Cowboys of Madagascar

The anthropologist Luke Freeman joins a group of young Malagasy men on the cattle trail.

As a socio-cultural anthropologist, I’ve lived in Madagascar for more than three years and I know the people, the language and the culture well. The cattle drives undertaken by young Malagasy men have fascinated me ever since I lived in a remote rice-farming village in the central highlands.

This gives an indication of how much the Malagasy love cattle. They are potent symbols on the island and it is common practice for young men to trade in them prior to marriage.

To fulfil my ambition, I headed for the frontier town of Tsiroanomandidy looking for a group of drovers with whom to share life on the road. Here I met Vonjy, a young man who had spent most of his life driving cattle across the island.

Our destination sat in the middle of nowhere, abandoned in a landscape of wide plains, where nothing grows but tall, swaying savannah grass. Undulating hills dip and rise to the horizon, the monotony broken only by the broad red scars of soil erosion. There is often no sign of life for miles. This was the land we were to cross with our herd of 52 zebu steers, the long-horned cattle found all over East Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

Far off in the darkness glowed the orange rings of bushfires lit to burn off the old dry grass and bring forth new green shoots. Ground that seemed flat in the daylight became treacherously uneven on a moonless night. Some of us formed a line either side of our cattle as we struggled to keep the herd together, shouting warnings to the drovers behind us. On one occasion we stopped to discover that two of our steers had disappeared.

The next morning we awoke, dew-damp, on a cloudy hilltop, not far from our destination. The cattle mooched slowly in the tall, wet grass. It was just dawn, but a woman and her daughter who had walked 16 kilometres to set up shop were already selling coffee and cakes wrapped in leaves.

Tsiroanomandidy hosts the largest cattle market in Madagascar. Every Wednesday, a huge cloud of dust hangs over the town, raised by the hundreds of cattle pressed into the wooden corrals.

This was an easier journey, a slow wandering over the highest peaks of central Madagascar. The head drover was a laid-back languorous man who didn’t raise an eyebrow when he heard I was joining his team; we nicknamed him the President. Our somewhat haphazard meanderings through the hinterland came to a sudden end when, passing through a village near Firavahana, the President found a buyer for his cattle. It would take a couple of days to sort out the paperwork, so Vonjy and I decided to leave him to it.

From there, we got a lift 400 kilometres by road down to Madagascar’s second biggest cattle market at Ambalavao, where Vonjy had more family in the trade. We joined them on another cattle drive up through the central highlands along Madagascar’s main north-south road.

The highlands are the most crowded part of the island; every last hectare of land has been carved into neat rice terraces that scale the hillsides. From here, our journey took us eastwards into the forest.

I learnt that such minor hardships were easily overcome as my body became conditioned to the rhythm of the road: walking at cattle pace, prodding and coaxing the beasts; listening to the drovers’ soft talk.

If there’s a lesson to be learnt from the young men with whom I travelled, it’s just how simple travelling can be. Over the hundreds of kilometres I travelled with the drovers, I never heard a cross word or an argument. You don’t need a whole lot to be happy on such a journey.

Malgudi Days

Just at that turning between Market Road and the lane leading to the chemists shop he had his ‘establishment. At eight in the evening you would not see him, and again at ten you would see nothing, but between those times he arrived, sold his goods and departed. Those who saw him remarked thus, ‘Lucky fellow! He has hardly an hour’s work a day and he pockets ten rupees — even graduates are unable to earn that! Three hundred rupees a month! He felt irritated when he heard such glib remarks and said, What these folk do not see is that I sit before the oven practically all day frying all this…

At about 8:15 in the evening he arrived with a load of stuff. He looked as if he had four arms, so many things he carried about him. His equipment was the big tray balanced on his head, with its assortment of edibles, a stool stuck in the crook of his arm, a lamp in another hand and a couple of portable legs for mounting his tray. He lit the lamp, a lantern which consumed six pies worth of kerosene every day, and kept it near at hand, since he had to guard a lot of loose cash and a variety of miscellaneous articles.

He always arrived in time to catch the cinema crowd coming out after the evening show. A pretender to the throne, a young scraggy fellow, sat on his spot until he arrived and did business, but he did not let that bother him unduly. In fact, he felt generous enough to say, ‘Let the poor rat do his business when I am not there. This sentiment was amply respected, and the pretender moved off a minute before the arrival of the prince among caterers.

Though so much probing was going on, he knew exactly who was taking what. He knew by an extraordinary sense which of the jukta drivers was picking up chappatis at a given moment — he could even mention the licence number. He knew that the stained hand nervously coming up was that of a youngster who polished the shoes of passers-by. And he knew exactly at what hour he would see the wrestlers arm searching for the perfect ducks egg. His custom was drawn from the population swarming the pavement: the boot polish boys, for instance, who wandered to and fro with brush and polish in a bag, endlessly soliciting ‘Polish, sir, polish” Rama had a soft spot for them.

It rent his heart to see their hungry, hollow eyes. It pained him to see the rags they wore. And it made him very unhappy to see the tremendous eagerness with which they came to him. But what could he do? He could not run a charity show, that was impossible. He measured out their half-glass of coffee correct to the fraction of an inch, but they could cling to the glass as long as they liked.

He lived in the second lane behind the market. His wife opened the door, throwing into the night air the scent of burnt oil which perpetually hung about their home. She snatched from his hand all the encumbrances and counted the cash immediately.

After dinner, he tucked a betel leaf and tobacco in his cheek and slept. He had dreams of traffic constables bullying him to move on and health inspectors saying he was spreading all kinds of disease and depopulating the city. But fortunately in actual life no one bothered him very seriously. The health officer no doubt came and said, ‘You must put all this under a glass lid, otherwise I shall destroy it some day… Take care!

Rama no doubt violated all the well-accepted canons of cleanliness and sanitation, but still his customers not only survived his fare but seemed actually to flourish on it, having consumed it for years without showing signs of being any the worse for it.