Mantasoa Part II: Jean Laborde

Sometimes we look back in the history of our human race and we find a man so unusually gifted and whose story so absurdly bizarre that we just think to ourselves, “What the heck? How did that even happen?” That is not exactly the feeling I had when I first read the name “Jean Laborde” about three years ago in my French course. In fact, the most I knew about the man was that he was a French industrialist who helped begin a process of industrialization in Madagascar in the early 19th century. A few years later, however, I would learn more about the man through history books and even a novel. What I discovered about the man, his legacy, and the lake he left behind in Mantasoa blew my mind, all of which made my visit to Mantasoa that much more exciting and deeply personal.

Jean Laborde was born in 1805 in France as the son of a blacksmith. When he grew up, he went to work in French Pondicherry, India. In 1831, when he was only 26 years old, he went treasure hunting off the coast of Madagascar. For a long time, some of the coasts of Madagascar were homes to wealthy and accomplished pirates who either retired on the island or set up pirate safe houses, many of them as large as towns with their own governments, laws, customs, and constitutions. So it was not out of the ordinary that a young, adventurous man would set out in search for lost treasures. Nor was it out of the ordinary that a cyclone struck Jean Laborde’s ship and stranded him on the Red Island. What was out of the ordinary, however, was that Laborde eventually made his way to the capital, here in Antananarivo, where he worked as a blacksmith under Queen Ranavalona I, who was known as the cruel queen, and eventually became the father of industrialism and manufacturing in Madagascar.

When Laborde arrived in Tana, he impressed the queen with his skills as a blacksmith, some rumors state that he had a secret affair with her on several occasions, which would not have been out of the ordinary as during the Merina Monarchy, the ruling monarch had the divine right to whomever they so pleased. Enticed by the man, Ranavalona sought to use the man’s skills to thrust Madagascar into an industrial age by constructing the island’s first major foundry and industrial complex.

The location Laborde selected was a little place called Mantasoa, just east of the capital, where he found an abundance of iron, wood, and water, which was not yet in the form of a lake. In fact, the area remains rich in natural resources, some of the rocks containing 50% or more iron in them, which, if you knock on the rock with your fist, rings like a bell, what we make singing stones out of.

Now with a location and the backing of the queen, Laborde had one major problem. That is, although he was the son of a blacksmith, he had never actually built a forge to the scale that he had promised, nor did he know how. Luckily, another Frenchman, Napoleon de Lastelle, gifted him a state-of-the-art collection of encyclopedias on how to build a foundry capable of producing the amount of steel and iron Laborde desired. So, armed with nothing but a brain, a set of complex and technical encyclopedias, and a lot of money from the Queen of Madagascar, Laborde set out to build Madagascar’s first industry. Nonetheless, there was another problem.

Mantasoa had iron, wood, and water, but none of it was concentrated. In fact, there wasn’t even a lake, just a collection of streams and rivers. But that wouldn’t stop 28-year-old Jean Laborde who, in 1833, began a massive construction project that would convert the seemingly disconnected streams and rivers into a single body of water, modern day lake Mantasoa. That is to say, Jean Laborde decided that he wanted to build a lake so he could power his foundry.

After constructing dams and dykes, Laborde began filling in an incredibly unusual outline for a lake. Indeed, the lake is oddly shaped with long, straight outshoots that seem scattered and unnatural. The idea sounds crazy, and it was. But Laborde, with the help of nearly 20,000 slaves and apparently endless funds from the queen, built the lake, taking 20 years to completely fill it. Meanwhile, Laborde’s foundry was built, even with several modifiers Laborde had personally added where he found certain aspects of the encyclopedias lacking. Mind you, Laborde made these changes having never actually build a foundry before.

Some of his designs were like none anyone had seen or tried before. For instance, the metal the foundry heated would expand as heat was applied and then shrink as heat was taken away. Laborde didn’t want it to change sizes throughout the process. Thus, he inserted iron pins into the side of the granite walls of the foundry and then slide iron polls through the rings on the end of the pins. This created a type of cage around the granite stone foundry that would keep everything in place throughout the smelting and casting process, despite the increase and decrease in temperature. In short, Jean Laborde literally made-up new techniques not necessarily knowing if they would work or not. They did. And the result was a completely modern industrial complex in the heart of Madagascar.

Laborde’s factory was incredibly successful. There were no other factories in Madagascar, and there has never been anything as grand or noteworthy as his factory in Mantasoa, which has since been left to the pages of history after the fall of the Merina Monarchy and the arrival of the French conquerors. Jean Laborde used 20,000 slaves to build his factory and lake. When it was complete, the factory produced cannons, swords, rifles, bricks, ironworks, timber, furniture, candles, and countless other manufactured goods once only available through imports. In fact, Laborde’s factory armed the Malagasy army so well that there were over 500 cannons stationed around Madagascar at the time of the French invasion, all of them manufactured at Mantasoa.

Laborde’s legacy doesn’t end there. He trained over 3,000 craftsmen, carpenters, ironsmiths, and other vocational skill workers. Unfortunately, many of these vocations would falter during the colonial period, and when Mantasoa closed, there were no other institutions to train the Malagasy in producing manufactured goods. Today, the artificial lake is the home of a resort, replacing the manufacture good industry with a tourist industry and some local scale brickwork and logging. The majority of the factory buildings survive, including the foundry itself and the home of the workers. One of the buildings became a high school but was later closed.

Traces of Jean Laborde remain around the town, including his home constructed entirely out of wood because, at the time of Queen Ranavalona I, it was illegal to build anything out of stone unless it were a tomb. Similarly, Laborde was Catholic, yet it was illegal to practice the Christian faith openly for members of the court or noble class and completely illegal for the peasants, so he incorporated subtle Christian themes into the architecture of his home in Mantasoa, such as the cross shaped columns surrounding the residence. Laborde remained in generally good standing with the queen, being exiled temporarily during the reign of Radama II before returning as consul of France in the 1860s when he died in Mantasoa. The French conquest would not occur until the 1890s. Nonetheless, this son of a blacksmith, turned adventurer, turned castaway, turned hired craftsman, turned industrial genius managed to build a lake and a foundry that, at the time, was as good, if not better, than those of Europe or America, which produced thousands of manufactured goods for an entire civilization. What a story.

Coming to a place like Mantasoa and walking where Jean Laborde lived was extremely powerful for me, not only as a history nerd, but also as a literary nerd. Before leaving for Madagascar, I read a Malagasy novel, one of the two translated into English, titled “Beyond the Rice Fields.” The story itself takes place in a town further east of Mantasoa. Driving through the countryside of Madagascar, especially this part, gave me a whole new perspective of the landscape and geographic context. Moreover, the main character goes to Mantasoa where he is trained as a craftsman and meets, on several occasions in the story, Jean Laborde. But it doesn’t end there. The story also takes place in Analakely, where my school is located. And in Andahalo and Mahamasina, where I go to church and at the bottom of my hill. In short, I am literally living and walking in the places I have read about in both history books and Malagasy novels. It’s absolutely wild to think about it sometimes, and, in my opinion, demonstrates the importance of reading about the culture and history of a place before you get there.

I think I’ll write a blog later about some of historical places I’ve been to and their significance. There are plenty here in Tana considering this is where most of modern Malagasy history took place. But that’s for another time. As always, know that you are in my prayers each morning. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised.