Madagascar: a waning tradition Soahangy Mamisoa Rangers, Paris-based Malagasy journalist
Madagascar has a long tradition of village solidarity. Seven million people die each year of curable diseases and 800 million have no access to health care. At the fairs, where 1970s music was played on old gramophone records, the young and not-so-young came to eat, have a good time and spend a bit of money	In the uplands of northern Madagascar, the villagers of Ambingivato shaped their community’s future with their own hands. But this kind of collective action is fading fast Ambingivato, a village with a hundred or so inhabitants, is five hours’ walk from Ambararata, the nearest town accessible by vehicle. For the past 20 years it has had a hospital and a school which serve four neighbouring villages. This sounds a bit grand, as the hospital is just a couple of big whitewashed rooms, one of them a maternity ward and the other for receiving patients. The school consists of two huts built of tanimanga (clay), each with four rooms in which children of different ages and educational levels mix. But makeshift though it is, the hospital has meant that mothers-to-be no longer have to suffer the ordeal of bumping along all the way to Ambararata in a cart drawn by two oxen. The school is equally modest but it provides an education for the local children. Both were built by local farmers themselves following a decision by the fokonolona, a kind of community assembly and a political institution dating from pre-colonial times. Any project initiated by the fokonolona becomes a public facility and is respected as such. To the Malagasy, the term conjures up a picture of solemn meetings at which the community gathers to decide its future. One of its regular functions, for example, is clearing roads after the heavy December and January rains. Each year at this season, Ambingivato is cut off from the other villages by godrampotaka, the very thick grey mud that is typical of Madagascar’s rural areas, and its people are prevented from exporting rice and coffee via Ambararata to Befandriana Avaratra. The menfolk set to work with shovels to clear the blocked roads. Unaware of new concepts of “community development” and “local participation” and well before Western NGOs arrived in Madagascar, Ambingivato’s fokonolona was thinking about how to improve local conditions without calling on any outside help. To build their school and hospital, the villagers divided up the work among themselves. The children went down to the Anjingo River to gather rocks, the men broke them into small pieces to use as foundation material and men and women together hauled earth which was mixed with rice straw to make big bricks for the walls. To raise funds in an economy where cash is little used, the fokonolona held fairs and organized hotely–small inns where women served rice, ox meat and poultry to the people from surrounding villages, who would buy tickets for the occasion in advance. At the fairs, where 1970s music was played on old gramophone records, the young and not-so-young came to eat, have a good time and spend a bit of money. The cash raised went to buy things like the hospital’s expensive corrugated iron roof and to build one of the school’s two huts. The other part of the school still has a thatched roof. Now, after many years, it is time to replace it with corrugated iron and mend the mud walls weatherbeaten by gale-force winds sweeping in from the Indian Ocean every year. But the Ambingivato fokonolona is no longer so energetic and is less enthusiastic about the school than it once was. The fall in coffee prices in the last 20 years, the death of elders who handed down customs, the exodus of young people and the lack of local prospects may help to explain why all the Ambingivato fokonolona does these days is clear the roads. Times have changed. In recent years, many non-governmental organizations have been busy in Madagascar. They bypass the fokonolona, and do everything from providing water supplies to refurbishing schools. The projects are useful and local people take part in them. But the initiative comes from the outside. Instead of taking their own decisions and doing the job themselves, people are now content to wait for others to do it for them.