There is nothing which quite compares with the first couple of days spent in this country, over 5,500 miles round the globe from Europe, south of the Tropic of Capricorn. I followed on my in-flight screen the graphic of a little plane twitching its way out of France, down the length of Italy, crossing the toe at Messina; then over the Mediterranean Sea and into African air space at Benghazi, following a straight line over a big chunk of Africa - Africa! -, a route which kept parallel with the Nile, flew right over Mount Kilimanjaro, then the magical-sounding island of Zanzibar to slice out over the Indian Ocean and into - oh the very name of it - Madagascar, entering the island along a huge river delta. The river gleamed in morning light and we descended over a red land, then over circular enclosures and tall red houses to land at Antananarivo airport, where the temperature is a constant thirty degrees Celsius in November, and where immediately bright-smiling youths clamoured to help me to find a taxi, a hotel, carry luggage, change money, offer phone credit. My mobile phone is no longer on the London-Casablanca axis - I have moved into a different time zone to a place where people call me ‘vazaha’, imagine I must be immensely rich because I come from that wealthy other-world zone which is every western nation. I am going on from the capital with another plane to a coastal town in the extreme south-east of this enormous island nation, washed by the Indian Ocean: Fort Dauphin, Taolonaro.
During the fifteen-minute taxi ride from the airport and through the town, I gaze, inwardly open-mouthed in surprise, at the sight of so many people, of small children in grubby oddments of clothing and bare feet, who stare with big eyes; all living so close together in rough and ready shelters made from wood, metal sheet, palm leaf, whatever comes to hand; and all amid the din of laughter and chatter, the constant noisy animation of people, vehicles and bicycles, with chickens and chicks pecking about amongst it all. I feel so European all of a sudden. In Europe we live with such confident expectations; we expect drinking water from the tap, toilets which flush and bathrooms to put them in, shops you can go inside to browse, cooking facilities at waist height, unlimited and uninterrupted electricity supply, social services, roads you can drive a car on, animals enclosed in fields, power tools, traffic lights, housing which was not growing on a palm tree a short while ago; shoes, women in trousers, private cars requiring car parks, public transport which runs to time and in some comfort. Departing from these expectations is disorienting, initially. I realize that I had cherished something of all those notions, European that I am, now a stranger travelling in this stranger land, amazed at what I see. This is the way another world of people live and work.
The roads in the town are mostly paved, and sandy, for the old port is below, down a short road. The beach and the ocean become visible as we reach the small house where I am to stay. The taxi bumps away down to the road again. All is delightful: the three coconut palms beside the house, the sunset beyond the headland of the new port, the warmth, the welcome, the ocean’s roar and a bed with a four-poster mosquito net hung from a frame above. I am here.
I walked early to the market, along tracks busy with children, workmen building walls with cubes of pale stone, and the many stalls, papered with Coca Cola stickers, to one where I was shown I would enjoy pancakes for breakfast and a tin cup of coffee, sweetened with condensed milk, from a large thermos. I practised the phrases I had copied, listening for the way they should sound, with the lilt in the voice. At many stalls I could buy credit for the mobile phone and, in the first few days, the necessary bottled water. Every shack along the roadside is a stall of some kind. Walking is a social activity and I should guess that I used that greetings couplet about fifty times a day to respond to friendly smiles, or engage in scraps of French conversation with groups of children; even tiny ones know how to say ‘bonjour’ plus the inevitable ‘vazaha’. The lichi trees are in season and the women bind sprigs together for sale by the roadside: the pink skins and shiny seeds form much of the litter underfoot. The identifiable remainder is plant debris and shreds of plastic from the flimsy bags given with goods. I saw no discarded glass at any time, because all bottles are returned for the deposit and re-filled. Boys play football; plastic bags, tightly wound with string make a good enough ball for bare feet. A very large stiff sisal leaf with a thick base makes a surf board, big as a whale’s rib, for sliding down a bank of earth. Taxis toot when they pass me, for as a vazaha I might prefer to ride.
