Close your eyes for a moment before reading on. Imagine the fine sand of Ifaty beneath your feet, still warm from yesterday's sun. The water there starts turquoise, almost transparent, then shifts to deep blue further out, as if someone had poured several shades into the same bucket without ever mixing them. A thousand colors for a single sea, and none of them quite the same from one fishing village to another, from Nosy Be to Anakao. In the distance, an outrigger canoe glides silently, carried by a wind that no one seems in a hurry to name.
Between July and September, off the coast of Sainte-Marie, humpback whales return, as they do every year, to give birth in warmer waters than those they came from. They leap, they sing beneath the surface, and the fishermen who have crossed their paths since time immemorial never tire of it, even after the hundredth season. A little further on, among the coral reefs of Ifaty or Toliara, green sea turtles glide silently between the corals, indifferent to tourists holding their breath to watch them pass. These are gestures that nature has repeated here forever, long before Madagascar had a name, and will continue to repeat long after we are gone.
It would take an entire book, not a column, to tell all that this island carries. The forests where species live that are found nowhere else on earth. The tsingy that look like forests of stone carved by patient hands. The baobabs that seem to have been planted upside down by mistake, and which the whole world comes to photograph at sunset, in silence, as if in a church. One could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but that: cataloging all the beauty that Madagascar received as a gift, without asking for anything, without paying for anything either.
This island fascinates far beyond its own shores. Travelers from every continent sometimes save for years to afford a ticket to Madagascar, despite airfares that often discourage even the most persistent desires and endless connections. Photographers, researchers, nature lovers come from Japan, Germany, Canada, South Africa, solely to catch a glimpse of a lemur in its natural habitat or swim alongside a humpback whale. For many, thousands of kilometers away, Madagascar remains a postcard that makes one dream, a name pronounced with stars in one's eyes, long before setting foot on its soil. People come from far away, despite everything, for what we have sometimes stopped seeing by living on top of it.
And yet. This word alone sums up everything this column will never fully explain. How can a land so generous, so desired from the other end of the world, carry so much misery? How can children grow up hungry just kilometers from a sea teeming with fish? How can families lack drinking water on an island where it rains, in some places, more than two thousand millimeters a year? Researchers from around the world have written about this paradox, with learned words, statistics, theories about resources and institutions. I do not claim to do better than them here, nor to prove them wrong.
I simply pose the question, as any Malagasy sitting by this thousand-colored sea might, wondering why so much beauty and so much hunger exist on the same piece of earth. I have no ready-made answer to give you, and I distrust those who claim to have a definitive one. But before turning the page, take just a minute. Look once more at that sea in your mind, the whales, the turtles, the warm sand. And ask yourself, honestly, what you, at your own scale, would do to ensure that this wealth finally benefits those who live on it.
Mbolatiana Raveloarimisa