The shores of Madagascar's east coast, the soul of an entire people

Imagine a riverside people. They are ineffably attached to their land even as it is devastated by the unleashed fury of wind and ocean for at least a month each year.

On a delicate and narrow strip of land, between ocean and river, exist villages that die and are reborn, and a people who leave and return, waiting for the cyclone that strikes during the first three months of the year to pass, leaving houses as wrecks, coconut trees felled, vegetation in ruins when the inhabitants return to their land. Yet against all odds, they rebuild everything and resume their daily lives around the water for the rest of the year.

This is the case with the shores of Madagascar's east coast. The Pangalanes Canal, today recognized as one of the must-see destinations of the Great Island for its lush nature, is notably the land of different ethnic peoples: the Betsimisaraka in the Northeast, an ethnicity of cosmopolitans unified under a single designation, who are fully integrated into Malagasy culture and ways of life; then the Antanala or "tanala" in everyday language, the foresters of the center East, "Antanala" meaning "those who live in the forest"; the Antambahoaka and the Antemoro who live slightly further north than the Antanala, notably between Mananjary and Vohipeno. They are recognized as the keepers of the "Sorabe,