Tôlanaro

She was fighting geopolitics.

The British were pushing hard for abolition of slavery and conversion to Christianity, while the French were eyeing the port of Fort Dauphin and the northern harbors.

Rana Valona saw both as existential threats.

So she closed the borders completely?

So I've worked across southern Madagascar looking at the interplay of conservation narratives and extractive narratives and justifying projects.

I've also studied titanium mining in the southeast around Fort Dauphin and looked at the ways that mining, despite causing a lot of social conflicts there being a lot of violence associated with it a lot of dispossession um how it gets framed in terms of development gifts and how for example the qmm mine which is owned in part by rio tinto and in part by the malagasy government presents itself as this model of sustainable mining and this kind of model for global extractives.

And so this is really kind of where I got super interested in the politics of environmental restoration, which is one of my main areas of study now.

And as I was studying what was going on in Fort Dauphin in southeastern Madagascar, this is when the kind of restoration paradigm started to build In the high-level policy discourse, you saw lots being discussed in terms of, of course, carbon and other ways of producing nature-based commodities, but increasingly framed in ways that positioned these sorts of projects as repairing some aspect of a broken nature.

Particularly around climate change, you see it very strongly, but we see this also in landscape restoration discourses.

We've seen it forever when we hear talk of land degradation and when we hear about things like desertification.

Exactly, and unlike the Portuguese who mostly sailed past, the French actually tried to settle.

They landed at a spot they called Fort Dauphin, but the locals knew it as Tolanaro, and the people living there were the Antanasi.

The name literally means people of the salt, because they controlled the salt pans along the coast, which was a huge commodity for preserving meat and fish.

The French arrived in 1642, led by a man named Sieur Pronys.