Antananarivo, Madagascar
From far away, Tana (as the name’s frequently shortened to) might provide an alluring impression of Madagascar: settlements spread out among the hillsides, surrounded by green rice fields.
But up close is where the true first impression is, and while not that bad, it’s not a nice one. Honestly though, I’m not sure what would be. Taking a cab an hour from the airport into town, everything hits: the traffic, the pollution, the crowds, the poverty. (Perhaps it’s the jarring change from Mauritius, since none of this usually phases me.) As darkness falls (relatively early at 5:30pm in the winter), the streets quiet down even downtown and gain an almost eerie atmosphere. It’s kind of off-putting, and it didn’t exactly inspire any desire to go out any further than the end of the block.
The next morning hits, and I’m out looking for breakfast. On the grand Avenue de l’Indépendance, I spot a boulangerie from afar, a lovely prospect and perhaps one of the few positive legacies of French colonization. Aside from the croissant, inside is another story: old European men and their very young local female consorts. As I quickly found out over the rest of the month, there’s a distressing amount of exploitation going on, and I felt no option of internally coping aside from averting my gaze.
For better and for worse… reality may not be what most visitors come for, but this is Madagascar.
After a short walk up and down the very steep Analakely Market set upon and sandwiched between two staircases, I decided to take a quick city tour. Setting off with MJ, a city guide from the tourism office, I had a rundown of the country and the city’s history, which to me had two very different visible sides.
One is the vast array of complexions and faces I’m seeing. To be blunt, people are still Black, but they look quite different from mainland Africa. It’s hard not to notice a significant portion of the population having very Asian facial features! Stripped of context and in isolation, I would absolutely be mistaken of their origin — that applies even to the president. There’s a simple answer to this: well, early Madagascar was settled by seafarers from current-day Indonesia, to which some of Madagascar’s largest tribes trace its origins. This includes the Merina, with their former kingdom centered around what is now Antananarivo (“city of the thousand,” where “tanàna” means city and the thousand refers to the soldiers who conquered it). The Malagasy language isn’t of Bantu/African origin either, but rather Austronesian, just like Malay.
The other is in the buildings, a snapshot of a specific era. Queen Ranavalona was a 19th century sovereign of the Merina kingdom who subjugated the rest of Madagascar’s kingdoms through executions and enslavement. Around the reign of her predecessor and husband, European missionaries had come sharing expertise in brick-making, architecture, press-printing, and other skills in addition to Christianity. Initially welcomed, she instead viewed the outsiders with suspicion, banning the religion for all Malagasy, killing those who continued to proselytize by throwing them off cliffs. She also disliked the stone buildings the outsiders constructed, as stone was traditionally used for tombs, and so banned those too, allowing only wood construction.
That didn’t work out so well for herself — her own palace in the Rova (royal compound) burned down in a fire. (Her successors later unbanned both stone buildings and Christianity. ) She took on a shipwrecked Frenchman, Jean Laborde, as her lover however, and in addition to sharing expertise on producing weaponry, he showed his love for her by designing both her palace and the man-made, heart-shaped Lake Anosy in the centre of Tana.
It was four sovereigns later, during the reign of Ranavalona III in the late 1890s, however that the French took over, sending her off to exile in La Réunion and later Algeria. By colonial standards, it doesn’t seem terribly long: independence was granted in 1960. While French rule was marked by swapping slavery for forced labour, resource exploitation, conscription to fight for France in both World Wars, and a violent suppression of a peaceful Malagasy nationalist movement, it also ushered in modernisation and development of infrastructure.
This era is memorialized in black and white at the Musée de la Photo in Tana. In addition to a brief history of aviation and French tourism in Madagascar, as well as some photos from unmodernised villages that look like they could have just been taken now, the museum shows films of a vastly different country than the one I’m seeing: beautiful train stations with long-distance service, spacious roads, and a general lack of chaos. Contrast this to now: the train station’s now shops and there’s no more service between Madagascar’s two largest cities, let alone anything leaving the capital. The ornate buildings are showing wear and tear. Surrounding them are slums, and a faded glory fades all the more. There’s also a whole lot more people living now in cities clearly originally intended for less people, and they all share the sidewalk-less roads with zebu carts, cars, scooters, giant semi-trailer trucks, and every other possible moving object no matter the speed.
It’s a little alarming to eulogize colonialism with rose-coloured glasses, and even wish for it back — or is it audacious? It’s a local sentiment I’ve heard and yet I don’t know how widespread it is. What I encountered more of, however, is a lingering sense of resentment towards the French, despite the infrastructure constructed in their era. Perhaps it’s the fervour in the lead-up to Madagascar’s Independence Day. Scrawled frequently on random taxi-be (local bus) stops is “Dehors le France” — get out.
Even their current president, Andry Rajoelina, is a dual citizen of France and widely seen as a puppet, elected last year as an ex-president who previously took power by coup. In a country where education is both neither mandatory nor free, where infrastructure is in a sorry state, and corruption is rife, how do you get votes? Give people free t-shirts and a pre-filled ballot. What about priorities after election? Build a fancy new stadium in Tana. There’s a Black Angel statue Paint in the center of Lake Anosy to commemorate Malagasy soldiers fighting for France in WWI — formerly white, he had it painted gold for some reason. Build a fancy gondola under the guise of relieving traffic — the locals scoff. And of course, the common sentiment: keep the money flowing to France?
As one person colourfully described to me, colonialism has merely been replaced by a modern version of the same thing. A country so rich in resources should not be in the bottom 10 countries by GDP, below even several war-torn countries, so where are those resources going? (Same goes for all that tourist money, when tourist admission prices around the country are quite steep. I don’t think I’ve ever been to another developing country with this much tourism catering to groups and/or luxury.)
It’s still unclear to me what France currently does overtly and covertly in Madagascar, and whether the current state of things is actually France’s fault or if their past misdeeds make them an easy scapegoat for domestic corruption. There’s too much context I can’t grasp in a short stay.
But I ask if things are getting any better or worse. More than one person told me that food and gasoline are getting more expensive, and that infrastructure continues to deteriorate — and yet they all say this isn’t worse. It’s just how it always is.