Madagascar: Lost Palace of the Tana by Richard Newton

Antananarivo (call it Tana if you prefer) is used to restless nights. Freshly arrived, I struggled to sleep in a hotel room overlooking Avenue de l’Indépendence. Time and again I was roused by muggings on the pavement outside. Come dawn, the dramas of the night gave way to city bustle, and the calls of market vendors sounded in a street where, in darkness, chilling cries and fleeing footsteps had echoed.

But even this city, which is so practised in shrugging off its nightmares, was left dazed by what happened on the night of November 6, 1995. The howls of the city’s two antiquated fire trucks were the first indication of disaster. Hundreds of people rallied to the scene, thousands more watched from the streets below, but there was nothing that could be done as fire ripped through the hilltop Rova Palace, reducing centuries of history to smoke. In the flames of that infernal night, Tana lost its soul.

As if the destruction of the Rova palace and the national treasures it contained were not tragedy enough, the fire also consumed the earthly remains of all but one of the kings and queens who ruled Madagascar until the monarchy was dismantled by the French at the end of the 19th century.

In Madagascar, the dead are venerated to the extent that their bodies are periodically exhumed in a ceremony - famadihana (turning of the bones) - which reinforces the bonds between the living and their ancestors. The cremation of the royal remains was therefore a catastrophe that shook Malagasy society to the core. Worse still, it turned out that the fire had been a deliberate act. Thus, in spectacular fashion, the ethnic tensions that have smouldered for centuries on this, the world’s fourth largest island, ignited.

The origins of the Malagasy people are diverse. The early human settlers, arriving from the 1st Century AD onwards, came from South East Asia, Africa and Arabia. By the 17th century, they had evolved into a number of distinct clans.

The dominant clan of the hauts plateaux (the highlands) are the Merina, who established their capital atop a hill in the centre of the island. They called it Antananarivo (pronounced ‘Tananarive’), meaning ‘town of the thousand’ - a reference to the soldiers garrisoned in the fortress. The fortress became the Rova Palace in the 1790s, and from it King Radama I set about bringing the entire island under his rule.

On an island in which the past is an integral element of the present, the military campaigns that brought about geographic unity have not been forgotten. The coastal peoples (côtier) resent the Merina’s success in forging a kingdom with no frontier but the sea, and it was a group of côtier extremists who were ultimately blamed for setting fire to the Rova.

The population of contemporary Tana, which has risen to over a million, is almost 95 percent Merina. But, that is not to say that the capital is palpably homogenous. Tana is a unique blend of exotic influences. For the first-time visitor it can be unnerving. The city does not obviously belong to any single continent. Or century, even.

It has a colourful vibrancy that is perhaps more Asian than African, more ancient than modern. On Fridays, the entire city centre is choked with the umbrella-shaded stalls of the zoma market (zoma means, simply, ‘Friday’). Within the market, time and geography lose all bearing.

People don’t walk through the zoma, they flow. I joined the current and drifted with it: from fruit stalls to those selling dog-eared French magazines; from clothes stalls to an area specialising in spare Renault parts. All the time I had to beware of an insidious undercurrent: thieves armed with razor blades to cut through pockets and rucksacks.

As I moved with the crowd, I registered that even among the Merina there is immense diversity of skin colour and ethnic appearance. To some extent, the tone of a Merina’s skin determines social standing. The three distinct castes - Andriana (nobles), Hova (commoners), and Andevo (serfs) - are weighted in favour of those of lighter shade.

When I eventually spilled out of the zoma, I was no nearer gaining a handle on this beguiling city. Surrounded by rice paddies, Tana sprawls over twelve sacred hills; a clinging jumble of slim, two-storey, red-brick buildings with steeply pitched tin roofs. The whole conglomeration is threaded together by a labyrinth of twisting roads, paths, and crumbling stairways.

To a degree, the architecture is a legacy of British missionaries, who were the dominant European influence in the early 19th century. Besides brick buildings, the missionaries introduced Christianity and formal education, and devised a written version of the Malagasy language.

The British government officially recognised Madagascar as an independent country in 1820. The French were less charitable, and initiated the Franco-Malagasy War (1883-85) which ultimately led to the island becoming a French colony in 1896. Independence was regained in 1960.

Since independence, the yoke of French influence has not entirely been sloughed. The cars bouncing along the cobbled city streets are inevitably antique Renaults and Citroëns, and Tana’s housewives struggle with the eternal problem of how to fit baguettes into their shopping bags. The French language continues to be widely spoken.

Independent Madagascar has not fared well. Decades of dictatorship and corruption have seen it slump to become one of the world’s poorest nations. The poverty in evidence on the streets is shocking, and there is widespread ambivalence towards sanitation, making the city one of the foulest-smelling and least hygienic in the world. Crime is rife. And yet, despite everything, it has undeniable, roguish charm.

Since 1993 and the coming of democracy (albeit fragile), a reformist government has sought to put the country back on track. But the economy remains weak, inadequately supported by agricultural exports - coffee, cloves and vanilla. Significantly, Madagascar is no longer self-sufficient in rice, the main staple - the country has the highest per-capita rice consumption in the world.

Throughout its history, Tana has been dominated by the Rova Palace, seemingly impregnable at the summit of a 200-metre cliff known, for good reason, as ‘the place of the hurling’. Queen Ranavalona I (1828-61), according to Kenneth Gandar Dower, had 'a passion for sewing her subjects up in sacks and making use of the first-class facilities offered by her capital in the matter of vertical drops.'

Under good monarchs and bad, there was no escaping the gaze of the Rova. In the French colonial era, the palace became a symbol of hope. And in recent, troubled times, residents of Tana needed only to glance up at the palace on the hill to remind themselves of their proud heritage.

Now it is in ruins, with only the stone outer walls still standing. In daylight, the sight of it inflicts daily pain on the city’s psyche. At night, when darkness masks the worst of the damage, the Rova looms above Tana like a ghost.