David
Attenborough wept when he visited a year ago, seeing the rainforest, which had
been scorched and burnt to build the rice terraces, which would have been
charming if you didn’t know what they were before. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the trees cut down to
build the furnace, to create the monstrous Orks, is replaced in Madagascar by
the terraces of blood red earth, which give the Malagasy’s more rice to eat
than the Chinese. There are men
working digging deep to create bricks from mud, placed in prosaic piles and
then fired in kilns made of the same brick.
A fifteen day tour of the island is not enough to do justice to the
place, but on the whistle stop tour organised by tour company Explore, it was
enough to realise Madagascar is going through an Industrial revolution and it
looks ugly. But we went through one of
our own, so who are we to judge?
I
went with Explore, a company which has excellent guides who know their country
and tell it like it is, not how the brochure tells it as it is. No travel show clichés here. This is
Madagascar in the raw and myself and ten others (including Tom on our last big
holiday adventure together) travelled in a coach 1000 miles in fifteen days
from the cold wet highlands of the East to the hot, arid desert and beach coast
of the west.
The
best way to express the experience of Madagascar is through emotion.
On
seeing the level of deforestation, initially I felt angry. The more our guide for the fifteen day trip
with Explore told us – the excellent Claude – the more I realised how complex,
contradictory and confrontational the culture is. The rainforests have been decimated on a
scale I could not have imagined all within a decade. There are pockets left and what is left is
being eaten away by locals who do not understand the value of lemurs,
chameleons, geckos and the tourists who pay money to visit them. Why should they? If they are able to feed
their family on rice and get money for the sapphires they mine for, what good
is a lemur? The wide eyed all dancing
all singing animal is something that have grown up with but either have to be
paid to not kill or penalised with twenty five years imprisonment if they
do. There are initiatives to integrate
the community into understanding the importance of the rainforest but the lack
of understanding shows in the poor quality of guiding. At only one Park we visited, the Lemur
Park outside the town of Tanna, which has traffic resembling Fulham Road on a
Chelsea Cup Final, we were told to not approach the lemurs, they can approach
us, but we don’t approach them. No smoking, no loud voices and no feeding. All other Parks we visited – and we visited
over fifteen in our time there – there was no direction, the guides were noisy
and ‘lion fever’ ensued when lemurs were spotted, as all the groups trekking
through the forests rushed to the sites, pushing each other over, while the
hapless lemurs looked down from on high wondering what all the fuss was
about. The lemurs that ventured down
– some more confident than others – looked curious but most looked scared. They have reason to be. On the edge of Sapphire City, a village
which has built up over a year following the find of sapphires, a small amount
of rainforest (
Zombitse
National Park – now protected by the World Wildlife Fund – is the last place of
the nocturnal (vampiric) lemur, and the Madagascar buzzard, cuckoo roller and
black parrots and Greenbull. It is a
rainforest zoo with tours which last about an hour and a half, but we are told
the locals from Sapphire Town come in at night and kill the lemurs because they
believe if there are no lemurs to save there is no need for a rainforest, and
they will be able to mine this area too. One of the other guests in the group
tells me in South Africa they have solved this problem. They kill poachers on
sight. No jail, no excuse, no
burial.
And
what of the Malagasy themselves? Their
culture is self-sabotaging by its very nature.
Heaped in ancestral ‘it’s always done this way’ with a healthy dose of
fear and cruelty. Take the fate of the
majestic Zebu, native to the island. Any man worth his many Zebu herd, receives
a tomb at his death accustomed to his wealth his life. In the Barra tribe, a man steals a Zebu, a majestic animal with a
beautiful face, and then buys a wife with it.
The prettier the wife, the more Zebu he must steal. The tribe is
polygamous, as are most of the tribes in the west, and so he ends up stealing a
lot of Zebu. When they marry they kill the Zebu. A man is only worth as many Zebu he has. He steals them and then creates a herd –
which again all are slaughtered at his death.
The Malagasy believe when a man dies his children should not inherit, as
they need to prove their own worth.
Vast herds are killed and the meat is wasted as even in the grandest of
ceremonies not all is eaten. There is
no way to store the meat either. Next,
Zebu are slaughtered as part of a ritual ceremony to awaken the spirits. The Zebu is pierced through the throat with a
spear, so the animal screams and awakens the spirits. The throat is then cut
and the blood encouraged to flow onto the ground. It is not good to be a Zebu in
Madagascar. The chickens are something
else here. There was a tradition to have
all new borns left in a Zebu enclosure and if the Zebu stepped on the baby, the
baby was a bad spirit and was meant to die, and if the baby survived it was a
good spirit. They don’t do that one any
more. The normal size of family use to be eleven (despite the Zebu ceremony)
and is now four. The population has
increased from five million in 2010 to twenty five million in 2016, most being
young.
