Poverty in Eden : Madagascar: Myth Hardly Fits Reality

Madagascar: The name evokes vague images of the exotic, of spices and rain forests, a culture a world apart.

The reality: Emaciated people subsist in crowded mud or grass huts in little villages. Every girl 14 or older seems to have a baby on her hip and another on the way. What few roads exist are potholed and washed out. A main thoroughfare from the capital city eastward to the nearest port (about 150 miles) is a grueling 10-hour drive by truck or four-wheel-drive vehicle.

In the countryside, a land enriched by rain forests and rolling hillsides, never a day passes without dozens of deliberately set forest fires. The impoverished peasants burn down the rain forest, spot by spot, to clear land for a crop or two of rice. Within a few seasons, the soil is depleted, erosion sets in, the land is abandoned and a new spot of forest is destroyed. This devastating slash-and-burn agricultural practice is called tavy.

Scientists Alarmed

Scientists are increasingly alarmed at the loss of the rain forest and the destruction of natural habitat of animals and plants that exist nowhere else in the world. Their voices are a weak cry in the wilderness, a futile echo against starvation, ignorance and desperate need.

Is there hope? Can Madagascar be saved?

The world’s fourth-largest island, Madagascar lies off the eastern coast of Africa, a world apart since it broke away from the African continent about 165 million years ago. Its plants and animals have evolved on a parallel but separate track from the rest of Earth’s ecology. Primates exist here that are found nowhere else, except in captivity. More than half of the island’s birds and most of its mammals are unique to this place.

An increasing number of biologists consider Madagascar “the world’s foremost conservation priority; the place with the greatest number of unique species in the greatest danger of extinction,” according to National Geographic magazine.

Half of Rain Forest Lost

And yet, just since 1950, Madagascar has lost half its 65,000 square miles of rain forest. What is not lost to the practice of tavy is burned to produce charcoal for fuel.

During the same span of time, the human population has more than doubled to 10.3 million. The average annual income is $250 and the average life expectancy is 50 years. But numbers don’t convey the tragic sense of urgency in Madagascar’s plight. The protection of the rain forest is a race against time. And it clashes with the crying need of the people, who struggle village by village just to stay alive.

Drought has plagued Madagascar this year. As a result, even more fires are being set by villagers. “People believe the smoke will bring rain clouds,” explained Roland Ranaivoratsitohaina, an English-speaking guide from Antananarivo, the capital. Efforts to produce rain artificially by seeding clouds have had little success.

Madagascar isn’t an easy place to visit, and yet for those who go there, it is a place that will burn in memory forever, not only for its overwhelming problems but also for its beauty and its natural wealth--ranging from the remaining lush rain forests in the eastern hills to the stark beauty of the southern desert.

Few Cruise Ships Call

A few cruise ships have begun to call at Madagascar’s port of Toamasina. And at Nossi-Be Island just off the northwest coast, there is even a luxury resort. A couple of tour operators offer guided tours.

There is a rain forest reserve called Perinet, about 85 miles from Antananarivo, where one can go to study the all-but-extinct Madagascar lemur and to see a sample of the splendid rain forest that once covered much of the eastern side of the country.

Scientists from the Primate Center at North Carolina’s Duke University have conducted studies at Perinet for several years. They’ve both educated and learned from a local boy named Maurice Besoa who can spot a lemur in a treetop a hillside away, point out a huge snake that no one else would have seen, or quietly tip a leaf to expose a sneaky scorpion or a heavy-breathing frog.

Maurice leads visitors along barely cleared jungle paths, through swampy stream beds, over rocks and logs and hills in a quest to spot the various types of lemurs that live in the rain forest.

Can Identify Lemur Types

He stops, puts a finger to his lips for quiet, and listens to their calls, some a mournful wail and others that sound like mocking laughter, and he identifies the type of lemur and whether the call is a warning, a greeting or just idle chatter.

Maurice said, with Roland as his interpreter, that his younger brother, Bedo, 17, has been offered a chance to study at Duke if he can somehow manage to improve his English over the next two years. Besides helping visiting scientists with their work, and leading occasional bird-watching tours, the brothers have little chance to practice the language.

Experts have identified 90 birds, 26 mammals, 26 amphibians (mostly frogs), 16 reptiles (mostly snakes) and 33 varieties of lemurs all exclusive to Madagascar. They’ve tracked 42 families of indris lemurs at Perinet alone.

One lemur, the aye-aye, with long fingers and claws and large floppy ears, is especially endangered.

“The villagers fear aye-aye,” Roland said. “If they see aye-aye they must kill it, or evil will come to the village.” He shook his head, sadly.

