NORTHERN MADAGASCAR'S SAPPHIRE RUSH AND SLOWDOWN

The village of Ambondromifehy was originally founded in the early twentieth century by young men who had come to the far north of Madagascar from the island's east coast to watch over herds of cattle grazing in the region. As the place's few long-time resident elders – tompontanana or people ‘responsible for the community’ – described it in 1999, these young men saw opportunities here and settled, began growing rice, married and had children, and eventually died and were entombed here. Succeeding generations followed suit. Everything changed, however, when sapphires were discovered nearby in 1996. First came attempts at large-scale mining about 10 kilometres east of the village. Soon after came the first foreign and Malagasy sapphire buyers, and then, as word spread, the first independent Malagasy miners and traders, many of these last migrants fresh from work in the region's faltering gold trade. Dozens of new arrivals quickly turned to hundreds, and then hundreds turned to thousands. The rush was on.

Like most small-scale mining towns, Ambondromifehy was a magnet not just for the mobile risk-taking men who appeared to dominate the place, but also for school teachers, shopkeepers, petty traders, farmers and a wide range of others from throughout Madagascar, all of them intent on earning the fortunes rumoured to be accessible in this place. Ambondromifehy, in other words, became a place in which many different kinds of people wound up ‘meeting when grown’, an expression commonly used in the region to describe the circumstances of internal migrants who find themselves pursuing livelihoods alongside others with whom they share no roots or family connections. Meeting when grown is a good thing, one recent arrival told me in 2006, in that it enables people to learn things that they never would have learned in the places they hail from – whether divination techniques, farming methods or other dialects of the Malagasy language. Meeting when grown also has its downside, though. One older long-time resident of Ambondromifehy complained that a place in which people meet when grown is better described as a place ‘without parents’, meaning, as he saw it, a place in which juniors greatly outnumber seniors, and the authority of elders (for whom he spoke) doesn't count for much. By the time I first met this man and other long-time resident parents of Ambondromifehy in 1999, they were already decrying the destruction that ‘visitors’ had brought to their midst. While the very first arrivals had reportedly done the appropriate thing by asking permission to settle and seek livelihoods from local land, those who followed soon became so numerous that control was out of the question. Land was occupied without permission, irrigation ditches dug up, water sources depleted, and, most egregious to all, local land taboos were transgressed.

For those who did meet when grown in Ambondromifehy, the relationships necessary to carry out the work that had brought them there developed quickly. Mining was commonly carried out in teams, usually consisting of young men working cooperatively and sharing what they could find in pits they had dug themselves. In other cases, miners found safety and support in numbers as they searched for sapphires in the depths of the region's many caves. Buying and selling sapphires in the local market was also a profoundly social pursuit, requiring that newcomers establish reasonably trustworthy ties with miners and fellow traders alike. In some cases, traders took on the role of patrons, supplying food and other supplies to teams of miners with the expectation of being able to buy whatever sapphires they came up with. For all, successes precipitated demands on the successful, and, with the promise of more successes to come, the successful were quite often happy to oblige. Beer was bought, and redistributed, by the case. Food was shared. Money was given freely. By 2006, however, things had changed considerably. Like others I spoke with that year, one miner I interviewed recalled the early years of the rush with nostalgia, pining for the days when one could find sapphires ‘on the grass’ and then blow the great amounts of money earned from their sale ‘dreaming’ over rounds of beer at a town bar or on visits to the discos of cities near and far.

