I chatted with some stranger on the Internet a few months ago. It must have been someone from India or somewhere else in Asia. This person asked me where was I from and I told him ‘Madagascar’. Then came the surprise. He wrote ‘Liar! There is no place called Madagascar.’

I was not shocked, not even surprised. In fact I was almost used to that kind of reaction, as I often chatted with people I didn’t know, living in places I’ve never been to. But things changed a bit since the time the movie ‘Madagascar’ came out.

Before the film came out, people who didn’t know the country were simply asking ‘Madagascar, huh, where is that?’ I just had to answer ‘On the map it is in the Indian Ocean, between Mozambique and Mauritius’. Since the movie ‘Madagascar’ became a global success, the name of the country became well known and the number of searches about it on the Internet increased. Suddenly, everybody seemed to know a lot about Madagascar. Or at least they thought they did. But this can’t be all bad hey?

For those who still don’t know: yes there is a place called Madagascar, and yes we have lemurs here. It’s a big island nation 400 km away from the south-eastern coast of Africa. Madagascar’s capital city is roughly 3 hours flight from Johannesburg. To give it to you in a nutshell: Madagascar is a nice place to visit and a rather nice place to live in, even if poverty problems are serious. People speak a Malayo-Polynesian language called ‘Malagasy’ and are of Asian and African ethnicity. French is the language of the elite and even if their number is on the rise, only a small number of educated people speak English.

Toki