Tribal > Articles > Journey into the Red Zone

“Fifteen of them,” nodded the old hunter, “hiding by the river - waiting for somebody.” He shrugged his wiry shoulders with the nonchalance of a man who had seen more than his share of bush bandits. Besides, there was nothing for him to worry about. It was me and my backpack full of Western ‘treasures’ that they were after.

We strained our eyes past the emerald patchwork of rice paddies, across the muddy sweep of the Manambolo River and into the shadows of the trees. Nothing stirred in the midday heat of western Madagascar.

My would-be ambushers were a bandit tribe known as the Dahalo, who looked like they were set to make my trek through the lawless region of the Zone Rouge more of an adventure than I had bargained for. I weighed up the options. The only transport out of the Zone Rouge, a single bush-taxi, was a week’s slog back across a formidable chain of hump-backed ridges and deep, forested ravines. In front of us were the Dahalo and at least five more days of sparsely-populated savannah and the craggy Bungolava peaks before ‘civilisation’ (of a sort) at Ankavandra - an island in the wilderness boasting three or four satellite hamlets linked by a few miles of dirt track.

“How’s he know they’re waiting for someone?” I asked my guide in French. “He says that they were preparing magic,” Eloi translated for me from Malagasy, his forehead furrowed with what I considered to be a healthy concern.

In a country where daily life is governed by supernatural powers, magic is not something to be dismissed lightly. Eloi, a devout Catholic and the son of a doctor, warned me once again about the Dahalo’s powers: “They are more than just bandit thugs,” he said. “They have their own magic and carry charms that protect them. If you try to shoot a Dahalo, all he has to say is ‘rano’ [water] and your bullets will turn to rain.”

Sorcery is a complex affair in Madagascar, and for charms to work the wearer must obey a certain set of taboos: “The Dahalo are not allowed to eat hedgehog or sheep or any other ‘cowardly’ animal,” Eloi continued, “and, above all, they must never, ever wash their shirts.” He was warming to his subject: “You can recognise a real Dahalo because his shirt is yellow with dirt and his eyes are bright red.”

I was heading westwards on a quest that had started as a pipe dream long before I had even heard of the Zone Rouge. I was on the trail of a mysterious tribe of white pygmies known as the Vazimba. Many Malagasy believe that the Vazimba were the indigenous peoples of the island and some still actively worship them as the most ancient of the ancestors. Malagasy folklore has it that these pygmies (who some claim to be at once telepathic and invisible) still exist in hideouts in the western mountains and the region into which they supposedly disappeared is as mysterious as the ‘lost tribe’ itself.

In remote areas of Madagascar there are few options left to a wayfarer who wishes to travel through the countryside rather than fly over it. In the remote western hills there’s only one. So, at Tsiroanomandidy, when the potholes of the grandly named ‘Route Nationale 1’ finally crumbled into a muddy dirt-track, before fading away altogether into the tall grasses of the savannah, I made plans to set out on foot.

My guidebooks were absolutely blank for the entire region that I wanted to cross from the central highlands to the west-coast – an area of roughly the same size as El Salvador. Amongst the talkative local stall-holders and the noisy backpacker dives of Antananarivo, the island’s capital, nobody I’d met had even been as far as Tsiroanomandidy.

From the moment when the Peugeot pick-up bush-taxi final skidded to a halt in Tsiroanomandidy’s dusty central square everyone I spoke to was bursting to tell me about the Zone Rouge. Before looking for a room, I stopped to cut the road dust with a bottle of THB (‘Three Horses Beer’) and the barman shocked me with his horror-stories of cattle-rustling, murder and torched villages. I tried for a second opinion at the police station and a macabre desk-sergeant added other perils - including kidnapping, slavery and black magic - to the list. (I had the impression that the Tsiroanomandidy boys-in-blue were not shy about pointing out to a vazaha - a foreigner - that they were fearlessly engaged in a crusade against all the combined forces of the darkness).