Before discussing the trends and events that marked the end of the rush in Ambondromifehy, I should stress that what many remember as the mining town's best years were anything but good for all. Long-time resident elders of the place were not the only ones concerned over the effects that the sapphire trade was having in the region. International and Malagasy conservation organizations charged with managing local protected areas were also concerned, and with good reason. In the early months of the boom, the Ankarana Special Reserve – a protected area located only a few kilometres from Ambondromifehy – became well known as one of the best locations in which independent miners might work. Not only was the land of the reserve unfarmed and untitled, the caves and crevices found within it made getting access to the ‘wealth of the land's belly’ relatively easy. What is more, although protected on paper, the reserve was, in fact, largely unprotected on the ground, meaning that prospectors could come and go from what conservationists had termed the ‘taboo forest’ with little concern over being caught. This easy access was short-lived, however. In the face of the unprecedented destruction caused by so much human activity inside the reserve, the local office of the National Association for the Management of Protected Areas requested government support to keep miners out. Support came, but even local outposts of police and military in Ambondromifehy could not keep these trespassers out of the reserve. Indeed, from all reports, the involvement of police and military only further complicated an already complex local political economy, reinforcing all the while the common perception within town that people in positions of power were intent on keeping the region's mineral wealth for themselves and away from simple miners (Walsh Reference Walsh2005). Outside of town, meanwhile, the dominant image of Ambondromifehy was anything but flattering. Press and popular reports of the place during the rush years employed many of the same images as the newspaper article cited earlier, portraying it as an anarchic, polluted nightmare. More significantly, perhaps, Ambondromifehy was deemed unworthy of the sorts of public service projects (digging wells or building schools and clinics, for example) that the state and NGOs were undertaking in other, far less populous, communities in the region.

The slowdown that would change Ambondromifehy, if not its reputation, so significantly began as early as 1999 when a much larger sapphire rush in southern Madagascar drew large numbers of foreign buyers and Malagasy miners and traders away. A good number of those who left town at this time eventually returned, only to be drawn away yet again by other gemstone and gold rushes through the early years of the new century. By 2006, local officials estimated that the population of the town had fallen by at least two thirds since the height of the boom, to around 5,000 inhabitants. In 2010, a local government office had collected the names of 1,347 residents, though this number came with the assurance that many more had not been counted.

A population drop is not the only change that Ambondromifehy has seen in the years since the end of the rush. Indeed, perhaps the most significant change to come to town during this period was set off by a national political crisis in 2002. Amidst the chaos of this crisis, during which Madagascar went without a ruling President or government for more than six months, a newly constructed police station located just outside of town was burned to the ground. Nothing was built in its place, and when I visited a year after, in 2003, I found not only that the police had not returned, but also, and not coincidentally, that miners had moved into the reserve to live alongside their pits. And there they have remained until the present, much to the chagrin of conservationists. Not only does their living, cooking and hunting inside the reserve pose a threat to local ecosystems, but the slowdown in the local sapphire trade has meant that some who have held on in the region have taken to supplementing the diminishing returns of their mining work with various forms of ‘tree work’, especially the production of charcoal and construction lumber from local forests.

While there is no doubt that the supply of locally mined sapphires has declined in Ambondromifehy's slowdown years, and that the sapphires in areas that have already been mined are not as close to the surface as they once were, the most attentive observers of recent developments in the local sapphire trade – those who continue to participate in it – tend to stress that it is the drop in the number of foreign buyers coming to the region that has had the greatest effect on the local economy. Here it should be noted that almost all of the sapphires mined locally are destined, ultimately, for foreign markets (Walsh Reference Walsh2010), and that the foreign traders who have come here over the years have been buying with such markets in mind. Given how susceptible the trade in Ambondromifehy is to fluctuations in the trade in Thailand – where the bulk of Madagascar's sapphires are processed and transformed into jewellery – as well as to market shifts in consuming countries like the US, China, Japan and Great Britain, it isn't surprising that Ambondromifehy was hit particularly hard by the global financial crisis of 2008, during and after which foreign buyers adapted to the uncertainties of the time by buying fewer sapphires and paying less for them. In the same year, many foreign buyers were also dissuaded by the Malagasy government's decision to impose greater restrictions on the export of rough gemstones in the hope of bolstering the country's nascent gem-cutting industry. While the ban on rough gemstone exports has since been lifted, anecdotal reports suggest that many of the foreign traders who left in 2008 and 2009 have never returned.