Another type, the hapalemur, a gentle gray creature, lives only in bamboo. Maurice pointed out a family of these rare little creatures in a bamboo stand near his family’s hut.

Clean, Primitive Hotel

Visitors to the Perinet Reserve stay at the Hotel de la Gare, a fairly clean but decidedly primitive hotel which also doubles as the Andasibe train station on the route from Antananarivo to the east coast. Trains call four times a day, including a wall-rattling interruption of sleep at 2 a.m.

The finest room in the house at Hotel de la Gare is the royal suite, in which Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, spent a night two years ago in his capacity as chairman of the World Wildlife Fund International.

All of the nine guest rooms are large and Spartan. Mattresses sag between brass bedsteads; pillows are filled with dried grasses. Sheets are clean and mended. There are no screens at the windows. Toilets are down the hall. Guests must bring their own drinking water, toilet paper and soap.

Meals are simple, cooked up entirely with local ingredients: barnyard eggs; long loaves of wheat bread; various meat broths and vegetable soups; slabs of beef, pork or chicken; rice or potatoes, and for dessert berries or fruit in season. The local brew is Three Horses beer.

People Speak Softly

The people of Madagascar are soft-spoken; even children at play have quiet voices. “Only a showoff is loud,” Roland said.

The population breaks down roughly between the light-skinned Merina people of the central plateau and the more Negroid peoples of the coastal regions. Malagasy is a lilting language that evolved from the inhabitants’ Indochinese origins and has little in common with any of the languages on the continent of Africa. The nearest language to Malagasy so far identified is spoken in central Borneo, far across the Indian Ocean. There are also similarities to the languages of Polynesia. The first people are thought to have arrived in Madagascar about a thousand years ago, coming from the east in outrigger canoes.

The capital city is a sprawl of mostly old buildings that march up and down the 12 hillsides that rise from the surrounding high plateau and mark the city boundaries. Each hill was occupied by a separate tribe, legend has it, and they joined under a single king in the 1700s, the monarchy being abolished by the French in 1897.

Portuguese Came in 1500

In Western terms, Madagascar’s history is chronicled as being “discovered” by the Portuguese in 1500 and occupied on and off by the French in the 18th and 19th centuries, by the British briefly during World War II. The island has been independent since 1960. Scheduled elections in recent years have been repeatedly postponed.

Visitors face several checkpoints at the airport; luggage is searched and one must declare all the money brought into the country. When foreign money is exchanged for Madagascar francs, there’s no changing back. Tabs are kept on all money exchanges and the figures are again carefully studied at departure to make sure there have been no undeclared transactions.

The taxis are ancient Japanese cars held together with prayers and baling wire. The short trip from the airport into the city passes by dozens of little clusters of shacks and mud-red brick buildings that grow denser as the city approaches.

Standing water and rice paddies surround the city on the broad plain that abruptly rises here and there in steep little hills that look like the hills of a child’s drawing.

Crowds Always in Evidence

From morning to night, there are crowds of people walking and standing along the roadsides, as though the entire population of Madagascar is milling about. Neighborhood stores are tiny wooden booths, each stocked with a few jars and cans, and around each a cluster of people. A house on fire at the edge of the city attracted a quiet throng of a thousand spectators who stood and stared as the blaze crackled and black clouds of smoke rose into the clear blue sky.

Although 80% of Madagascar’s people live in rural villages, even in the capital there are flooded rice paddies and terraces, and more than one stone-paved street has buckled under the pressure of persistent vegetation.

Most of the city--except the rich part of town and Embassy Row--is depressingly poor, but visitors can walk around safely. There is a large public garden, free, which is a lovely enclave overlooking a lake. People come to stroll and to sit and watch the flocks of hundreds of white herons that roost in the trees of the garden.

Busy Shopping Scene

The main shopping street is given over every Friday to the Zoma, an outdoor market, from dawn to dark, offering mountains of fruits and vegetables, handmade brooms and baskets, embroidered linens and carved icons, beneath umbrellas of white parchment and flowering jacaranda trees. Below, raggedy babies suckle at their mothers’ breasts, old men apply new varnish to sun-baked furniture for sale, and housewives swap coins for produce.

Besides the flora and fauna exclusive to Madagascar, visitors are drawn by the intriguing religious and superstitious practices of the people.

One lingering custom is the legendary reopening of graves every few years to bring the ancestors up to date on the events of the living. People are said to take the bones around town, introduce them to new members of the family, have a feast or two, and then return them to their silk shrouds and crypts.

Time is a circle in Madagascar, with the spirit of the dead alive and revered among the living, observing and demanding. The past is intertwined with the present; it is the future that threatens to become unraveled.