Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar

"I wanted to give people a sense of Madagascar’s human diversity and history, not just its wildlife. I chose two books by anthropologists who lived in very different places on the island, including this one by David Graeber. David died recently, too young. In an interview a few years back, he said that Lost People was his favorite among the several books he wrote. It’s mine too. Written like a detective story, he recounts conversations with people in a community in the Central Highlands, where he lived for 18 months, as he tries to figure out what is happening. He can’t understand why there are such tensions in the village, and the book is his journey to understanding that they arose out of history – a history of slaves and slave ownership. He writes about the culturally separate spheres that people occupied historically, and how these shifted through time and produced the tensions that he encounters in the present. The book offers considerable insight into the last century-and-a-half, as well as the present. I found it very moving, and couldn’t put it down. It reads almost like a novel. Madagascar was caught up in the early Arab slave trade, way back in the 14th century. Then the Portuguese upped the ante, and the French and the British after that. By the late 18th century, Madagascar’s main exports were rice and slaves. This is not something that anybody much likes to talk about. Madagascar was also a hub: slaves from Africa were shipped through the island to other west Indian Ocean islands, which became colonial centers of sugar cane production. When France declared Madagascar a colony in 1896, the new colonial administration abolished the slave trade immediately – and established a system of indentured labor instead. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Going forward 100 years to the village where Graeber lived, the source of tension was in the present, but the tension’s roots were buried in the past. Thefts were frequent in the village around the time when he arrived. The thief hadn’t been caught. Hoping to rid themselves of the problem by other means, the community — descendants of former slave owners, many of them quite poor today, and the descendants of former slaves, many now prosperous — agreed to hold a shared ritual. This was something they’d not done together before. The day afterwards, a massive hailstorm destroyed all the crops planted by the villagers. Everyone said it was because they had tried to mix rituals. It was a traumatizing disaster for the community, and David walked into the middle of it: history, separation, ritual that went badly wrong, and largely unspoken family memories all played a part. It’s a remarkable book. Madagascar’s history is vast, and I think there’s enough about the last two centuries on my list. The edited volume by Ivan Scales, which we’ll talk about in a minute, includes a chapter by my husband, Robert Dewar, about the history of human settlement (though that history keeps changing, as new discoveries are made), and a chapter by Scales himself focuses on the history of the last two centuries. There are other histories of Madagascar, to be sure. One that stands out for me is A History of Madagascar by Mervyn Brown . He was the UK ambassador to Madagascar from 1967-70. Alone among the diplomatic corps, he spoke fluent Malagasy, knew a lot about Madagascar, and was a great pianist and music maker – all reasons for the respect and affection for him there at the time. (I met him once, just after I arrived in 1970, and heard a lot about him). His book was everything you’re asking for: quite political but also going way back, and it was on my initial list. I’d read it many years ago and reading it again before finalizing my list, it now struck me as very out-of-date: the Malagasy people ‘arrived and exterminated all the big animals’, for example. I decided I couldn’t include a book with this simple story of blame, and I took it off. Thinking about this list has been really interesting, and I’m glad you’re questioning my choices. I wrote my own book because there simply isn’t one that pulls the threads together with up-to-date evidence about the past, and that’s what I set out to do – partly. Yes! I wanted to challenge the narrative of a timeless, forested paradise destroyed by the arrival of the Malagasy people. The first evidence of people on the island is 10,000 years old, and the first indication of decline among the great big, charismatic animals that have gone extinct comes a little over 1,000 years ago. So, for the best part of 9000 years, people and creatures seem to have got along together well. It isn’t the fact of people, it’s what they do: and that’s grounds for hope, right there. There are many reasons to despair about the state of our world, including Madagascar, and we need all the grounds for hope we can find. Madagascar was not entirely forested either. That’s another flawed piece of the prevailing wisdom. Growing evidence — much of it recent, thanks to research by botanists from Kew Botanic Gardens and the University of Antananarivo — indicates that there were grasslands millions of years before people arrived. Madagascar may have been a ‘paradise’, but not an entirely forested one. Madagascar has always been a place of change, in fact. Deep in the past, it was buried in the heart of Gondwana and not an island at all. For millions of years it lay far south of its present location —S over the South Pole even, for a while. Sixty-eight million years ago, it was a land of dinosaurs, giant predatory frogs and vegetarian crocodiles. Like every place on Earth, Madagascar is a real, changing place, not some frozen paradise of our imagination. And that’s what my book tries to convey."