with the South Korean conglomerate Daewoo for a ninety-nine-year lease of half of the island’s arable land to grow grain. South Korea, with a growing population and limited land and water resources, certainly needed the grain, but the decision was both legally and morally dodgy. The prospect of selling off ancestral land to foreigners horrified many people. What was to happen to the subsistence farmers who had used the land for centuries to grow rice and herd zebu? Would villages be moved from ancestral lands? Would Daewoo bulldoze family tombs to clear land for planting? This time, Ravalomanana had gone too far.
Richard, who had taken part in the popular uprisings against Ratsiraka in 1991 and 2001, was back on the streets in January 2009 to call for the resignation of Ravalomanana, the leader he had previously supported. For months, the president was locked in a power struggle with the young mayor of Tana, Andry Rajoelina, a former disc jockey, whose party had swept local elections. A week of rioting, looting, and burning in the capital left up to one hundred dead.
Ravalomanana’s ascent to the presidency had reduced French influence. The Anglo-leaning president actively sought commercial and political ties with the United States and promoted the English language as a way for Madagascar to compete in the global economy. With the discovery of offshore oil deposits in the Mozambique Channel, France claimed drilling rights around two of the Îles Éparses (Scattered Islands), small coral islands that were French territories and had no permanent population. Ravalomanana claimed the islands for Madagascar. His diplomatic saber rattling worried the French, who decided to support his rival and provided Rajoelina with refuge in their embassy. The public mood changed when the presidential guard opened fire outside the palace, killing twenty-eight protesters and injuring more than two hundred. The government lost control of the army and police force, and tanks moved into the capital. On March 17, a few hours after declaring he would fight to the death rather than resign, Ravalomanana stepped down, transferring power to a trio of loyal military leaders. A few hours later, the trio were arrested and handed over power to Rajoelina. Ravalomanana fled to Swaziland, then South Africa. He was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment on charges relating to the shooting of protestors outside the palace. The coup was roundly condemned by the international community, including the African Union (AU), but the AU was not ready to take on Madagascar’s large and well-trained army. Rajoelina was effectively left in power, with international bodies accepting his promise to call early elections.
Promises, promises. From March 2009 Rajoelina promised—and then postponed—elections every year until 2013. Meanwhile, the economy tanked; most foreign aid, which had accounted for 40 percent of the budget, was suspended; licenses for mining projects were revoked, and foreign investors were scared away. In polls, two-thirds of Malagasy described their financial situation as bad or very bad, compared with one-third before the coup. The main stumbling block to an election was the conflict over who could run. Eventually, a deal was brokered that barred both Rajoelina and Ravalomanana, but each endorsed a proxy candidate. In October, the proxies—former finance minister Hery Rajaonarimampianina for Rajoelina and former health minister Jean Louis Robinson for Ravalomanana—fended off thirty-one other candidates to go into a December runoff. Rajaonarimampianina was the eventual winner. The donors returned, followed, somewhat nervously, by the mining companies and other foreign investors.
Richard holds France partly responsible for Madagascar’s political instability and lack of economic progress. “When British colonies became independent, Britain did not meddle in their affairs and they were left free to develop,” he said. By contrast, through a policy sometimes dubbed Françafrique, France continues to intervene, militarily, politically, and economically, in its former colonies. “France wants our president to be on its side for political and economic reasons—for the oil of the Mozambique Channel, for mineral resources. French financial interests are still strong. All actions by our government are taken in support of France. It’s neocolonialism.”
Over his career, Richard has served in government for more than a decade, under three presidents—Zafy, Ratsiraka, and Rajoelina. Yet he also joined the street protests that led to the overthrow of three presidents—in 1991, 2001, and 2009. Like his dual roles as college professor and traditional healer, he sees no contradiction between his political positions. Yet he despairs of lasting change. “Since independence, Madagascar has had four republics. Each time we change the republic, we change the constitution. Each party, each faction rewrites the constitution to meet its needs.” He shrugged. “We’re always having referendums. It’s very tiring.”
four
On and Off the Road in Madagascar
Not-So-Wild Madagascar
UNICEF had booked a resort hotel in a national park east of Tana for a weeklong workshop to launch the research project. Away from the noise and bustle of the capital, free from classes and meetings, our five-person team and our colleagues from UA could huddle in breakout sessions, share meals, and build personal relationships. In the jungle, mobile phone coverage was patchy and the Internet slow. There wasn’t much to do when the sun went down except sit on the veranda, enjoy a rhum arrangé, and listen to the lemur lullabies.
It’s just over ninety miles from Tana to Andasibe National Park on RN2, the highway to Toamasina, the main port on the east coast. If the weather is clear and the traffic light, you can reach Andasibe in two hours; our outbound and return trips both took three hours, an average of thirty miles per hour. Trucks hauling fuel and containers wheezed up the hills; every few miles, we came across one stranded by the roadside, its driver sprawled across the open engine, or the trailer precariously jacked up, teetering on the edge of a cliff. Almost all freight to the capital and highlands is transported on this road. The single-line railroad the French built along the route could carry heavy freight, but the truck owners’ cartel has put pressure on the politicians to withhold funding for maintenance, and the track has fallen into disrepair. We saw only one train.
From Tana’s so-called ring road, the surreally named Boulevard de Tokyo (built with Japanese aid), RN2 rises through the hills. It’s a similar landscape to the Imerina region west of the city, with most land devoted to rice cultivation. The paddies stretch out over the bottom lands and the lower slopes of hills where farmers build terraces; water flows from springs into the terraces and then to the lower paddies through channels or pipes, where flow is controlled by sluice gates. In the fields, wood-fired brick kilns stand like sentries, and large stacks of rough red-mud bricks line the roadside; in several places, the granite outcrops have been gouged to quarry stone for road and home construction.
In 1817, the Merina king Radama I led an army of twenty-five thousand along this route to subdue the Betsimasraka and capture Toamasina. The Betsimasraka (the “many inseparables”) was a loose confederation of clans that ruled a large stretch of the eastern seaboard and had long-established trading relations with Europeans. The kings periodically processed through their domains to remind the kinglets of who lived in the largest rova, who had the troops and cannon, and who had the support of the British Empire. The royals and other andriana were carried up and down the hills on sedan chairs by teams of bearers. Depending on the royal weight, there were two or four bearers up front and at the back. It was an exhausting but prestigious job carting around the royals and, later, French colonial officials and missionaries. According to Luke, those at the front of the sedan needed different strengths from those at the back, so they developed muscular specialties. You can almost hear the negotiation. “OK, I’ll go back right on Monsieur, le colonel. My rate is ten francs a kilometer on flat stretches, fifteen up hills, and three meals a day. An extra charge if he’s more than eighty kilograms.”
As RN2 descends from the highland escarpment, the hills on either side are clear cut or covered with second-growth eucalyptus forest. A hundred years ago, old-growth forest extended over much of the highlands and northeast, but most has been destroyed by slash-and-burn agriculture and the cutting of timber for charcoal, firewood, and home construction; perhaps as much as 90 percent of the island’s original forest has been
