Day 2 - Madagascar. In the middle of a revolution (unexpected) and poverty (expected).
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On Saturday, we began our journey from the capital to the local tea and coffee region. 450 kilometres doesn’t sound like much in Europe, but in Madagascar, it meant nearly 15 hours on the road with just a few short stops. Most of the road was a slalom between potholes, so the average speed was under 40 km/h.
On the road, we mostly saw trucks, minibuses, rickshaws, bicycles, ox carts, handcarts… and a few cars here and there. In smaller towns, we often saw people pulling carts with another person sitting in them. Not any faster than walking, but if you have the money, why walk yourself, right? We’re the fools chasing our 10,000 steps a day…
The police stopped us twice during the 450 km journey to pay a "tax". It’s mostly a formality, and locals see it less as a fine and more like a road tax. If you’re stopped several times a day, you just say you already paid in the morning. The officer is human too and sees no point in pushing it.
Where are the forests?
Nature around Tana (short for Antananarivo) is fairly monotonous, rice fields upon rice fields. The forests that once covered the island’s central plateau were largely cut down a couple of centuries ago to create pasture for cattle, leaving a rather bleak impression at first.
As it’s currently the beginning of spring here, the fields were mostly brown with piles of bricks scattered around. It turns out the fields serve two purposes: rice is grown in the summer, and in the winter, the clay soil is used for brick-making. How they manage to preserve fertility in the long run, and how deep they end up digging themselves, remains a mystery to us. But people don’t seem to think much about the distant future. It’s about surviving today and tomorrow.
As it’s currently the beginning of spring here, the fields were mostly brown with piles of bricks scattered around. It turns out the fields serve two purposes: rice is grown in the summer, and in the winter, the clay soil is used for brick-making. How they manage to preserve fertility in the long run, and how deep they end up digging themselves, remains a mystery to us. But people don’t seem to think much about the distant future. It’s about surviving today and tomorrow.
As we reached further south, the scenery changed, with more greenery and trees, hillsides with groves and rice fields, picturesque enough to finally make you want to stop the car and take photos. Even the houses didn't look as destitute as the shacks we saw near the capital. Today, as we continue on, we should also reach the tropical rainforests.
Poverty that is even hard to put into words
It takes only a few dozen kilometres to understand how poor Madagascar is today. Poverty is visible everywhere — the buildings, the roads, the vehicles, the clothes people wear, the beggars who appear at your car window the moment you stop. Those handmade bricks, for example, cost just 2 cents apiece. For one euro you can get 50 bricks.
We also saw heaps of granite gravel by the roadside, nothing unusual at first, until we noticed ten people sitting side by side, hammering huge granite boulders into small pieces. That’s how gravel is made here. Oni, our local guide, was surprised to hear that it’s done differently elsewhere…
Soon we noticed that half the people wear reasonably clean clothes, while the other half are in indescribably dirty rags, because they simply don’t have spare clothes to wash the ones they are wearing. Summer is coming, the weather will warm up, and maybe clothes will be cleaner then as well.
Wages are roughly the same as in Kenya, around €100 a month if you can find work. The difference is that in Kenya there are actual official jobs, whereas in Madagascar there are hardly any. So people are left to hammer granite and mould mud bricks.
The revolution - people demanding access to water and electricity
The day we were supposed to land in Antananarivo, a revolution started. The protest began with young people demanding universal access to electricity and water. In the capital, water is sometimes unavailable for days, and in every hotel we’ve stayed in so far, there’s been a bucket of water in the bathroom so you can at least refresh yourself a bit.
Electricity is mostly produced in small diesel-powered plants. Demand is rising, but capacity isn’t enough. On top of that, diesel generation is expensive, and the poor state simply doesn’t have the funds or perhaps those funds disappear into someone’s pocket, as locals suspect. The result is 8–10 hours of power cuts per day, with the government’s corruption and neglect seen as the main culprits. Despite promises, the situation only keeps getting worse.
The electricity price is another mystery, absurd given the country’s poverty. We asked about it ten times from every angle to be sure we weren’t misunderstanding, but apparently, households must pay a fixed fee of €40 a month. That’s a lot even in European terms.
There are supposedly meters, but nobody looks at them, and the bill is always €40. In rural areas, less than 10% of homes have electricity. Those with some income choose which months to pay and which months to have it cut off.
But what started as a peaceful protest, escalated into a revolution, and 10 people were killed in clashes on Friday. On Saturday, there were new protests and 15 more deaths. Sunday was a day of prayer, and from today it will likely continue. How this ends is impossible to predict right now.
We’re heading into rural areas where it’s probably calm, but whether we’ll be able to get back home in two weeks is, at this point, uncertain. We’re hoping for the best.
We’re heading into rural areas where it’s probably calm, but whether we’ll be able to get back home in two weeks is, at this point, uncertain. We’re hoping for the best.