Real History of the Vanilla Coast, Sava, and Masoala Maroa in Madagascar deep past Sava Maroa

Real History of the Vanilla Coast, Sava, and Masoala Maroa in Madagascar deep past Sava Maroa

The finest book on the past of Madagascar is probably The Sloth Lemur’s Song by the Cambridge professor Alison Richard, but to date there aren’t really many books, funding, or interest in the ancient past of the island, despite it being utterly unique and endlessly fascinating. 

The Japanese government granted more funding to literature about Madagascar when Sumitomo invested in the mine in the east, the country’s single biggest investment in Africa, and the Chinese invested in small scholarships which didn’t have uptake among Chinese students looking for careers, but chiefly Germany USA and France still hold large departments for the study of African history, which dwindling interest from Malagasy diaspora or foreign students. 

In all the time MVC has been in northern Mada, we’ve only ever met half a dozen foreign students studying or researching the isle’s past, and about a dozen local Malagasy, all inevitably underfunded and underequipped, if still hypermotivated to investigate and research the history of their home. Oral histories abound in Sava and south of Masoala, as well as folk and ghost stories, but collecting these into a literature just hasn’t happened, even on the social media beat or internet of the 2010’s and 2020’s.

Aside from obituaries, written static recorded Malagasy history of actors, events, and the overarching sweep of time is scattered and incoherent, much like the base of knowledge of the Malagasy history itself. The sum total of what you can pull from the Gasy facebook still can’t make much sense or content of anything prior to the cold war and Ratsiraka. Ratsiraka, who came to power under Soviet mirror-ideology rebranded for Mada, also stopped freedom of speech on the island and revised history somewhat in his “Malagasization” of the island education, stripping a generation in the 70’s of any reliable narrative of their history, and leaving even more kids totally illiterate with no sense at all of what their island is about. 

The merina of the capital who genetically hailed from Borneo 4 millenia ago never had much to do with Sava and the vanilla coast. Ever since at least 3 of those centuries, merina mainly focused on centralizing rice growing and fruits in the center and center south and expanding cattle out to the same in the large pasteur lands. Nobody was growing spices at all for any sort of export or international commerce under merina. Way late into the European age of exploration, the French didn’t even plant in Sava much of anything for spices until the 1900’s. So, Sava history does not have as much to do with the mainland Madagascar central and highland history, in most of the human chronology of the island.

The coast starting in Diego facing the Comoros had naturally much more position to command trade and attack astray boats, but unfortunately (for avid imaginations,) pirates in Libertalia simply wanted to police and plunder those blown off course and not build a nation so to speak. Fantasies and folktales of pirates are popular in SAVA and the East Coast, but Sainte Marie and Cap Est is even today everywhere wild and choppy seas, and their smattering of colonies from Mananara and Sainte Marie sheltered the bay where they traded and settled. 

The pirates near SAVA never made any sort of Utopia, though they by direct local accounts and some maritime accounts had sex with a lot of local women over that time, and definitely drove a genetic treasure chest of interesting features and traits in their descendants, like the Russians from 47 ships would as well 2 centuries later, near Diego Suarez during their war with Japan.

When agriculture education was “gifted” to the Malagasy around Sava and Maroa over the last 50-150 years in various market led, NGO-led, and state led programs, everyone liked vanilla and coffee and didn’t give too much time or suffer too many fools about pepper and sugarcane, but in Antalaha and Maroa  we’ve had a better run of agro in northern madagascar than the disasters introduced to the south in the earliest decades interlocked into the European production chain. 

Prickly Pear, for example, came in from Mexico for the dye industry early in the French era after vanilla, but those opuntia pear cactus thickets (and their fences of thorns) housing rebels were deliberately infected by the French before WWII with attack insects with the pretense of making a red dye cochineal industry.

 The dye beetles ate everything, all the pears, so tons of southern people in the tracts from Tulear to the southern tip died without their food staple as as result of this “industry stimulus.” The real purpose all along was to use the cochineal beetle insects to clear out the thickets to open up rebels/dahalo for targeting so the French could get rid of them. 

By 1931 before the onset of the world war in the west and Asia, the bugs killed all the fruit in the opuntia regions. To date that is the least- known but worst debacle of internationally introduced and implemented agriculture in Madagascar. 

While vanilla ice cream became much more common in America with the massive compaction and commercialization of refrigeration technology, prices perked up, and vanilla became literally a flavor most households know.…Meanwhile cochineal crashed and the south of Madagascar disappeared into dusty obscurity for world markets. The French had to import a different pear to the south that resisted the bugs, and finally fed people there. Up to the modern day it is the poorest region of Madagascar, while vanilla from Madagascar has become the global gold standard and one of the actual symbols perhaps of the nation. Despite political power plays with Antananarivo, Sava and the vanilla coast is one of the richest areas of the island.