Mikea Erotic

The Mikea are known by what they do rather than by who they descend from. In the dry deciduous forest of southwestern Madagascar, inland from the fishing coast between Morombe and Toliara, "Mikea" names the people who live off the woods: digging wild yams, taking honey, hunting tenrecs and birds, and planting a little maize at the forest edge. Their neighbors, the cattle-keeping Masikoro and the seagoing Vezo, speak the same language and share the same ancestors. A family can move into the forest and become Mikea, then move out again and stop being Mikea. Researchers who went looking for a relic population of hunter-gatherers found something more interesting instead: a way of making a living that people adopt, abandon and return to as the rains, the maize price and the state make one option safer than another in a given year.

That flexibility has a history behind it. The forest has long been a place to be out of reach, first of the Sakalava kings who taxed and raided the lowlands, then of French colonial administrators collecting head tax and conscripting labor, and more recently of the cattle raiders who work the southwest. It is not a comfortable refuge. Surface water is absent for much of the year, and the Mikea answer to that is the baboho, a fat wild tuber holding enough moisture to drink from, which is what makes staying deep in the woods through the dry season possible at all. Speech is Malagasy in its southwestern dialects, an Austronesian language whose closest relatives sit in Borneo, which still surprises people who expect an African island to sound African. Religious life runs on ancestors rather than on churches: the razana are consulted and fed, Zanahary stands behind the world without interfering much in it, and conduct is organized by fady, prohibitions particular to a family or a place. The pressure now comes from two directions. Commercial maize clearing, hatsake, has eaten long stretches of the same forest the Mikea depend on, and the national park declared over that forest in 2007 brought rules about who may hunt, dig and burn inside its boundaries. The people most often photographed as Madagascar's last foragers spend a good deal of their time negotiating with conservation officers, grain buyers and their own relatives over which life to live this season.