We were eight in the solid 4x4 Turbo wagon, with Goodrich all-terrain tyres, plus a spare; four fuel containers on the roof gallery along with our own luggage and all the food and water we would need for four days, the lot arranged by Dino the driver and lashed down, with a protective plastic sheet over all. We were going to the southernmost tip of Madagascar, a full day’s drive away, to the Cap Ste Marie; which I had read of in the adventures of Robert Drury, a young 18th century seaman, who, following his shipwreck, had spent nearly twenty years, held captive to local chiefs. Our journey would take about seven hours and has been known to take ten, but this was not yet the wet season, so the roads would be as passable as may be expected. As we drew southwards, there were first fewer trees, then fewer rice fields, finally less of any kind of leafy growth; instead spiny plants, often very tall, pressed in on the road. The land grew redder and more barren. The red road stretched straight ahead and we left behind the view of distant mountains. A brick lorry, laden also with dozen workers, passed us heading back towards the town, and then off to the side we saw the brick makers themselves, their huts and the kilns built from red bricks stacked ready for firing. The few villages we passed had huts sometimes roofed with tin, for the traveller’s palm trees are scarce here. This palm, aside from the usefulness of its huge leaves, and the water they enclose, is said to direct the traveller since its leaf blades grow in flat section at the base, which is aligned east west. Indeed, where several grow together this is broadly so. The fruit stems however are arranged on spurs facing north south. There were many people on the road, evidently walking great distances with their load on their head, or on bicycles, or driving their zebu carts. These andruiy people used to be nomadic and their name means ‘the tribe of the people of the thorns’. Many times we spotted herdsmen moving their amiable zebu cattle or goats to find new pasture, which is not as green as it sounds – since all the growth is spiny, these animals are adapted to the tough leaves from which they get all their water.
Our route took us through Ambovombe, the home of one of the Malagasy men travelling with us, friends we had already spent much time with in Fort Dauphin. Seraphin had not seen his family for a year, so costly and difficult is the journey. There we would stop for a meal. To reach the house we passed through a wide square where a small boy bowled a bicycle tyre hoop with a stick, women carried washing, men sat in the shade of a tree, children stopped to watch us pass. The driver negotiated several twists and turns in the sandy streets, passing between dwellings joined by narrow footpaths where villagers lived, and arrived, startling a cockerel and some geese as we appeared from between the trees. All the family seemed to be assembled, and we were greeted by each in turn. Before sitting to eat, a sister showed us to a bucket, a tin cup and a ladle placed beside the well so we could wash our hands. The house was large and cool, built of new tin sheeting, long net drapery hiding this, from floor to roof. Heavy furniture, and photographs and trophies lined along a large dresser would not have looked out of place in a wealthy Paris apartment. We sat on the many sofas while soft drinks were served, followed by a meal of salad and braised zebu meat. Later, after numerous photographs of smiling faces in laughing groups, we went on our way, with gifts of woven baskets.
We came, in the afternoon, to a large bridge which at some part of the year must cover a wide and powerful river; now though, the flow was reduced to a third its size, yet filled with activity. Leaning over the parapet, high above this fascinating scene, we observed the life of that village, an image I cannot forget. Dotted all along its banks or beaches were people, singly or in groups, busy washing themselves or their clothes, watering animals, bathing or swimming. Clothes were spread out to dry upon the sand, children were submitting to energetic scrubbing of heads and bodies, zebu sat and chewed. On our return journey we would pass by this place again, but much later in the day, and see a strange sight – two dozen zebu, their herder behind, running and cantering over the red sand in their haste to get to the water’s edge to drink. The low sun pulled long shadows from each animal as it ran, kicking up terracotta dust in the air, smudging the sunlit scene to a pastel drawing. Beyond that place, the land spread flat into a wide panorama of commercial plantations of sisal and aloe vera, both spiky, sword-leafed cactus, stretching in dense rows into the distance. These plantations are not village owned, but are on a much larger scale: the villagers are but labourers, some of whom we saw cutting the lowest leaves with machetes, to create a trunk; dense prickly pear used as field divisions. So we drove, weaving cautiously around the dips and hollows for more hours while the land grew dark and there were no more habitations, few persons on the road and no bird or sound to be heard. We arrived with the last of the daylight, to the edge of a plateau, which dropped abruptly to a horseshoe-shaped valley plain a few kilometres wide, and a sunset over the sea beyond. A steep track, paved with slabs of concrete led down into the vale, which from a height had held promise of fertile soil, yet from the ground was shown to be arid and dry, growing nothing but thorn bushes. In evidence of this, at the bottom of the track, a water tanker passed coming from the coast. Several young men held on to the top rails of this for the ride and it went by in a cloud of dust. We drove through the last village at dusk and reached our huts, in their picket fence compound, by the sea at La Vanono, where white sand beaches meet the Indian Ocean, an image from a travel poster - to sleep in a reed cabin on the sand, with nothing but the sound of the waves for company; this is peace and quiet, an idyllic place for a holiday. Food was laid out for us on the first night. We would later be served the food which we had brought, ingeniously transformed into interesting dishes at each meal. The electricity was turned on for us, so we could find our beds.
