The world’s fourth-largest island, off the coast of southern Africa, looks across the Indian Ocean toward politically troubled Mozambique, where whale sharks and manta rays approach the finest sandy beaches to within the distance of a fishing boat. From Paris, the colonial Air France brought us directly to Antananarivo or, in Malagasy, the city of a thousand soldiers. The simple and friendly airport, at least at first glance, does not intimidate visitors with groups of police officers and soldiers, as had often surprised us when entering other Third World countries; even the airport paperwork does not correspond to the country’s lack of development, as is so often the case. The city boasts just under two million inhabitants, the country well over twenty million, give or take a few million, most of whom look up at the poverty line from below, just as they look up toward the part of the city on the hill reserved for ambassadors, politicians and better hotels. Sewage, in places running through open drains, feeds stray dogs and the poor, while the siren of an ambulance awakens hope for better times, when perhaps a few percent more people will be able to afford medical care. Roads unimaginably bad to a European led us to the east coast across the mountainous, savannah-covered island, occasionally dotted with small villages where electricity, toilets, a full plate and primary school are still unknown. The shores around Morondava sunbathe the few white visitors on hot white sand, while dreamlike sunrises and sunsets accompany fishermen in archaic wooden boats on their daily hunt in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. The sight of wooden, grass-roofed huts belonging to dark-skinned inhabitants, who no longer resemble the Arabs said to have first settled the island but appear more African, is probably much the same as that seen by the white oppressors who, in the name of the cross, brought plague, influenza and genuine poverty to the island. They managed to Christianise only a third of the people, most of whom therefore still believe in the original forces that turn this poor planet. From the dreamlike, endlessly long beaches, Air Madagascar, which incidentally still has no permission to land in Europe, carried us to the eastern side, where the climate is the complete opposite of the west: wet, much cooler, mostly cloudy and favourable to the growth of dense rainforest containing more than a thousand different plant species. Because of the unusual isolated course of evolution on this piece of land, which separated from mother Africa some 160 million years ago, most of them grow only here. Animals underwent a similar evolutionary isolation, and it felt like another planet as we walked through the densely overgrown rainforest, brushing the webs of giant spiders from our hats. The cries of lemurs, said to be ancestors of primates, echoed through the crowns of trees and palms several hundred years old. They came close, very close, as if they wanted to say that perhaps we should finally come to our senses: our furry relatives also have a home, so let us leave it to them, at least a little longer, at least until the next impact of a great meteor once again resets the course of evolution and perhaps the highest species then takes somewhat better care of its only home. From afar, from the terrace of a hotel where a beer costs as much as the average monthly salary of a dirty local currently threatened by plague, the capital looks colourful, sunny, unforgettable, surrounded by rice fields and decorated with blue-flowering acacias that here resemble large European oaks. I walked the streets of the lower city and the remote villages of a half-literate country, and I cannot escape the indirect and silent responsibility that should be felt by all of us who, from soft armchairs while watching British and American “popular science” channels, observe a world that we try to help and develop with the waste products of our own development, which have merely littered an original world. A few missionaries, mainly to make the Vatican feel better and give the great cross a slightly cleaner conscience, try to feed a small proportion of the people and serve them the by-products of a voracious pharmaceutical industry. The blue uniforms of the always-smiling Malagasy children, descendants of friendly colonised parents, unfortunately recall the blue clothes of their enslaved ancestors, who secretly rattled the chains of their European masters.