Since the 1980s, French people called vazahas by the Malagasy people have gone to the island of Nosy-Bé, located in the north of Madagascar, to have paid relationships with young girls, sometimes minors.
Every evening a disastrous spectacle is repeated in the main street of Ambatoloaka. Old, pot-bellied white men return home accompanied by one or more young Malagasy women. Each of them hopes in their heart of hearts to find the one who will marry them and take them out of poverty. Hence a certain ambiguity, even a dividing line between paid prostitution and couples. In this village located thirty minutes by tuk-tuk from Hell-Ville, the main city of Nosy-Bé, Aurélia maintains paid sexual relations with women on a daily basis. vazahas whose average age does not fall below 60 years. She distinguishes her relationships from prostitution: “Being a whore is an insult. They only make passes. I don’t do that. I spend my days and nights with them, sometimes a week. We have a real relationship. »
Painful sex
More than a year ago, it was poverty that pushed Aurélia, 21, to migrate from Antalaha in the northwest of Madagascar to Nosy-Bé. Once she arrived as a housekeeper, her employers quickly stopped paying her. Without income, the young woman heard about this alternative financial opportunity. The salary is less than the two hundred thousand ariarys (around forty euros) that she could earn and send to her four brothers and sisters. But you have to survive. In Ambatoloaka, selling your body brings in less than doing housework here and there. This precariousness, vazahas residents are the main culprits according to Warda, dark skin, small figure, a piercing on the lower left of his lip. The young woman arrived in Ambatoloaka and started going there when she was only seventeen. “Residents tell tourists or newcomers ‘you can do whatever you want with them and pay them little.’ Sometimes I hear in their conversations that five thousand ariarys (around 1 euro Editor’s note) that’s enough for us. »