For years I have looked at the map of Africa with its great Madagascar outrigger island and happily assumed that in continental drift terms this massive fragment fitted snugly into its apparently matching curves due west about 400km across the Mozambique Channel – in other words into the ample eastward facing bosom of Mozambique itself. My recent and cursory research into plate tectonics and the Gondwanaland theory suggests that the whole floating ark that is Madagascar actually sheared away from what we now know as the coast of Tanzania and Kenya some 165 million years ago, thus belonging many degrees further north than I had it slotted away – much like a jig-saw puzzle piece that you have jammed into place because of where you want it to fit.
Furthermore I had not realized that the long straight edge of Madagascar’s east coast was once attached to the long straight edge of the Indian sub-continent – which must have been one of the longest, toughest straight edged rips ever - even in geological history. Amazing to think that it was once possible to walk from Mombasa to Mumbai overland by tackling the small mission of crossing Madagascar’s mountainous spine. A mere training run for Sachin Tendulkar.
Madagascar is big. It’s approximately the size of Texas or Botswana and bigger than Spain, Sweden, Japan or France. It’s as if you took all that dough that was used to make the roughly rectangular pie crust that is France and rolled it into a fat, crusty baguette instead. And while we are with the food theme, if you sniff around carefully in your fridge or biscuit tin, you’ll almost certainly find a small part of Madagascar as the island accounts for over half the world’s vanilla bean production.
The island has long held other fascinations for me. Gerald Durrell was largely responsible for the majority of them. His descriptions of searching for mouse lemurs by torchlight, his meeting with the near mythical fossa cat, his fight to save the endangered and incredibly gentle aye-aye all fired my boyhood imagination and fuelled my entirely unfulfilled ambition to become a game ranger. Durrell once described the island as looking like ‘a badly presented omelette’ on his map of the world. I grew up poring over a large wall map of the world in the back room off our kitchen where my mother baked scones. I needed a little footstool made by my grandfather to help me examine the further northern climes in detail – Madagascar on the other hand was close enough to the ground for me to trace its outline at about eye level to a six year old.
Madagascar for me held all the mystery of Narnia, all the menace of Gollum, all the magic of Doctor Dolittle of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. Was it not the island of Sinbad’s encounter with the Roc, surely Gulliver had visited there on his travels? So when I asked my wife where she wanted to go for her 50th birthday and she said ‘Madagascar’, I knew she must have been listening to my various travel fantasy ravings over the years. Oh dear.
While doing the research for a holiday there, I was struck by the number of different names the island has attracted over the years. ‘The Great Red Island’ is how early Portuguese navigators saw it rising out of the sea – a sort of maritime Ayers Rock image. ‘The Island at the End of the Earth’ is attributed to ancient Chinese cartographers who obviously got about a bit but decided they had to draw the line somewhere. ‘Le Grande Isle’ countered the French, who set about turning Madagascar into a colonial market garden and refueling station in the 1880’s - what with the Cape Town stand on the route to the East already being taken.
Marco Polo is credited in some quarters with having coined the term ‘Madagascar’ having confused it in his jumbled explorer’s mind with ‘Malaysia’ – both being ‘down there somewhere’ from Venice presumably. Funnily enough this was exactly the same confusion that the first travel agent I approached was suffering from – which makes you wonder about which agency old Marco used and where he was really trying to get to?
Another nickname that I like for Madagascar is, ‘The Eighth Continent’. It’s more commonly billed as the world’s fourth biggest island behind Greenland (which may in fact be three congealed islands under its increasingly gooey ice cap), New Guinea and Borneo (which both have rather messy country boundaries striped all over them.) However, rather than the dubious distinction of fourth place, I prefer to think of Madagascar jostling Antarctica and Australia in the queue for full continental recognition (‘we’ve got a shelf and all…’) If it’s a Malagasy queue, it could take some time. But then the place has already been some time in the making because the title that is indisputably Madagascar’s is that of ‘the world’s first and oldest island’.
