Gatô

By Eric H. Campbell

    On the road east to Fort Dauphin one passes through a village unremarkable but for its large fruit stands...

    “Ô gatô, é!”

Vendors crowd around a taxi brousse with their platters.

   ...and the women who crowd around the passing vehicles, hawking golden cakes.  Cake is “gatô” in Malagasy, from the French.

    The village is Ampasia (“am-pasha”), and until recently it was unique in this region for its cakes.  About eight years ago, Elá, a village mother, figured out the recipe for herself.  She told other villagers and they launched a local enterprise.

The cooks bake the cake batter in small metal cups.

    The cakes are shaped somewhat like American cupcakes, with puffy tops and scalloped edges.  The recipe is fairly ordinary: flour, sugar, oil, chocolate, eggs, milk, and baking soda.  Taste-wise, they’re nothing spectacular, but perfectly satisfying for a sweet tooth.

Sifoa, 15, spoons oil into baking cups.

    The ovens for the cakes are cooking pots, placed on a bed of coals.  In the bottom of each pot is a layer of sand, serving to radiate the heat more evenly.  Another layer of coals is placed on each pot’s lid.

Lampoly, 20, runs to intercept a taxi brousse.

    The dozen or so sellers stack their wares on platters and offer them to travelers who stop in Ampasia.          The vehicles range from huge cross-county trucks to smaller taxis brousse to local pickups to 4x4s carrying tourists.

    Lampoly, 20, pursed her lips in distaste at the mention of the tourists.

    “They don’t buy anything,” she said.  “They just watch.”

    Understandable; if an inexperienced foreigner is nervous about getting sick, they probably won’t touch any local food.

    While they wait for customers, the vendors scan the road in both directions.  The adults chat, while the children might dance with each other.  No one really drops their guard, lest they miss the next sale.

A successful day of selling can bring a profit of around 4000 ariary ($2).  This sum is several times what the average farmer makes per day.

    Fortunately, this difference does not appear to be very much of a lure for the next generation of villagers.  Genevéve, 40, explained how her two children help her during the summers, but will go back to school once the year begins in October.

    The cakes of Ampasia provide a shining example of how villagers with very few resources can unite and start new enterprises.  Such developments, however inconspicuous to foreigners, bode well for the future of Madagascar.

Photo Post: Antandroy Households

For the past two weeks I’ve been part of a mission with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to investigate a malaria outbreak in Androy.  The team visited the towns of Ambovombe, Antanimora, Andalatanosy, and Bekily, and many of the smaller villages around them.
    One of our primary information-gathering techniques was to do a house-to-house survey on residents’ mosquito net use.  Mosquito nets, usually impregnated with insecticide, are the most effective tool for malaria prevention.
    The villages in this area are extremely poor.  The people raise goats and zebu, and farm cassava in the thin soil.  The single-room houses have mud walls and thatched roofs.  Up to ten people may sleep in one house.

Bekopiky Sud, near Andalatanosy.

Bekopiky Sud, near Andalatanosy.

Bekopiky Sud, near Andalatanosy.  The wife is wearing a traditional face mask made from crushed roots.

Anjata, near Bekily. 

Anjata, near Bekily.

Antsakoamary, near Bekily.

Bekopiky Sud, near Andalatanosy

Anjata, near Bekily.  The rods in the corner are a walking stick, a cattle goad, a metal spike for digging cassava, and a spear for defense.

Tsikolaky, near Bekily.

The Fruits of Tanambao

These fish come from both the Indian Ocean and the rivers around Fort Dauphin.

By Eric H. Campbell

    Over the past decade or so, Americans have become increasingly aware of just how their food is made.  Huge, unseen amounts of effort and technology go into just about whatever food you care to name.  But in Madagascar, where farming has yet to be put on a conveyor belt, the story is very different.

These green balls are formed from mashed cassava greens.

    The food market in Fort Dauphin’s Tanambao neighborhood is an excellent place to discover the paths food takes through southern Madagascar.  The word “Tanambao” means roughly, “the entrance to the town.”  Many towns in Madagascar have a neighborhood called Tanambao, located on the main road where traffic first arrives.

A woman picks through onions while minding her daughter.

    In the tin-roofed pavilions facing the road women sell vegetables: cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, onions, garlic.  April is the season for fresh chickpeas, which can be found alongside many other types of beans.  Some of this produce comes from the villages around Fort Dauphin, but it also arrives by the truckload from Ambovombe.

These eggs usually sell for 500 Ar (25¢ US) each.  That sum borders on the extravagant for many Malagasy buyers.

    A little deeper into the market, the food becomes more varied.  Ninaka, a man of about 35, sells Bourbonnais eggs.  These eggs are larger and more costly than normal hen eggs in Madagascar.  I asked him if he and his family ever eat the eggs.
    “What kind of egg-seller would I be if I wasted them on myself?” he chuckled.  “No, no, they’re too expensive for me to eat.”
    Instead of being a chicken farmer, Ninaka is a middleman.  The eggs come from Antananarivo, three days’ travel by road.  As the area around the capital is significantly more developed, it is possible that a relatively modern facility supplies the eggs.

Saban helps a doctor from Fort Dauphin's CHD hospital choose a cut of mutton.