The
animals do not stand a chance.
Is
there any light relief? So called
Sporting Chickens because they have long legs and long necks and are able to run
very fast, they are, like the Zebu, a main stay of the cooking, which is mainly
rice, rice and more rice, sweet potato in the west and vegetables. The influence of France dominates, as do the
number of visitors from France.
Breakfast is bread and jam, sometimes with croissant and pain au
chocolat although that is mainly for the tourist as it is in France.
And
what of the lemur? You need a good
camera. An iPhone is not good enough. You need a zoom. The lemurs rightly stay up in the trees away
from the visitors, bewildered by the noise down below. In Ranomafana National park, where the new
species of lemur the Gold Bamboo can be found, when we found it, so did four
other groups, all pushing each other out the way, guides shouting to each other,
trekkers chatting away. No one was
told to shut up. In the fifteen days I
was there, I saw over eighteen species although there are suspected to be over
eighty and many more yet to be discovered before the cut down all the
rainforest. You will get neck ache
looking up for so long. I was taking
photos of what I thought was a diademed sifaka lemur at the Analamazoatra
Reserve, only to discover five minutes later I was staring at a clump of wet
moss. It was here we also spotted
chameleons, including the smallest and largest in the world, and geckos and insects,
which look like, dried leaves and twigs.
You end up looking at everything much more closely and for longer. The lemurs are utterly enchanting. They to
‘move it move it’, dancing between one tree to the next and singing to each
other, and huddling together for warmth and comfort. Unlike the Malagasy, they are
monogamous.
Some
traditions are bizarre. The bones are
kept of the deceased family members in carefully constructed tombs, some of
which are painted. The more important
the man, the bigger the tomb. We saw some the size and shape and image of small
boats. Others are for families and the
skeletons are piled one on top of each other, the average number each tomb
takes is thirty. The skeletons of
brother in laws are brought into the house and the men of the family are able
to insult or swear at the bones as they were not able to do so in life. When I asked if the women are able to do
this, Claude smiled and shook his head. “The women don’t need to. They do it
while the man is alive.”
And
what of the people? They are lovely.
Having read the above you may think they should be a cruel, hard people,
but with the exception of Sapphire Town, where we weren’t allowed to stop because
it was too dangerous (full of prostitutes and drug dealers, and mirror-sun
glassed fat mafia types guarding gem palaces, and stores selling everything
from spare ribs to spare parts, women panning for the small sapphires amongst
the other stones by the side of the road. Elsewhere the people are welcoming,
friendly, engaging and curious. We
stopped off at Fianarantsoa, a village on market day where the locals on the
cooler days, wear coloured scarves around their bodies – both men and women.
Women and men carry baskets of wild spinach and sporting chickens (if they are
able to catch them). Large baguettes
and small sweet donuts are sold with piles of rice, and chocolate which sort of
resembles our own. (Kitkat is called
Kingfat there).
The
East side is cool and wet, with more rainforest, and the highlands, the locals
looking more Indonesian than African.
Their straight hair and lighter skin only being betrayed when they are
asked to dance and sing which is infectious African beat.
The
West side is hot and dry, they call the sun the eye of the day and the blanket
of the poor people, and the lemurs seem to love bathing in the warmth, while
they spend most of their time shivering in the rainy season. In the parched desert landscape, this is where
the balboa trees survive, like giant carrots, sticking their fat fingers up
into the air and surviving centuries although they may find the next decade the
toughest. Claude tells us the Chinese give the Malagasy jobs in the East, but
other guides blame the Chinese for stripping the land. In the West, the Indi
Pakistan treat the locals ‘like dogs’ according to Claude, but everyone blames
the government. No money the government has received over the past three years
has gone to any good cause. Claude
explains. “Since the political uprising, they just want to get as much out of
the country as they can while they are in power. They don’t think about the good of the people
or the long term, they just think about how to line their own pockets. But then
are your governments any better?”
Our
last few days were spent on a beach. I
kept calling it an island, but it wasn’t. It was just further down the coast
from Toliara. We stayed in a hut on the
beach, which had no running hot and cold water, and where you had to shower
from large buckets and hot water was provided in a bucket on request. I became extremely adept at washing myself,
remembering how I had watched the ladies by the roadside bathe their
children. There was an option to go
snorkelling on Nosy Ve, a sacred island where albino birds were spotted where
we found Dory and Nemo and Octopus in the Indian Ocean. As well as whales.
There were lots of whales.
Souvenirs
are beautifully calved inlaid wood. Don’t buy sapphires or any precious stones
for that matter. Say you want to see the
lemurs. I believe nature always finds a way and there is hope for them thanks
to the work of Theo, Patricia, Claude and people like them either doing
something or sharing what they know, although by the end of the trip, I completely
understood why Attenborough sobbed.
