Welcome to Ilakaka Madagascar

Where the sapphires are extraordinary, the security is armed, and you're buying stones from a jail cell.

Let me explain what a buying day in Madagascar actually looks like, because nobody who hasn't done it believes me the first time.

You fly into Antananarivo, Tana to anyone who's been there, on whatever's flying that week. The airport is what it is. The drive into town is hours through traffic that defies category, past rice paddies and brick kilns and the occasional zebu being walked down the shoulder by a kid with a stick. The city is built on hills, spilling down the slopes in red brick and rusted tin, and the old French colonial bones are still there if you know where to look. The Hotel Colbert is still standing. The Mandarin Oriental is not in Madagascar. There is no Mandarin Oriental. That's the joke, and it isn't really a joke.

The sapphires are real, though. That's why you came.

Madagascar produces some of the finest sapphire on Earth and has since the deposits at Ilakaka were discovered in 1998, when the population of that town went from 40 people to 60,000 in about 18 months. Andranondambo, in the south, produces stones with colour that approaches Kashmir on a good day, a velvety, slightly hazy blue that the trade has quietly substituted for Kashmir for two decades when nobody's looking. Ambondromifehy in the north produces a different material, more saturated, sometimes greenish, often heated. Diego Suarez, Sakaraha, Ankaramy. Every region has its own profile, its own dealers, and its own way of making your day strange.

The buying does not happen in an office.

The buying happens in what is, functionally, a holding cell. I'm not being dramatic. It's a small concrete room with a single barred window, a metal door, a folding table, and an armed guard you have hired standing behind you the entire time you are inside. There is another armed guard outside the door. You did not bring these guards. The dealer arranged them. You are paying for them. They are not optional.

You sit at a table. The dealer sits across from you. Or sometimes you’re standing at your jail cell window. He pulls out the parcels. You take out your loupe, your scale, your calculator. You start working, examining.

You do not, under any circumstances, leave the calculator unattended.

You do not put your loupe down on the table and turn around to take a phone call.

If you stand up to stretch, you take everything you brought with you, and I mean everything, off the table and into your bag, which goes on your shoulder and does not come off. The moment you turn your back, the moment you take your eye off the table for what feels like two seconds, something is gone. It will not be the dealer who takes it. The dealer will be as annoyed as you are. He will summon a kid from somewhere outside who will be sent on a very serious errand to find your missing scale, and the scale will reappear in fifteen minutes. Nobody will explain anything, and the buying will continue. 

This happens because the cell is not really yours. It's in a building the dealer rents, in a part of town where the population is mobile, and the windows are barred for reasons that pre-date your arrival. Anyone who walks past sees a foreigner with electronics on a table and starts doing math. The guards are there because the alternative is worse. The guards are sometimes the people you are being protected from, depending on what week it is and who has been paid. You learn not to ask.

Lunch is brought in. Lunch is rice. There may be something on the rice. The thing is usually some form of zebu, lean and grass-fed and tougher than what you're used to, or thinly sliced chicken in a sauce of tomato and onion, or, if you're lucky, romazava, the national stew of beef and leafy greens that's actually quite good when it's cooked properly, which it sometimes is and sometimes isn't. There's koba aina, the banana and peanut sweet wrapped in banana leaf, sold by women on every corner, which you eat as a snack because it's the only thing you've seen all day that wasn't rice. The food is not the point. You're not in Bangkok, where the dealer takes you to lunch at a place with cloth napkins and the only question is which curry. You're in Tana, and lunch is fuel, and you eat it with one hand on the loupe.

The stones, though.

The stones are why you came, and they are why you keep coming. A Madagascar sapphire from Andranondambo, when it's right, is one of the great experiences in the gem trade. The colour is a velvety cornflower with a depth that's hard to describe. You tilt the stone and it doesn't flatten, it just keeps going. Under the loupe the inclusions are different from Ceylon; less silk, more crystal inclusions, sometimes the diagnostic milky bands that mark the locality. The unheated material from a good deposit can rival any sapphire on Earth, and the prices, while not what they were ten years ago, are still well below comparable Ceylon and a fraction of comparable Kashmir.

The reason the dealing happens the way it does is that the supply chain in Madagascar is, let us say, informal. Most of the rough is dug by artisanal miners; miners working with shovels and bare hands at depths that would terrify a Canadian safety inspector. 

The rough moves through a series of intermediaries, village buyers, regional consolidators, Tana-based exporters, and the stone in front of you on the table has passed through several hands and is being sold by a man who is himself nervous about the transaction because the money he is about to receive needs to go back down that chain in cash, today, before tomorrow's prices change. The barred room and the armed guards are not because the trade is corrupt. They are because the trade is thin. There is no insurance. There is no recourse. There is no escrow. There is you, the dealer, the parcels, the cash, and a series of unspoken understandings that have kept the system functioning in roughly its current form for thirty years.

You leave with the stones in a money belt under your shirt. You go straight to the airport. You do not stop. You do not go back to the hotel for the bag you forgot. You fly to Bangkok and you exhale somewhere over the Indian Ocean, order the worst champagne the airline has and toast the day, because the day worked and the stones are in the belt. Tomorrow, you wake up at the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok, have lunch, and remember that you chose this life and that the choice is, on balance, a good one.

You swear you’ll never go back. But you always do. Because the stones from that buying cell are stones nobody else has access to, sourced in a way nobody else is willing to source, and the ring on a client's finger in Vancouver started in a barred room with rice on a metal plate and a man you trust, because trust is the only currency that works there. That story is in the stone, even if she never knows it.