In Amboasary, southern Madagascar, a ”football stadium” is a modest affair.
I was among thousands of good-humoured people crowding on a parched, sandy plain where the only hint of Wembley was two sets of rusting goalposts.
Remarkably, a few children had managed to scale the posts and perch tenuously on a crossbar.
The centre of attention was a raised wooden stage under a corrugated iron roof. The floor was made of wooden planks finessed with plants, loudspeakers and a carpet in the Arabian style. At the back sat an audience of local dignitaries on raked wooden seats.
At the front, a local group of musicians was doing its thing. A young man wore a black poncho with red and green stripes and lacy trim, trousers in the same colours and a headband that dangled shiny black beads on his forehead. His bare feet shuffled and skipped and spun on the floor.
He made way for a woman with long, beaded blue and red hair and a skirt slashed to the thigh. Her hip-jabbing style suggested she was Madagascar’s answer to Beyoncé. The singers were backed by sunglasses-wearing players on guitars, keyboard, steel drum-kit and traditional African drum.
I was with a group of journalists and aid agency workers. We were asked if we’d like a closer look that, it turned out, meant we were ushered through the heaving crowd and on to the stage itself. We took our seats behind the singers and looked out at the throng beyond.
Children: thousands and thousands of children. They gazed up eagerly, expectantly, cheekily. They held hands, leaned on each other, climbed on each other. Their tops and T-shirts formed a mosaic of primary colours.
They were congregated at the front of the crowd and occasionally spilled forward, like a volcano trembling before eruption. There were more spectators sitting in bunches on the high white wall of the compound, craning their necks to see. Somehow, in the generous heat and orange glow of pre-sunset, it was an archetypal African scene.
Yet the children were kept in their place. Patrolling the front of the crowd were men in combat fatigues wielding sticks with coiled whips.
Occasionally they raised their arms so aggressively that the children were hurled back as if by a great wind. But a moment later they were smiling again.
I wondered, not for the first time, why African children often seem so happy and carefree despite poverty, hunger and a miserably short life expectancy. In Britain and America, meanwhile, there are legions of sad, depressive or suicidal teenagers.
I looked into the crowd and counted the detritus of logos and brand names: United States Army, Shrek, Levi’s, AC Milan, American Eagles, D&G, Bob Marley, Ecko, Real Madrid, Timberland, WWF, Dallas Cowboys and, among them all, Marc Ravalomanana, the former president of Madagascar deposed in a coup earlier this year.
What were the performers singing about? Handwashing. Last week was the United Nations’ second Global Handwashing Day, designed to ”foster and support a global and local culture of handwashing with soap”. Apparently the funky young singers on show were belting out lyrics such as, ”It’s good to wash your hands before eating”.
Others got into the spirit. Two young children were invited to come forward and dip their hands in water by way of demonstration. A member of the public stormed the stage and started boogying with a rhythmic handwashing dance. Those whipcracking guards soon chased him away.
Eventually we slipped away, past the jagged rows of wooden shacks, to a nearby district hospital. The intensive care unit consisted of bare concrete walls with the odd faded health awareness poster. There was no glass in the large window cavities. A nurse tried to switch on the electric light but it flickered and died, leaving us shrouded in gloom.
There were six single beds spaced out unevenly. Above them were mosquito nets, coiled up so that each looked like the ghostly chrysalis of a butterfly. On one bed sat a mother, named Sambeie, bent over her six-month-old son, Maka Mahazoasy, who was suffering a bronchial infection.
All 12 of this woman’s children have suffered from chronic hunger, she told us. One died shortly after birth, one at seven months old, one at two years old. ”My children complain about hunger,” Sambeie said. ”I feel sorry there is nothing to give them. There is nothing to eat because there is no rain.
”There is no rain because it is God’s decision.”
We drove back to Fort Dauphin, clattering over ageing steel bridges, passing by herdboys thwacking their humped and horned zebu cattle, swerving to avoid potholes in a once hopeful concrete road slowly being worn back into the past. Our vehicle was a tiny white speck in the immense forested valley.
French-speaking, Asian-flavoured, biodiverse Madagascar has the uniqueness of an island, certainly, but 160-million years after it broke from the African continent, it still has all of its beauty, and all of its sorrow too. – guardian.co.uk