In our country, sewing classes are an institution: we learn to take measurements, cut into the fabric, and make what we have last. For some time now, the country has been automatically re-enrolled in this course, and in evening classes, if you please. From 5 PM until 8 AM the next day, the lesson is back. Fifteen hours of power cuts is longer than a workday, which proves at least that the learning is serious.
The first lessons are known to all. The phone announcing 3% battery with the calmness of a doctor who doesn’t want to alarm the family. The candle found at the back of the drawer, a relic of a time we thought was over. Children doing homework by the light of a flame, which, according to textbooks, makes them future great men. And then the conversations, resurrected for lack of power outlets: we discovered that the cousin had opinions, that the neighbor had a voice, and that dinner could last more than fifteen minutes.
When darkness falls, it feels like we’ve returned to the nightclubs of the old days. The lighting is dim, candles act as smoke machines, phones rise in the darkness like at a concert, and the neighbor’s generator provides the bass for the whole neighborhood. The only things missing are the turntable, the bouncer, and the entrance fee, which we pay anyway in the form of an electricity bill.
It even feels like we’ve returned to the time of lords and their subjects. The lords own a generator: they dine in full light, watch their series, and treat the darkness as a topic of conversation. The subjects have candles and do what they can with what the night leaves them. Between the two, there are those who own an external battery: they are invited everywhere, offered the best chair, and no one asks about their health, but about their battery percentage.
Generation Z has already asked the question in the streets. A young person said: “I don’t want to change countries, I want to change my future.” The sentence is worth more than any speech: it doesn’t ask for another country, only that the current flows in this one. It seems that, for us, the future is also subject to load shedding: it turns on intermittently, and rarely at the hours when we need it.
There is a Malagasy proverb that puts it this way: “Basy atifik’avana, tsy afenina fa arangaranga.” A weapon pointed at a relative is not hidden, it is displayed. Truths spoken, even while laughing, do not target anyone: they serve as a warning.
It must also be said, to be fair, that for a good part of the country, darkness is not a return, it is the ordinary. There are villages where they have known neither the light of before nor the cuts of today, and where candles have never been put away in the back of a drawer because they never left them. The smile stops where this observation begins. It is easier to laugh at the darkness when you have spare batteries.
So we will laugh anyway, because we must illuminate something, and we will continue to follow the sewing course, pattern in hand, hem to redo, and nerves to stitch back together. But we will not forget to ask, politely, for the power to return before the course turns into a diploma.
Captured & Published at: 2026-10-10 05:39:01 (Madagascar Local Time EAT)
Original Source: https://www.lexpress.mg/2026/10/coupes-et-coupures.html