Close your eyes for a second. Imagine the fine sand of Ifaty under your feet, still warm from the previous day’s sun. The water starts as turquoise, almost transparent, then turns 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 are 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. They leap and sing beneath the surface, and the fishermen who have encountered them forever never tire of it, even after the hundredth season. A little further on, on the coral reefs of Ifaty or Toliara, green turtles glide silently between the corals, indifferent to the tourists holding their breath to watch them pass. These are gestures that nature has repeated here since time immemorial, long before Madagascar had a name, and will continue to repeat long after us.
It would take an entire book, not just a column, to describe everything this island holds. The forests where species live that are found nowhere else on earth. The Tsingy that resemble stone forests carved by patient hands. The baobabs that seem to have been planted upside down by mistake, which the whole world comes to photograph at sunset, in silence, as if in a church. One could spend a whole life doing just that: cataloging all the beauties that Madagascar has received as a dowry, without having asked for anything, without having paid anything either.
This island fascinates far beyond its own shores. Travelers from all continents sometimes save for years to afford a ticket to Madagascar, despite airfares that often discourage the most tenacious desires and endless connections. Photographers, researchers, and nature lovers come from Japan, Germany, Canada, and South Africa, just 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 dreamlike postcard, a name spoken with stars in one’s eyes, long before setting foot on its soil. People come from afar, despite everything, for what we have sometimes ceased to see while living on it.
And yet. This word, by itself, summarizes everything this column will never be able to explain completely. How can a land so generous, so desired from the other side of the world, carry so much misery? How can children grow up hungry a few 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 per year? Researchers from all over the world have written about this paradox, with scholarly words, statistics, and theories about resources and institutions. I do not claim to do better than them here, nor to prove them wrong.
I am just asking the question, simply, as any Malagasy sitting by this sea of a thousand colors would, wondering why so much beauty and so much hunger exist on the same piece of land. I have no ready-made answer to give you, and I am wary of those who claim to have a definitive one. But before you turn the page, just take a minute. Look at that sea in your head again, the whales, the turtles, the warm sand. And ask yourself, honestly, what you, at your level, would do so that this wealth finally benefits those who live on it.
Captured & Published at: 2026-08-20 06:23:48 (Madagascar Local Time EAT)
Original Source: https://www.lexpress.mg/2026/08/trop-riche-pour-etre-si-pauvre.html