an endemic family of birds, rival Darwin’s finches for diversity, with more pronounced morphological differences than beak size. There are 130-odd species of palm tree. Intense speciation can be relative. Take baobabs: Outside of Madagascar, these massive, bottle-shaped trees come in only two varieties, one in Africa and another in Australia. Madagascar has seven species, including the African one. Such intense speciation is what one might expect of a continent, not an island.”

“The wildlife’s ancient pedigree shows up in the limited overall variety of creatures. Of primates, there are only lemurs. Of rodents, only cricetids (a family of small rodents that includes hamsters). Of carnivores, only euplerids (meat-eaters that preceded canids and felids, the dog and cat families). Madagascar has a glorious assortment of tenrecs, but they comprise the only kind of insectivore on the island (except for bats). The world’s artiodactyls, or even-toed ungulates, include swine, hippos, camels, giraffes, deer, antelopes, sheep, goats, and cattle. Yet of this broad group, Madagascar has but the bush pig, which scholars believe was introduced by the island’s first colonizers, and the pygmy hippos, which are extinct. This same taxonomic poverty is found in all faunal groups.

Then there are the unexplained presences. Like the boas, the iguanid family survives only in Madagascar and in the Americas, along with representatives, strangely enough, in Fiji and Tonga. Madagascar’s national plant, the traveler’s tree, counts its closest relative in Guiana. The Myzopoda bat resembles primitive bats of New Zealand and South America.”

“Amazingly, there is no such thing as a native primary freshwater fish on Madagascar; that is, there are no fishes native to the country that are physiologically restricted to freshwater.”

“Jergen Ruud, a Norwegian ethnographer whose 1960 book Taboo: A Study of Malagasy Customs and Beliefs remains the classic in the field, says that fady (“FA-dee”) are hammered in” from early childhood. It is impossible for foreigners traveling through Madagascar to stay on top of local fady, as they differ from village to village, even family to family. Some families even keep them secret. But their power is absolute, for they come from the ancestors, and anyone breaking a taboo makes the entire village maloto (unclean). Fady help hold together the moral fabric of society. As Ruud notes, “the taboos in their many fields show a consistent tendency to point a damning finger at the contrast to the ideals which the individual and the group hold in different walks of life.” So deeply ensconced are fady in the Malagasy world that the word for “excuse me” and “please” is azafady, which literally means “May it not be taboo to me.”

Fady collected around the island over the past century and a half give an idea of how deeply superstitious the Malagasy are. One should not sing while eating, for it causes the teeth to grow long, while to skin a banana with the teeth results in extreme poverty. Never eat while lying down; your parents will be choked, just as kicking walls of your house will kill your parents. A soldier should never eat tenrec, lest he assume the timid, shrinking disposition of an animal that typically rolls into a ball when attacked. Pregnant women must not eat eels for fear that the embryo or fetus will become as slippery as the eel and slide out of her body. Nor should she ever step. over an ax, or her child will become bow-legged. A newborn baby should be called ugly and likened to a pig or a dog so that it is not hated by ghosts — which will follow you at night if you whistle, shout, or carry mutton. Never point at a tomb or your fingers will fall off, and never build a tomb at the end of a valley, for it will draw the living towards itself. And so on.”

“In ancient times, a single continent known as Pangaea existed on Earth. In time, that broke into two supercontinents, a northern one known as Laurasia and a southern one called Gondwana. Again, in time, both those supercontinents broke up. Laurasia divided into the northern hemisphere continents of North America, Europe, and Asia. Gondwana fractured into the southern hemisphere continents of South America, Africa, Australia/New Zealand, and Antarctica. India, now a part of Asia, was a member of the Gondwana club until it drifted north and rammed into what is now Tibet about 50 million years ago. In the ancient supercontinent, Madagascar lay sandwiched between Africa and India before it, too, went its separate way.”

“A bevy of recent studies relying on advanced methods and sophisticated instruments have drawn a widely corroborative picture of the weaning of Madagascar from mother Africa. These studies have brought to the fore a mountain of evidence, including data on seafloor spreading, pole positions, the distribution of early plants and marine invertebrates, and petrology and geochemistry. The portrait shows that Madagascar abutted present-day Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania before tectonic forces began wrenching it away in the mid-to late Jurassic, perhaps 165 million years ago. For tens of millions of years, it drifted southeast attached to India, in a mini-continent known as Greater India. Sometime in the Cretaceous period — current suggested dates range from 133 to 124.5 million years ago — Madagascar reached its present position. It remained attached to India for tens of millions of years before the subcontinent split off about 88 million years ago, to begin its long drift north to Asia.”

