3 hours drive north of Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, is a small agricultural town named Anjozorobe. It is surrounded by green hills and enormous stretches of rice paddies. Local farmers are certainly liable to the slash and burn culture, which means there are few trees about, but the production of nutritious red rice still has high yields. People wear a huge array of hats. Some don more traditional straw trilbies and sun hats while others adorn a whole range of hats imported by foreign aid charities. American clothes dominate as a result of this. Traditional garb seems rather distant. While I was teaching, the main high school even held a beauty pageant, which although extremely popular, seemed to borrow its entire process from an outside world. Students dressed in tennis gear and brandishing a tennis racket to
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