I took the photo on 18 May 2018, on “the 8th continent”, as Madagascar is nicknamed.
Ambalavao is the southernmost substantial town in Madagascar’s central highlands; its weekly cattle market is the nation’s biggest.
All the cattle are Zebu – an originally-Indian breed, which became emblematically “Madagascan”; this has been so for rather more than a millennium.
Culturally/religiously, Zebu are enormously important; Madagascans revere them, some men test/display their “virility” in highly-ritualised (generally, non-lethal) fights with them.
Zebu beef is the most highly-prized animal protein.
There has long been a tradition (also highly-ritualised) of Zebu-rustling.
The traditional form of cattle-theft did not involve murder, armed intimidation, internationally-linked organised crime, and wholesale corruption.
In 21st century Madagascar all of the aforementioned are signature features of the so-called “Zebu War”.
At this century’s turn, Madagascar was already one of the world’s materially poorest countries.
In recent decades it has become even poorer.
The “Zebu War” is one of various drivers of a sustained deterioration in Madagascan humans’ general well-being/life expectancy, and of the catastrophic decline in the lot of non-human Madagascans…in an increasingly-ravaged, not-so-natural environment.
Click here (& then click through to each following image) to see an award-winning series of photos about the “Zebu War”.
Click this for an explanation of how a not-so-terrible “rustling tradition” transmogrified into something devastating.
Pelican Yoga’s photo-essay on market day in Ambalavao is here.
Comments