Everything about Madagascar

Madagascar isn't a country Westerners know much about, except that it has an unique fauna. I therefore found this book extremely interesting, although dated. Maureen Covell's “Madagascar: Politics, Economics and Society” was published in 1987. The author is a scholar of political science based in Canada, and seems to know virtually everything about the island-nation. The book concentrates on the Marxist or pseudo-Marxist regime of Didier Ratsiraka, who took power in 1975. It also contains chapters on the frequently violent history of Madagascar.

Uniquely in Africa, the people of Madagascar speak languages related to Malay and Indonesian. Madagascar's Merina Empire had been internationally recognized by the great powers, but was eventually awarded to the French during the 19th century Western scramble for Africa. The French abolished slavery, but the goodwill this may have created was lost soon afterwards as the colonial power introduced forced labor and extortionate taxes. In 1947, France brutally suppressed a nationalist uprising, killing 100,000 people in the process. After independence in 1960, “Social Democratic” President Philibert Tsiranana continued a pro-French and anti-Communist course, maintaining good relations with Taiwan, South Vietnam, South Korea and Israel. Domestically, Madagascar was nominally a multi-party democracy, but Tsiranana pulled all the strings to make sure he was reelected. The economy was dominated by French companies plus Indian and Chinese middlemen. The education system was so Francophile that geography lessons were about the environs of Paris while Madagascar literary journals published articles about Provencal poetry!

In 1972, a series of crises led to the fall of the increasingly erratic Tsiranana, an event known as the May Revolution. Indeed, it really was a genuine revolution, with as much as 100,000 people marching on the presidential palace! After a series of ineffectual transitional governments, Didier Ratsiraka took power in 1975, turning Madagascar into a “Marxist” state. His main goal was to break the dependency on France through nationalizations, expansion of the civil service, educational reforms and a “non-aligned” foreign policy. With the country's economy in free fall (to some extent because of bad advice from the World Bank), Ratsiraka was forced to gyrate back and forth, while playing off various political factions against one another. In the end, the new regime had to accept the IMF's harsh conditions in order to get Western loans. The story ends with Ratsiraka's military brutally massacring a suspected opposition movement (the “Kung Fu” groups mentioned below)…

It was apparently a topic of some discussion, both among political scientists and diplomats, how “Marxist” Madagascar's new leadership really was. The country's political and social landscape certainly had some intriguing traits. An important role in the May Revolution was played by the Zwams or Zoams, gangs of youth who loved “spaghetti westerns” and tried to mimic the manners of Clint Eastwood's character in “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly”. The “w” in Zwam actually stands for “Western”, as in the film genre, not the political concept! The Zwams or Zoams were later turned into a kind of storm troopers for Ratsiraka's regime, until the new leader got tired of them and had them killed en masse by a competing network of gangs, based on Kung Fu and the Bruce Lee fandom. Later, Ratsiraka got rid of the Kung Fu adherents, too. Ratsiraka himself was hardly an orthodox Marxist, sprinkling his speeches with Biblical references and calling on his supporters to read Pythagoras and Descartes alongside Marx.

“Madagascar” is a very detailed book, with the author discussing the intricacies of patron-client relationships and Malagasy ethnicity in the same breath as the role of the gendarmerie or the expansion of the black market. The May Revolution is described in some detail. I sometimes wonder how she knows so much about this country? Sure, she lived there, but I probably know less about Sweden than she does about Madagascar! Despite being dated, the book is an excellent introduction to the subject, and I therefore give it five stars.