to the next. Sometimes it’s bankrupt. Sometimes the pilots are on strike. Sometimes there is no fuel. You should never book too far ahead on Air Maybe.
The road to the city from the airport passes through a densely populated area. After a few hotels and the Chinese casino, it’s the typical African or Asian street scene—honking cars, slow-moving trucks, hole-in-the-wall shops, children playing on the narrow sidewalk, porters lounging on hand carts. Change the language on the signs and it could be almost any city in India, Bangladesh, or Indonesia. A mesmerizing array of small retail establishments are crammed into narrow storefronts—a tire repair shop next to a beauty salon, then a halal butcher, a one-room health clinic, a furniture workshop, a SIM card recharge outlet, a shop selling friperie (secondhand clothes), a small hotel, a lumberyard, a used car parts store, another beauty salon. Then a wall plastered with posters for music concerts and religious revivals, almost obscuring the Défense d’Afficher (forbidden to post) sign. A jumble of colorful hand-painted signs, mostly in French or Malagasy with a sprinkling of English—Good Auto, Rehoboth Shack, Smile Pizza, Quick Fix Oil Change, Flash Video. For the last four miles, the road runs along the levee of the River Ikopa. The low-lying areas around the city are crisscrossed by canals supplying water to the rice paddies. Among the paddies are islands of shacks, with chickens, geese, and ducks (some destined to be pâté) running free, and zebu grazing on patches of grassland. Then past the fifteen-thousand-seat national rugby stadium—home of the Makis (the lemurs)—to a retail district centered, without any sense of ideological irony, on a square dedicated to a communist hero, the Place de Ho Chi Minh.
Situated just over four thousand feet above sea level, Tana, with its hills and narrow, winding streets, feels like a tropical, slightly rundown version of Paris with rice paddies. From the original rova (fortress) built by the Merina king Andrianjaka in the early seventeenth century, the royal real estate expanded, with new palaces and royal tombs built on the highest points of the ridge. The residential topography of Tana (as in other Merina towns and villages) reflected class distinctions. Down the hill from the palaces were the houses of the andriana, the noble class; the commoners, the hova, lived further down the slope, and the slave caste (andevo) and rural migrants on the plains to the west. Members of castes were required to live in designated districts and return to them after working in other places. Nonnobles were not allowed to build wooden houses or keep pigs within the city limits. As the population grew, the Merina kings used forced labor to construct a massive system of dikes and paddy fields around the city to provide an adequate supply of rice.
Tana temporarily lost its status as the Merina capital in the early eighteenth century with the death of the king Andriamasinavalona. The kingdom split into four territories and for the next seventy-odd years, Merina kinglets fought, intrigued, allied, married, and died as they competed for supremacy. The eventual winner was Andrianampoinimerina from the eastern district, who conquered Antananarivo in 1794, ending the civil war. His former capital, Ambohimanga, was designated the spiritual capital of the Merina, and Antananarivo the political and commercial capital. Andrianampoinimerina created a large marketplace at Analakely, the lowland area between the two ridges, and it remains the city’s economic center.
By 1810, when Andrianampoinimerina’s son Radama I ascended the throne and began expanding the Merina empire, Antananarivo, with a population of more than eighty thousand, was the largest and most important commercial city on the island. Radama’s successor, Ranavalona I, helped launch Madagascar’s modest industrial revolution. British missionaries introduced brickmaking, and a shipwrecked French craftsman, Jean Laborde, established factories to produce construction materials, agricultural tools, and weapons for the army; in Antananarivo, two massive staircases were built to connect the market at Analakely to the growing residential areas on the two ridges.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, all houses in Madagascar were built from wood, grasses, reeds, and other plant-based materials deemed appropriate for structures used by the living; stone, as an inert material, was reserved for the dead and used only for family tombs. In 1867, after a series of fires destroyed wooden homes in Antananarivo, Queen Ranavalona II lifted the royal edict on the use of stone and brick for construction. The royal palace was encased in stone. The first brick house built by the London Missionary Society in 1869 blended English, Creole, and Malagasy designs and served as a model for a new style built in the capital and across the highlands. Termed the trano gasy (Malagasy house), it is a two-story, brick building with four columns at the front that support a wooden verandah. In the late nineteenth century, these houses quickly replaced most of the traditional wooden houses of the andriana. As Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic Church gained adherents, stone and brick churches were constructed.
In the early twentieth century, under French administration, the city spread out along the lower hilltops and slopes in la ville moyenne (the middle town). In the basse ville (lower town), northwest of the Analakely market area, French urban planners laid out the streets on a grid pattern aligned with a broad boulevard, now called the Avenue de l’Indépendance, with the city’s Soarano railroad station at its northwest end. Engineers drilled tunnels through two large hills, connecting isolated districts; streets were paved with cobblestones, and some later with blacktop; water, previously drawn from springs at the foot of the hills, was piped in from the Ikopa River. Since independence in 1960, the city has spread out across the plains in every direction, and urban growth has been largely uncontrolled. In the sprawling districts of the basse ville, where roughly built houses are vulnerable to fire and flooding, many residents splice into city power lines to steal electricity. Informal settlements, without adequate water supply and sanitation facilities, have grown up on agricultural land on the outskirts.
FIGURE 3.6 Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, “Paris with rice paddies”
Today, the historic haute ville retains its late nineteenth-century charm. Trano gasy houses with steeply pitched tiled roofs, verandas, and flowering cactus line the cobbled streets snaking up the hillsides; alleyways with stone steps descend to the Analakely market and shopping streets branching off from the Avenue de l’Indépendance. Among the most impressive buildings are the stone-built churches on the summits. Below the Malagasy Montmartres, people cook over open charcoal fires, draw water from hand pumps, and sleep in doorways. The official population of the Tana metropolitan area is more than two million—about one-tenth of the total population of Madagascar—but that does not count unregistered migrants from rural areas who arrive every day to work or engage in petit commerce.
The French influence is still apparent—in language, the architecture of public buildings, the bakers selling baguettes and croissants, the escargots and pâté de foie gras on the restaurant menus. At the Soarano railway station, the Café de la Gare resembles a brasserie in a French provincial town, with its dark wood paneling, chandeliers, candlelit tables and white-shirted waiters. The best hotel in the city, the Colbert in the haute ville, founded as a handful of rooms above a café in 1928, reeks of colonial extravagance with its marble-clad lobby, patisserie, hair salon, perfume shop, spa, and casino. At the nearby Café du Jardin, overlooking the Analakely market, the large-screen TVs rebroadcast French provincial rugby matches.
My guide to the city was Luke, who had worked in Madagascar on and off for more than twenty-five years. He arrived in Tana in 1989 as the country was emerging from more than a decade of what some termed “Christian Marxism” (Marx would have turned in his grave). He was supposed to be fulfilling his university foreign-language requirement by spending a year studying French. He had another motive. “Saying you’re going to Madagascar to study French is rather like saying you’re going to Nigeria to study English,” he said. He improved his French but concentrated on learning the Malagasy language and studying the culture. Since 1989, he has returned to Madagascar almost every year. As an anthropologist, cultural study meant more than wading through dissertations, books, and articles on kinship, tradition, and religion. Luke worked as a rice farmer and herded zebu across the southern deserts.
It was in 2004, while Luke was on a zebu drive, that he was summoned to the capital by the so-called yogurt king Marc Ravalomanana,