On my most recent visit to Ambondromifehy in 2010 I asked people their thoughts on what will become of this place over the next decade. The overwhelming response was that the town is not, as many outsiders have been predicting for years now, on the verge of complete collapse. This modest optimism surprised me. Only a year earlier, the town had been largely abandoned when a new find of demantoid – a rare sort of green garnet – only 150 kilometres down the highway drew thousands of its remaining residents away. The place was empty, I heard from one older man who had stayed behind during this new rush; you could bathe out in the open by the side of the road, he reported, and didn't have to worry about anyone seeing you. Once again, though, people came back; mining and trading demantoid during a rush, it seems, did not offer the same opportunities as mining and trading sapphires in the midst of a slowdown. While no one I spoke with in 2010 imagined that Ambondromifehy would ever be the place it had been during the rush of the late 1990s, no one imagined that it would ever be anything but a place dependent on the mining and trade of sapphires, either. The sapphires are still there, I was assured again and again, and there is still a market for them. Indeed, shortly before I arrived on this most recent visit a group of four miners had sold several days’ worth of stones (3 kg in total) for 120 million Malagasy Francs (around $12,000) to a group of Malagasy traders. Commenting on this and other indications that the local trade might, in fact, be reviving, a trader put the conditions necessary for Ambondromifehy's survival simply. So long as there are still people overseas interested in buying sapphires, he said, there will be people here willing to dig them up. And so long as there are success stories to be told, sapphire work will remain attractive among a limited set of options, and Ambondromifehy will remain a draw. Indeed, what surprised me most during my 2010 visit was meeting several people who had arrived in town for the first time in the previous few months.

Having offered a quick overview of what has been happening in Ambondromifehy over the past decade, I turn next to describing some of the uncertainties that have come with life in this place, both during and after the rush that has made it what it is.

LIVING WITH UNCERTAINTY

All people, no matter what their circumstances, live with uncertainty. In Malagasy communities in which I have worked in the past, for example, people concern themselves with everything from the vagaries of weather and its effects on crop yields, or the unpredictable outcomes of national political developments, to the deeper-lying uncertainties inherent in social relationships with powerful and sometimes capricious ancestors. In suggesting that people living in Ambondromifehy have been ‘living with uncertainty’, then, I am not suggesting that they are altogether exceptional. That noted, a careful consideration of the particular set of uncertainties that people face in this town reveals a good deal about what makes a place like this distinct. In this section I focus especially on how the uncertainties of the town's slowdown years are connected to, and in some cases extensions of, those that prevailed during its boom times. The intended point is simply that whatever else has changed in this place through years of decline, certain difficulties inherent in navigating life in and around the local sapphire trade remain. Let me begin with the uncertainties associated with ‘meeting when grown’.

Based on the limited description offered in the previous section, some might infer that boom-time residents of Ambondromifehy managed to create reasonably functional and productive social and work networks despite having only met when grown. They did, but always in the face of the uncertainties that come with such arrangements. People who meet when grown in communities like this don't generally know their neighbours very well, let alone whether they can trust these people as workmates or trading partners. As I have described elsewhere (2009), this means that the decisions of boom-time residents of Ambondromifehy to engage in reciprocity with one another – to give with the expectation of a return – were always questionable given the possibility that the accompanying relationships might not proceed as planned. Simply put, however necessary they were to the functioning of the trade and the community that emerged around it in the midst of the rush, reciprocal relationships based on mutual ‘gifting’ (Mauss 1990) that developed at this time were also quite easy to exploit; all that is required for any apparently reciprocal relationship to be revealed as something more nefarious is an unexpected departure, something that is all too easy to make in a town like Ambondromifehy. During the early years of the rush, the dangers that can come with putting too much trust in people one doesn't know and cannot track were especially apparent in widely circulating stories of ‘red suitcase’ women who, legend has it, would enter working, trusting, spousal relationships with men under false pretences, only to skip out on them with all of their shared earnings in hand. Ten years later, stories collected from women in town suggested that it was, in fact, men who were more likely to abandon relationships and obligations in Ambondromifehy. In either case, the fact that such relationships involved people whose connections with one another tended to be both relatively recent and shallow was especially problematic. Indeed, in a place of people who have met when grown, the story of the red suitcase woman warns, one can't even be sure that one's spouse is the person that she or he claims to be.

