Once upon a time – about eighty million years ago – the break-up of Gondwanaland left an isolated island (some 1,000 miles long and 300 miles across) lying 250 miles off East Africa’s coast. During this ‘continental drift’ era, when Madagascar was slowly separating from Africa, Australasia, South America and the Indian Deccan, the highest forms of life were primitive placental and marsupial mammals. From these, on Madagascar, no large, vigorous, predatory creatures developed. Instead Evolution wandered down a peaceful byway, not being very inventive, which is why zoologists and botanists now describe the island as ‘a living museum’. Most of its plant and animal life is unique, though its geological structure and geographical features have much in common with Southern Africa. Fittingly, the coelacanth was first found in Madagascar’s deep surrounding waters, having survived there almost unchanged for many millions of years.
Despite countless man-hours of academic toil, no one is sure – or ever likely to be – exactly when Madagascar’s first settlers arrived. But it is certain that few fertile areas of the world remained so long uninhabited; the earliest archaeological evidence of human occupation dates from about AD 900. It is also certain that Malagasy* culture has Malayo-Polynesian roots. The language belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian group though about twenty per cent of its modern vocabulary is Bantu, with a sprinkling of Sanskrit, English, French and Arabic.
At one time it was assumed that the proto-Malagasy had sailed straight across the southern Indian Ocean to Madagascar, a distance of almost 4,000 miles. Now the most widely accepted theory is that migrant traders, in large twin-hulled outrigger canoes, made the journey by comparatively easy stages: from Sumatra to the Andaman Islands, to Ceylon, South India, the Maldives, the Laccadives and so across the Arabian Sea to Socotra and finally (during the first century AD?) to Azania, now known as Kenya and Tanzania. There they found empty spaces, a good climate, varied trading opportunities and a sparse, undeveloped population on whom it was easy to impose their own culture.
During the next few centuries – according to this theory – more and more Polynesians settled on the African coast, then gradually moved inland, introducing new food plants wherever they went: taro, yams, bananas, coconuts, breadfruit. This novel notion of growing food, instead of merely hunting and gathering it, contributed to a Bantu population explosion, one of the causes of the eventual settlement of Madagascar. Another cause was Arab domination, by the tenth century, of Indian Ocean trade.
The island’s sporadic settlement extended over centuries, beginning perhaps as much as 1500 years ago with small groups establishing themselves on the north-west and west coasts. Larger groups came later and, having had more contact with the rapidly expanding Bantu, were less obviously Polynesian. These new arrivals settled on the south and east coasts, as well as among the original migrants. Madagascar’s mountainous and densely forested interior remained for long unexplored; it could be approached only through the valleys of the Onilahy, Tsiribihina and Betsiboka rivers, which run into the Mozambique Channel. Probably the first people to venture up those valleys and discover the high central plateau were the Vazimba, a tall, strong, dark-skinned tribe with curly though not frizzy hair. The second, main migration apparently pushed these early settlers inland. Then, much later, they were pushed west again when the Merina arrived on the plateau. They ended up in the Bemaraha Mountains as troglodytes who food-gathered in the forest; now the majority live in primitive hamlets on remote heights. The Merina tradition that the Vazimba are indigenous to Madagascar has been rejected by anthropologists.
The exact origin of the Merina, the largest and most enterprising of Madagascar’s eighteen main tribes, remains a mystery. Scholars offer contradictory explanations for their light brown skin, straight black hair and impeccable Polynesian features. Some argue that they are descended from Malayan or Javanese migrants who landed on the east coast of Madagascar no more than seven or eight centuries ago and were never in the African melting-pot. Others maintain that their ancestors were among the earliest groups to settle in Africa, when there were few Bantu around, and that they married only within the tribe – making it taboo to do otherwise – during all those centuries when later settlers were being slightly miscegenatious. There are several other theories with which I won’t detain us. The ‘late arrival’ theory, favoured by the Merina themselves, seems to me the most plausible. But whenever and from wherever they arrived, the pioneer Merina evidently found it necessary, on reaching the plateau, to combine intermarriage with military conquest – a popular formula, throughout Malagasy history, for settling territorial disputes. The minority of Merina who do not look pure Polynesian tend to be tallish and rather dark with slightly wavy hair.
The Polynesian/African genetic experiment had happy results, unlike many inter-racial mixes. When the proto-Malagasy settled on the Great Red Island they had already become, despite marked variations in physique, colouring and features, a homogeneous people united by their language, their animist religion and a distinctive, stable culture. On the practical level they had retained three important characteristics of their Polynesian heritage: highly developed fishing skills, rectangular wooden huts built on stilts in rainy regions and the ecologically disastrous technique of slash-and-burn rice cultivation. In Africa they had learned about animal husbandry and they brought to Madagascar the ancestors of those huge herds of magnificently horned hump-backed zebu which still dominate the social and religious rituals of millions. These animals have become a symbol of Malagasy culture; they appear on the coinage, the stamps and many printed cotton skirts and lambas. (The lamba is sometimes worn as a shawl and sometimes, by both men and women, as a sarong.)
