It’s officially 923 km (577 miles) from Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital in the central highlands, to Toliara, the main port on the southwest coast, on Route Nationale (RN) 7. All the guidebooks (and every Malagasy I’ve met) say that RN7 is the best road in the country. It’s all relative, I guess. I’d classify RN7, a two-lane highway with many one-lane bridges, as a superior county road in Ohio or West Virginia, or maybe a lesser state route in need of maintenance. Yet, for better or worse (mostly for worse), this is the main route to the south. And it doesn’t even go all the way. The southernmost port and city, Tolananro (Fort Dauphin), is another two days’ travel from Toliara on dirt roads (which also have at least the official status of Route Nationales), bone rattling in the dry season and impassable in the rainy season.
With Air Madagascar on strike, the only way for me to reach Toliara, where I was scheduled to run a workshop for UNICEF, was on RN7. We left Antananarivo’s airport mid-afternoon on Saturday and had to spend two nights on the road before reaching Toliara on Monday morning.
Driving on RN7, it sometimes seemed that half the country was on the move. By taxi-brousse (bush taxi), the minivans with luggage, bicycles and the ubiquitous yellow bidons (jerry cans used for carrying water) piled so high that they look as if they will tip over on a curve (they sometimes do). By auto and bicycle rickshaw. By bicycle. On carts pulled by zebu, the humped cattle used for every agricultural task and (with fish) the main source of protein for the population. Every hour or so we stopped to let a herd of zebu cross the road, the boy herders shouting and waving their sticks. Outside the towns and villages, there were always people walking along the road. Rice farmers going to and from their fields. Men with axes and long sticks with curved blades, cutting eucalyptus trees for firewood and charcoal. Children returning from the river with bidons, lashed onto wooden push-carts, the day’s supply of water for cooking and washing. Families walking home from church.
Of course, most people in central and southern Madagascar were not on the move. It’s just that those who were traveling were squeezed onto the narrow ribbon of RN7. Outside the towns, I saw only two east-west roads leading off RN7 with a tarmac surface, and who knows how far it went? The poor infrastructure—primarily the roads, but also rural electricity supply—is the major barrier to economic development in a country where most people are still subsistence farmers, and which lags behind most countries (even many African countries) on human development indicators for health, nutrition, water, sanitation and education. Every rainy season, landslips block the road, and sections wash away, or develop huge potholes. Each administration in this notoriously politically unstable country promises to fix the roads and extend the network but, faced with poverty, hunger and pressing social problems, the promises are soon forgotten. “You can’t eat roads,” remarked our driver dryly.
South of Fianarantsoa, the second largest city, RN7 turns southwest, dipping down out of the highlands to the treeless savanna grasslands. This is Madagascar’s High Plains country, where herders drive their zebus and sleep out under the stars. If it wasn’t for the distinctive red and white kilometer posts on the roadside and the absence of pick-up trucks, it could be Wyoming or the Dakotas, the long grass blowing in the wind, the mountain ranges on the horizon. The grasslands gradually give way to a desert landscape dotted with scrubby trees and cactus, reminiscent of the American Southwest.
The wealth in this beautiful but desolate landscape is definitely in them, thar hills—in this case it’s not gold, but sapphires. Migrants from all over the country have come to this region to seek their fortunes, digging into the hillsides with shovels and pickaxes. They live in rough, single-story shacks in a series of small towns that straggle RN7. The real wealth is controlled by foreign traders—mostly from Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Thailand—who buy the rough sapphires and sell them, mostly for export. The names on the gem stores tell the story—Fayez, Najeem, Iqbal, Farook. These are reportedly wild towns, with high rates of crime and prostitution, where the lucky miner who has just sold his sapphires blows it all on sugar-cane moonshine and the slots at Les Jokers Hotel and Karaoke Bar.
The final 100 km to Toliara is desolate, and the people poor. In contrast to the rough but functional two-story houses of the highlands, the villages consist of single-room mud huts with thatched roofs and fences of branches and cactus, their occupants literally scratching out a living from the dry, sandy soil. Finally, we glimpsed the sea in the distance and crossed the low sandy hills into Toliara. We made it to the Chamber of Commerce just in time for the mid-morning coffee break. And just in time—my first presentation was on the schedule for right after the break.