Here and There by A. A. Gill Read Free Book Online Page B

spell of French colonialism and some English Methodist missionaries, are split between Catholicism and Protestantism, which is really only the wrapping that hides their old ghostly beliefs in extreme ancestor worship.
    They’ve nurtured an extreme dysfunctional hybrid that transcends its heredity and its history. They have become the children of an astonishing geography with 10 distinct climates and habitats and more indigenous green things than anywhere else on earth. The Malagasy have gone about transforming their island, planting the rice they must’ve carried carefully in their outrigger canoes from Indonesia and herding the humpbacked cows that may have come from southern India or Africa. If you’re a conservationist or a New-World earthful ecologist, then the arrival of humans in Madagascar has been an unmitigated disaster. They have for a thousand-odd years rigorously burnt away the forest, made extinct several species of lemur and the largest bird ever to stand on this land, the mythical roc.
    But ecologists and environmentalists always think that about people. They never look at humans as anything other than the problem to be blamed and fettered and laden with collective historical guilt. They’ve never looked at our beauty and ingenuity and the vivacity of people and what they build and grow and the lives they spin. Malagasy are as fascinating and as memorable as any of the weird species on this island. The burnt landscape that was created for the cattle and the rice is just as astonishing and memorable as the forest. The unlikely combination of Asia and Africa in this land is miraculous and wholly unexpected.
    Australia and Madagascar have a very particular thing in common. It’s the baobab. There are said to be nine species of that remarkable hollow tree that the bushmen of the Kalahari say was planted upside-down by an angry devil. Seven of them exist only here in Madagascar. One lives in Africa and one in Australia. A keepsake, a souvenir from a time when all three were part of the überdaddy continent Gondwana.
    Quickly, without looking, what’s the capital of Madagascar? If you knew it was Antananarivo, buy yourself a beer. Now say it to the person sitting next to you. If you managed without stuttering, giggling, repeating, spitting and arriving at no fewer and no more than six syllables, buy everyone in the office a beer. It is the most impossible language. It sounds like Swahili spoken with an African accent and it loves syllables almost as much as it loves As. They insert extra As wherever they can. It’s a language that could only arise on an island. It’s not meant to be spoken by outsiders. John Donne made the oft-repeated clichéd observation that no man is an island. It’s a truth about men, but it’s also an implied truth about islands, that they stand apart. That they’re not like other lumps of land. That the things that happen on them only happen on them. Visit Madagascar – while stocks last.

Galling the Gauls
    France’s allure may have faded for some but it will always be the model of worldly sophistication.
    Every year I go to France, to the same place in Provence. I do the same things. I go to Saint-Rémy and drink café crème, pick at a croissant, and read two-day-old English papers, trying to ignore all the other Englishmen doing the same things around me. I buy another pair of rope-soled espadrilles that will grow sticky and uncomfortable and join the other 48 pairs in the basement cupboard. I buy lavender oil, though actually the finest lavender comes from the south of England. I go to the fromager and get three sorts of chèvre and wait for an age as the assistant wraps them as if they were a present for an ancient aunt. I go to a market in my new shoes that slip and chafe and I’ll buy five sorts of olives and some figs and little packets of sausage and some pâté and a jar of confiture de fraise des bois and