A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Marco Polo (1254-1324) knew where the end of the world was.  He never went there but he heard about it.  It was a "great red island" in the vast unknown sea far to the south of India, and it had a strange name:  Madagascar.

160 million years ago, Africa split apart with a massive southeastern chunk breaking off.  By around 90 million years ago, most of this chunk broke off itself and began drifting north to eventually crash into Asia becoming India.

The part of the chunk left stayed put several hundred miles off Africa.  So the land of Madagascar – the 4^th largest island in the world (after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo) – is African.

But the very first thing you notice on coming here is that the people are not.  Malagasy, as the people call themselves, are not African.  They are Indonesian, speaking a Malayo-Polynesian language.

Malagasy are descended from one group of folks who sailed 3,700 miles across the Indian Ocean in outrigger canoes from what is now Indonesia – around 2,000 years ago.  An incredible and mysterious achievement, never repeated.

They never went on to settle in the African mainland, just this "great red island" 1,000 miles long and 300 miles wide which they found uninhabited.  They brought with them a rice culture, which is why there are rice paddies everywhere and the place looks like Southeast Asia. 

A thousand years passed.  From this one single migration (as determined by DNA analysis) from Indonesia around the time of Christ, the Malagasy spread across the giant island and lived in isolation from the world.  Then strangers started appearing on their northern coast calling themselves "Moslems."

The Malagasy wanted no part of them or their strange and offensive religion.  Persians ("Shirazis" from Shiraz) and Arabs were sailing in their dhows down the east coast of Africa enslaving and Islamizing as they went.  But when they crossed the Mozambique Channel to Madagascar, they discovered people very different from Africans.

Arabs had found the islands of Indonesia (Sumatra, Java, Borneo, etc.) easy Islamic pickings for converts.  Somehow, the converts' distant relatives weren't.  This is an important mystery.

Ever since they invented Islam, Arabs have forced their religion upon peoples throughout the world, most of the time with little or no resistance.  The exceptions are among people who have a competing religion like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism.  It's very hard to think of any place without a strong competing religion already in place that resisted Islam.

Madagascar is that place.  That's one reason it is a light at the end of the world.

For century after century, Arabs and their African converts made efforts to settle on the northwest coast of the island with little or no success.  A few communities were established, a handful of converts made.  It was like the Malagasy were inoculated with Islamic antibodies in their cultural immune system.  They were resistant to cultural infection from the Islamic disease.

How did they do this?  It's never been investigated.  Anthropologists would be rendering a service of enormous benefit to mankind if they could discover the Malagasy secret – especially if we could then use it to vaccinate other cultures from Islam.

And that's not all to the mystery.  For centuries the Malagasy rejected Islam, yet when offered Christianity for the first time by British missionaries in the early 1800s, they embraced the religion of Christ with enthusiasm.

Today, almost every village and town throughout the island country has a church.  On Sunday, you see people dressed their best walking down long roads to the church of their choice – for many Christian denominations flourish here in harmony.

Of Madagascar's 20 million folks, the overwhelming number are Christian or have combined Christian beliefs with their indigenous animist ones.  Only about 5% are Moslem.

How this happened is also mysterious, for much of Madagascar's history – up until just the last few years, in fact – has been red, as red as its soil, red with blood and tyranny.

The place was a morass of little kingdoms fighting each other when the first Europeans, the Portuguese, came by in the early 1500s.  But they were just on their way to the Spice Islands of the "East Indies" (the future Indonesia), as were the Dutch, and neither stayed.

Who did stay were pirates.  By the late 1600s, islands off Madagascar's east coast had become strongholds of British, French, and even American pirates plundering merchant ships carrying silks, spices, and jewels from India and the Indies to Europe.

By the middle of the 1700s, the British Navy had put an end to most of the piracy, establishing settlements at a number of ports and harbors.  An enterprising young prince from a small kingdom in the central highlands saw the opportunity and befriended the newcomers.

This was Andrianampo Inimerina (1745-1810) – "Hope of the Merina" – who had, by marrying princesses of the various clans of his Merina tribe, created a Merina kingdom.  He solidified his power with British arms and advisors.

His son, Radama I (1792-1828), continued both strategies, marrying princesses of other kingdoms until he ruled the entire island with British help.  Formal relations with Britain were established in 1817.  Missionaries from the London Missionary Society were welcomed.  Radama quickly adopted Christianity and encouraged his people to do so.

They did in droves.  The Bible was soon translated into and printed in Malagasy.  Radama was beloved.  Madagascar was never happier and more at peace.  Then came the Black Widow, the female spider who eats her mate.

Radama made one marriage too many.  His last was to Ranavalona, who poisoned him and took over, plunging Madagascar into a murderous insanity lasting 33 years.  She kicked out the missionaries and persecuted Christian converts with horrible tortures.  Over 150,000 Christians were slaughtered and countless others.

The Malagasy to this day call her rule ny tany maizina, "the time the island was dark."

What she didn't know, however, was that her son and heir had secretly and clung to his Christian faith.  When she finally died in 1861, her son, now Radama II, proclaimed his country to be Christian once again.  Missionaries flooded back in to build churches and schools.

