I was sitting in the front of a pick-up. Wedged between the driver and me was Ed Tucker-Brown, the gearstick between his knees. Tucker-Brown’s job was to change gear when the driver pressed the clutch. He had little to do, though, given we rarely got out of first.

We plunged through swamps, the bonnet disappearing under muddy soup. We inched our way down vertiginous, rutted slopes of crumbling laterite soil, often on three wheels, and then had to winch ourselves up the other side. We crashed through subhumid forests. Farmers sitting on their zebu-drawn carts — the only other wheeled transport we saw in the three hours it took us to cover 50km — watched us from the shade of tamarind trees.

“If I make roads, the white man will only come and take my country,” Madagascar’s King Radama I declared in the early 19th century, as the island battled colonialism. It seemed as if the legacy of the royal decree was still being felt.