“The town of Tuléar came into existence in 1895 and is now the provincial capital. According to legend, Toliara (as it is also spelled) got its name when a European sailor asked where he could tie up his boat. “Toly eroa,” replied a local. “Tie up down there.””

“A good man might steal, indeed is encouraged to do so. Walen says Sakalava parents punish their children only for getting caught while stealing. “They are not punished for the stealing; that is not considered an evil deed at all, indeed it is considered a very good way of acquiring property,” he notes. “But to steal so that the theft be discovered is such a foolish and stupid deed that it deserves contempt and punishment, which latter is actually carried out.””

“Throughout Madagascar, when anyone enters a village unannounced, or even the forest around it, he must immediately present himself to the president of the fokontany, the local committee in charge of community affairs, and explain his reason for being there. Failure to do so is at the least impolite and at the worst cause for punitive action. In at least one instance, a pair of Western scientists working in a remote region died at the hands of local tribesmen, who apparently feared they were heart-stealers.”

“Burial is so important that in many parts of Madagascar, people spend far more time, effort, and money on building tombs than on building homes. Indeed, Malagasy tombs, wrote one visitor, “may justly be reckoned among the most remarkable and impressive antiquities of the country.” Westerners touring the south of Madagascar are often baffled to see the small, makeshift thatch houses of the Mahafaly and Antandroy compared to their massive stone sarcophagi. The amount spent often far exceeds one’s annual income.”

“The most imposing tombs are those of the Mahafaly and Antandroy. While highland tribes bury entire extended families in their tombs, these southern tribes build elaborate stone structures for single individuals. A typical Mahafaly stone tomb I saw in the southwest was five feet tall and perhaps 1,600 square feet. Its smooth, whitewashed sides bore a portrait of the deceased and a series of life-size paintings of events from his life. One depicted him doing a leaping kick, another disarming a policeman with a karate chop. These reveal that the man had been part of the kung fu craze that swept Madagascar in the mid-1980s, causing riots around the country before the government banned kung fu clubs. Another painting showed a jet in flight, indicating that the man may have once flown on an airplane, a status symbol among the desperately poor Mahafaly. On the roof of the tomb rested objects from his life, including a suitcase and a chair, and the horned skulls of the dozens of zebu sacrificed at his funeral. There were also six of the carved wooden totems known as aloalo. Each six-foot-tall aloalo was a pole of geometric patterns topped, again, by symbols of his life: a house, a man tending a zebu, and a man being arrested by two gendarmes, his arms tied behind his back. This enormous tomb was not for a venerable elder, but for a man who died at age 27.”

““The first ceremony of drying the corpse is succeeded by a most revolting custom,” wrote the prolific writer and missionary James Sibree about burial practices among the Antankarana. “For at the end of several days decomposition produces a putrefying liquid, which is received into vessels placed under the framework on which the corpse is deposited. Then each one of those present holds his hand so as to receive a portion of the horrible liquid, with which he rubs his whole body!”

The Merina and Betsileo have taken the practice of second burial to its greatest extreme in the ceremonies known as famadihana (“turning of the bones”). Among the Merina, famadihana take place most often when the body of a person who died far away is brought home for interment in the family tomb, while the Betsileo typically hold famadihana when temporarily buried corpses are incorporated into a newly built family tomb. Descendants may also hold bone-turnings simply to honor ancestors buried in the sepulcher. The practice may be somber, but more often it is a celebration with music, singing, drinking, and dancing.

During a famadihana, family members remove the body or bodies from the tomb, place them on a mat, and rewrap them in new lamba mena, the silk shrouds used throughout the island to clothe the deceased. If old shrouds remain, the new ones are simply wound around them; if only bones are left, they are washed and enfolded in a new shroud. Family members often carry the ancestors being feted around the village, showing them new buildings and other recent developments. Finally, sometime before dusk, the family returns the remains to the tomb, which is sealed anew until the next turning.”

“Richardson went on to record the rather stiff fines Bara imposed for seemingly moderate offenses:

For sitting or reclining on another person’s bed: a fine of one ox or to be shot.

For striding over a person, or for striding over the foot even: the same.