The uncertainties inherent in relationships among Malagasy people in Ambondromifehy were even more pronounced in connections between Malagasy traders and foreign buyers. At the beginning of the rush, foreigners (Thais and West Africans in particular) were the only ones taking sapphires out of the country, and they were thus in a powerful bargaining position vis-à-vis the Malagasy traders from whom they bought. Foreign traders were able, for example, to take stones out of the country on credit, offering nothing more than promises of return payments to the Malagasy traders with whom they dealt. So long as the trade was working and demand was high, this system worked reasonably well (though Malagasy traders often complained of never being paid in full for what they had given to their foreign counterparts). As the tide of the local trade shifted, however, foreign traders began leaving with valuable stocks of stones and then not coming back at all, leaving local exchange partners high and dry.

Early on in the rush, Ambondromifehy's inhabitants attempted to mitigate the uncertainties inherent in their relationships with others in town and in the trade by establishing associations that draw people with common interests together. The most successful of these have been mutual-aid associations made up of people who come from the same region of origin. With names like ‘the Children of Vohemar’ (a town on the East coast) or ‘the Children of Majunga’ (a city on the West coast), these associations function mostly as a means for raising money necessary to provide members with support in times of illness or death. In Ambondromifehy, as in other migrant communities in the region, such associations are especially attractive to people concerned with the possibility that they might die far from home and without the means to have their bodies repatriated. Less successful have been associations that aim to encourage members to invest more in the community of Ambondromifehy itself. The parents’ association connected with the local public elementary school, for example, has never managed to garner much local support for building much-needed facilities, despite repeated requests by teachers and association representatives. Since 1999, I have also observed three separate efforts at organizing miners and traders into cooperatives begin with high hopes and end in disappointment. On paper, formalizing working relationships through the creation of such associations would do a great deal to temper some of the most problematic uncertainties that people here face: advocates promise that such associations would supply miners with access to equipment and funding in times of need; provide Malagasy traders with a steady supply of sapphires from affiliated miners; and give all concerned greater bargaining power when dealing with foreign traders. In practice, however, the regulations that such associations attempt to impose are untenable. Particularly problematic have been efforts at establishing a single marketplace in which affiliated miners and traders would be expected to carry on their dealings with one another and foreign traders in a public and transparent way. Such openness, local critics noted, goes against the very nature of the sapphire trade, a context that is as fraught with uncertainties as the social lives of those who engage in it.

Making money from mining and trading sapphires in Ambondromifehy has never been easy. At the start of the rush, miners had little but rumours and the established routines of predecessors to go on when deciding where to start digging. They have become better at it over time, of course, but the advantages that have come with knowledge gained through experience have been offset by the difficulties presented by the increasing scarcity of stones to be found in already established mining areas. Thus, miners I met in 2008 were struggling just as much as they had in previous years with a question that faces small-scale gemstone miners everywhere: when to abandon mining sites in which they have already invested their labour. As the hand-dug pits and tunnels in which miners around Ambondromifehy work get deeper and longer, they not only become more difficult and dangerous to navigate, but also harder to leave. There is always the chance that today's efforts in a particular pit will be more profitable than yesterday's return.

