One section of the market is devoted to traditional medicine. The stalls are piled high with wood sticks, bark, shells, bottles, and packets of remedies. One promised to cure almost anything—diseases of the heart, liver, lung, and stomach. Others claimed to improve fertility or build muscles. To ward off evil spirits, there are amulets to wear and incense to burn. It occurred to us that perhaps UNICEF should commission research on the market. The use of traditional medicine is not confined to remote rural regions and ethnic groups; here in the capital city there were dozens of stalls, most offering the same range of merchandise, and people were buying.
An Ample Supply of Vowels
In April 1996, at the height of the Balkan crisis, the satirical newspaper the Onion reported the latest US initiative to bring peace to the region:
Before an emergency joint session of Congress yesterday, President Clinton announced US plans to deploy over 75,000 vowels to the war-torn region of Bosnia. The deployment, the largest of its kind in American history, will provide the region with the critically needed letters A, E, I, O and U, and is hoped to render countless Bosnian names more pronounceable.
The deployment, dubbed Operation Vowel Storm by the State Department, is set for early next week, with the Adriatic port cities of Sjlbvdnzv and Grzny slated to be the first recipients. Said Sjlbvdnzv resident Grg Hmphrs, 67: “With just a few key letters, I could be George Humphries. This is my dream.”7
Far be it from me to criticize US foreign aid policy—even a satirical version of it—but I feel obliged to point out that large stocks of vowels are lying idle and unpronounced in other countries. If the State Department had done its research more thoroughly, it could have purchased an ample supply from Madagascar, giving a much-needed boost to the country’s foreign exchange earnings. Americans should be asking why their government is sending its hard-earned vowels overseas when some American schoolchildren are struggling to form syllables. We need to keep our vowels at home to help make America great again.
Unlike some African countries that have many languages and even more dialects, Madagascar has a single, vowel-rich national language—Malagasy—with French as the second language for most educated people. There are regional differences, of course. Standard or official Malagasy is the dialect of the highland Merina, the government, and national media. Outside the highlands, especially in racially mixed coastal areas, dialects are spoken; people understand official Malagasy but do not use it in everyday life.
Malagasy is not related to other African languages, although it imported words from Bantu and Arabic, and later from English and French. It belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family; its nearest linguistic relative is a language spoken in southern Borneo. Madagascar has a long and rich oral literary tradition, expressed in hainteny (poetry), kabary (public discourse), and ohabolana (proverbs); the Ibonia epic poem, about a folk hero of the same name, has been handed down in different forms across the island, and many stories, poems, and histories are retold in musical form. From the seventh century, ombiasy (wise men) transcribed Malagasy using an Arabic script called sorabe to record sacred knowledge. Written, Western-inspired literature developed shortly after colonization by France at the end of the nineteenth century, and it flourishes today.
Malagasy positively brims with vowels. Of course, some unstressed syllables are dropped, and diphthongs compress vowels, but that’s cold comfort for the tongue given the abundance of a, e, i, and o in many words. A simple greeting, “Hello” (two vowels in English), has seven in Malagasy—Manao ahoana. That’s manageable, but the names of some people and places seem bewilderingly long to the non-Malagasy speaker. The chieftain who unified the Merina clans in the late eighteenth century to form a powerful kingdom in the highlands went by the polysyllabic name of Andrianampoinimerinandriantsimitoviaminandriampanjaka. Presumably, some rival Merina chiefs surrendered after failing to successfully pronounce his name, a small triumph for syllables over armed conflict. Later, he adopted the shorter, easier-to-recall name, Andrianampoinimerina (the lord at the heart of Imerina). His son, who expanded the Merina empire, made it easier for his foes to negotiate terms. He was called simply Radama I.
As in other languages, the name tells a story about the position or lineage of its owner. The name of some kings begins with “Andriana,” a term that denoted the noble caste of Merina society. In the extended form of Andrianampoinimerina, “Andria” appears three times, indicating that the king ruled over three regions. It’s a well-worn monarchical marketing strategy to project power by accumulating titles, so the Merina king was doing no more than European rulers had been doing for centuries. Andrianampoinimerina’s British contemporary, the unfortunate George III, was officially King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, King of Hanover, and Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg. Napoleon I made himself Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, and Mediator of the Helvetic Confederation. All of which makes the Merina king’s name look rather modest. The difference, of course, is that in Malagasy, the titles run together in a compound word.
The Merina kings followed the playbook of all conquerors, renaming places to imprint their own version of history. “The imperial tactic,” according to Luke, “was to inscribe the Merina presence in the mythology and identity of local places.” In many cultures, the clearest markers of settlement and land ownership are ancestral tombs; when these are removed by a conquering army, the original inhabitants’ historical claims to the land are erased. In the early seventeenth century, the chieftain Andrianjaka expelled the inhabitants of Analamanga, a village at the highest meeting point of two forested ridges, and built a rova. According to oral tradition, he deployed a garrison of one thousand soldiers to guard the rova. A later king, Andriamasinavalona, renamed the settlement Antananarivo, the “city of the thousand,” in honor of Andrianjaka’s soldiers, and it became the capital of the Merina kingdom. A hundred miles west of Richard’s home town of Arivonimamo (the “town of a thousand drunken soldiers”), on the edge of the highland escarpment at the terminus of RN1, is the town of Tsiroanomandidy where “two shall not rule,” which is reportedly what the Merina king told the local ruler when he conquered the place. East of Tana on RN2, place names commemorate the passage of the Merina kings and queens and their retainers. There’s Manjakandriana, which literally means “where the king passed through.” Nandihizana is “the place where there was dancing,” marking the arrival of the Merina queen and the cue for the local population to turn out and boogie.
Madagascar has had eight presidents since independence in 1960; the names of six begin with “Ra”—Ramanantsoa, Ratsimandrava, Ratsiraka, Ravalomanana, Rajoelina, and Rajaonarimampianina. When I first reviewed the list of our UA colleagues, I was similarly dismayed: they included Rabaovololona, Ralalaoherivony, Randriamasitiana, Ravelonjatovo, Rakotonirina, Rasolofoniaina, and Ramamonjy. The lineage of most highland Malagasy is represented through their names, which position them in relation to their clan, region, or village. Remembering them is easier when you mentally lop off the honorary “Ra” prefix, which means “Mr.” or “Ms.” But there are still a lot of vowels and syllables. Even for the Malagasy. Antananarivo is usually abbreviated as Tana, except on the iconic French red and white kilometer road markers, where it is uncomfortably squeezed into an ugly “Ant/rivo.”
Divide and Rule
For even the experienced analyst, Madagascar’s politics are infuriatingly complex. Since independence in 1960, the country has vacillated between dictatorship and freewheeling democracy, between socialism and unbridled capitalism, while maintaining a close but uneasy relationship with its former colonial master. Five successive presidents were forcibly ousted from office. In a continent that has seen more than its fair