Madagascar was not ‘discovered’ by Europeans until 10 August 1500 when an off-course Portuguese ship sighted an unexpected mass of land. Gradually the sailors realised that it was an unknown island and named it ‘St Lawrence’s Island’, after the saint of the day. Portuguese geographers then decided that this must be the Arabs’ ‘Isle of the Moon’ and the ‘Madagascar’ of which Marco Polo had heard rumours as he crossed Arabia.
No sooner discovered than attacked. In 1506 and 1507 the scattered Arab trading settlements along Madagascar’s northwest coast were destroyed by the Portuguese, during a relentless campaign against their main rivals in the spice trade. Subsequently a few half-hearted efforts were made to explore the Malagasy coasts. But it quickly became obvious that the island was without precious metals, precious stones or rare spices, that the coastal fevers were exceptionally virulent and that the natives’ reactions to vazaha (foreigners) were unpredictable. So Portuguese attentions were returned to the African mainland.
Between 1613 and 1619 a Portuguese Jesuit, Fr Luis Mariano, zealously investigated many coastal villages with soul-saving in mind. He preached doggedly, often risking his life, but found it impossible to persuade the Malagasy that Hell awaits the wicked. He therefore decided they could never be converted to Christianity and went home. Two hundred years later he was proved wrong when Christianity – though not his version of it – came to play an extraordinarily important part in the formation of modern Madagascar.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Merina rulers moved out from their plateau homeland to take control of most of Madagascar, though the formidable southern semi-desert, and a large area of the west coast, south of Majunga, remained unconquered. In 1810 the accession of King Radama II to the recently established Merina throne coincided with Britain’s seizure of Mauritius from the French. The eighteen-year-old king, eager to bring the whole island under Merina authority – a difficult task, given the nature of the terrain and the turbulence of certain tribes – welcomed the practical and moral support of the first British Governor of Mauritius. Robert Farquhar had offered this support as part of his strategy to stop the export of slaves from Madagascar and undermine France’s claims to have gained sovereignty over the entire island in the seventeenth century; Britain did not covet Madagascar but was anxious to keep it French-free.
To strengthen Anglo-Malagasy ties, Farquhar urged the radical Nonconformist London Missionary Society – already interested in Madagascar – to send missionaries and artisans to Imerina where the young king was impatient to introduce European education and craftsmanship to his people. In February 1818 the LMS duly despatched two young Welshmen, David Jones and Thomas Bevan, with their brides, to settle in a region where no one had ever seen a white woman. By February 1819 Mr and Mrs Bevan and their new-born daughter, and Mrs Jones and her new-born daughter, had all died within six weeks at the port town of Tamatave. For centuries the notorious ‘Malagasy fever’ (cerebral malaria) had been one of Madagascar’s main defences against the outside world and during the nineteenth century ‘General Tazo’ (fever) and ‘General Hazo’ (forest) made their names as the most efficient officers in the Malagasy army.
When the bereft David Jones at last reached Imerina, on the central plateau, he reported home: ‘King Radama is exceedingly kind and affable. He is a great advocate for education and esteems the instruction of his people in the arts of civilisation more than gold and silver.’
Having commented that in general the Merina of all classes were more civilised than many of the inhabitants of Wales, Mr Jones had to add (one can almost see his pen trembling with horror): ‘The greatest sins of all they are guilty of, are adultery and fornication which reach to the highest pitch among the people universally so that there are few husbands and wives who are not guilty of adultery and not one young person above ten years of age I believe free from fornication.’ The spread of Christianity did little to alter this happy-go-fucky situation. Fifty years later, the education of Malagasy girls was often interrupted by pregnancy from the age of twelve on, and at twelve or thirteen many left their mission schools to marry.
When King Radama dictated a letter to the LMS, requesting as many missionaries as were available, he insisted that they must include builders, carpenters, tanners, weavers and blacksmiths. Being suspicious of French designs on his country he also communicated with Paris, turning down an offer of Catholic missionaries. It could do his people no good, he pointed out, to be disputed over by mutually antagonistic Christian sects. His own attitude to religion was cynical. While rejecting the taboo-ridden animism of his ancestors he remained unimpressed by Christianity as an alternative and saw the missionary presence as a means to material and social, rather than spiritual and moral, advance. He could have found no better people for his purpose than the men and women of the LMS. Between them they possessed all the qualities needed to meet the Malagasy challenge. They were tough, kind, democratic, resourceful, energetic, versatile and adaptable. At times their adaptability led them to compromise quietly when orthodox Anglicans or Roman Catholics would have raised the theological roof. As a result of this flexibility Malagasy Christianity has a flavour all its own and the high percentage of Malagasy who regularly attend church is almost a world record for the 1980s.
David Jones was soon joined in Antananarivo by another young Welshman, David Griffiths, and together these two, personally assisted by a keenly interested and intelligent Radama, provided the Malagasy with a written language based on the Roman alphabet. They then translated and printed texts for the rudimentary schools already founded, in which it was soon possible to use the senior pupils to teach the juniors, so quick-minded and avid for learning were the Merina young. Next, and most important of all for the Welshmen, came the translation of the Bible, a daunting task to which their more advanced students contributed as the years passed. By 1826 the New Testament had been completed and the Old was coming along nicely. To us this seems an astonishing achievement on the part of two men from humble homes in the Welsh mountains who first had to learn Malagasy themselves, and then devise a script, while simultaneously establishing an academic educational system and supervising the training of artisans. How many ‘experts’, laden with what electronic equipment, would now be despatched to a Third World country to implement such a programme?