Unfortunately, the French flooded in along with them.  In the Great Game of divvying up Africa among them, the Brits, French, and Germans agreed, in exchange for France renouncing most all colonial claims on continental Africa, that Madagascar would be a French colony.  The Brits sold the Great Red Christian Island out.

A French Army was sent to conquer the Merina capital of Antananarivo, the French Parliament voted to annex the island in 1896, and the Merina royal family packed off to exile in Algeria.  The colony was ruled by French military force for the next 50 years.

After World War II, the Malagasy saw a chance for freedom and rebelled in 1947.  After 90,000 Malagasy were killed in a year of fighting, the rebellion was suppressed.  Ten years later, a Malagasy Republic was declared, which allegedly received independence in 1960.  It was just a pretense, for the French colons, colonial rulers, continued as before.

Then came folks far more ruthlessly imperialistic than the French ever thought to be:  the Soviets.

KGB agents steadily and patiently worked their way into the Madagascar military and government.  In 1972 they staged a coup and seized power, with their principal protégé, Army Commander Didier Ratsiraka coming out on top in 1975.

Imposing a Communist dictatorship and nationalizing almost the entire economy, Ratsiraka destroyed the lives and livelihood of millions of Malagasy.  With the Soviet collapse in 1991, he invited the French back in and promised democracy.  He befriended French President Jacques Chirac who let him rig his perpetual reelections.

This brings us to 2001 and a fellow from a small village in the central highlands, Imerikasina.  An enterprising lad, he and his new bride made batches of home-made yogurt in their tiny kitchen, which he would sell in buckets pedaling his bicycle around the village.

His name was Marc, and his yogurt was so good he made enough money to move to Tana (what everybody calls the capital, Antananarivo), where he made enough to start a dairy products factory.  This was in the early 1990s, and by 1998, Marc was a millionaire, the richest self-made man in Madagascar.

He ran for Mayor of Tana and won, becoming wildly popular for reforms that cleaned up the city and got bureaucracies out of the way for businessmen, resulting in increasing prosperity.  Then in 2001, he ran for president of the country against Didier Ratsiraka – and won.

Except that Ratsiraka refused to accept his loss.  His thugs blew up the electricity pylons to the city so that Tana was without power.  Civil war broke out, quelled only when the UN, over the strenuous objections of Jacques Chirac, recognized Marc's victory.  Ratsiraka fled to France, where his buddy Chirac provided him with asylum and a hyper-luxurious villa in the Riviera that he lives in today.

Madagascar's 27-year Ratsiraka Nightmare was at last over – and now there shone a new light at the end of the world, Marc Ravalomanana.

Madagascar's new president is dedicated to private enterprise capitalism creating wide-spread prosperity for the Malagasy.  He was so successful at it during his first term that he was reelected last December to another 5-year term with almost 55% of the vote in a squeaky clean election. 

But that's not the only election he won last year  — he was also re-elected vice president of the Anglican Church.

"I dream of a Christian nation," he announced at a recent sermon for a Sunday service.  Working with churches and Christian charities is, he says, "one of the best ways to develop our country." 

Further, Marc Ravalomanana is a self-professed "Anglophile."  The only language most all Malagasy use to communicate with the world is French, isolating them from the non-French speaking world, most of which now uses English.  He wants his country to break free of this "French trap" that enables the French to still control his people.

For example, the major regional power in this part of the world, the major economy with the strongest currency, is South Africa.  Yet its money, the Rand, is not exchangeable or convertible here.  I have a wad of Rand in my wallet and it's useless – not even the banks will take it.  The banks will only take Euros and Dollars.

Opening up Madagascar to free trade and investment with South Africa would be an enormous stimulus and greatly help shake it free from French control.  But Ravalomanana is in his own French Trap, for if he moves too quickly, the French will destabilize his government.

Money will flow into opposition parties, protests organized, scandals discovered and blared in headlines around the French-speaking world.  So he is on a tightrope, hoping now that things with Sarkozy will be different.  Yet Sarkozy "controls only so much," he notes, while the French colonial bureaucracies continue as before.

Madagascar President Marc Ravalomanana is young, energetic, charismatic, very smart, very successful, very popular, and a light at the end of the world for Christianity and Capitalism.

His challenges are enormous.  Over two-thirds of Malagasy still live on $1 a day or less.  Vast areas of land are environmentally destroyed through primitive methods of "slash and burn" agriculture.  The French Trap isolates and stifles economic improvement.

He is convinced that Christianity, Capitalism, and reaching out to the English-speaking world will solves these challenges, by providing his people with the moral values and practical mechanisms to prosper.  Let's wish him success.

Ps.  It wouldn't be fair to end this without showing you what Madagascar is most famous for.  Lemurs!  That special and lovable species of primates unique in all the world – nowhere else are there lemurs.  Jackson got these shots:

There's the most well-known, the Ring-Tailed Lemur:

The largest, called the Indri:

The Bamboo Lemur:

The Ruffed Lemur:

And the beautiful Golden Sifaka:

You can only see them for real at the end of the world.