Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere

2. Overland on Foot, Aloft: An Anatomy of the Social Structure

“A forest is a gold mine to a Naturalist.” The live hush—rustle—reverence. He feels walls of his life dropping away. You need people who know the broken trails, sudden pits underfoot, and the animals. Capybara, jaguar, agouti. —Ruth Padel, “In the Seraglio,” Darwin 29 2 OverlandonFoot,Aloft An Anatomy of the Social Structure A European traveler to Madagascar in the early nineteenth century, say 1825, would encounter a mosaic of rolling grassland and humid rain forest outside the limits of the eastern port of Toamasina. The traveler would likely head westward to pay his respects to King Radama I and his court in Antananarivo, the seat of the Merina Empire on the central high plateau. The trek from the coast to the capital was over 200 miles long, and the traveler, possessing heavy trunks of clothing and food provisions , faced an uphill and uncomfortable journey through a rain forest that, for all of its botanical and zoological wonders, could be lethal. Malaria had felled many. It was said that King Radama’s military strategy relied on “General Hazo’’ and “General Tazo’’ (Generals “Forest’’ and “Fever’’) to shelter the Merina kingdom from foreign invaders (Gallieni 1908:149; Campbell 2005:245). Madagascar’s east coast had heavily trafficked ports because of the relatively calm waters of its harbors. Toamasina in particular was reputed to offer the best anchorage of the island (Lloyd 1850:59). The east coast was thick with precious timbers, minerals, and fruits, and it possessed a well-trafficked footpath between Toamasina and the highland capital, Antananarivo. Automobiles would not appear on the island until 1900, four years after France’s annexation of Madagascar and two years after Governor-General Gallieni actually purchased the cars from abroad—two Panhard-Levassors (Gruss 1902:194). In 1900, a celebrated “road to the east” from Antananarivo was opened (Gallieni 1908:170). The Tananarive-Côte-Est (TCE) railway would not be completed until 1913, built with the exertions of Malagasy laborers who were 30 For est and La bor in Ma dagascar drafted by the French state during a huge public works campaign (Gallieni 1908:226; Porter 1940). The path to the High Plateaus was often treacherous and steep, crosscut by rivers and root systems. The traveler had no choice but to go overland , carried in the filanjana, the Malagasy palanquin. This was a raised chair hoisted on the shoulders of four to eight Malagasy carriers, tradesmen known as mpilanja (alternatively, mpilanjana) (Valmy 1959; Campbell 2005:252). On the filanjana, the European’s legs and feet were Malagasy . Europeans and Malagasy together subscribed to the idea that the forested footpaths were unsuitable to the European constitution. In Max Mezger’s 1931 German children’s novel, Monika Fährt Nach Madagaskar (Monica Goes to Madagascar), a scientist father explains to his young daughter upon their arrival on the island why they must travel by filanjana instead of walk: “Only the natives with their broad feet and soles as hard as leather can walk fast on such ground” (Mezger 1936:148). This is to say that before the appearance of bush taxis or locomotives, European visitors encountered the eastern rain forest without a direct connection to the ground. At a minimum, they wore footwear; most often they were transported in filanjana and canoes. Lurching along in their elevated chairs, Europeans surveyed the environment, their hands free to sketch and record observations in their journals (see Pratt 1992). Many returned to England and France to publish travel journals illustrated with exotic plants, animals, and the island’s diverse “tribes.” These natural histories were the products of contemplation unmoored from the weight of the body while walking. Like travel, the act of translating a landscape into words and images defined a modality of perception that was specific to the time and place (Raffles 2002). Botanical exploration in Madagascar, as in early-twentieth-century Burma, Tibet , and China, entailed “practices of writing, revising, and reading the landscape to fashion Edens of the world of things” (Mueggler 2005:447). For the orchid hunters, ethnologists, and natural historians who traversed Madagascar’s rain forest by filanjana, such a mode of transport may not have been ideal, but it enabled a slow-motion translation of nature into text. It also placed the traveler on a stratum of space that was free of the sensory intrusions of walking, such as thorny scrub and root- Overland on Foot, Aloft...