    Saban, 40, cuts apart pieces of sheep and goat meat from Amboasary.  He wears a distinctive cap and beard, showing that he is Muslim.  Naturally, his meat is halal. 
    Other butchers ply their trade in a large concrete shell of a building.  It’s dim; there are fluorescent lights on the ceiling, but there might as well not be.  The butchers work at long counters, each with a balance and a set of iron weights.  They cleave pieces of meat apart on much-used wooden chopping blocks, slice the fat from it, and arrange the chunks for the customer’s selection.

A butcher sorts chunks of beef by size.

    “The beef all comes from Tsiombe,” one of them told me.  “The pork comes from Ambovombe, but Tsiombe has the best beef.”  Tsiombe is on the far side of Androy from Fort Dauphin, at least a day and a half by road.
    There’s also an area for fruit-sellers.  They arrange their bananas in rows, their oranges and coconuts in pyramids.

An old lady sells oranges in the fruit market.

    “These lemons are from Manambaro,” a girl offered.
    “What?” I asked.  “I live in Manambaro, we don’t have any lemons.”
    “No, not the town of Manambaro, the little villages around there,” she replied.

Senjy, 29, oversees her stocks of rice, beans, and chickpeas.

    It turns out that although the market’s food is free of hormones and preservatives, it’s not as local as it might appear.  Rice, the supreme Malagasy staple, may be the best example of this trend.  Every year Madagascar buys large amounts of rice from Pakistan.  Just another way in which life on this island is rarely as simple as it appears.

Angavo: A Hidden Gem

The first leg of the trail skirts several rice paddies.

    From the valley floor, Angavo Mountain appears crowned with some colossal structure.  Its formidable walls and pointed roof hint at some mysterious, swashbuckling episode of Madagascar’s history.  Is it a fortress, built by some conqueror?  A tomb, housing the bones of a much-loved monarch?  A temple, to a deity lost to time?
    It is none of these.  Angavo Mountain bears nothing more than rock spurs and boulder formations.  And from almost any point below, these stones line up with each other to give the illusion of a man-made citadel.  In fact, the upper slopes bear almost no trace of humans’ presence.
    Instead, the mountain possesses an untouched beauty usually only found in Madagascar’s national parks.  During the climb up the north face, one passes in short order through a series of environments that reflect the diversity of climes throughout the island.
    The trail begins in Ebobaky, a farming village of about 400 residents.  As in many small villages in Madagascar, Ebobaky’s people are very poor.  There are only four or five brick houses; all the other dwellings are one-room huts of flimsy wood, or even banana leaves sewn to a wooden frame.  The average wage for a farmer is about 1000 Ariary (50¢ US) a day.

Zebu graze on the lower slopes.

    The surrounding foothills are given heavily to agriculture.  Cassava fields stretch nearly to the horizon, while rice paddies lie in the depressions.  In unplanted areas, bare-chested herdsmen watch over small herds of zebu, hardy crescent-horned cows.
    A little further up, patches of ground lie bare and red, baking under the sun.  The hard earth is knobbly.  These dry spots provide glimpses of the rocky desert region to the west, where vegetation is sparse and water is precious.

A few gnarled trees have found purchase in the tough ground here.

    Yet on the north slope there is water aplenty.  Spring-fed trickles lace the mountain’s face, crossing and joining to form larger streams.  These rills have carved chutes for themselves in the hardpan, each about six inches deep.  With grass growing thickly around each and hiding them from view, it sometimes sounds as if one is standing atop a huge gurgling pipe system.

These monoliths stand several times the height of a person.

    A scattering of boulders comes into view, along with the mountain’s more impressive monoliths.  The east face of Angavo’s upper tower soars forbiddingly upward like a Southern-Hemisphere Half Dome.  At the same time, a sharp metallic drone arises from the cicadas in the forest nestled just below it.

Ascending the tower from this angle would be risky without rock-climbing equipment.

    At the top of the ridge, there are no trees, only a tranquil expanse of grass.  Dark boulders sit here and there like whales’ backs breaking the surface of the ocean.  This area is much like the high-altitude grasslands just above the town of Ihosy, two days’ travel to the north.

The ocean here is plentiful in fish, shrimp, and many kinds of shellfish.

    Looking south, a patchwork of rice fields dissolves into sand dunes, which then meet the azure expanse of the Indian Ocean.  The fishing villages along this section of coast are also very poor.  Fortunately, because of their seafood-rich diet, the villagers are healthier than many other Malagasy citizens.

Roots and vines twist over the forest floor.

    The forest on Angavo’s southern slope is dense with undergrowth, yet almost park-like with its soaring canopy.    Alien-looking spiders build webs between the trees, while insects scurry through the leaf litter below.  Brown sifaka lemurs search for fruit in the treetops. The trails are faint here; humans rarely venture into these woods simply because they’re so remote.

A red spider perches in the center of its web.

    Indeed, the mountain’s isolation and ruggedness are the only protection it has from the encroaches of humanity.  Amid a scattering of destitute villages hungry for resources, Angavo exists as an unmarred wild place.  Certainly ecotourism could bring revenue to the villages while heightening their respect for the natural world.  But until the infrastructure for such tourism is in place, it may be up to intrepid travelers and their guides to experience the mountain for themselves.