Trying to make a living from buying and selling sapphires is no less complicated than trying to make a living from mining. First, traders must know about the distinctive qualities of the sapphires they have or should be looking to buy for resale. Unlike gold and other mined commodities that can be sold by weight for a single standard price, every sapphire is unique and must be evaluated and priced as such. The problem is that knowledge about the more and less valuable qualities of sapphires being mined around Ambondromifehy comes ultimately from buyers further along the exchange chain in whose interest it is never to reveal too much of what they know (Walsh Reference Walsh2004). In the early years of the boom, this fact of the trade made it easy for knowledgeable foreign and Malagasy buyers to amass fortunes by paying ridiculously little for stones that sellers had no way of knowing were worth much more than the buyer's price. Over the years, the advantage enjoyed by the most knowledgeable few has lessened as more Malagasy traders have obtained the technology (special flashlights and magnifying devices, for example) and the expertise necessary for discerning the internal qualities of sapphires, but this increase in knowledge has not always translated into an increase in profits across the board. After all, it is not only the qualities of stones that determine what will be paid for them. Also important are a number of other factors over which people in Ambondromifehy have no control and about which they have little access to certain knowledge: the state of distant markets for the stones mined locally, currency exchange rates, international fashion trends, or the output of other sources of sapphires elsewhere in Madagascar and in other supplier countries. Since global demand for what is coming out of the ground around Ambondromifehy appears to shift frequently, and today's unwanted or low-cost stones could well be worth considerably more in the future, Malagasy traders have tended to speculate in the local marketplace by stockpiling what they think might be undervalued stones. As time goes by, however, and fewer foreign buyers come to town every week, such investments appear increasingly foolhardy. As with miners, though, traders have a hard time knowing when to give up on something in which they have already invested so much.

In the face of the many uncertainties inherent in the local sapphire trade, miners and traders are frequently on the lookout for signs of what their futures might hold in the town. Unfortunately, their readings of the signs they encounter are not always accurate. Take, for example, the fact that Thai traders had built solid, cement-walled houses in Ambondromifehy in the midst of the town's apparent decline – as sure a sign as any to many I have spoken with since 2006 that the local trade is destined to continue well into the future. Why would these foreigners build such houses if they weren't intending to stay here, and keep buying, over the long term? In fact, these houses were built more for the sake of short-term convenience than with long-term intentions. As the boom passed and profit margins fell, it became both safer and more economical for Thai buyers to live permanently in town than it had been in the past, when they were forced to commute regularly from the far more expensive provincial capital of Antsiranana, a hundred kilometres away. In other words, what has been taken by some as a sign that Ambondromifehy is ‘developing’ (a term several informants invoked when speaking of these durable structures) was, in fact, more the product of the local trade's decline.

Thai buyers were not the only ones to appear to be investing in this town despite the decline of the local sapphire trade. Malagasy miners and traders have done the same over the years, whether by building solid houses of their own, contributing to the digging of wells, or taking over the building plots of neighbours to plant gardens. As of 2006, a number had even begun growing rice in the region, either sharecropping with long-time residents or renting land on which to grow. Although it is tempting to read these investments as signs of people's long-term intentions in this place, we must be careful not to overstate the case. People may, for example, have been building more solid and comfortable houses over the years, but they have also continued to invest even more in portable forms of wealth (cars, generators, mining equipment, and, of course, gold jewellery and gemstones) that they can take with them should they up and leave someday. Similarly, these settlers’ gardens tend to be planted with quick-growing trees that will give fruit in short order, they do not keep rice seed from year to year, and none of them appear to have any interest in amassing cattle locally – all indications that they are thinking ahead, certainly, but always with the possibility of a future move in mind.

LUC'S STORY

As should be evident from the preceding section, living with uncertainty in Ambondromifehy is not a matter of living in a constant state of denial or abjection. It is, rather, living on the edge of whatever is next. To illustrate this simple point further, I conclude by discussing one miner/trader's decade-long stay in this town. I first met Luc in 2004, several years after the end of the boom. In the years since, I have visited, phoned and interviewed him frequently, surprised at each encounter to find that, despite all I had been hearing of the town's impending collapse, he was not only surviving but making a decent living in Ambondromifehy. While Luc is by no means representative of all who have stayed on long after the end of the rush, I hope that in presenting some of his story I may provide readers with a better sense of what living with the uncertainties described above can be like.

Luc first arrived in Ambondromifehy at the age of 23 in 1998. He had come from a village on Madagascar's north-east coast knowing nothing about sapphires but intent nonetheless on making enough money from these little stones to set himself up for life. Like so many others, he began by mining illegally within the ‘taboo forest’ – the conservation area west of Ambondromifehy in which, at the height of the rush, young men risked being shaken down by local gangs or arrested and imprisoned by national police. Thankfully, he recalled years later, when the rush ended and ‘the market [for sapphires] got worse’, gang activity became less lucrative and the police ‘didn't care as much’. So it was that, shortly after our first meeting in 2004, Luc and I were able to spend a day wandering around the ‘taboo forest’ visiting families of miners who had settled permanently inside this conservation area.

