soil that makes Bangladesh one of the most agriculturally fertile countries in the world.
Second, each country is the creation of a colonial power—the British, French, or Dutch. Even Madagascar, which makes the most geographic sense because it’s an island, was formed only when one ethnic group subjugated others, a conquest that was administratively consolidated by the French. In the others, European powers cobbled together tribes, ethnic groups, and independent kingdoms (maharajahs, sultans, and emirs) into colonies where unity remained fragile. At independence, British India and the Dutch East Indies were sliced and diced, creating new fissures. Despite half a century of nation building, the boundaries drawn in the colonial era remain a challenge to unity and identity.
There are common threads to the national narratives of colonialism, and to a historical schizophrenia in which the colonizer is both resented as the agent of oppression and exploitation, and admired for transforming the economy, building infrastructure, expanding education, and establishing political institutions. As Shashi Tharoor, a former UN diplomat and Indian cabinet minister, notes: “Whether through national strength or civilizational weakness, India has long refused to hold any grudge against Britain for 200 years of imperial enslavement, plunder and exploitation.”4 This ambiguous relationship to the colonial past has shaped national development and public discourse. As my Malagasy colleague Richard Samuel puts it: “All actions by our government are taken in support of France. It’s neo-colonialism. More than half a century after we declared independence, we have still not achieved it.”
Third, all four countries face daunting environmental and climatic challenges—devastating floods, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, urban pollution, saline intrusion, deforestation, and desertification. The benefits of economic development—from mining to cash crops, from logging to tourism—come with social costs. Governments, foreign and domestic business interests, international agencies, environmental groups, and local communities are engaged in high-stakes conflicts over land, natural resources, and water. The technocrats who decided to address the Madagascar government’s budget deficit by leasing more than half the country’s agricultural land to a South Korean conglomerate did not consult with the people farming the land, let alone offer them any compensation. In the furor that followed, the government was overthrown in a coup.
Fourth is the movement of people. Internal and external migration are most often driven by economic factors: historically by the global and national slave trades and the transportation of indentured laborers to rubber and sugar cane plantations; today by economic opportunities, particularly in the Persian Gulf, where remittances from migrant workers support families and boost domestic GDP. Some migrations are caused by natural disasters or climatic shocks. Yet the most disruptive population movements are occasioned by war, civil conflict, or political change—interethnic conflict in Madagascar, the 1947 partition of British India, Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War, separatist movements and conflicts in regions of Indonesia.
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