After King Radama’s death in 1828 reactionaries took over and during their régime many Malagasy Christians were martyred in unspeakable ways – which drew more of their compatriots to Christianity, instead of frightening them off. Yet despite the fervour of the ordinary Merina no monarch was converted until 1869. Then Queen Ranavalona II and her Prime Minister-cum-lover were baptised together and soon after married in church.
Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony – industrious, astute, diplomatic – was the real ruler of Madagascar from 1864 to 1896, during which time he had to marry three Queens for reasons of state. Queen Ranavalona’s conversion seems to have been genuine but the Prime Minister’s was a matter of political expediency and required him to put his country’s good before his personal affections. Before marrying the Queen in church he had to divorce his wife, Rasoanalina, to whom he was devoted and by whom he had had sixteen much-loved children. (To make matters worse, Ranavalona II was some fifteen years his senior and not too well preserved.) The couple were baptised by a Malagasy pastor and, significantly, there were no Europeans present at this historic ceremony. By 1869 Nonconformist Protestantism had been accepted as a Malagasy religion; having no colonial government support helped. Catholic missionaries in Madagascar have always been handicapped by their French connection.
In 1890 the LMS could – and did – boast of 1,224 churches, 59,617 members and 248,108 adherents, the majority in Imerina. (I have been unable to discover how the precise figure for ‘adherents’ – a suspiciously ambiguous term – was arrived at.) By then Christianity had transformed important aspects of Malagasy life, without undermining the traditional culture. On the plateau Quakers worked in harmony, as is their wont, with the LMS. Elsewhere the Jesuits (chiefly on the east coast) and the Norwegian Lutherans (chiefly in the south) had established their own missions. But the alliance between the LMS and the ruling Merina meant that Nonconformism enjoyed a special position throughout Madagascar, which it retains to this day.
In 1862 Dr Andrew Davidson of the LMS founded Madagascar’s first medical service but in the 1880s the Quakers took on the main burden of medical work. Both the French Jesuits and Norwegian Lutherans included doctors among their pioneer missionaries, the Catholics specialising in the care of lepers. A government medical service was set up in 1875 and its personnel, unlike most Merina government servants, received salaries. By 1880 there were several fully qualified Malagasy doctors. A few took degrees in Edinburgh, including Dr Ralarosy who organised a village dispensary scheme as trained Malagasy nurses became available.
Before the French took over in 1896 primary education, especially in the villages, was left almost entirely to the churches. The Malagasy preacher was usually the teacher, too, and used the local chapel as his schoolroom. In 1880 the Prime Minister made elementary education compulsory for all children over seven, only a decade after it had been introduced in England and two years before it was introduced in France. Already some 40,000 pupils were regularly attending Protestant schools and by 1894 the number had risen to 137,000. To cater for this educated public the missionary printing presses, largely LMS-run and Merina-operated, produced a steady flow of textbooks, dictionaries, religious works, hymn-books, newspapers, monthly and quarterly journals and a scholarly Antananarivo Annual dealing with various aspects of Malagasy life. When the French took over, the vast majority of the plateau population, of both sexes, was literate and numerate, a fact which distinguished Madagascar from any other colony of the time.
The French conquest tempted Jesuit missionaries to tell the more credulous villagers – especially the Betsileo – that they must become Roman Catholics to avoid being considered disloyal to France. Some Jesuits also commandeered Protestant churches, accusing their Pastors of treachery, and had many of their clerical rivals arrested and several executed. When these activities were reported to the first French Governor-General, Galliéni, he ordered the Jesuits out of the stolen churches, assuring the Malagasy that they were at liberty to worship how they chose – or not at all. Although himself a fervent atheist, Galliéni eventually acknowledged the achievements of the LMS and co-operated with them.
Galliéni ruled for nine years and ‘pacified’ those regions never subdued by the Merina. The new unified state cost many Malagasy lives, though not as many as were lost during the unsuccessful campaigns of King Radama I and Queen Ranavalona I.
Unfortunately the second Governor-General, Augagneur, was a rabid anti-cleric who at once announced his determination to separate Church and State. He banned teaching in churches, thus closing ninety per cent of the rural schools because few villages could afford a separate building. But no one could de-educate Antananarivo’s intellectuals, some of whom formed an anti-colonial movement long before such enterprising behaviour had been dreamed of elsewhere. During its early years this group lacked strength, cohesion and consistency, yet it contained the seed of today’s Malagasy nation.
As a colonial possession Madagascar was utterly unlike any of the European colonies in Africa, though in one way comparable to British India. There too the people of various states had long been accustomed to bureaucratic and/or hierarchical institutions of their own, however ramshackle these may have become by the time the British arrived.