The army had established lonely military posts of three to five men in outlying villages and had even made several helicopter raids into the centre of the Zone Rouge. But the bandits knew the terrain and were forewarned and hidden by villages that were believed to be under their protection. Their leaders, brigands with names like Ratsibahaka (The Bad Lemur) and Zaza Mola (Crazy Baby), were famed for the weapons that they carried. It was rumoured that, in the early eighties, the South African Government or the CIA (or both) had supplied some bandit groups with automatic rifles in an attempt to destabilise the socialist government. Yet the bandits were never revolutionaries or guerrillas: they lived primarily from terror and their own ruthless brand of cattle-rustling.

Madagascar’s human population has only recently equalled that of the cattle, and zebu are still the life-blood of the country; amongst most of Madagascar’s eighteen tribes a man’s worth is still counted in head of cattle. Every week hundreds of hump-backed beasts are herded from the pastures on the western plains to the island’s biggest cattle-market at Tsiro, as the town is known locally. This cattle-market – lying about 150 miles west of the capital (six hours by bush-taxi) – is the raison d’être of the Zone Rouge.

I found a room by the marketplace and Tiana, the landlady – taking advantage of a rare chance to practise her English – agreed to guide me to the dust bowl on the edge of town where cowboys dressed in the ubiquitous sarong-like lambas leaned on their spears and watched over their foot-sore zebu. “People are moving into Tsiro all the time,” Tiana told me. “It’s too dangerous to live in the country anymore. The men who bring their cattle to the market often have to fight to get them here and some are killed on the trail.” As soon as they’d sold their animals and had money in their pockets the cowboys would be jumping on an Air Mad bush-hopper back to their villages in the far west. I was unable to tempt anybody into making the return trek across the Zone Rouge.

Just as I was beginning to despair of ever finding a guide who could lead me westwards I met Eloi Razafimandimby. He had the coffee-coloured good looks and powerful build of the Betsileo tribe, coupled with a deep love for his island and a determination to see as much of it as possible. Formerly a schoolteacher in an isolated Zone Rouge village he showed an immediate interest in my quest for the Vazimba.

“It could be dangerous if you were alone,” he shrugged, “but I know many people there. They won’t hurt you if you’re with me.” These were the first positive comments that I had heard since I arrived in the west and I latched onto them.

It wasn’t until we were already entering the Zone Rouge - and Eloi began strapping himself into what he called a ‘homemade bulletproof vest’ - that I began to question the wisdom of my decision.

The inhabitants of the few remaining villages in the Zone Rouge live hard lives, tending their paddy fields and herding their precious zebu. Their days are governed by omens and taboos, and their nights by fear of massacre at the hands of the bandits. Sometimes the bandits would send a message advising when they would attack and as long as the villagers left their cattle when they escaped into the forests there would be no killings. At other times the Dahalo came in the night, without warning or mercy.

Although the settlers came from several of the island’s eighteen tribes, they were firmly united in the pioneer spirit that had brought them to this lawless country where there is an abundance of good, rich land . . . if you’re prepared to fight for it.

The headmen gave us spears to keep next to our sleeping mats and if the village owned a shotgun they kept an armed guard on patrol throughout the night. Despite the tension, I always felt that I was among friends in these hamlets. On one occasion I fell peacefully asleep under the gaze of five young men, who leaned on their spears watching over the first vazaha who had ever been in their village.

Often there was nothing to eat but boiled rice and a handful of peanuts yet the villagers were always ready to share what they had with a visitor and we’d repay them out of the provisions we carried from Tsiro. Beef is rarely eaten except for ceremonial purposes but twice we were honoured with freshly killed hens. Rice water – laughingly known as whisky Malgache - was the usual beverage and, boiled for a couple of minutes with the burnt rice in the pot, it was not only surprisingly tasty but also reassuringly sterile.

Most of the homes were made from woven saplings, plastered with zebu dung that hardened into concrete within days under the powerful equatorial sun. A ramshackle collection of six of these huts, near the Bungolava foothills, went by the name of Soa Tana (Sweet Town) and it was here the old hunter warned us about the Dahalo ambush.

