The Dignity of Man

Analamazoatra, “at the dark forest,” lay about a mile from the town of Andasibe along a stretch of road that most residents avoided walking after nightfall, believed to be haunted by malicious spirits, or jiny. One night that December, a guard named Charles arrived at his post at a small orchid park, part of the larger Special Indri Reserve, to find himself alone. His partner had stayed home sick.

Alone in the dark forest, and the last straw was a dismissal without warning.

Engulfed by the crickets, the rustling, and the plaintive howls of indri from the treetops, Charles could not hold his post through the night and fled. His coworkers understood why he had run, but also knew the orchids had been left exposed to thieves who could sell endangered plants on the black market. When management fired Charles without the warning their contracts entitled him to, his colleagues, thirty-nine manual workers employed by an internationally funded conservation project, decided they had had enough.

Most of the strikers had lost secure, tenured positions with the state forestry service, Eaux et Forêts, back in 1993, when management of the Andasibe-Mantadia Protected Area Complex passed to an Integrated Conservation and Development Project, or ICDP, run by a North American nonprofit. Tenure became a renewable contract. Salaries, the workers felt, no longer matched the risk and skill their forest work required, and the promised sick leave, medical benefits, training, and even basic field supplies like rain ponchos rarely materialized in practice.

In the middle of the strike, several workers traveled to Antananarivo to consult Madagascar’s National Trade Union Syndicate, a leftover institution from the socialist era occupying a small, run-down office in the capital. With the syndicate’s help, the Andasibe workers formalized their own union, the first ever organized by contractual employees of a foreign-managed conservation project anywhere in Madagascar.

The grievances that surfaced were often small in scale and large in meaning. One conservation agent recalled being assigned to guard a tourist outhouse at the reserve entrance after its sink had been stolen, a task he experienced as a genuine humiliation. “It’s the dignity of man!” he exclaimed, recalling the assignment years later, borrowing, whether he knew it or not, language with roots in the French Revolution.

Another worker, officially a conservation agent, had been relegated instead to selling entrance tickets, cut off from the fieldwork that gave the job its meaning. “The species Propithecus exists here,” he said, naming one of the reserve’s sifaka lemurs, “but I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen it.” Most of the lower-tier workers who felt this way were non-Merina, while the office administrators managing them, several related to the project’s national director, were Merina, a hierarchy the workers noticed and resented even when they didn’t name it directly.

The timing worked against the strikers. Madagascar’s national parks authority, ANGAP, was about to take over management from the American nonprofit, and when it did, in January 1997, none of the strikers’ demands had been addressed. The main organizers were laid off; others who had joined the strike took pay cuts instead.

When the researcher who documented this story later raised the strike with a USAID representative in Antananarivo, seven months after it happened, the response was a shrug: strikes, she said, had occurred at ICDPs across the island, including at Isalo in the south and Fenerive-Est on the east coast. Project managers, it turned out, had kept the Andasibe strike hidden from USAID entirely, wary of jeopardizing future conservation contracts. The incident appears in no program evaluation, and is absent even from later official retrospectives on decades of USAID conservation funding in Madagascar, a labor history erased so cleanly it left almost no paper trail, remembered only by the people who lived it. USAID itself no longer maintains a presence on the island today, one more institution whose footprint in Madagascar proved less lasting than the memory the workers kept of what happened at Andasibe.