Alfred Ramangasoavina, a former Malagasy Minister of Justice, liked to remind vazaha that one cannot talk of Madagascar’s accession to independence in 1960. Before the French conquest the Merina Kingdom had been internationally recognised as an independent sovereign state, therefore in legal terms the country recovered its independence in 1960. It was not, like so many African ex-colonies, a new-born state with artificial borders – arbitrarily drawn, in defiance of ethnic realities, as a result of European meddling and haggling. Yet there were several crucial differences between the old and new Madagascars. Throughout most of the nineteenth century the island was ruled by a Merina oligarchy not fully in control of all regions; the 1960 Republic was a union of Madagascar’s eighteen tribes, enjoying (at least in theory) equal rights.
To understand present-day Franco–Malagasy relations, it is necessary to think back to August 1896 when a law was passed in the French Parliament declaring Madagascar a French colony. At once General Joseph Simon Galliéni took over the island, with full civil and military powers and explicit instructions from the Prime Minister, André Lebon – ‘The system which consisted merely in exercising the protectorate* over the dominant race is now set aside. The authority of the sovereign power must now be applied by the authority of the chiefs of each separate tribe.’ The intention was immediately to downgrade the ‘dominant race’ since the Merina were the greatest threat to French control over the new colony; during the brief French Protectorate, Merina officials had been secretly organising widespread rebellion from Antananarivo.
However, General Galliéni soon realised that he needed the assistance of those people described by the Reverend William Ellis as ‘more numerous, industrious, ingenious and wealthy than those of any other part of the country’ – people who already had considerable experience of governing two-thirds of the island. The last Prime Minister, Rainilaiarivony, had set up an administrative hierarchy, with regional governors and deputy-governors, which was accepted by the majority of the population. So Galliéni ignored his own Prime Minister’s directive (colonial governors could get away with that sort of thing before the days of instant communication) and retained the existing structure, using as subordinates to the French district commissioners those Malagasy officials (usually Merina) who had been serving the monarchy. To expedite this bureaucratic dovetailing, he encouraged all French officials to learn the language and until the 1940s most senior administrators spoke fluent Malagasy.
Yet the Merina were gradually and inexorably downgraded, though not at once deprived of all senior positions. In the regional training schools set up to supply the junior staff for the administration, and overseers and accountants for the settlers’ plantations and commercial firms, no Malagasy were trained to take on senior posts. Also, admission to Antananarivo’s lycées was strictly controlled; given the high average intelligence of the Merina, it would have been dangerous to educate them en masse beyond primary level. Of the limited number of lycée students, only a few of the Merina élite – hand-picked for political reliability, though the hand-picking did not always work – were allowed to study at French universities. This restriction did much to inflame Malagasy nationalism, as did the dual judicial system: French laws for the colonists and a brutally unjust code, known as the indigènat, for the Malagasy. Under the indigènat district commissioners could sentence any Malagasy – without trial – to fifteen days imprisonment for not cultivating enough rice (enough, that is, in the estimation of the French authorities), or for not paying taxes, or for refusing to provide unpaid labour.
The Merina upper classes were most sensitive to educational and promotional restrictions. But the operation of the indigènat, the imposition of taxes and the much-abused forced-labour system were resented by every section of the population. Under the monarchy, Imerina’s large feudal estates had been cultivated by serfs and slaves and each area’s fokon’olona (rural commune) had obliged freemen to contribute annually to public works, either by giving a sum of money or a certain number of days labour, known as fanampoana. Colonial apologists used the Merinas’ possession of slaves as justification for the French system of forced labour, which was a particularly dirty trick. Malagasy domestic slavery was not criticised even by the Reverend Ellis, a commentator ever eager to condemn the effects of ‘the barbarous laws of Madagascar … partaking of the inconsistency, superstition and cruelty which characterize the public and domestic regulations of most heathen nations’. And the Reverend T.T. Matthews – another LMS apostle who laboured in the Malagasy vineyard during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century – admitted that ‘Domestic slavery in Madagascar was the mildest form of slavery, and in most cases the slaves were regarded as almost members of the family and treated as such’. His only complaint was that ‘even the mildest form of domestic slavery was utter ruination to all family morality. For, even in the days when polygamy was rampant, a man’s female slaves were all at his mercy, and were practically his concubines, or those of his sons, or both.’ However, since ‘family morality’, as defined by the LMS, never got a look in anywhere on the Malagasy scene, this objection carries little weight.
All over the world, in rural societies with a limited – or no – cash economy, corvée systems operated, and still operate. Someone has to construct communal irrigation channels, mend bridges, maintain tracks, clear canals and so on. It is however one thing to contribute labour for the good of one’s own community and quite another to be forced to work, far from home, for the benefit of foreign settlers. When Galliéni made a law, one month after his arrival, requiring every healthy male between the ages of sixteen and sixty to work for the French on fifty days out of each year, for nine hours a day, on minimum wages, he created France’s most intractable problem in Madagascar. Yet as the ruler of the new colony he had no alternative. A man of flawless personal integrity, he was far from being the worst type of colonial administrator; indeed, by nineteenth-century standards he seems almost benign. But the French Parliament was impatiently demanding tangible rewards to justify the colossal expenses, both financial and human, of the military conquest; and without forced labour there could be no rewards. The formal abolition of slavery a few years earlier – ironically, a result of the pre-conquest French Protectorate – had left the highlands without any dependable labour force; and the east coast had never had one.