We felt nightmarishly vulnerable as we lowered ourselves through the swirling café au lait of the Manambolo River. The sun was just climbing over the hill at our backs and it was still cold when we stepped warily into the shadows under trees. We sat still for a few minutes, holding our breath and listening for the crack of twigs underfoot, before scrambling through a wall of giant bamboo and up out of the valley. Then we were in headlong flight, striking directly towards the Bungolava Mountains rather than sticking to the infinitely easier, but more predictable, valley trails. We crossed the rolling savannah of Bezavona (‘Place of Many Mists’) in a single day in our determination to leave the bandits behind and camped that night in a densely wooded gully, shielding the glow of our campfire as best we could.

We added three more days to our journey by taking the most ludicrous (and therefore unpredictable) route across a seemingly endless chain of hills and valleys, covered with what I was beginning to think of as man-eating grass.

Swaying six feet above our heads, vero grass not only sliced like razorblades but it seriously reduced our already slim chances of successful pygmy-spotting. Furthermore, these vero patches were no more than islands in a sea of grass of a far more vicious nature. Danga grasses are crowned with sharp black spines that seep a resin so that they stick together in a tangled mat. As you drag your legs through this gluey mass, the spines are dislodged by the dozen to go about their business of insinuating themselves slowly but surely into your flesh. I soon began to appreciate why the Dahalo might have been reluctant to follow us.

Now, on top of all this, Eloi was determined to add the blood-guzzling spirit-animals of Bungolava to my list of woes. “The songaomby’s like a big sheep, but it lives on the blood of men,” he was explaining. “A man from my hometown once tried to hide in a tree when he saw a songaomby. This was very silly because everybody knows that it plays a wicked trick to get you down. It stood underneath the tree and it . . .” – he paused, searching for the mot juste – “how you say? . . it pee-ed, and swished its tail. The pee burns like acid and the man fell out of the tree when he got splashed. The songaomby ate him.”

My friend shook his head sadly, “Nobody ever saw him again.” Eloi was one of the Betsileo - ‘The Invincibles’ - whose ancestral homelands are on the southern end of the island’s central plateau. Although the Betsileo are generally the most widely travelled of Madagascar’s tribes, they maintain a deep-rooted horror of dying away from home, where their spirit will not be able to find its way back to the homelands. If a relative who has been buried in a distant land appears in a dream, it is taken as an unmistakable sign that his spirit is restless and feels abandoned. Speedy arrangements must be made to bring him home as soon as possible and at any cost. There are endless sagas of loyal Betsileo trekking for weeks on end with suitcases bearing the remains of wayward loved-ones.

In a country as racially diverse as Madagascar, the Betsileo have retained to a great extent the characteristics of the country’s first settlers, the pioneers who made the long voyage from Indonesia almost two thousand years ago. These intrepid sailors introduced to Madagascar their highly developed fishing techniques, stilted houses that could withstand the monsoons and the ecologically disastrous slash-and-burn agricultural system that had possibly driven them out of their islands in the first place. From the cycle trishaws of the highlands to the pirogue out-riggers of the west coast, Madagascar still feels much closer to Asia than to Africa.

It was not until centuries later that the first statuesque Bantu cattle-herders crossed the 300-mile Mozambique Channel from Africa. It occurred to me that they could well have described the short, wiry Indonesians that they found there as ‘white pygmies.’

Eloi Razafimandimby had already taken off his ‘bulletproof vest’, but I was aware that this was because the thick leather straps were excruciatingly uncomfortable rather than because he was confident that we were out of reach of the bandits. We didn’t yet realise as we hauled ourselves over the highest ridge in Bungolava that we were heading towards the main recruiting grounds of the Dahalo. All across the Zone Rouge gangs of likely-lads were heading westwards towards blood-or-glory at the biggest of the year’s bare-knuckle, street-fighting festivals in the town of Antsalova.

