How Colonialism and Poverty Forced Madagascar to Reject COVID Vaccinations

“There is a long history that built distrust in general western decision making, that you have to assume exploitation in some way.”

Grandidier’s Baobab is a strange tree. Its colossal stump never thins out, instead holding a bloated and rounded shape. It reaches nearly 100 feet and is noted for its smell of sour fruit. Alfred Grandidier, whom the tree is named after, was a French botanist and explorer who first visited Madagascar in 1865 and soon thereafter petitioned for the French government to annex the island as its own territory. 

Nearly 100 years later, in 1960, Madagascar gained independence from France and became a burgeoning social-democratic country under the election of Philibert Tsiranana, who was responsible for the country’s namesake as “the happy island.” The independence of Madagascar did not cause a separation from colonial powers as Tsiranana continued to trade predominantly with France and the United States, establishing the country as a figure of the west in direct opposition to communist African powers such as Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah and Tanzania under Julius Nyerere. In the late 1960s, Tsiranana’s opposition was growing specifically in response to his economic ties to France and his developing cardiovascular ailment. He was overthrown as president by Richard Ratsimandrava, who only ruled for six days before being assassinated, plunging the country into brief disarray and then the socialist leadership that the country just years earlier stood against. 

Since then, Madagascar has struggled with its lingering shadow of colonialism and social unrest. They have drifted in and out of democratic governance, shifted alliances multiple times, and have generally struggled with economic troubles throughout the last few decades. Madagascar’s attempts to stabilize its politics could not have come at a worse time. As a global pandemic wreaks havoc on norms and industries, Madagascar has seen a near-full drop in tourism and a decrease in textile and food exports. 

Now, as vaccines are being distributed worldwide, one would imagine that Madagascar is embracing a return to normalcy by way of peer-reviewed medicine. Instead, Madagascar has swung the opposite way of nearly every other country and defiantly rejected any COVID vaccines. The country’s current president, Andry Rajoelina, has touted a drink concocted out of wormwood that has been dubbed “Covid Organics.” The rationale behind this opposition is far more nuanced and complex than most could possibly empathize with– especially those from a country like the United States that pales in comparison to Madagascar in poverty, violence, and disease. 

Reaching out to experts who are actually well acquainted with Madagascar is the first challenge in attempting to understand a country that is so distant and isolated from the United States. Richard Marcus, Professor and Director of the Global Studies Institute and the International Studies Program at California State University, Long Beach is not only an expert in Madagascar politics, but also a Malagasy speaker. Marcus has an apartment in Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo. In grappling with the pandemic, he has become well acquainted with the country’s public health strategy as the Lead Researcher for the World Bank’s Southern Madagascar Social Sector Policy. 

In an attempt to paint a backdrop on the current social climate in Madagascar, Marcus explains, “it was a great disruption with the 2009 overthrow” of former president Marc Ravalomanana by the current president and then-mayor of Antananarivo, Andry Rajoelina (pronounced An-try Raz-well-nah). “Madagascar is not Côte d’Ivoire, It’s not Mali, in terms of the military doesn’t play that kind of role. There weren’t these concerns of great violence… But it was a disruption in terms of there was no clear path to an election or gaining legitimacy with the government and how to create a clear political process.” Another distinction that Marcus makes between Madagascar’s coup and the more chaotic and violent ones that are seen in places like Latin America is that the former’s president was incredibly unpopular, and in seeking re-election “only won approximately 9% of the vote.” 

Now, the current president “has been incredibly successful at—through legitimate processes—gaining just unimaginable amounts of power.” A stark example of this was how, when faced with a senate that wasn’t willing to obey him, President Rajoelina “went through a process that was consistent with the constitution for how to change the Senate, and in this case to reduce the senators so that it was predominantly an appointed senate.” After dominating local governments, Rajoelina’s party now faces “no competition, and he did so through entirely legal means, and that’s not sustainable. So now, it feels like the quiet before the storm.” These feelings of uncertainty are concerning, but far from new. Understanding how instability and authoritarianism have plagued the nation is also key to deciphering its past, and how colonialism has affected—and will continue to affect—Madagascar and its political and social movements. 

Madagascar, like many other underdeveloped countries, has faced mounting medical concerns for centuries. Marcus reminisces: “When I went to Madagascar for the first time, it was around the time of HIV/AIDS. The rumors at the time were that this was all about some population control experiment by the US on Madagascar. With every kind of especially external disease, there’s those types of things, which are usually false rumors but nonetheless one can understand why that would be considering there were decades where there was human experimentation on the population.” 

A prominent example of how western medicine has sown distrust and fear in this part of the world stems back to colonialism and it affects the entire globe today. The notoriously brutal Belgian rule in the Congo is an instance of just how horrific colonialism’s effects have been in Africa. King Leopold II had his sights set on exploring and “civilizing” Africa, as affirmed by the colonialist International African Association. Even beneath that, he was intent on profiting off of the Congos residents by any means necessary. To fuel monetary gains, the King ruled that if slaves did not gather as much rubber as was set by quota, that their limbs be cut off. 

