Sample text for Lords and lemurs : mad scientists, kings with spears, and the survival of diversity in Madagascar / Alison Jolly.
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1
Lemurs Just Behind Their Houses
Madagascar is sometimes called the Island at the End of the Earth. Even
within Madagascar there is an especially far-off place, the extreme south:
extreme in its distance, extreme in its parching climate, extreme in the
violent reputation of its people.
If ever you visit Madagascar, you may well come here. Among its
spiny deserts lies a nature reserve called Berenty -- a tiny place, but in its
own way a microcosm of the world. At Berenty, tourists in Tilley hats and
Gucci knapsacks stay side by side with people who are well off if they own a
second shirt. The tourists do not even need to lock their bungalow doors.
They had better shut the windows, though, or they may find a troop of
ringtailed lemurs inside foraging for Coke and bananas. If twenty lemurs
promenade toward your living room television screen, and the sunlight haloes
black-and-white ringed tails like swaying upraised question marks, that is
Berenty. If you see a group of white sifaka leap between trees in aerial ballet
or bounce over the ground with flailing arms, that is Berenty. In fact, it is
likely to be Berenty"s parking lot, while the cameraman ties himself in knots
to frame out the human side of the story.
Most visitors to Berenty spend a fascinated hour in the Museum
of Androy. They stand on tiptoe to stare into the roof of a tiny house that
once belonged to a woman of the Tandroy tribe, the People of the Thorns.
They gawk at photos of a chieftain"s funeral. They sometimes giggle at
sacred talismans made of cow"s horns and crocodile teeth. Meanwhile, in
villages not five miles away, people live in just such houses, conjure with just
such talismans. When a clan elder dies, zebu cattle stampede through the
village amid gunfire and dancing and merrymaking and sex, all the way to the
grand climax, when young men spear a whole herd of zebu to send their
ancestor fittingly into the afterlife.
I do know a lot about ringtailed lemurs. As for people, all I can tell
you is what they chose to tell me. Many of the tales told here come from
single witnesses: stories, not history. The stories pass through slavery and
colonialism, nationalism, socialism, and the neocolonialism of the World
Bank. I make few judgments about these isms, except to quote Dr. Roland
Ramahatra as he stood at his father"s bedside: "Manichean divisions into
good against bad are simply wrong." Berenty"s real history is childbirth and
marriage and bitter imprisonment. There are spear fights and stink fights and
tombs adorned with the skulls of sacrificed cattle. You meet He-Who-Cannot-
Be-Thrown-to-Earth and He-Who-Never-Suckled, Robin the English slave boy,
Alison the American, and Hanta with her degree from Moscow. And, of
course, Frightful Fan and Cream Puff.
Above all you meet a family tenacious in luxury and in disaster:
the Lords of the Helm, feudal leaders who keep their pact with the Tandroy in
a globalizing world.
The first time I saw Berenty, everyone else came in their own airplane.
I turned up in my Land Rover unannounced. I had bucketed over five hundred
miles of so-called road in less than a week, with no illusions that there would
be a telephone. I"d already explored forest lands in many parts of the island
continent and would not have gone to Berenty at all -- except that so many
people told me, "You must visit the de Heaulme family. They have lemurs just
behind their houses."
Lemurs in the backyard sounded grim. Miserable captives with
cords around their waists, I supposed. Still, they might be worth a detour on
the way to discovering a wild paradise where I might finally settle to study the
private lives of lemurs, the animals that most resemble our own ancestors of
fifty million years ago. I was twenty-five years old, with a brand-new Ph.D.
and a Sputnik-era research grant to swell my pride. I thought I knew
everything, or at least enough to take on the whole of Madagascar.
"What"s that strange name?" I asked my friends. "De Heaulme?
An H that separates the two words, then e-a-u, like eau for water? Rhymes
with Stockholm? Got it. Okay, when I reach the extreme south I"ll go have a
look-see."
I headed south along with Preston Boggess, a Yale undergraduate
who was helping me look for a site for my lemur study. We traveled from
peak-roofed brick towns surrounded by rice paddies to high, windswept plains
studded with monolithic granite mountains, to hardscrabble villages of mud
huts, and, finally, to tiny plank dwellings where a man could stand straight
only beneath the ridgepole and must bend double to crawl out the door --
houses scarcely distinguishable from chicken coops to my naive eyes. All
along the way, herds of humped, long-horned zebu blocked the corrugated
track, and dogs, chickens, and guinea fowl lay in the road taking dust baths.
The Land Rover reached a dropoff. The road dipped to the wide
plain of the Mandrare River. Below lay sisal. Endless geometrical rows of
spear-tipped leaves marched down to the river, which glinted like a basking
snake in a valley beaten colorless by the heat of noon. Forty kilometers
beyond, the land rose to a line of blue mountains, their summits capped with
a whipped-cream froth of cloud. On the side toward me the cloud sheared off
as though cut by a knife where it met the clear air of the desert. Over all
arched a sky so blindingly blue that I wondered how people ever thought red
the loudest hue. There is no color to outshout Berenty"s sky.