“Did I ever tell you about the kalanoro?” Eloi began as we scrambled down the western slope of Vatosìra Mountain. “He’s a little hairy man, his feet point backwards and he can’t resist the smell of frying pistachio nuts . . .” Sorcerer bandits, killer grass, man-eating sheep, and now hairy, pistachio-craving dwarfs . . It seemed that even the helpful desk-sergeant in Tsiroanomandidy had understated the facts when he warned me what I might be letting myself in for in the Zone Rouge.

Both my ankles were painfully poisoned by danga thorns by the time we splashed through the paddy fields surrounding the wilderness town of Tsiandro. I tried not to think about the likelihood of the muddy water being infected with bilharzia as I stopped to savour its delicious coolness.

Tsiandro lies close to the northern end of the Tsingy de Bemaraha Reserve and Gaston, the local warden and by proxy the district délégué (government representative), showed us to a room in the official compound.

“Everything that arrives in Tsiandro must be carried here on a man’s back, for two days,” said Gaston, explaining why the half-dozen bottles of Three Horses Beer that had just been rustled up were the most expensive that I’d yet bought in Madagascar. “Not only that, but most people here don’t use money at all. For instance” – some words of Malagasy were rattled off between himself and the ever-present crowd of children blocking the doorway – “at current exchange rate, a jar of sugar equals three of rice, and a bottle of THB equals eight jars of rice!”

Gaston was a mine of information on everything to do with the area and he set us up not only with a knowledgeable guide to lead us through the dense forests of the reserve, but also with a lead on the Vazimba. A few hours walk to the north-west, he told us, there was a tiny village, the headman of which was said to be Vazimba.

George, our new guide, appeared early the next morning wearing a skirt made from bright orange plastic: “to keep out the danga,” he winked. We stocked up on rice and coffee and tramped out of Tsiandro with George swinging a live hen for fresh meat during our three-day crossing of the reserve. The towering limestone pinnacles of the Tsingy, Madagascar’s most famous geological feature, lie mostly at the southern end of the national park and very few tourists ever visit this northern section. Although most of Madagascar’s lemurs are to be found in the few pockets of rainforest that remain in the east, George was soon pointing out groups of magnificent, woolly Verreaux’s sifaka. They looked strangely human staring down at us from the highest treetops, with their black skullcaps and snowy fur coats.

Chameleons were everywhere and I saw more snakes in our trek through the Tsingy de Bemaraha than I’ve seen in months in other tropical countries. My pleasure at seeing these creatures was further enhanced by the knowledge that, inexplicably, there are no poisonous land-snakes in Madagascar.

George was full of information about all of the creatures of Bemaraha, though the habits of some of these were hard to believe: “There’s a snake called fandrefiala that lives in the reserve. It’s rare but very dangerous. It has a poisoned spear-tip for a head and will drop out of the trees to kill anybody who walks underneath.” Both of my guides were clearly convinced of the existence of these weird and wonderful creatures and I did my best never to show my scepticism.

George and Eloi were still describing Madagascar’s weird and wonderful creatures as they led me limping into a dusty square between a collection of rickety huts. Two men came smilingly forward. One was tall and lanky, the other short and bandy-legged but they were both dressed in the shorts and T-shirts that are now the dress of choice across most of the country. A teenager appeared, firing off a volley of cheerful French: “Bienvenue, m’ssieurs. Comment allez vous?” With his lamba worn toga-like over one shoulder and a large plastic comb stuck in his hair (the badge of a Malagasy dandy) he appeared to be the traditionalist in this motley group.

One by one they stepped forward to offer the formal two-handed handshake. None would have dreamed of betraying bad manners by letting us see that we had not been expected. At first it had been unnerving to think that our arrival was so obviously anticipated in these wilderness hamlets and I assumed that the bush telegraph had travelled ahead, as it almost always does. But as we moved onto remoter and more un-trodden trails I realised that this was impossible. Even in the most isolated communities it was regarded as simple good manners that we should be greeted like old friends who had just popped over from a neighbouring village.