Around the early 1900s, “sleeping sickness” threatened the regime of wealth created in the Belgian Congo.Unlike the torture and dismemberment sanctioned by Belgium, sleeping sickness was a medical condition that could have ruined their reign. So, the King and his country scraped together a vaccine for the ailment to get workers back to building his personal wealth. The Belgian company that created the vaccine, Janssen, is now part of Johnson & Johnson, which has created a COVID-19 vaccine. Therefore, the lineage from a torturous colonial empire to a COVID vaccine is an incredibly quick timeline. This, along with other medical evils in Africa perpetrated by the west, has caused an incredible level of distrust. Professor Marcus explains, “If you have a system that is stacked against you in that way, and that is necessarily exploitative in a neo-colonial kind of way, then disease becomes part of that.” The reasoning for rejecting western vaccines in Madagascar is political, economic, and medical; a grouping that may help make the unthinkable quite understandable. 

The global political motives for rejecting science are not difficult to discern. In the early stages of the pandemic, former President Donald Trump notably rejected the dangers of COVID itself and then later touted the benefits of an untested medicine, hydroxychloroquine. This infamous moment speaks to a broader truth about the relation between politics and science, and how the two are often at odds. In the case of Madagascar, the motives for rejecting the vaccines are also largely political. Reeling from the impacts of colonialism means that the country has something to prove; more specifically, its leadership feels a constant pressure to project power as a means of rejecting its colonial past. This is done to prove that Madagascar is both independent and strong, but also partly as a coping mechanism for a sense of powerlessness that has plagued the island nation and much of the continent at large. 

Because accepting vaccines would make Madagascar look reliant on its past foes, the government turned to an extreme form of denialism, a non-peer-reviewed “cure” to COVID-19 called Covid Organics, or CVO. Covid Organics is an herbal drink that primarily consists of wormwood. Its purported efficacy has been touted by President Rajoelina, and the drink is now being used as one of the main countermeasures against COVID in the country and beyond. Professor Marcus adds that “the development of Covid Organics means that there’s a counter-narrative to be had by the government.” This point makes it clear, along with the lack of medical evidence, that Covid Organics is less a solution for COVID, but rather a solution to mounting colonial pressures and skepticism about the country’s handling of COVID-19. The President rejects any doubts about CVO’s efficacy—instead telling a French radio show that the West refuses to admit that “a country like Madagascar developed this formula to save the world.” 

The drink’s use as a weapon of anti-colonialism is quite ironic, considering that the largest wormwood producer in Madagascar is a French company, Bionexx, and that funding for medical research on Wormwood was partially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Still, Madagascar already felt violated by the pandemic, even going so far as to call COVID “The French Disease.” Because of Madagascar’s relative cultural isolation from other western countries, the initial spread of disease in Madagascar may likely have originated in France. It’s therefore logical to assume that Madagascar’s distrust of the COVID vaccine has nearly everything to do with its hesitance to work with its former captor. Professor Marcus goes on to say that “there is a long history that built distrust in general western decision making; you have to assume exploitation in some way.”

The final article of reasoning for Madagascar’s lack of enthusiasm for the vaccine is medical. Madagascar is not only going through a patch of political turmoil, but is also suffering from other social and health issues. Professor Marcus reiterates that, “there has been disease spread and there have been deaths, official numbers are under 400…so it’s not like in California, where it’s all about health. The COVID-19 impacts have been largely economic, and those have been very significant…and there’s no way to take apart that the southern part of the country is in the worst famine it’s experienced in more than two decades and it’s very hard to take apart what is an impact of famine from what is an impact of COVID-19.” 

The bottom line is that COVID was at the forefront of—for example—America’s agenda, but for Madagascar, COVID is simply not as much of a priority. Marcus questions, “If what you’re worrying about is famine at that level and you’re still having 3000 or so people dying every year from Malaria… then should vaccines be your biggest focus as opposed to saying ‘let’s focus on famine, let’s focus on Malaria, let’s focus on the things that hit us the hardest?’” This isn’t to say that COVID shouldn’t be handled in Madagascar whatsoever; but it does give pause to some of the claims that the country is completely mishandling this disease. They deal with issues that most of the world is fortunate enough to overlook. 

Still, Madagascar has been tackling the issues as they come, and have done so by accepting money from the international community. Marcus says, “We’ve seen a massive international response: There’s been a 600 million dollar response from the international community, and just in the past few days, the World Bank has announced an additional 150 million that is officially a COVID-19 response, but the primary part is facing the economic side and the social side. So, it’s actually called the Social Safety Net Project, because the concern is not the disease—the concern is people starving to death tens of thousands at a time. That’s COVID related and that’s a real concern.” 

For Madagascar, the medical concerns about COVID are intrinsically tied to the country’s other medical issues, its economic losses, and its political turmoil. It’s easy to see why, with so many overlapping concerns and consequences, that Madagascar has turned its back on the COVID vaccine.