Then, at the sisal plantation"s hub, there were whitewashed split-
rail fences! And whitewashed stones around flower beds of aloes and pink
Madagascar periwinkles. The track was graded and swept as no road had
been for the past five hundred miles. The houses were neatly squared
cement, painted white, with torrents of magenta or salmon- orange
bougainvillea at the corners. The first house I came to had a kind of carport,
but instead of a car it held a single-engine Cessna 172, green and white, call
sign FOBSO. Had I somehow stumbled into Texas?
Jean de Heaulme opened the door. He was ten years older than I,
with smooth black hair and round cheeks and merry eyes. I explained that I
was a scientist, an American lemur-watcher who had heard that at Berenty
they had lemurs behind the houses, and I introduced Preston, my assistant.
Jean told his wife, Aline, that there would be two more guests for
lunch. It seemed they were having a party. Friends would soon arrive from
Fort Dauphin, over the mountains. I protested haltingly that we hadn"t come
to visit, only to see animals. My French was fluent enough: I had spent a
happy junior year in Paris and had even passed my own father"s survey
course in French literature at Cornell. What made me stammer was my first
sight of Aline. She is one of those women who would stay elegantly groomed
in the midst of a cyclone. She had already practiced on more real cyclones
than most. I looked at her trim black curls and white strap sandals, all too
conscious that my khakis did nobody credit. My field boots seemed to grow
to the size of dugout canoes.
My protests were cut short by the noise of motors. Two little
planes taxied down the grass strip beside the road; two couples got out. It
became clear that we would all settle down to leisurely drinks and a four-
course meal awash with good wine. I can still remember the main dish: a
whole capitaine fish caught in the sea off Fort Dauphin at dawn, poached
within the hour, flown to Berenty in the Cessna, then piped with a geometry
of homemade mayonnaise and nestled among radish roses.
It was a long day. We went with the other visitors to see the sisal-
processing factory. Then somehow it was dark, too late to look for lemurs or
to return to Amboasary town. (American Lutheran missionaries had loaned
Preston and me an empty house there.) Jean and Aline sent us off to dine
with his father and uncle.
The uncle, Alain, already frail and white-haired, was always
deferential to his older brother. Everyone else deferred to him, too. Monsieur
Henry de Heaulme was terrifying.
I still do not know why. Monsieur de Heaulme was a square,
stocky man, then about sixty, his face like his son"s image set in granite. It
fell in straight-hewn lines, with a straight-line mouth and cleft chin. He chose
phrases and ideas with absolute precision, a necessity, since every
pronouncement would be taken as law. He never, or never that I heard, raised
his voice. He addressed persons of every degree with the same slow-spoken
courtesy and interest. Any primatologist knows, though, that to decipher a
dominance hierarchy, you don"t watch for aggression in the dominants. You
look for signs of fear in the subordinates. When Monsieur de Heaulme
entered a room, like the statue in the final act of Don Giovanni, strong men
summoned all their courage to speak and timid ones wanted to hide under
the table.
In the morning, finally, it was time to visit the forest. I understood
now that Berenty estate held a real forest, a nature reserve with lemurs living
in it, and that we would need a guide. I laced up my boots and tucked in my
trousers and hung my telephoto lenses about me. As we came to the door,
Jean said, "Oh -- would you mind taking our daughter, Be;ne;dicte, along?
She adores the woods."
Be;ne;dicte looked up at Preston and me, her knuckle in her
mouth. She was three years old, dressed in the bottom half of a turquoise
bikini. What kind of forest was suitable for a naked child? The guide, clearly a
friend, swung her up on his shoulders and we set off.
A path led into woods like none I had seen in Madagascar. By
now I knew the somber mysteries of tropical rainforest. I had sweltered
among the shadeless thorns of the spiny desert. But in this woodland, rough-
barked tamarinds, which Malagasy call kily, spread their horizontal branches
like huge old oak trees. Under the desert sun they cast emerald shade, as if
it were June in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Above them towered emergent
acacias called benono, the many-nippled, for the thorn bases that stud their
gray trunks. The ground in the shadows held a brown carpet of leaf litter and
fallen, crackling kily pods. At intervals the sun poured down into little grassy
glades lined with curtains of glossy liana leaves that swung from the tree
crowns. Kilys grow in single file along many Malagasy riverbanks. Berenty
forest lies cradled between the Mandrare and one of its old arms: two square
kilometers of well-watered river land. This is the woodland of fairy tales, where
lovelorn prince meets enchanted princess.
In the more robust Malagasy version, Berenty means Many Eels,
or the Great Eel. When the old river arm flooded after cyclones, people say, it
left fat marbled eels stranded on the forest floor. In those days female river
eels were two meters long and broad to match (the males are smaller). The
females grow for twenty-five or thirty years until a trigger in their brains tells
them to begin a one-way journey to the middle of the Indian Ocean to spawn.
Not so romantic as enchanted princesses, but better eating.
