with French aid. Communities up and down RN7 were left wondering whether the easiest way to get their bridges repaired was to blow them up and wait for donors to build new ones.
South of Fianarantsoa, RN7 turns southwest, dipping down out of the highlands to the treeless savannah grasslands. This is Madagascar’s high plains country, where herders drive their zebu and sleep out under the stars. The grasslands stretch for almost two-thirds of the length of the country, west of the highlands, and have a dry season of seven to eight months. If it wasn’t for the distinctive red-and-white kilometer posts and the absence of pickup trucks, it could have been Montana or Wyoming, the long grass blowing in the wind, the mountain ranges on the horizon. The grasslands gradually give way to a desert landscape of canyons, steep cliffs, and buttes dotted with scrubby trees and cactus; in the late afternoon, with the sun casting long shadows off the striking rock formations, we could have been in Arizona or New Mexico. We stopped for the second night in Ranohiro, gateway to the huge L’Isalo national park. Chez Alice, with its cactus fence and corral boasting Malagasy rodeo (presumably bareback zebu riding), was full, so we found a hotel in the town center, eating dinner alongside long tables of European tourists on their “Madagascar Adventure” tour. We were on the road again at 6:00 the next morning, as the sun rose over the bluffs and canyons, bathing them in the warm morning light.
Desert Treasures
The wealth in this beautiful but desolate landscape is not in them thar hills, but in the ground. And it’s not gold, but sapphires. Gemstones were first discovered in the forests of northern Madagascar in the early 1990s, drawing migrants to seek their fortunes. In the south, prospectors were collecting garnets to sell to foreign dealers; in 1998, a batch mined near Ilakaka, a wide place in the road along RN7, turned out to be pink sapphires. The discovery transformed Ilakaka from a few ramshackle huts into a boom town. The field, which stretches southwest across the desert from Ilakaka, is reportedly the largest deposit in the world, yielding high-priced deep blue sapphires along with pinks, yellows, and rubies. Other mining towns sprouted up along RN7. Their streets are lined with ramshackle stores selling provisions and tools, and rough, single-story shacks where miners rent small rooms at high prices. These are wild towns, with high rates of crime and prostitution, where the lucky miner who has just sold his sapphires blows it all on sugarcane moonshine and the slots at Les Jokers Hotel and Karaoke Bar.
With such riches to be uncovered, no machinery is used; miners use pickaxes and shovels to break the rocky ground and dig shafts, using buckets to haul the earth to the surface. It’s dirty, dangerous work; in the rainy season, shaft walls can collapse, trapping the miners underground. Most mines are individual or family operations. A few commercial mines, with optimistic names such as African Bank, Swiss Bank, and World Bank, are financed by investors who hire day laborers. The landscape is pockmarked with mine workings, but the deposits closest to RN7 and the towns have been exhausted, and miners must walk miles into the desert to work their claims.3
The real wealth is controlled by foreign traders—mostly from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Thailand—who buy the rough sapphires and sell them on Asian markets. The names on the gem stores—Fayez, Najeem, Iqbal, Farook—tell the story. The government, with support from donors, is training Malagasy miners and small traders in gemology and stonecutting and trying to collect export taxes. Regulating the industry and stamping out corruption is challenging. Rough sapphires are routinely smuggled out of the country, with a wink and a $100 bill slipped into the passport at customs.
The final sixty miles to Toliara are desolate, and the people poor. In contrast to the rough but functional two-story brick trano gasy houses of the highlands, the homes are single-room wood-and-mud huts with roofs of thatched reeds or palm leaves and a dirt floor, surrounded by fences of branches and cactus. Average rainfall in this region is just twelve to fourteen inches a year; the population depends primarily on zebu herding, raising meagre crops of maize, sorghum, and sweet potato in the sandy soil and along river banks.
Finally, we glimpsed the sea and the table mountain (a modest version of Cape Town’s landmark) that marked the final descent to Toliara. We crossed the low sandy hills into the city and reached the chamber of commerce in time for midmorning coffee. Just in time—my first presentation was scheduled for right after the break.
The “Champaign Country”
In June 1630, ships of the East India Company anchored in St. Augustine’s Bay at the mouth of the Onilahy River, about twenty miles south of present-day Toliara, to take on provisions before sailing up the Mozambique Channel. It was, by the standards of southern Madagascar, a cool winter, allowing the merchant Richard Boothby to feel comfortable in his suit of English cloth. During the three-month stay, not a single crew member died and there were few cases of sickness. “The country about the bay,” wrote Boothby, “is pleasant to view, replenished with brave woods, rocky hills of white marble, and low fertile grounds.” Crew members told him that away from the coast the land “abounds with mines of gold and silver and other minerals” and “a large plain, or champaign country, of meadow or pasture land as big as all of England,” with ample fish and game. “It is very probable,” Boothby wrote, “by the quantity of brown fat oxen, cows, sheep and goats brought down and sold unto us by the natives, that the country is very fertile.”
Boothby was intoxicated by what he saw and heard, as was his colleague, the surgeon Walter Hammond, who later published a pamphlet, Madagascar, the Richest and Most Fruitfull Island in the World. You must wonder if they were intoxicated by something else when they recorded their impressions. Compared with the east coast of Madagascar, with its tropical rainforest and lush vegetation, the land beyond St. Augustine’s Bay is among the most barren and infertile in the island.
Such enthusiastic accounts fell on eager ears in London, where city merchants, supported by King Charles I, were ready to invest in expeditions they hoped would make them wealthy. The East India Company was already engaged in a trading war with the Dutch and Portuguese in the Spice Islands and other parts of the Indian Ocean but had failed to establish settlements and forts. In 1635, a rival company, the Courteen’s Association, was granted a royal charter to trade in the East. Boothby and Hammond encouraged Courteen’s to sponsor a colony in Madagascar. Several attempts failed because of lack of funds and opposition from the East India Company, but eventually in August 1644 three ships with 140 men, women, and children, under the command of John Smart, set sail. They arrived in St. Augustine’s Bay in March 1645 and built a fortified settlement.
It was not the green and pleasant land Boothby and Hammond had promised. The settlers arrived at the end of the short rainy season, and the crops they planted perished for lack of water. The sparse cattle pasture soon dried up. There were no minerals. Smart sent out ships to seek trading opportunities, but they returned with discouraging news; the French and Dutch had established settlements on the east coast and threatened hostile action if the English tried to trade. By August, the St. Augustine colony was running out of supplies. The locals, writes Mervyn Brown, “who were usually friendly and ready to trade . . . became either non-cooperative or openly hostile when they realized that the visitors intended to settle and take some of their land.” The settlers got into disputes over cattle and rashly joined local clans in raids on their enemies. Dysentery and fever took their toll. When the colony was abandoned in May 1646, only sixty-three of the original settlers had survived. “I could not but endeavour to dissuade others from undergoing the miseries that will follow the persons of such as adventure themselves for Madagascar,” wrote one of the survivors, Powle Waldegrave.4
So ended, after little more than a year, the first English attempt to establish a colony. French trading settlements lasted longer, but none of the European trading powers succeeded in establishing a permanent commercial foothold on the island until French colonization in the late nineteenth century. English ships continued to call at St. Augustine, and some locals adopted English names, but no attempts were made to reestablish a settlement. After the French abandoned Fort Dauphin in 1674, trading contacts were mostly with pirates who preyed on European ships bound from the