Within a couple of years of arriving, Luc successfully transitioned from mining to trading, acting first as a demarcheur – a mobile trader who mediates exchanges between sellers and buyers – and then, as he learned more and made more connections, buying and selling for himself. In the early 2000s, he also developed a close relationship with a Thai trader, named Deng, for whom he began collecting particular kinds of stones from among the miners and fellow traders with whom he had existing relationships. Indeed, by 2004 Luc was better known around town as ‘Deng's Luc’, suggesting just how important his collaboration with his Thai patron had become. Over the years, and despite a language barrier that prevented them from discussing much but trade, Luc and Deng became quite close. Luc accompanied Deng on visits to other mining rushes on the island, and once drove him almost 1,000 kilometres to the airport in Madagascar's capital. And yet Luc also complained of having been ‘burned’ by this friend – more than once, Deng didn't pay what he said he would for stones for which Luc could never have found another buyer. By 2010, Luc's dealings with Deng had fallen off significantly. While Luc was hanging on in Ambondromifehy, Deng had moved on to buying other gemstones mined in the region. As someone who only ever bought what he knew his own contacts back in Thailand would buy, Deng had nothing invested in sapphires or Ambondromifehy specifically. Indeed, during a chance meeting and conversation I had with him in 2010, Deng was quite clear as to his own view of the future of the town in which Luc continued to hold on. ‘Ambondromifehy is over,’ he said, drawing a finger across his throat.

Luc met and married a woman in Ambondromifehy in 2000, and had two children with her in 2001 and 2003. Joining his new wife's church, he converted to Seventh Day Adventism. He also became a member of the Children of Vohemar, donating money to the association whenever someone from his home region was in need. He was less inclined towards repeated efforts (in 2004 and 2007) at recruiting him into work-based associations that would formalize and regulate existing relationships with miners and fellow traders. ‘It is hard to join together [in such associations] in a community where people have met when grown,’ he explained. ‘They want to collect money from you, but then they eat [embezzle] it. Better to work on your own.’ In lieu of such formal arrangements, he opted for the far more common trader strategy of supplying teams of miners with provisions of food, gifts of cigarettes and occasional loans of money, with the expectation that they would bring him whatever they had to sell before showing it to anyone else. As problematic as certain aspects of the trade are to him – as an Adventist he is especially conscious of the fact that making a living from trading sapphires requires him to lie to others – he claims that there is no better way for someone like him to make the money he needs to support his children. By 2010, his wife had taken up with another trader and moved to another boomtown.

In 2005, Luc built a solid, cement-floored house on the side of the highway that runs through town. He spent about seven million Malagasy Francs (about $700) on the structure, expensive by some standards, but nowhere near the cost of the cement-walled structures that Thais were building up the road at around the same time. Other Malagasy traders in town, he told me, were sending all their money away to build houses in the regions from which they had come. His thinking was different.

This was typical of his decisions around investment and consumption in that it came out of the realization that, despite his initial plan to get in and get out quickly, he had already settled in Ambondromifehy and might as well start living like it. Beginning in 2008, he even started growing rice locally on land rented from one of the town's original inhabitants. ‘I've been here ten years now’, he told me in 2008. ‘I'm not a visitor but a tompontanana [a person responsible for the community].’ Claiming this status, however, did not mean that he always agreed with others in town (school teachers and local government representatives, for example) who were interested in seeing the community ‘develop’ in ways that would encourage more external oversight. Bringing electricity, running water and more public services to this place, he worried, would raise the cost of living in the town. As it stood in 2010, Ambondromifehy had, in his view, many of the attractive qualities of bigger towns or cities (ease of access, plentiful consumer goods and food markets, distractions, possibilities for generating income, and so on) without any of the associated costs or bureaucratic hassles. It was a place in which he could live cheaply and comfortably while waiting for a break. While he recognized that his, by then, school-age children didn't have access to the quality of education they might find in bigger regional centres, the fact is that he didn't have the money to support them living anywhere else. Besides, this was his and their home. ‘When I return from a visit to the place of my parents,’ he noted in 2008, ‘I tell people I am returning home – to Ambondromifehy.’