The guide took us off the path to a part of the forest that squeaked
and chattered. We looked up at trees hung with bats -- bats with red-gold fur
and large-eyed faces like those of fox cubs: Malagasy flying foxes. The guide
clapped his hands, while Be;ne;dicte squealed and pulled his hair with
excitement. A thousand bats whirled into the air. The sun shone through the
membranes of their four-foot wingspan, as large as any bats" in the world.
I didn"t really want to upset the bats, and I couldn"t bear sharing
the forest. I murmured that I would drop back to look for lemurs.
The lemurs found me. Staring lemon eyes in a black, heart-
shaped face set in a square, white-furred head: a white sifaka clung vertically
to a vertical trunk, its tail rolled up like a watch spring. Then, without warning,
it leaped. It seemed to double in size. Its hind legs, longer than head and
body together, propelled it backward into space in a curve as taut as ballet. It
did not jump away, but toward me! It turned in midair to land with both hind
feet first, then folded up and clung vertically to another trunk, still watching
me. Another followed across the same gap, and another, until a troop of five
converged in a half-circle less than fifteen feet away -- maddeningly inside
the range of my telephoto lens.
"Hey, who"s watching who?" I asked severely. (I have never gotten
over talking to animals.) One answered with a growl remarkably like a
snore. "Shi-fack!" it told me. "Shi-fakh!" it said even louder, the first syllable
bubbling in its throat, the second a click like an amplified hiccup. Soon all
five were mobbing me the way birds mob a cat, less than a single spring
away. At that point, say the Malagasy, sifaka may leap on you and slash
you viciously; when these placid vegetarians fight among themselves, red
blood stains their white fur. But this was just a chorus of dubious swearing.
The sifaka turned to go.
Now their way was blocked. A troop of twenty-odd ringtailed
lemurs had approached from behind. Their tails dangled like long fuzzy
caterpillars; their pointed, raccoonlike face masks caught the dappled forest
light. They too joined the mobbing, yapping in synchrony like so many ill-
mannered little terriers.
In any other forest I would be lucky to see the tail tip of a lemur
disappear at speed. The national reserves of Madagascar at that time had so
little protection that lemurs treated all humans as hunters. As they should
do -- I had nightmares of habituating a study troop, only to have somebody
serve it up as stew. But the Berenty lemurs had not been hunted in the
twenty-.ve years since the de Heaulmes had set up the forest as a reserve --
or even longer, for lemurs are fady -- taboo -- to the local Tandroy people. I
sat, enchanted, in the woods for half an hour, being sworn at by sifaka and
yapped at by ringtails, unwilling to move. I just waited, like the desert Arabs
who would not leave the waterfall, waiting for it to decide to come to an end.
Preston and Be;ne;dicte and the guide finally hauled me away.
By the time we came out of the woods, my study plan was clear.
Somehow I would find the courage to ask that granite man for permission to
spend a year in his forest. Then I would rent the missionaries" empty house
in Amboasary town so that I would not be wholly dependent on the de
Heaulme family or under their feet.
In my crumpled khakis, all hot with excitement, I barged in on
Monsieur de Heaulme in his office at the sisal plant and poured out my
hopes. It took him only a few seconds to agree. They had no housing on the
estate for me, but I would be free to spend as much time as I pleased in the
forest reserve for the coming year.
Driving back toward town through the sisal rows, my head
spinning, I understood a little of what had happened, who this family was. No,
not Texas. The de Heaulme family were aristocrats who had never actually
noticed the French Revolution. They thought it normal to have a naturalist in
their game park, as they might have a librarian in their library or an
archaeologist assembling their museum. All I had to do was drive my Land
Rover straight into the eighteenth century, park under a kily tree, and start
work.
Of course it nearly did not happen.
Preston and I walked into the unused house where the Lutheran mission had
said we could camp for a few nights. Another visitor had arrived in our
absence -- a pastor from an upcountry station who had never heard of us. He
was now out behind the house, conferring with his catechist in shocked
tones. His prim black suitcase stood in the exact center of the main room,
with a black Bible lying on top. Even the suitcase seemed to be gathering up
its skirts in horror, staying as far from every wall as possible. We had left in a
hurry the previous morning, leaving beds unmade, Preston"s cigarette butts in
unwashed Nestle; milk tins, and the sink full of empty beer bottles.
Fortunately it was beds, not bed. I had no romantic interest in a mere
undergraduate (nor he in me). I had someone else to wait for, in any case.
Oh, and we"d left a five-foot boa constrictor in the screened food
cabinet. We"d brought the snake back two days before to photograph. There
seemed no place else to keep it. The owner of the black suitcase must know
all too well that Malagasy sorcerers consider boas the familiars of
kokolampo, pagan forest spirits, so our snake was not an appropriate pet in a
mission home.
In the end, the whole American Lutheran assembly held a meeting
and prayed for me. They decided that if they rented me their house, I might
be saved.
Copyright © 2004 by Alison Jolly. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication:
Lemurs -- Madagascar.
Madagascar -- History.