For brushing a person’s face or any part of his body even with any part of your clothing: the same.

For using spoons, plates, drinking vessels belonging to another person: the same.”

“Like many Malagasy, Ramilisonina uses only one name.”

“The writer David Quammen has aptly likened Madagascar to a giant bald head, with just a few tufts of hair — the relict forests — poking up around the edges.”

“The only member of the 35,000-strong orchid family that produces an edible fruit, vanilla thrives in warm, moist climates with steady rainfall, and the Sambava area gets six and a half feet of rain a year. Vanilla also prefers half sun, half shade, so growers have left gigantic trees from the rainforest that once blanketed this region standing over the vines, lending the plantations the feel of a well-tended forest park.

Well-tended is an understatement, as I can see clearly looking at these endless plantations out my window. Vanilla is the most labor-intensive crop in the world. Five years elapse between planting the vine and bottling the aged extract for the first time. Growers must carefully tend each vine on its own specially planted tree, and they must pollinate each vanilla blossom by hand in order to produce the coveted bean. (Vanilla is Spanish for “little pod.”) A native of Mexico, vanilla was introduced to Madagascar in the nineteenth century, but without the native bees and hummingbirds that normally pollinate the plant. So the Malagasy hand-pollinate them with a pointed bamboo stick that they use to transfer the male pollen to the female stigma. (A slave on Réunion perfected the technique in 1841.) By the early 1970s, Madagascar supplied 70 percent of the world’s vanilla, though the market is unsteady and this figure has fluctuated wildly over the years.”

“Many of the people in the highlands look as if they might have just gotten off a flight from Jakarta, while the carefully tended rice terraces in the southern highlands, stepping up the sheer mountainsides like stairways to the clouds, come straight out of rural Java.

Rice is a cultural obsession of the Malagasy. “There are many plants, but it’s the rice that’s sweet,” they say. The Malagasy equivalent of our phrase “to have a meal” is “to eat rice,” and all other food is called laoka, meaning an accompaniment. A heaped-up cup of rice grains is still a standard unit of measurement in Madagascar, as is, metaphorically, the rice cooking pot. The ethnographer John Mack once asked a Malagasy how far it was to a neighboring village; the man’s answer was the number of pots of rice one could cook in the time it would take to walk there.”

“The Malagasy language, despite having engendered some 18 different dialects on Madagascar, remains a single language spoken by everyone from Vezo fishermen on the southwest coast to Merina politicians in Tana to Betsimisaraka ombiasy on the northeast coast. This is remarkable. That an island as large as Madagascar, with diverse ecosystems cut off from one another by forests, deserts, mountains, or rivers, should have but one language baffles linguists. Madagascar’s neighbor, Africa, has 1,500 languages. The island of New Guinea, only a third larger than Madagascar, has 700 languages. Why does Madagascar have only one?”

“The modern language that most closelyresembles Malagasy is Maanyan, a Malayo-Polynesian tongue spoken today in the Barito Valley of southeastern Borneo.”

“The irony is especially thick considering that modern humans evolved less than a thousand miles away on the African savanna. It wasn’t until long after humans had colonized the entire globe, including such inhospitable regions as the Arctic and the Mongolian steppe, that they finally reached Madagascar. Along with New Zealand, Madagascar was the last large landmass on Earth that people colonized. It is incredible to think that some of the most advanced civilizations that ever existed — the Assyrian and Mycenaean civilizations, the Egyptian dynasties, the Olmec of Central America, the Shang of China, the Indus civilization of India — all rose and fell before a human being likely ever set foot on Madagascar.”

“Each day has its own color, and Sunday’s is white. This decidedly does not suggest purity, for the Malagasy concept of white is opposite to the Western one. “To white one’s neighbor” (mamotsifotsy namana) is to slander; “to spit white” (manao fotsy rora) is what one does after losing in court or begging unsuccessfully; an unreliable person is one who “says white words” (olona fotsy teny).

Malagasy call a Westerner vazaha, or foreigner, for to call him a “white man” would be to insult him in the worst way. The color’s pejorative connotations — whose source may lie in a pervasive Malagasy fear of albinos — come into play on Sundays, when it is taboo to consume the meat of white animals or white-colored foods such as milk, indeed to come into contact with anything white. Paradoxically, when a baby is born on this day, diviners sacrifice a white fowl and rub it on the newborn to counteract the bad forces of the vintana.”