Nowhere seems more animated than the market, a maze of streets lined with kiosques and shacks, where the assorted wares are stacked, hung, piled on the pavement even, while members of the shopkeeper’s family are sleeping beneath the counter or on mounded goods, to keep out of the midday sun. This stall sells plastic wares, towers of coloured bowls of many sizes, and buckets, brushes and brooms. The next one deals in mobile phones, another in hardware, selling a thousand small items and also advertising hairdressing; the women mostly braid their hair elaborately in multiple plaits. The outer row of market stalls sells clothing, frip, all washed, from bales sent from France mostly. The customer is expected to pick through this, and without undue ceremony try an item on, then barter a little to reach an agreed price, amid grins and laughter. In the back, a woman and a child or two will be sleeping. Many wonderful things may be found; consequently the local people have invented their own brand of fashion, displaying a fine sense of style: an old man walked by wearing a pair of flowered cotton beach shorts, sandals, a tweed jacket and had topped it all off with a very practical velour horse-riding helmet. Women prefer the patterned lambahoany, tied around the bust or waist. People seem very courteous, saying azafady when they want to pass, and there is much laughter. The inner ring of the market offers quite a challenge to the senses: this is the meat and fish market, which must be good because a million emerald flies cannot be wrong. The meat is zebu and the fish and seafood are morning fresh. If you want chicken you must choose one from the lobster pot cages, take it home alive and deal with it yourself. Vegetables are abundant here, so is fruit, and people can eat well on not so much. It is clear that many do not have that much. Rice is filling and eaten at nearly every meal.
Few people appear to smoke cigarettes, which are expensive and can be bought singly, and because petrol is sold at European prices, there are not many saloon cars to be seen, and the taxi drivers free-wheel whenever possible. There are no traffic lights for there is no circulation except for the taxis, dusty 4x4 vehicles with fuel cans stacked on the roof rack, and bicycles. The bicycle has a long lifetime, not for sport, but for carrying all manner of goods. It is the commonest form of transport: one of the busiest stalls in town was a workshop for repairing and renovating old bicycles. Every day I observed quite young boys pedalling or pushing their bicycles with a stack of three or four sacks of charcoal strapped expertly to the panier rack. Riding while holding a cockerel on the lap and packages on the back is no trouble, nor is a rolled sheet of shiny roofing tin, or a length of recovered timber held crosswise, or a neat large bundle of palm leaves, a kit for a new roof. People spend their days from 5am when it becomes light, walking about, carrying materials. Women balance buckets of water, enormous baskets and bags of produce or washing on their heads, and walk tall with straight backs. In Europe it used to be one flat book and it was called Deportment. I saw nobody lugging a bag braced on the hip as Europeans do. Babies are carried on the back in the lambahoany cloth, tied so that the child is pressed to the mother’s body and she can continue working. Men employ a wooden pole with a bag hung onto each end, kept from sliding off with a nail. I followed a fisherman who carried four very large fish, each easily a metre long, hanging tight and glossy, steely blue like giant mackerel. The young woman I passed walking up the hill from the beach with two very big wet fish balanced perfectly one upon the other on her head, amazed me. Just how do you balance fish? Women keep their hands free and can look after a child at the same time and even turn their heads without shifting the load one bit. They carry this way instinctively – I saw a woman who had nothing but a small bag of dried beans on her head; and another later in my stay who brought her load of clothes to wash by a river, wrung it, spread it to dry on some bushes, then having nothing left but the bar of soap, put that onto her head and walked home.
The days are very hot. Men who have set out furniture for sale along the road edge, lie beneath their own tables while they wait for trade. People sit in the shadow of any building, under the body of a large truck – any shade will do. At midday the various schools in the town release children in differently coloured shirts, laughing and chattering, home for lunch. A herd of hump-backed zebu cattle amble their way past the starred hotel, causing taxis to wait; interesting that the drivers do not hoot at this slow passage but do later, at a taxi which has stalled and is being pushed out of the way by the driver and another man, presumably the passenger. As I watch I have to find excuses not to buy silver bracelets, vanilla pods or carvings, from the girls who persistently present these, wrapped in a cloth; I know I will crack soon. All this surprises me. Give me another day or two and everything I have seen will begin to appear normal, even logical. But for now, all I can say is ‘What an amazing town’.
Next instalment: (2) in which I go out of town on a bicycle and other means.
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copyright Julia Austen 2015