The interesting thing about the makeup of our group was the presence of these four young Malagasy men, the driver by now firmly part of the group. This gave us a chance to meet the local village community; without this we would otherwise have been merely Vazahy, a bunch of white tourists with a driver. As it was, that very same evening, the harshness of life in this barren region was brought home to us when my daughter accompanied the Malagasy friends to the fishing village we had passed through, where one of them knows the ‘chef de quartier’, the ‘president’, as they call him locally. Dancing and music began, then word arrived suddenly of the death of a baby in the village. All merriment ceased on the instant, crowds slipped away and as she and the other friends returned to the lodgings, they could hear mournful singing coming from many huts as all shared in the family’s grief. The following day they met again with the Chef, and led by one of the Malagasy who is a good communicator, had some discussions, seated under the one huge tree beside his house, on topics such as Love and Religion. Villagers gathered to listen. The ‘president’ is a young man with a modern spirit who wants some of the old ways to change, one of which surrounds the costly feasts which by tradition must be offered to the whole village by the family of a person who dies. This is often beyond their means. Not to mention the construction and upkeep of the stone tomb monuments. Along our route we had observed a number of these, resembling pillars, grouped together, white painted and decorated with images from the person’s life. Often zebu horns surmount the pillar. One showed a hunting rifle; another, a much more lavish affair, was a whole building, with a picture of two women beside its doorway and the model of a blue taxi bus on the top.
The community is very poor. Living by the sea in a completely arid region, some distance from any other place, they fish, setting off daily before dawn in pirogues, a canoe ‘dugout’ made from an entire tree trunk with a solid baulk of timber as an outrigger, to counter balance, a square of lashed timbers project on the other side, allowing a fisherman to lean far out when they rig a square sail. They shift along with a wind, otherwise they paddle. I had a go at this and pronounce it strenuous work. We saw 25 or so pirogues, going way beyond the horizon to find the fish. That day they brought back an enormous gape-mouthed monkfish, a small shark and a dolphin, which caused some excitement. Money changed hands even on the rocks where the fish was laid. This though is their only means of survival; they are not farmers and apart from some cassava root which offers poor nutrition, their diet is fish, and when days go by with no fish for reason of bad weather, they have no food. At the market in the nearest village, very few vegetables were on sale, only rice. With a minuscule annual rainfall, these people rely entirely on the tanker delivery of water which they must buy at about 20pence (500 ariary) per bucket. Imagine it. Conserving water is very important therefore. There are dozens of children in this village, all playing on the rocks on a Sunday morning; some little ones having fun smearing their faces with a paste they made by rubbing a red stone on the rock. Most of them were bare, a few wore odds and ends of clothing – it was strange to see European football shirts and a very old ski jacket, turning up in this remote place. Some of the littler children show signs of malnourishment and I wonder what will be the future of this village. The village has a stone church, but the houses are everywhere made of light timber and reed thatch, which must have been transported here, for the only shade is that cast by the thorn trees. Standing in the village with the sea at my back, the wide curved escarpment of the plateau, so flat and bare it could have been drawn with a ruler, is the only view. And yet, in spite of the arduousness of their labours and the harshness of their environment, the happy dancing around the fire on the last evening, and then the singing in close harmony, by the girls and women, of their village song ‘A La Vanono’, with its lilting chorus we could all join in on, belied all that and revealed instead a joyful people, who welcome strangers. I feel privileged to have been there. This left me with a feeling of loss when we departed early the next day. Their voices are still in my ears.
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copyright Julia Austen 2015