Fifth is political change. Since achieving independence, and throughout the Cold War era, these countries have vacillated between autocracy and multiparty democracy, between state control of the economy and media and open markets and press freedom. Even in India, where political institutions are well established, strong leaders have emerged—Nehru and the Gandhi dynasty, and today, Narendra Modi. In other countries, where institutions are more fragile, the leaders of anticolonial resistance movements all too often became homegrown despots, amassing power and wealth for their families and associates and ruthlessly suppressing opposition, often with support from the West or the Soviet bloc.
Are We in Africa—or Asia?
It had been a long lunch at Ku-de-ta. Andrew and I decided to walk for an hour or so before returning to the hotel to try to figure out if we could rescue the UNICEF research project. We strolled to the ridge of the haute ville where a great stone staircase descends to the market area and looked west toward the hills and the rice paddies. Most of the people on the streets, with their dark brown skin color and straight black hair, were Asian in appearance. If it weren’t for the French-language signs, cobbled streets, and colonial-era architecture, we could have been in a hill town in Indonesia.
It was more than a millennium ago—somewhere in the Malay Archipelago, near where my journey ends—that a small group of people set sail in their outrigger canoes, heading west with the trade winds across the Indian Ocean and avoiding the monsoon. They stopped for water and supplies at harbors in the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea before sailing south and landing on a large island, previously uninhabited by humans. It’s a journey that took years, maybe even generations, with trade and intermarriage along the way. They were Madagascar’s first settlers.
three
Land of the Merina
Of Kings and Drunken Soldiers
“We’re on our way to Arivonimamo—the town of a thousand drunken soldiers.”
Richard Samuel laughed at his own joke as he edged his dented Nissan pickup through the chaotic traffic of Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo, weaving around aging Citroën and Renault taxis, potholes, and hand carts hauling furniture, metal fencing, and sacks of charcoal.
The name of Richard’s hometown evokes the heyday of the Merina, the highland ethnic group that ruled Madagascar during the nineteenth century and is still prominent in politics and business. In an early campaign, the Merina king Andrianampoinimerina dispatched a thousand soldiers to capture a market town in the rice-growing region about thirty miles west of Antananarivo. Facing little resistance, the soldiers didn’t have much to do except get drunk on home-brewed, sugarcane rum and give the new garrison town its name. In Malagasy, “Arivo” means thousand and “nimamo” drunks.
Richard is proud of his Merina heritage and claims descent from “a former king (roi).” In Madagascar, the word “king” needs to be treated with caution. Until the French colonized the island at the end of the nineteenth century, the central highlands were a bit like medieval Europe, albeit with nicer weather. Local lords, supported by armed retainers, ruled the villages and their rice fields from fortified hilltop positions. To call them kings is a stretch; my colleague Luke Freeman, an anthropologist who has worked in Madagascar for more than twenty-five years, more aptly describes them as kinglets (in French, roitelets or petty kings).
Whether roi or roitelet, Richard’s ancestors were local nobility, their power measured by the size of their domain and the number of zebu—the humped oxen that are the mark of wealth in rural Madagascar—in their herd. Today, descendants of noble families still claim moral authority because of their lineage and, in some cases, their healing powers.
“I have inherited, along with all the members of my extended family, the power to cure burns,” Richard told me. “It’s not a skill, it’s a gift. All the members of my family have it. My son, my daughter, my sisters, my brothers—all can cure.” It was, he said, a matter of noblesse oblige. No traditional healer in a community hangs out a shingle like a doctor or dentist. People simply know which family has the power to cure this or that ailment. Richard says he does not expect payment; his power is a gift from the ancestors, and he must use it to benefit others. Some traditional healers take cash payments, but Richard says it’s more common to receive a gift—a bag of rice or cooking oil.
I met Richard at the University of Antananarivo (UA) in September 2014, on my first trip to Madagascar for the UNICEF research study. He was soft-spoken, modest about his own experience, and respectful of others’ opinions. We bonded quickly, and on my visit in March 2016 he invited me to travel to Arivonimamo.
Richard lives in two worlds. He has advanced degrees in economics and development studies, has worked in senior positions for government ministries, and is on the sociology faculty at the country’s leading teaching and research institution. As the descendant of nobility and a traditional healer, he inhabits another world, far from the pressures of life and work in the city. As often as he can, he returns to Arivonimamo—to the modest home of his parents, to the Catholic high school where he was educated by Canadian friars, to the church where he was baptized and had his first communion. On the main street and market, people stop to ask for his advice on all sorts of matters. Most of his family members still live in the area. A few miles west of the town is the new house Richard and his wife Tina have built for weekend getaways and their retirement. It’s next door to the family cemetery.
FIGURE 3.1 Richard Samuel, academic, political activist, minor nobility, traditional healer
Island or Continent?
If people have an image of Madagascar, it’s usually of a beach, a baobab tree, or a cartoon lemur. The island’s name recognition was boosted immensely by the 2005 computer-animated comedy hit from DreamWorks about four animals from New York’s Central Park Zoo who, after spending their lives in happy captivity, are suddenly repatriated to Africa and shipwrecked off the coast of Madagascar. Two sequels and a spin-off, the implausibly titled Penguins of Madagascar, put the “big red island”—so named because of the red, claylike soil of the central highlands—on the movie map and may have given a minor boost to tourism.
It wasn’t always an island. It was once part of the supercontinent of Gondwana, sandwiched between Africa and India. Gondwana started breaking apart about 180 million years ago, but it was another 100 million years before Madagascar detached itself from Africa and floated off into its present position in the Indian Ocean. Stretching almost 1,000 miles north to south and almost 375 miles across at its widest point, it’s almost the size of Ukraine and a little larger than Texas; it’s in the top fifty countries in the world for land area, larger than Kenya, Thailand, or Spain. It’s often ranked as the world’s fourth-largest island, after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo. But is it an island? Its long geologic history, wide range of vegetation and climatic zones—from semidesert to tropical rainforest—and biodiversity arguably place it in the “continent” category; indeed, some (including, of course, the tourist companies) call it the “eighth continent.” Neither geologists nor biologists, writes geologist Maarten de Wit, “have a definition that is capable of classifying Madagascar unambiguously as an island or continent.” Which gives de Wit a catchy subtitle for his scientific journal article: “Heads It’s a Continent, Tails It’s an Island.”1
Because it was separated from other landmasses for eighty million years, Madagascar developed a unique ecosystem, with plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. It has more than twelve thousand plant species, almost ten thousand of them found nowhere else, almost 350 reptile species, and forty-three primates, including the signature cuddly ring-tailed lemur. The biodiversity makes Madagascar what