In these two main areas of French settlement and exploitation, entirely different types of property rights had been traditionally recognised. On the central highlands, in Imerina and the territory of the Betsileo immediately to the south, most of the fertile land formed large feudal estates – whose cultivators, on the abolition of slavery, had automatically become the de facto owners of as much land as was necessary for the survival of their families. Along the steep, wet, densely forested east coast, the Antasaka, Antaimoro and Betsimisaraka tribes had for centuries practised slash-and-burn mountain-rice cultivation and obtained all the food, clothing and building materials they needed from the surrounding forests. So neither the highland peasants nor the coastal tribesmen (who had always been freemen) felt any urge to work for the French. They didn’t need cash – it was as simple as that. Therefore, like many another colonial ruler, Galliéni pronounced that ‘Taxation is an indispensable stimulant to the energy of the native’. Put more crudely, if you impose a tax, and operate a legal system that allows men to be jailed for not paying it, people will have to earn money, either by working for wages or by producing surplus food, though they may have no need or wish to enter a cash economy.
Throughout the colonial era, the provision of adequate labour for the settlers’ purposes remained the administration’s biggest problem. Marcel Olivier, Governor-General from 1924 to 1930, wrote: ‘Without the effective support – let us be frank, without the pressure – of the administration, nine-tenths of the European enterprises would disappear for lack of manpower. The freedom of the worker to choose his job should only become part of the laws of a country when the obligation to work has become a customary practice.’
This is a classic example of the imperialist mind in action, transposing European standards to a non-European context, purely for the colonists’ benefit, and assuming that the ‘natives’ ’ failure to view things from the European angle was a moral defect instead of a preferred way of life which did no harm to anyone. We Westerners tend to congratulate ourselves, nowadays, on the disappearance of such attitudes; but our congratulations are premature. The activities of most multinational companies throughout the Third World also demonstrate a total disregard for local needs and traditions, though their motives and methods are more cleverly disguised. Some people prefer the old-style colonial bluntness. At least the exploited ‘natives’, or their political leaders, knew exactly what they were up against.
However, ‘exploitation’ was not the name of the whole game. Colonialism brought genuine benefits as well as appalling hardships to the Malagasy, as to many other peoples. Throughout the vast areas unsuited to European settlement, most of the locals, by then accustomed to the hierarchical structure of Merina rule, effortlessly transferred their loyalty to French district officers. And many of these, when not influenced by powerful settlers, showed much paternalistic benevolence, being prepared to work hard, and uncomplainingly endure the most spartan of living conditions, for ‘their’ people.
Galliéni saw health-care as one of his main duties. Soon after his arrival he expressed appreciation of ‘the perseverance of the missionaries in these praiseworthy efforts, which the Hova (Merina) Government had tried to emulate; a hospital having been built by its orders, and an attempt having been made to create a school of medicine, which resulted in the training of a few doctors and midwives’. The missionary medical services, restricted by lack of funds, were quickly and efficiently extended by ordering the well-equipped Medical Corps of the Army of Occupation to give free treatment, and build dispensaries, wherever it went (which was most places). The new hospitals, orphanages and dispensaries were ‘to be kept up’ – Galliéni ordered – ‘by means of contributions by the villages, but, where necessary, subsidized by the local budget’. He also founded a new School of Medicine in Antananarivo, opened maternity homes and established training centres for midwives. Antananarivo’s main dispensary provided free advice and medicines, and thousands of booklets on hygiene were distributed – with remarkable results, because of the high literacy rate. Some hospitals had to be enlarged to accommodate women VD patients. Among the Malagasy no shame attached to those diseases and the victims, having read their booklets, were soon blocking hospital entrances. The population of Madagascar was three million – or so – when the French took over. It is now nine million – or so.
After Galliéni’s departure in 1905 the forced-labour laws were increasingly abused, separating many men from their families for two or even three years. The influential forest-concession and plantation owners knew how to tame their local French district commissioner, who was supposed to look after the workers’ interests. Official labour statistics for 1943 record 3,810,000 compulsory ‘man/days’. It is not astonishing that the 1947 Rebellion was at its most frenzied in such areas as Manakara and Ambatondrazaka, where the plantation owners were especially notorious for their cruelty.
Galliéni’s successor, Victor Augagneur, made promotion for Malagasy officials, in the Departments of Education and Health, conditional on their becoming Freemasons. This proved a useful ‘divide and rule’ implement since most educated Merina were devout Christians whose consciences forbade them to join an anti-clerical Freemasonry.
Augagneur also decreed, in 1909, that certain Malagasy, after fulfilling numerous stringent conditions, could become French citizens with full civil rights, thus escaping the indignities of the indigènat. This was his way of implementing Galliéni’s policy that the leading families should be allowed to regain some power once Madagascar had fully accepted French rule. Not many were able or willing to take advantage of the decree; there were scarcely ten thousand Malagasy-French citizens in 1960, out of a population of six million. But this group’s influence was disproportionately great and most of its Francophile members were absorbed into Colonial Society.
