Ancien site industriel de Mantasoa

The old industrial site of Mantasoa covers the remains of a revolutionary development in Madagascar in the 1830s. The first Malagasy Queen, Ranavalona, wanted to become more independent of European powers and especially produce her own modern weaponry. To accomplish this, she enlisted the Frenchman Jean Laborde who had been shipwrecked off Madagascar and had engineering experience. The forced labour of 20,000 Malagasy men was used to develop the site, and later 1,200 men found employment at the factories. The site was only used between 1841 and 1855 until Laborde fell out of grace and went into exile.

Mantasoa lies about 50km from Antananarivo, but it took us 3.5 hours to get there (we went by normal car, in a 4WD it may be half an hour or more faster). The area is much more densely (re)forested than the region around the capital and it has a river – the proximity of wood (pines) and water (swamps were turned into artificial lakes) were what drew Laborde to this place for his industrial site. Mantasoa nowadays is a municipality of about 10,000 inhabitants spread across several villages.

Five locations are distinguished in the Tentative Site description, but they lie close to each other in town and there is more heritage from this period to be found in between. We started at Laborde’s former house, an impressive wooden building modelled after the farms in his home region of Auch. A question by my travel companion for the day, WHS …