Muddling through Madagascar E-Book

Dervla Murphy

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

With her fourteen-year-old daughter Rachel, Dervla Murphy journeyed across the unique island of Madagascar, neither part of Africa, its nearest neighbour, nor part of Asia, the ancestral home the Malagasy people who live there. Beginning at Antananarivo, Madagascar's capital, they travelled south by foot, bus and truck through the Ankaratra Mountains, marvelling at lemurs in the Isoala Massif, exploring the great rain forests of the Betsimisaraka tribesmen and living briefly with the Vezo fishermen of the west coast. Her vivid account tells of an island of astonishing natural beauty inhabited by 'the most loveable people I have ever travelled among.'

Leseprobe

‘The inimitable travelling roadshow’ Sunday Telegraph

‘The book … presents a rare glimpse of the Malagasy peasant life and the impact of the severe economic decline of the last decade’ Spectator

‘Victorian travel writers really believed they were giving their readers news of unknown parts of the world; they felt a duty to tell. So does Dervla Murphy. Her book is packed with historical, geographical, and anthropological information’ The Times

‘The classic travel book one has come to expect from her … Muddling Through in Madagascar is the real thing – a travel book with substance’ Guardian

‘“Muddling through” is an understatement: almost every possible disaster happens en route, but each is described with jaunty good humour and a sharp eye for detail’ HughSeymour-Davies

‘It is both a revelatory look at a richly mysterious country and a traveller’s tale that keeps its grip every bump of the way’ Irish Times

‘A myth in the making is Ms Murphy … a traveller of the old school … The world is getting a very small place indeed for the likes of Dervla Murphy’ Punch

Muddling Through in Madagascar

Dervla Murphy

To all our Malagasy friends —

Those whose names we can remember,

Those whose names we have forgotten,

And those whose names we never knew.

Definitions

Muddling Through: ‘to attain one’s ends in spite of blunder after blunder’

Muddling On: ‘to get along in a haphazard way through makeshifts’

Oxford English Dictionary

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphAcknowledgements MapIntroduction: A Bit of History  1 The Slow Red Road to the Great Red Island  2 Antananarivo: ‘Tana, City of Beauty’   3 Ambling through the Ankaratra  4 Among the Merina  5 Antsirabe Insights  6 Lemurs and Things  7 Days and Nights with Fotsy and Merk  8 ‘Sites of Dreams’   9 Journal of Missing Pieces10 Prostration on the Pirate CoastBibliographyCopyright

Introduction A Bit of History

Once upon a time – about eighty million years ago – the break-up of Gondwanaland left an isolated island (some 1,000 miles long and 300 miles across) lying 250 miles off East Africa’s coast. During this ‘continental drift’ era, when Madagascar was slowly separating from Africa, Australasia, South America and the Indian Deccan, the highest forms of life were primitive placental and marsupial mammals. From these, on Madagascar, no large, vigorous, predatory creatures developed. Instead Evolution wandered down a peaceful byway, not being very inventive, which is why zoologists and botanists now describe the island as ‘a living museum’. Most of its plant and animal life is unique, though its geological structure and geographical features have much in common with Southern Africa. Fittingly, the coelacanth was first found in Madagascar’s deep surrounding waters, having survived there almost unchanged for many millions of years.

Despite countless man-hours of academic toil, no one is sure – or ever likely to be – exactly when Madagascar’s first settlers arrived. But it is certain that few fertile areas of the world remained so long uninhabited; the earliest archaeological evidence of human occupation dates from about AD 900. It is also certain that Malagasy* culture has Malayo-Polynesian roots. The language belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian group though about twenty per cent of its modern vocabulary is Bantu, with a sprinkling of Sanskrit, English, French and Arabic.

At one time it was assumed that the proto-Malagasy had sailed straight across the southern Indian Ocean to Madagascar, a distance of almost 4,000 miles. Now the most widely accepted theory is that migrant traders, in large twin-hulled outrigger canoes, made the journey by comparatively easy stages: from Sumatra to the Andaman Islands, to Ceylon, South India, the Maldives, the Laccadives and so across the Arabian Sea to Socotra and finally (during the first century AD?) to Azania, now known as Kenya and Tanzania. There they found empty spaces, a good climate, varied trading opportunities and a sparse, undeveloped population on whom it was easy to impose their own culture.

During the next few centuries – according to this theory – more and more Polynesians settled on the African coast, then gradually moved inland, introducing new food plants wherever they went: taro, yams, bananas, coconuts, breadfruit. This novel notion of growing food, instead of merely hunting and gathering it, contributed to a Bantu population explosion, one of the causes of the eventual settlement of Madagascar. Another cause was Arab domination, by the tenth century, of Indian Ocean trade.

The island’s sporadic settlement extended over centuries, beginning perhaps as much as 1500 years ago with small groups establishing themselves on the north-west and west coasts. Larger groups came later and, having had more contact with the rapidly expanding Bantu, were less obviously Polynesian. These new arrivals settled on the south and east coasts, as well as among the original migrants. Madagascar’s mountainous and densely forested interior remained for long unexplored; it could be approached only through the valleys of the Onilahy, Tsiribihina and Betsiboka rivers, which run into the Mozambique Channel. Probably the first people to venture up those valleys and discover the high central plateau were the Vazimba, a tall, strong, dark-skinned tribe with curly though not frizzy hair. The second, main migration apparently pushed these early settlers inland. Then, much later, they were pushed west again when the Merina arrived on the plateau. They ended up in the Bemaraha Mountains as troglodytes who food-gathered in the forest; now the majority live in primitive hamlets on remote heights. The Merina tradition that the Vazimba are indigenous to Madagascar has been rejected by anthropologists.