Whether or not he became a French citizen, the educated Malagasy who was good at his job was accepted as an equal by his French colleagues and regularly invited to their homes – a situation almost unimaginable in British India and quite unimaginable in British Africa. Senior French administrators were rarely prejudiced in the crude, colour-conscious British way; intellectual parity was their main criterion for the establishment of social relations. And because the Merinas’ intellectual development had been conditioned by generations of contact with European educationalists, and by some experience of European universities and much experience of European literature and thought, the colonists found them easier to get on with than France’s Asian ‘subjects’, whose more sophisticated cultures were inaccessible to all but a few exceptional European minds. The average administrator had little in common with most of his settler compatriots; ‘chancers’ were numerous in Madagascar, where limited scope for profit meant less competition and fewer bureaucratic controls than in the more prosperous and better-organised colonies. Similarly, many Merina found that they had a greater intellectual affinity with the French than with the majority of their fellow-Malagasy. Thus lasting Franco–Malagasy friendships flourished and intermarriage was acceptable; one of the last Governor-Generals had a Malagasy wife. The children of mixed marriages usually rose high in the government service and Franco–Malagasy matings, in or out of wedlock, produced no equivalent to the pathetic Anglo-Indians.
However, only a minority chose this degree of co-operation and integration with the colonists. Meanwhile many middle-class Merina, with allies from their own élite and from other tribes, were supporting that nationalist movement which was more or less active – though not often united – throughout the whole period of French domination.
Merina pride had been deeply wounded by the degradation of their kingdom to colony status and the abrupt loss of power, prestige and possessions. Yet many soon recognised that the European development of Madagascar might benefit the island in general and their own tribe in particular, if the indigènat and educational restrictions could be abolished or at least modified. This realisation, combined with the natural mildness of the Malagasy temperament, meant that Malagasy nationalism never became a movement of extremists. Indeed the term ‘nationalism’, though generally used, is imprecise in this context; most of Madagascar’s so-called nationalist leaders, before the Second World War, were not seeking to overthrow the administration but simply to ameliorate the harshness of colonial rule.
One of the pioneer leaders was Ravelajaona, a Protestant clergyman and a scholar whose encyclopaedia – Treasury of the Language and Things of Madagascar – is still used. His party of moderate intellectuals, ‘The Christian Young People’s Union’, included several relatives of the Royal family and was banned by Augagneur. In 1913 Ravelajaona published a series of articles on Japan, in a Malagasy-language journal, explaining how an Asiatic people could profit by a study of Western science and technology. This series had a lasting effect on many young Merina who had been humiliated and frustrated by the French refusal to allow them academic freedom and the jobs for which their talents fitted them.
Three years later, in the middle of the First World War, a group of Malagasy nationalists tried to organise an armed uprising. (Probably these were The Christian Young People’s Union who, following their banning, had become a secret society not unlike the Irish Republican Brotherhood of the same period.) When the conspiracy was discovered some five hundred ‘intellectuals’ were arrested and forty-one were accused of incitement to revolt. The jumpy settlers spread rumours of a German plot involving the discovery of barrels of poison and enough gunpowder to kill every French citizen on Madagascar. This was pure fantasy, but to soothe the colonists each defendant was given a viciously heavy sentence on the flimsiest of evidence. However, no Malagasy was executed; the French were less politically myopic than the British in Ireland during that same year. Most of the prisoners were freed in 1918, the rest in 1921 under a general amnesty. As in Ireland in 1916, the majority of the population were uninterested in (if not actually disapproving of) the activities of the conspirators. And, again as in Ireland, at the time of the attempted uprising many Malagasy were fighting with their colonial masters against the Germans.
During the First World War 46,000 Malagasy were recruited and 2,368 killed in action. The return home of these troops, bearing hard-won battle honours, changed the nature of the nationalist movement. No longer was it dominated by thwarted Merina academics. Having served France on terms of equality in Europe, the ex-soldiers were disinclined to revert meekly to the status of second-class citizens in theirown land. They were mainly responsible for the rapid spread of political agitation during the 1920S. And as the numbers of educated Malagasy grew, all over the island, so did the demands for equal civil rights, though as yet only a tiny radical minority was seeking complete independence.
The French dedication to free speech was severely tested at this time – and proved genuine. The career of Jean Ralaimongo, a Betsileo schoolteacher who had volunteered to fight in Europe, well illustrated French tolerance of ‘constitutional’ opposition to the colonial régime. In Paris, immediately after the war, Ralaimongo shared a room with Ho Chi Minh and returned to Madagascar in 1921 already known as a potential ‘trouble-maker’. Yet he was received by the Governor-General, Hubert Garbit, who warned – ‘I don’t want anyone coming to upset my Malagasy under the pretext that they are unhappy when they are not unhappy.’ (Such self-deceptions enabled many colonial officials all over the world to exploit their fellow-men with a clear conscience.) Despite the fact that Ralaimongo was obviously hell-bent on ‘upsetting’ as many Malagasy as possible, Garbit then allowed him to travel freely throughout Madagascar, collecting evidence for a critical report on the administration which he published on his return to Paris. Moreover, in spite of the controversy aroused by this report, he was permitted, a few years later, to settle in Diego Suarez – the French naval and military base at the northern tip of Madagascar – from where he organised a long campaign on behalf of the peasantry which provoked many settlers to hysterical rage.