“When an earthquake strikes, “the whales are turning over.” A turkey is vorontsiloza, which means “the not terrible bird.” Did the first Malagasy to encounter this creature, with its gobbling call and formidable crest and wattles, flee in terror, only to later discover its harmlessness? Or did they believe, before they actually tried it, that such a homely bird must taste terrible?”

“The wee hours of the morning are known as misafo helika ny kary, “when the wild cat washes itself.” The following comes from a translated list James Sibree made of terms that rural Malagasy use for approximate times of the day:

12:00 A.M.

Halving of night

2:00 A.M.

Frog croaking

3:00 A.M.

Cock-crowing

4:00 A.M.

Morning also night

5:00 A.M.

Crow croaking

5:15 A.M.

Glimmer of day

5:30 A.M.

Diligent people awake

6:00 A.M.

Sunrise

6:15 A.M.

Dew falls; also: Cattle go out (to pasture)

6:30 A.M.

Leaves are dry (from dew)

6:45 A.M.

The day chills the mouth [winter months only!]

8:00 A.M.

Advance of the day

9:00 A.M.

Over the purlin [roof beam]

NOON

Over the ridge of the roof

12:30 P.M.

Day taking hold of the threshold

1:00 P.M.

Slipping of the day

1:30 to 2:00 P.M.

Decline of the day

3:00 P.M.

At the place of tying the calf

4:00 P.M.

At the sheep or poultry pen

4:30 P.M.

The cow newly calved comes home

5:00 P.M.

Sun touching. (i.e., the western wall)

5:30 P.M.

Cattle come home

5:45 P.M.

Sunset flush

6:00 P.M.

Sunset (literally, “Sun dead”)

6:15 p.M.

Fowls come in

6:30 P.M.

Dusk, twilight

6:45 р.м.

Edge of rice-cooking pan obscure

7:00 P.M.

People begin to cook rice

8:00 P.M.

People eat rice

8:30 P.M.

Finished eating

9:00 P.M.

People go to sleep

9:30 р.м.

Everyone in bed

10:00 р.м.

Gunfire”

“Malagasy themselves have to be on their guard with other Malagasy, who out of politeness must say yes to all questions. The Malagasy naturalist Guy Ramanantsoa, who was once trying to arrange boat transport for himself and Alison Jolly during a visit to Nosy Be, told her what happened when he asked residents when he should expect high tide. “The villagers said… that high tide is two o’clock in the afternoon. I misheard and said, ‘Ten o’clock?’ They said, ‘Yes, ten o’clock…then added in a whisper, ‘Two o’clock.””

“He is a 75-year-old man who introduced himself only as Monsieur Koto. In Madagascar, “Koto” is a common name for a little boy, but as Herbert Standing writes in his whimsical 1892 book The Children of Madagascar, “Often these names are retained all through life, the syllable Ra (for which the English Mr., Mrs., or Miss is the nearest equivalent) being pre-fixed. Thus you will meet quite old men bearing the name Rakoto … but use makes it familiar, and one does not think of the absurdity of the real meaning.” Better “little boy” than some of the other names Malagasy parents can come up with. “Sometimes the relatives seem quite at a loss for a new name,” Standing notes, “and so apparently call the child anything that happens to come into their heads … thus we meet occasionally with such names as Rubbish, Snail, Pumpkin, Sweet Potato, Goldfish, Drygrass, Cannon.””

“Today, village committees help decide on new projects, using their portion of park entrance fees. As in all of Madagascar’s protected areas, the entrance fee, which at Ranomafana is the equivalent of about ten dollars, is split between the national park system and peripheral zone villages. Currently, the 93 villages share about $10,000 a year this way. A committee of 18 village representatives elected for three-year terms decides on new projects. In 1995, they planned to use the money to buy seeds and build campgrounds, an artisanal training center, and small dams to expand existing rice paddies. Since these funds are available in perpetuity, Wright points out, the park itself has become integral to village economics.

Peters concurs. “The sharing of entrance fees is the most immediately conceivable and practical manner to distribute ecotourism revenues to remote populations and/or disadvantaged ethnic groups that otherwise would not benefit from tourism to the park,” he says. In his estimation, before the entrance-fee sharing began, only about 65 people at Ranomafana, or 0.002 percent of the 27,000 people in the peripheral zone, benefited from tourism to the Ranomafana region.”