From left: sundowners in the dry riverbed at Mandrare River Camp; approaching Miavana resort by helicopter; baobab trees near Mandrare A S I F T H E P A G E S O F A N O L D C H I L D R E N ’ S B O O K H A D F A L L E N O P E N , my first glimpse of Madagascar felt both weirdly familiar and unlike anywhere on Earth. The crumpled highlands around the capital, Antananarivo, were a jumble of tall redbrick buildings with wrought-iron balconies and steep shingled roofs, crammed alongside emerald rice paddies, white ducks, peach orchards, zebu cattle, towering church spires and cobblestoned streets. It was as if a careless artist had mixed up concepts for a storyboard and the result was this dreamscape – Provence by way of Indonesia and southern Africa. To me, it was a song composed of old chords, a type of exposure therapy. My parents were unsettled British settlers who spent the 1970s and 1980s living on a series of remote farms in southern Africa. For nine months of every year I went to boarding school in Zimbabwe, but during school holidays I was left unsupervised on those farms, left to roam wherever and with whomever. There, I was shown a different way of seeing, a world of ancestors, bewitchment and sacred trees. My family and I weren’t where we were from, but we weren’t from where we were either. That’s my crux. I split somewhere – not the middle, that would have been too neat, and probably less painful. It’s in all my work, this longing for belonging. Or rather the question of land, and who is best tasked with preserving what’s left of it. Humans settled Madagascar possibly as late as 1,500 years ago. First to arrive were Austronesians, who travelled to the island in outrigger canoes. Subsequent waves of immigrants came from Africa, Arabia and beyond. As the human population grew, Madagascar’s endemic creatures gradually began to go extinct. The large, slow-moving ones went first – the enormous elephant bird, for example. Other animals, and forests, became sacred and untouchable. But in Madagascar, almost nothing’s in general. It’s an island roughly the size of France – 1,600km from north to south and, at its widest, 580km east to west – but there’s so much to it that some ecologists call it the eighth continent. Put another way, when crossing it, you’ll go through hundreds of little worlds. Each has its own precise conditions and fosters a certain rare plant or a nearly vanished creature. Take the triangle palm, for example: Dypsis decaryi. Only about 1,000 of these trees are left in their native habitat, a small area in southern Madagascar’s Andohahela National Park. If you’re 86 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
driving through that part of the country, you may see the palms – some of them nearly 15m high and incredibly graceful – for half an hour or so. And then you won’t see them again. Or, the avenue of giant baobabs in the southwest, silver under a grey rainy-season sky and pink at sunset. They’ve been there for an eternity, some of them, or at least since mankind’s arrival on the island. Blink and you’ve missed them. By starkest contrast, daydream through the western US for a couple of days (I live in Wyoming now and have done this a couple of times), and the difference between one place and the next creeps up on you slowly. That barely undulating land can lull you into thinking everything’s forever. Madagascar leaves you in no doubt that it’s not. On my first morning I caught a twin-engine south from Tana, as the capital is known, towards Mandrare River Camp (madaclassic.com/mandrare) – from which I was to travel to the island’s lowland and spiny forests to see the endangered lemurs that reside there. The property, which aims to provide a kind of low-impact immersion into the surrounding ecosystems, consists of large, solar-powered canvas tents pitched under towering tamarind trees along the banks of the Mandrare River. Walking to my tent, I was assailed by wildlife. There were butterflies everywhere, droning bumblebees, skinks, a boa, a little brown snake, frogs. And birds: the place felt like a massive aviary, with a constant, lively accompaniment of cuckoos, drongos, nightjars. All that life, even in the life-hushing grip of a countrywide drought. The river was nearly bone-dry. From the veranda of my tent, I could see small villages shimmering in the heat on the opposite bank, 400m away. There were tiny wooden houses on stilts, each with three doors: one for women, one for men and one for children. All day, herds of zebu cattle – gorgeous speckled creatures with sweeping horns and humped necks – wandered down to drink at the shrunken river. In the morning and evening, girls brought buckets to those same shallows to take water back to their households. Everyone was looking at the battleship clouds to the west, which withheld rain night after night. And yet, at the small weekly market in the nearby town of Ifoka, to which villagers from all around the area came, the mood was sanguine, upbeat, defiant. The Antandroy, or “People of the Thorn Bush”, have learned to cultivate toughness. Southeast Madagascar, eerily beautiful in its spiny, secret way, is not a place that would reward those given to despair or to surrender. It makes sense, then, that the Antandroy resisted the French colonial forces longer than any of the other 17 tribes on the island, taking refuge in their forests until they were hacked out of hiding. CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 87