As France’s Socialist and Communist parties gained strength during the 1930s, Madagascar’s nationalists received increased support in the French Parliament. After the 1936 election of Leon Blum’s Popular Front, the Malagasy were granted the right to form Trades Unions, though only of workers who could speak and write French. Also, press censorship was lifted, forced labour – apart from a maximum of ten days a year for public works – was abolished in theory (in practice it continued until 1946) and all political offenders were granted an amnesty. From then on nationalist demands were supported by the many Leon Blum followers among the colonists and by influential non-Communist political parties within France. As a result, there was a spontaneous upsurge of pro-France emotion at the beginning of the Second World War and the nationalists voluntarily ceased their propaganda campaigns.
During the war Madagascar was occupied from May 1942 by Allied (mainly British) troops, after an ill-organised invasion through Diego Suarez; the British army did not distinguish itself on that occasion but the navy saved the day.
With the establishment of the French Union in 1946 all France’s colonial subjects acquired French citizenship and equal rights – again, in theory. In practice, Madagascar’s post-war difficulties meant that forced labour actually increased after the system had been legally abolished. This continuing dependence on ‘conscripted workers’ is believed to have been one of the main causes of the 1947 Rebellion. Another was the extreme hardship inflicted on the Malagasy by rampant black-marketeering and the corruption of the official Rice Marketing Board, to which all farmers were compelled to sell surpluses at artificially low prices. A third factor was what we would now call a ‘fundamentalist revival’ among the ombiasa and their followers – especially in the south. These ‘heathen sorcerers’, as the Reverends Ellis and Matthews called them, had never ceased to resent the intrusion of European ideas and Christian practices, to which they rightly attributed their declining power.
At that time of transition – a year after the creation of the French Union – confusion prevailed throughout Madagascar. The peasants’ loyalty to their French district commissioners had been irreparably damaged by the Allied occupation; the political parties were far from united; the indigènat and various other restraints on political activity were gone; many settlers were resisting proposals to lessen their privileges by introducing some degree of ‘power-sharing’ in the new National Representative Assembly (NRA). Many colonial administrators were also protesting against being made accountable to local Malagasy politicians – the time could not have been riper for anyone interested in promoting rebellion.
The Rebellion broke out on the evening of 29 March 1947, the day before the first meeting of the newly elected NRA. Strangely, the organisers have never been clearly identified, perhaps because most were soon killed and nothing had been put on paper. Many Malagasy cherish private convictions about exactly who was responsible where: but nothing can be proved. Certainly the Rebellion was carefully planned. It broke out simultaneously in such widely separated places as Moramanga, Diego Suarez and Manakara – and anyone with experience of Madagascar’s communications problems will appreciate the significance of that. For some unknown reason the capital’s rebels cancelled their plans at the last moment, but elsewhere their comrades soon had about one-sixth of the island under control, mainly in those areas where land and labour disputes had been endemic for half a century.
Guerrilla warfare continued for about a year, with little evidence of any centralised command. Scattered groups of peasants, meagrely supplied, opposed the French troops with spears, axes, slash-hooks, shotguns; they had only a few modern weapons stolen from military bases. In October 1947 several units of the Foreign Legion and thousands more Senegalese troops arrived as reinforcements. This extra Senegalese ‘input’ was, to say the least, unfortunate. During that historic night of 29 March, when Moramanga’s army camp was attacked by some two thousand men armed with slash-hooks and spears, scores of Senegalese soldiers were surprised and killed before they could reach their guns. The survivors massacred a never-established number of the local non-combatant population, which surprised no one. The Senegalese – a permanent part of the French garrison – had long since gained a reputation for unprovoked deeds of random savagery. It was only to be expected that when provoked the slaughter would be hideous. To have loosed these troops on the entire island, for eighteen months, with a mandate to ‘repress rebellion’, was the most dreadful crime committed by the French in Madagascar.
In December 1948, when 558,000 surrenders had been registered, the Rebellion was declared officially over. A subsequent Commission of Enquiry was told by General Garbay and the French High Commissioner (who under the new French Union régime replaced a Governor-General) that the Rebellion’s Malagasy victims numbered between sixty and eighty thousand. Most of those were villagers who had fled to the forest to escape military reprisals and died of disease or starvation. Along the east coast almost every family lost some of its members. The French lost about a thousand troops and thirty settlers, the majority Creoles.
