Sambava

The Sava coast was settled long before it was named: Betsimisaraka and Tsimihety communities farmed and fished here, and from the medieval period Islamised traders worked the north-east shore, with Vohémar up the coast an important trading port. Sambava itself, on the coast just south of the Bemarivo mouth, was a village of fishing and rice-growing until colonial planters saw what the wet climate could grow.

Under French rule the north-east was turned over to export crops. Vanilla, brought from Mexico by way of Réunion, took hold on this coast in the late nineteenth century, and coffee, cloves and coconut plantations followed. Sambava became the collecting point and shipping town for a district of small growers, and one of the largest coconut estates in the country was laid out north of the town. The acronym Sava — Sambava, Antalaha, Vohémar, Andapa — still names both the region and the vanilla trade that runs it.

Since independence the town has risen and fallen with the vanilla price. Booms have brought new concrete buildings, vehicles and banks; slumps have emptied them again, and high prices bring theft of curing beans and disputes over plots. Cyclones have repeatedly damaged the crop and the town, and the creation of Marojejy National Park in the mountains inland, inscribed as part of a World Heritage Site in 2007, has added a small tourist trade to a place that still lives on agriculture.

Sambava is a trading town where the calendar belongs to a crop. Life is organised around planting, hand-pollinating each vanilla flower, guarding the plots, harvesting and the long curing that follows — work that draws people in from the countryside and fills the town's offices and yards for months. Money arrives suddenly with a good season, and disappears as quickly.

The population is mainly Betsimisaraka and Tsimihety, with Merina and Chinese traders, an established Muslim minority and Indian-descended merchant families in the commercial street, and French remains the language of business alongside Malagasy. Christian churches of several denominations stand in the town, and ancestral practice continues beneath them: ceremonies for the razana, the ancestors, with zebu sacrifice, rum and long nights of music, and fady taboos that differ from one village to the next.

Custom around the forest and the rivers is strong, and guides from the villages at the foot of Marojejy explain what may and may not be done in places considered sacred. Music is coastal and danceable, the pace is slow through the heat of the day, and evenings are spent outside — on the sand, on the main street, or over a glass of rum steeped with the vanilla that pays for everything.

About 84,000 people lived in the commune of Sambava at the 2018 census, which makes it one of the larger towns of the north-east and the service centre for a much bigger rural district. The town is essentially one long street: banks, telephone shops, vanilla offices, hotels and eating houses along it, residential lanes of timber and raffia houses behind, and plantations starting a short distance out.

Work is vanilla above all — growing, curing, grading and trading — with coconuts and copra, cloves, coffee, rice, and fishing from pirogues launched through the surf. Public jobs, transport and small commerce fill the rest. Wages are low and the economy is unusually exposed to a single world price and to the weather.

The rhythm is early: markets before the heat, a long quiet middle of the day, then the street busy again in the evening. Power and water supply are unreliable, roads inland become difficult in the rains, and the cyclone season is a fact of life on this coast, with houses, coconut palms and vanilla vines all at risk in a bad year.

Sambava eats rice with fish and coconut. The sea, the Bemarivo and the smaller river mouths provide fish, prawns and crab, cooked in coconut milk with ginger and tomato or simply grilled, and served with vary — rice — and a laoka of greens or beans. Chicken in coconut sauce is the standard celebration dish, and sakay, the chilli paste, is on every table.

Cassava, taro, breadfruit and bananas fill out meals, and ravitoto, pounded cassava leaves stewed with pork, crosses over from the highlands. Street food is straightforward: brochettes of zebu over charcoal, grilled corn and cassava, fried doughnuts and mofo gasy rice cakes at breakfast, and samosas known as sambos from the Muslim shops.

The district's own crops turn up on the plate and in the glass. Vanilla goes into sauces for fish and chicken as well as into rum; cloves, pepper and cinnamon grow nearby; and lychees, jackfruit, mangoes and pineapples are sold by the roadside in season. Coconut water is drunk fresh, betsabetsa, fermented cane juice, is the country drink, and coffee from the hills inland is taken strong and sweet.