taking several minutes to reach its preferred cruising speed of about 80 kilometers (50 miles) per hour. Once it made it, it chugged along happily, using much less petrol than anything else on the road. For the new driver, the gear shift on the 4L and 2CV was a challenge—you pulled it out directly from the dashboard, then twisted it left and right, forward and backward, in a complex series of motions. In my twenties, living in Britain, I owned first a 2CV and then the slightly upmarket (but no more powerful) Citroën Diane. I soon became expert at the contortions required to shift gears.
I visit my sister and her husband in southwestern France every couple of years. There, it’s unusual to see a 4L or 2CV on the road, although I’ve spotted a few rusting in barns. But they are still the most common taxis on the roads of Tana. Many are survivors of the city’s traffic wars, with battered panels and out-of-whack alignment. On some, the ignition no longer works, so the driver hot-wires the engine. As you rattle up the cobbled streets you try to forget that there’s almost no suspension and just marvel that the car is still running.
The history of the French automobile industry lives and breathes—or rather wheezes—in Tana and other Madagascar towns. I’ve seen other Renault and Citroën models, the Peugeot 204, 304, and 404, and even the occasional Citroën DS (Goddess), the sleek, streamlined car with a hydraulic system that looked years ahead of its time when it was introduced in the mid-1950s. There are gas-guzzling SUVs on the roads of Tana, but in a country where all indicators—unemployment, poverty, health, literacy—put it in the “least developed” category on global indexes, you’re fortunate if you own a 4L or a 2CV. The last ones came off the production line in the early 1990s, but they still command high prices on the used-car market, more than $2,000 for a model with a few dents, a cracked windshield, and worn seats.
FIGURE 3.7 His pride and joy, a Renault 4L taxi
With spare parts no longer available, except from specialty dealers at high prices, how do drivers keep their cars running? The answer is “bricolage” (from the French verb bricoler, to tinker), loosely translated as “do-it-yourself.” “We Malagasy always manage to find a bricolage solution,” Richard told me. The auto parts trade, he said, is controlled by Indian and Pakistani shopkeepers who import parts from factories in Mumbai and Karachi. Many either fit the old cars or can be made to fit with a little bricolage. For that service, you go to one of the many metal fabrication shops that cut and weld made-to-order fencing, pipes, market stall frames, and agricultural implements. They can take a Tata or Mahindra part and make it work for your 4L; if not, they’ll just make you a new part. When cars eventually break down and cannot be repaired, the parts are salvaged and resold. “In this economy, there’s almost always a new use for something,” said Richard.
Madagascar Recycles
You’ll find the most ingenious examples of recycling and bricolage on Tana’s markets. Not the upscale markets where middle-class Malagasy, expatriates, and tourists shop, but the regular markets that serve most residents. Luke took me to the Isotry quartier, one of the poorer districts of central Tana, south of the Soarano railroad station. The Isotry bazaar is off the tourist route, and the more interesting for it. Live geese, ducks, chickens, and turkeys are crammed into straw baskets. Scrawny cats, tethered by string to the baskets, are also on sale; the point-of-purchase message is that if you buy a cat to keep down the vermin, it will not attack your poultry. There are live crabs in buckets, and stacks of friperie (secondhand clothes) and shoes. There’s new stuff, of course, including the bizarrely branded Chinese T-shirts and underwear—Tokyo Super Dry, Cool My To Rock, Hugo Premium Fashion Boss. Because it was early December, vendors were hawking artificial Christmas trees and decorations. In the consumer electronics section, it took me a few minutes to figure out why stalls displayed guitars, amplifiers, car batteries, and solar panels together. It’s because electricity is still not available in some communities around Tana, and city districts experience power cuts. The band must play on, so musicians travel with their own power supply.
At one stall, we found a selection of farming hand tools, with blades of different lengths, widths, and angles designed for every task, all forged from scrap metal. Richard had told me that the scrap metal trade is controlled by ex-zebu herders from the south, a tough bunch who drive hard bargains. Next door, the vendor was selling hand weights fashioned from car gears. Bottles and jars are washed and reused. I bought jars of homemade lasary mango hot sauce, a specialty of northwest Madagascar, and sakay, made from red chili peppers with ginger and lemon juice. To carry the jars, I used a shopping bag made from polyester straps used to secure boxes for shipping. The Malagasy have long learned to recycle and reuse—not through any sense of environmental consciousness but because in a poor country there’s no alternative.
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