To the Malagasy, the massacres of the Senegalese troops have become the epitome of barbarity and injustice. Most Malagasy are gentle, peaceable people – brave enough when necessary, but with no warrior-cult, no tradition of glorifying war. Their happy state of geographical isolation means that, apart from their own ritualistic slave-hunting tribal wars (which by definition involved few deaths), they have enjoyed a comparatively unbloody history. Never before had they experienced anything like the horrors of the twenty-one-month repression of the Rebellion. The eighteenth-century Merina ‘unification’ campaigns, and Galliéni’s 1896–1904 ‘pacification’ campaign, seem mild in comparison. It would therefore be understandable if the acid of unforgiving hate had ever since been corroding Franco–Malagasy relations. But though we did hear the Senegalese atrocities being mentioned with shudders of retrospective terror, we also got the impression that the French authorities of the day are not held directly responsible for all that happened. Many Malagasy seem to have chosen to regard the Rebellion and its repression as so atypical of Franco–Malagasy relations that both ‘incidents’ are best not mentioned when the colonial history of the island is being discussed. In 1967 the first government commemoration of the Rebellion’s victims was organised; but President Tsiranana prepared for this occasion by repeatedly urging the Malagasy not to dishonour their dead by vengefully brooding on past wrongs. (We could use a Tsiranana in Ireland today.) In 1970 Nigel Heseltine wrote: ‘Twenty years after this conflict it could be said that the psychological wounds had healed … The settlement of the consequences of the Rebellion are greatly to the credit of both Malagasy and French. It cannot have been easy to forget, and in fact the events have not been forgotten. But they are remembered with an objective dignity, and any return to the extreme forms of xenophobic nationalism, as appears occasionally in fringe newspapers of small opposition groups, has been resolutely rejected by the mass of the population as well as its leaders.’
The Malagasy word Fihavanana has – perhaps not surprisingly – no exact English equivalent. It was translated for us by a Merina friend as ‘benevolence and friendship towards all one’s fellowmen’ and it describes one of the most obvious Malagasy characteristics. As our friend said, ‘The basis of our Malagasy philosophy is this: it is better to lose money than affection.’
Fihavanana goes a long way to explain why the transition to independence was so painless in Madagascar. And it was helped in its operations by the personalities of André Soucadaux, France’s last High Commissioner, and Philibert Tsiranana, Madagascar’s first President.
Tsiranana was a Tsimihety from the Ankaizina region in the north-west, a schoolteacher from a poor peasant family, like so many of Madagascar’s political leaders. A man of high intelligence and by nature a reconciler, he had always believed that Madagascar should move gradually towards independence in friendly co-operation with the French. In 1954 he founded a new political party; at first based in his native province, it soon spread to include all the coastal peoples and some Merina moderates. In January 1956 he was elected to the French National Assembly as representative of the Malagasy people of West Madagascar. A year later he was leading a coalition of coastal parties, which had reduced the Merina parties to a minority in the Malagasy National Assembly. This proof that the workings of democracy could protect the majority from any reassertion of Merina dominance was a necessary condition for the granting of full independence. Tsiranana was a close friend of André Soucadaux, a Socialist with a real affection for the Malagasy, who was eager to do all he could to assist in the establishment of a stable republic.
On 15 October 1958 Soucadaux appeared before the Malagasy National Assembly and declared – ‘The Government of the French Republic solemnly recognises the establishment of the state of Madagascar, and the abrogation of the Law of Annexation of August 6, 1896.’
During the next twenty-one months, Soucadaux and Tsiranana continued to work as a team to bring about an efficient transfer of power. Their task was made easier by the fact that independence had been patiently negotiated with France, not wrested from a reluctant government by force. The Malagasy leaders had not just emerged from jail, or from guerrilla hide-outs in the bush, to take control. The Ministry of the Interior was the first to be staffed entirely by Malagasy, with only a few French advisers, and by Independence Day the armed gendarmerie, the civil police and the security services had been under Malagasy control for eighteen months. By that date too almost all French senior civil servants had been withdrawn and the ‘Accords Franco–Malagaches’, dealing – among other things – with the status of French residents in Madagascar, had been signed on 2 April 1960. Most of Tsiranana’s ministers were ex-civil servants, with years of experience in the senior ranks of the administration, and in 1960 he invited three famous nationalist leaders, who had been unjustly exiled to France after the 1947 Rebellion, to return home and accept ministerial portfolios. This was a moving gesture because in the past he and they had been implacable political opponents. All three came home and two – Ravoahangy and Rabemanana-jara – became ministers. Only the seventy-four-year-old Raseta declined the invitation.
On 26 June 1960 the Tsimihety peasant’s son watched the red, white and green flag of the new republic being raised over the Queen’s Palace in Antananarivo, sixty-four years after the last Merina monarch, Queen Ranavalona III, had watched the red and white Merina standard being hauled down as she was carried to exile on a litter – with an escort of Senegalese troops.
It had all been very civilised. No French residents felt it necessary to leave Madagascar abruptly; however they may have deplored their loss of top-dog status, they knew they had nothing to fear from the new régime. There were no disconcerting changes in the commercial life or administrative structures of the country and more than twenty years after Independence Madagascar still has several thousand French residents, most of whom have become Malagasy citizens. By now there have of course been many changes – not only disconcerting but, according to the French ‘old guard’, catastrophic. Their children and grandchildren do not see Madagascar as a country with a future; very few of them remain on the Great Red Island.