Back to Gondwanaland, the mega-continent, breaking apart all those millions of years ago. I have always struggled to find my frame of reference within geological and evolutionary timescales. The only trick that has come close to working for me is the one where the earth’s entire estimated existence from Big Bang to Big Brother is reduced to the scale of a single calendar year. I find it easier to imagine that great jig-saw of continental land masses cracking up and drifting apart around about early July with the first completely isolated fragment, roughly comprising modern day India, Pakistan and Madagascar, fully surrounded by the one mega-ocean by the end of the month. Then a further crack appears in August shearing off the larger Indian section to begin its headlong charge northwards crashing into the Eurasian plate around mid-September causing that almighty fender bender of a smash that we now call the Himalayas. Madagascar meanwhile floats serenely south across the equator and comes to its gentle bobbing berth a respectable distance from the mother continent by early November. About a month after this continental upheaval settles down, the first lemur wakes up.
The original proto-lemur ancestor was apparently an African who got so fed up with being beaten to a pulp by her rapidly developing gorilla and chimp second cousins that she and a couple of the kids hopped onto a passing vegetation raft in early December and floated across the Mozambique Channel in search of some peace and quiet and a food supply that she could call her own. Luckily she was light enough not to sink her leaky craft on its 400km crossing and sleepy enough not to notice that there were at least six different baobab seed pods on her floating mat. Once they arrived on their new island home, the family fanned out in search of food in an evolutionary process that we now call ‘adaptive radiation’ whereby animal adaptation to the environment is determined by the constraints of specific food niches.
And so today we have the over 80 different fruit and leaf and bamboo and insect and grub eating lemur species. Luckily for all of them all their major predators - not to mention the large and frankly tiresome African apes - had not made it across the water. In fact life really was bliss for the lemurs for a while because the first human settlers only showed up right at the end of December and of course immediately started to cut and burn their forests.
These first human settlers on Madagascar were an intrepid bunch in their own right. They had floated, surfed and occasionally paddled their dug-out canoes complete with balsa wood outriggers and palm fibre sails from India, Indonesia and possibly even further abroad, driven by the trade winds, pelted by monsoons and dragged by all the swirling currents of the Indian Ocean. Madagascar’s eastern seaboard with its lush tropical rainforest running down to white coconut fringed coral sands must have seemed every bit as attractive as it is portrayed in today’s travel brochures. Evidence of this early human settlement can be traced back just over two thousand years (we are already at December the 31st by our one evolutionary year calendar) by which time the Chinese, Egyptians, Malians and Romans had been crawling all over their known worlds for centuries – or seconds depending on your chronometer.
Much of Madagascar’s heritage remains visibly Indo-Malay - the single, polysyllabic language uniting the whole island; the abundant rice paddies in the monsoon facing valleys of the eastern highlands; the pragmatic acceptance of Christianity as just another ancestor-based form of spiritual sustenance; the whistling rickshaws and gaudy taxi-brousses of downtown Antananarivo. And yet there are clear African footprints as well – the widespread currency of zebu cattle; the triangular sailed dhows off the west coast; the baobab groves with their sacrificial offerings; the screaming presidential motorcade on its way to the airport. “We are of Africa but not African,” said our guide at one point. He spoke both French and English impeccably but unfortunately supported Chelsea.
He went on to apologise for the fact that Madagascar’s politics are in a state of extreme flux with a transitional government trying to hammer out a compromise constitution. In the meantime the reins of power seem to be in the hands of a young president who was once mayor of the capital, Antananarivo, and before that a radio DJ. Now Boris Yeltsin was known to seize a baton and conduct a military band and Bill Clinton was elected partly because he played the saxophone on late night TV but Madagascar is the only country I can think of which can claim to be run by a full-time, disc-spinning, headphone-wearing professional DJ. Cool.
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