An old man came out of one of the huts, screwing his eyes up against the sun. I wondered if we had interrupted his siesta. Mahatoky could have been seventy, but was probably not much older than fifty and he was the headman of this modest collection of seven huts that was bestowed with the impressive name - even by Malagasy standards - of Ankazomandiladongo. He was dark-skinned, with finely chiselled features and he wore a ragged denim jacket onto the back of which somebody, in another lifetime, had painstakingly embroidered ‘HARLEY DAVIDSON.’

At just under five feet, Mahatoky might have qualified for the textbook definition of a pygmy if it weren’t for the fact, as he explained later, that all Vazimba were not created equal. He had a disconcerting way of smilingly redirecting my questions - “Are all vazaha the same height as you?” - so that I had the impression that he preferred to guide me into answering them for myself. I asked Mahatoky what he could tell me about the Vazimba and he showed us to some low stools in the lengthening shadow of his hut.

“This is not my own lie,” he began - using the traditional disclaimer with which any self-respecting old-time Malagasy sage would have started his tale - “this is a lie that the ancestors told me.” He massaged his salt-and-pepper beard while the teenage dandy filled some enamel cups with delicious sugarcane wine, then he leaned forward to tell me the story of the Vazimba’s arrival in the west.

“At the time when the Merina tribe defeated the Vazimba and drove us from our highland capital, near where Antananarivo stands today, we had a great king called Andrianavaovao. He led his people westwards from the Massif Central, across the Bungolava Mountains to the Manambolo River.”

He paused and cast a peaceful eye over the village with the air of an old man who could no longer see any reason to hurry. “The king’s sister Ampelamana was also a great leader, but she had a son who was bad. Betandra, the son, was in love with one of his uncle’s wives. He wanted to kill the king but Andrianavaovao got to hear of the treachery, and he killed the young man with the knife that was meant for himself.”

Mahatoky leaned back against the wall of the hut and this time held his silence for so long that I began to wonder if he was going to continue. Only when our cups had been refilled with the sweet wine did he break his silence.

“Words are like rice plants,” he said, “they must be carefully arranged . . . and watered. Ampelamana, heart-broken by the death of her only son and tired of the journey, decided to settle her followers in the Manambolo valley. They became Vazimba Andrano (Vazimba of the Waters), and very soon their blood was lost among the people of the long valleys. Our king continued the trek with his wives and subjects - along the trail by which you came here - and finally they stopped to plant their rice and raise their zebu in this area. They became the Vazimba Antety - the Vazimba of the Plateau. And I’m the last Vazimba Antety,” Mahatoky sighed, “everybody else here is Sakalava, from the valleys, and my children are Sakalava-Vazimba.”

“When did all this happen?” I asked, “how many generations ago?” “It’s impossible to say,” came Eloi’s translated answer, “Monsieur Mahatoky says that the story’s always been this way.”

This wasn’t unusual. Until the French colonisation rural Malagasy did not recognise any time structure beyond agricultural cycles and specific obligations relating to loyalty to the ancestors. But there was something else that I wanted to ask, going back even further in time. Would the old man be able to tell me how the Vazimba first arrived in Madagascar? “Ask him,” I said, “where his people first came from. In other words, what’s his belief of the beginning of life?”

Mahatoky waited patiently whilst the question was interpreted and then turned slowly to fix a crooked smile upon me. I’m not saying it was telepathy but I didn’t need a translator to tell me what he was thinking: “Nobody knows that. Did this strange vazaha come all this way to ask me?” If only Mahatoky could have known just how far I had travelled to meet him. But how could I explain all this?

I would have liked to stay in Ankazamandiladongo longer, but it wasn’t to be. In three more days we would complete our trek through western Madagascar. Eloi was anxious to get back to his fiancée in Tsiro and - what with danga-poisoning and malaria - I was desperately in need of a rest myself. So we shook hands and limped onwards.

We were sat around a riverside campfire that evening chewing on our freshly killed celebratory chicken as the lavender sky blushed to an impossible crimson. As Eloi and I were reflecting on everything that we’d seen in our weeks in the Zone Rouge I remembered an old Malagasy proverb: ‘It is the destiny of the hen to die at the moments of man’s greatest happiness.’

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