Local traditions and culture in Madagascar

It is said that the first people arrived in Madagascar some 2000 years ago from Indonesia, later people came from Africa and Arabia. Now there are about 15 tribes, of which the Merina tribe is the most important. They live in the highlands (around the capital) and are descendents from the Indonesians. In the South you will find the tribes of African origin and at the east coast are the tribes coming from Arabia.

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Slash & Burn agriculture is just like it sounds. In Madagascar this traditional way of clearing land is called ‘Tavy’. Local farmers mark of a few acres of, often rain forest, and literally burn it all to the ground. They do this to plant rice field mostly. Rice is harvested for 1-2 year from the now cleared land and then left alone, or fallow, for 4-6 years. The process is repeated through 2-3 more cycles until the soils nutrients are destroyed. Then little can grow on it except scrub and rains bring erosion and further damage to the land. As poor farmers exhaust the flatter land, they then move up increasingly steep slopes over the years and this causes even worse environmental disaster. Why do they do it? It is illegal and poor land management. Unfortunately this quick & easy process has been handed down for generations. The government has stopped this in some areas through education of more productive methods, but not very area has gotten the message.

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Madagascar uses the standard ‘European’ 2 round pin plug and operates on 220 V 50 Hz. You may come across the safer plug with a male grounding pin, but not very often! British visitors can use a standard adapter like they do for Spain.

Then there’s the weird bit. Some electrical items sold here and made in China have a flat 2 pin plug like those in America (pictured). You need to buy a cheap adapter in the market for about 50 US cents. Don’t worry, they are 240 volt appliances, just DO NOT take them back to the USA!

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Malagasy people are amongst real partyers. I don't even talk about official, planned parties.

Rather talk about the ability of getting it to party while few people are together. It happens so often that when you have a family meeting, one decides to play either live music either a Cd or even.. a cassette (!). Some begin dancing then one suggests to throw a party... After pushing up furniture in order to improvise a dancefloor, partying till dawn.

It's easy to heat up the ambience with just some guitar and harmonica as well. Audience claps hands and sing acapella, accompanying instruments. Traditional songs, ballads are then reviewed... Families use to have some amateur music players so it's always useful in those cases.

Off course, alcohol, cooked meat, meatballs, kebabs and sambos help... But one dish is really welcomed when partying till dawn: vary amin'anana. This is a dish made of soft rice cooked with diverse leaves and diced beef meat with onions and ginger. Eat it with kebabs or sausages. With this, the night is yours ... and those beers... and these rums (Vieux rhum is for rum lovers, white rum is mostly for who only seek for some binge drinking)... and this whisky (don't be surprised to see some whisky à table, it's how they have it here) !

This feature is imported in Europe as well. Malagasy communities are used to that simple gatherings ending up with parties. It takes one hour to buy food and drinks, find the room, push away furniture... if you have a chance to be invited to a Malagasy party, go!! It's such an ambiance...

... women use to carry things on their heads. Be it water buckets, large baskets, women don't usually drag them, they weigh them on their head. I even saw women in the markets weighing their baskets with geese in them. They were browsing the marketplaces to sell their produce, the heads of the geese pending from the baskets. In brick-baking areas, it's very common to see women carrying baskets with sands, bricks, clay on their head, from a post to another. Nothing better to grant them with this gracious manner of holding their head. ;-)

[Note to self: should have insisted on training with big books on my head and not give up at first attempts... Should put it on the 2005 to-do list]

By the way, the photo is OK, don't change the settings of your monitor. It was taken when sun was right above our head, meaning light was at its brightest.. hence the sharp constrast between the green ricefields, the red earth of my countryside.

The rural villages we saw on the south end of Madagascar were made up of huts which were small and built of sticks with a thatched roof. In the Isalo Massif area the huts were made of clay with thatched roof and here we saw men wrapped in blankets carrying a spear walking down the clay roads. All of the villages have a market where things are traded.

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In the central area of Madagascar, farming in the mountains uses terraces which seems more oriental. There is one photo of this posted here. Also, the farm houses here were larger and constructed much differently than houses (huts) we had seen in other rural areas. These were made of red clay and were 2 story with a thatched roof. They have windows that have wooden shutters that close. Other houses were even nicer versions of the 2 story clay houses. They have brick columns in the front and have gray wood shingles rather than the thatch. I made sketches of some of these houses. I also made a sketch of a pretty little church perched on a hill down in a village with the mountains behind it. But the farming here still seems to be all by hand. It's quite primitive.

The local people especially out in the countryside of Madagascar are quite poor as far as having material possessions. Yet they are friendly and kind. One evening at dusk our van broke an axle. We were over 100 km from our town. Our guide finally decided that we would have to try to flag down some vehicles and catch a ride with them back to the city. Obviously we could not all go together. Most of the vehicles who came by were full of people already but they were willing to help us. We finally got a ride in the back of a small truck with 3 guys crammed into the front seat. There were bags of rice hulls piled in the back but they let 4 of us(our guide and my husband and I and another woman) sit on those and took us back to town. The drivers were very considerate, slowing down for potholes and bridges. They even took us to our hotel.
When I packed for this trip, I packed an extra suitcase of good clothes we no longer used, baseball caps, stuffed animals, and other things such as yards of cloth and table cloths I no longer used. This was 10 years ago when you could take 2 suitcases each on an airplane. I took bags of these things with me each day and gave them away to the people. We did not speak the language but they seemed to appreciate them. I'll never forget a little girl clutching a teddy bear or our driver with his Ga. Tech cap grinning from ear to ear.