Revolt in the deep south
The "Trano mena", the Red House, headquarter of the Centre for locust control, in Betioky, in the extreme south of Madagascar. It’s where I had to stay awake all the night on April 1, 1971, waiting for an attack on the town by a group of several hundred farmers in revolt. The alert was given in the evening, during the dinner. We gathered on the veranda, on the first floor, with all the staff, some Catholic nuns living in the neighborhood, and some policemen. I remember of boxes full of stones, grenades, rifles stored on the ground to face a possible attack... to whom it would have been probably hardly possible to resist. Early in the morning nothing had happen, and with a colleague we decided to take our car and to join Tuléar as fast as possible, at 160 km of bad earth track from Betioky. We had to pick up at the airport some colleagues arriving from France. Just on the tarmac, we received information that Betioky had been attacked. So it was not an April fool's joke !
I arrived in Madagascar in early 1971 to work in a research project on the Migratory locust, funded by UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) and managed by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). I had the status of voluntary from the french national service in cooperation. My first real job! This revolt had been fomented by the Monima (the National Movement for the Independence of Madagascar), a maoist orientation movement led by Monja Jaona, a former anti-colonialist activist. Faced with the economic situation, the rebels (1,000 armed members of the left wing of Monima) attacked five military and administrative posts in Tuléar Province, including Betioky where I lived at that time. They hoped to seize weapons and receive support from China (it was talk of a submarine in the Mozambique Channel). But the aid did not arrive. The rebellion was brutally crushed : 50 victims according to the authorities, more than 1,000 according to the rebels. We left Betioky just in time.
A few months later, it was the events of May 1972 in Madagascar. A student protest against French cultural domination of the island's schools quickly spread to a call for a general strike to protest poor economic conditions. The situation rapidly degenerated, between fifteen and forty rioters killed in Antananarivo, a state of national emergency declared. On May 18, 1972, President Philibert Tsiranana dissolved his government and turned over power to the army. In November 1972, after a national referendum, General Gabriel Ramantsoa became the new head of state. These events were somewhat disturbing for my thesis project.
The FAO project in which I was working was to be ended on late 1973. I had intended to use all the data accumulated to prepare my doctoral thesis. But for this it was necessary to export the data to France. Local conditions were severely tightened. The administration had become very pernickety and I was not sure at all to be able to export all my documentation off the island. All documents to be exported, even the smallest, had to be declared and authorized for export by the Ministry in Antananarivo. I decided to microfilm most of my data and to cut to postcard size many documents, and to ship everything in France by mail, in many separate letters, to various family members. The ploy worked very well. Back in France, I gathered all the pieces, was able to analyze my data... and finally defend my thesis in March 1975. Soon after, I joined CIRAD.
Photos M. Lecoq (from top to bottom):
- The "Trano Mena" in 2006; the building, designed in 1931 by the french entomologist B. Zolotarevsky, had been restored and had regained its original red color.
- The research building of the locust center in 1969, when I arrive in Madagascar. At that time, the first floor was the appartment of J.P. Têtefort, in charge of the research programs.