Like so many others in town, Luc's most recent brush with abandoning Ambondromfiehy came in May 2009 when he was drawn by the promise of new fortunes to be made from a new strike of demantoid (green garnet), 150 kilometres away. As he had done a decade earlier, he entered this new rush as a miner and then, quickly, moved into trading, putting some of the money he had earned from sapphires to work. He didn't last long there, however. The mining was especially strenuous, carried out by teams of workers on tidal flats in which pits would regularly fill up with water and require pumping out. The trading, meanwhile, was especially risky. Demantoid was as new to him and other Malagasy traders in 2009 as sapphires had been to them in 1998 – meaning that they were easily taken advantage of by foreign traders who knew exactly what they were after and how much it was worth. Ultimately, though, this new rush was just not conducive to the sort of life he had come to appreciate in Ambondromifehy. ‘It isn't orderly there,’ he told me a year after his return. ‘People from here weren't happy there.’ Ambondromifehy, by contrast, can ‘make one happy. It isn't hard to make enough money to get by.’

Luc's return to Ambondromifehy should not be taken as a sign that he had given up his goal of making a life-changing fortune. He was just as ambitious in 2010 as he had been when I first met him years earlier. In our last conversation, he told me that he had his sights set on taking advantage of ‘people who don't know anything yet about [the] stones [they are mining or trading]’, recognizing that this is one of the best ways of making quick money in the gemstone trade. He continued:

To make his fortune in this way, of course, will require that he leave town. When might this come? Luc didn't know more than that it might take a while. ‘None of us [who came during the rush and are still living here now] expected to be here so long,’ he reminded me ten years into his stay. Who can say how much longer? All he was certain of in 2010 was that despite his recent investment in a house in town, and regardless of his attempts at growing rice on local land, he has no intention of living here for the rest of his life. ‘Ambondromifehy’, he once told me, ‘is an easy place to live in, but it is an easy place to leave.’

Luc is certainly not alone in making a home for himself and his children in a place that he only provisionally calls home, a place that is ‘easy to leave’. In fact, Simone's recent work (2003; 2004; 2006) on the interconnected realities of migration and urban life elsewhere in Africa suggests that Luc and others in Ambondromifehy are less ‘mad’ or unusual than news reports might lead us to imagine. Many of the uncertainties precipitated by the mining and trade of sapphires destined for foreign markets are those long faced by Africans living an urban life that, Simone reminds us, ‘was primarily generated out of the imposition of an external world upon local economies’ (2004: 29). And for Luc, as for other urban Africans, such uncertainties may not be as repellent as many assume. While there is no doubt that the ‘mobility and flexibility’ that characterize places like these can have ‘disintegrating effects’ on ‘customary modes of affiliation’ (Gotz and Simone Reference Simone2003: 126), these same features also precipitate new opportunities for people like Luc to improvise, free of the weighty constraints that come with customary modes of affiliation (Simone Reference Simone2003: 9). Fundamentally, though, contexts like the one I have described here are places of waiting (Simone Reference Simone2003: 31) – not simply places of decline or stagnation, but places in which people abide and aspire in the face of uncertainty. And waiting in contexts like this is not necessarily any less active than moving. Just as movement throughout Africa can be understood as having become ‘a locus of experimentation and recalibration as much as it is a sign of desperation’ (ibid.: 34), so is staying put after a rush not just a matter of being left behind. In Ambondromifehy certainly, and perhaps elsewhere, abiding the familiar uncertainties of a place that may appear to be in decline can make more sense than exploring the possibilities, and unfamiliar uncertainties, of a next new thing.