Rites of Betsileo Princes,” “Identity and Descent among the Vezo” and “The Sakalava Poiesis of History.” The sheer volume of studies makes it tempting to think that traditional beliefs and practices dominate every sphere of life.
Our study indicated that traditional practices persist. Many pregnant women still drink a noxious potion called tambavy. After birth, the umbilical cord is buried near the ancestral tomb or cast into the river at a sacred site. Food taboos (fady) remain. Traditional forms of marriage are still practiced. However, many barriers to improving health, sanitation, nutrition, and education are practical—distant health facilities, bad schools and untrained teachers, poor infrastructure. Changing people’s beliefs was not the issue. It was about providing better services.
Our UA colleagues did not deny the role of tradition. They simply said that it was not the only or even the most important factor. They reminded us that for many people in Madagascar, survival remains a daily challenge. In May 2015, with the project already months behind schedule, we politely asked when data collection could begin. The chair of the communication department, Lucie Rabaovololona, reported that in Analanjirofo roads were still closed by floods and mudslides. Meanwhile, the two southern regions were experiencing drought and food shortages. The project timeline had to be amended, she said. Her rationale was simple yet evocative: “We should not be asking people questions about nutrition when all they have to eat is cactus.”
Abide with Me
The sound of the group singing drifted in from the courtyard of the Norwegian mission on a sunny December morning in Tana. The tune was familiar, but in my early-morning stupor after a long flight I couldn’t place it. Then it came to me. It was my father’s favorite hymn, “Abide with Me,” a Church of England standard. I had sung it during my childhood, usually at school assemblies or compulsory Sunday church attendance; it closed the funeral service for my father in 1985. I recalled the opening line, “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide,” although it seemed surreal on a warm morning in the middle of Madagascar’s capital city. I wondered how this hymn had traveled across two continents and been translated into Malagasy.
For that cultural exchange, we can credit the Norwegian Lutherans and other Protestant missionaries who have worked in Madagascar for two centuries. The London Missionary Society (LMS), a product of the evangelical revival of the late eighteenth century and composed mostly of Congregationalists and other nonconformists, was the first to plan a mission to Madagascar. The British seizure of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius from the French in 1810 provided a base for operations. In August 1818, two twenty-two-year-old Welshmen, David Jones and Thomas Bevan, arrived in Toamasina from Mauritius and opened a small school. Their wives and young children followed, but by the following January Jones was the only survivor, the others having died from the fever. Jones persevered and in 1820 was welcomed to the court of Radama I. Other LMS missionaries followed and within a decade had established schools and gained converts in the highlands.
Radama was personally indifferent to religion but wanted to improve the economy by adopting Western technologies. He welcomed the LMS because the missionaries included artisans—a tanner, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a cotton spinner, and a printer—who taught new skills; one, the Scot James Cameron, introduced brick making. By the time of Radama’s death in 1828, the LMS missionaries had established twenty-three schools with twenty-three hundred students, one-third of them girls. The missionaries began transliterating Malagasy into a written script, using the Latin alphabet. The LMS shipped a printing press, and by 1828 the missionaries were printing spelling books and readers, as well as gospel tracts. By 1830, three thousand copies of the New Testament in Malagasy had been printed.
After almost two decades of openness to trade, religion, and other European contacts under Radama I, the Merina kingdom turned inward and xenophobic under his successor, the capricious and bloodthirsty Queen Ranavalona I. Her reign began with the ritual murder of all potential rival claimants to the throne, including Radama’s mother and brother-in-law. The traditionalist party gained dominance at court and lobbied for cutting trading and diplomatic ties with the French and British. For a few years, the missionaries were allowed to continue teaching, preaching, and distributing religious texts, but from 1831 the government started clamping down on their activities. The queen’s hostility was fed by reports that Christian converts were contemptuous of ancient customs and regarded the royal talismans—sacred wooden objects carried on military campaigns and state processions to protect the kingdom—as idols. In 1835, she banned Christianity and ordered all who had been baptized to confess and recant. Most did, but those who refused, or continued to practice religion in private, were vigorously persecuted.
The lucky ones—mostly members of the noble andriana caste—lost their property or official position. Some were sold into slavery or exiled to unhealthy regions of the island, where they succumbed to disease within a few months. Other converts were executed in public, with cruelty designed to strike fear into the population. They were speared to death, burned at the stake, or hurled off a cliff below the queen’s palace. Some were placed head-down in a rice pit; boiling water was poured on them, and the pit was filled with earth. A few survived the notorious tangena ordeal by poison. The accused was made to swallow three pieces of chicken skin and some rice, with scrapings from the poisonous tangena nut, then drink a large quantity of rice water to induce vomiting. If all three pieces of skin were vomited up whole, the accused was considered innocent but then often died anyway from the effects of the poison.
In 1835, all missionaries left Madagascar, but many converts held to their faith, worshipping in private homes or in the countryside, hiding their Bibles in caves and holes in the ground. The martyrdom suffered by Malagasy Christians served only to strengthen their resolve. When, in 1861, the new king Radama II restored freedom of religion and declared an amnesty for all condemned for their beliefs, thousands flocked to newly opened places of worship. Christianity was no longer a foreign import because the Malagasy Christians had their own martyrs, preachers, and ordained pastors. Protestantism became established, even socially fashionable, among the ruling classes, when the new queen, Ranavalona II, and her prime minister, Rainilaiarivony (who married her, in accordance with political custom), converted in 1869. Soon after the marriage, the queen ordered the burning of the royal idols, completing a symbolic break with ancestral beliefs.2
With the field opened again for missionary activity, the LMS faced competition from other Protestant denominations, including the Anglicans. The Jesuits, based on the French island of Réunion, established small missions on the west coast and by the 1860s were competing for souls in the central highlands and on the east coast. Like the Protestants, the Catholic missionaries contributed to education, establishing primary and secondary schools, but the two groups were always in competition.
The LMS, Anglicans, and Catholics were followed by Norwegian Lutheran missionaries. They were young men from the farms and fjords, who set off for a long sea trip to an unknown island in the southern Indian Ocean. Some left young wives behind, promising to return when God’s work was done. Most never did, entering into accepted, but unsanctified, unions with Malagasy women. The first two missionaries arrived in 1866, establishing a church south of Tana. This precipitated a turf war with the LMS, but eventually both sides agreed to reserve the region of Betsileo in the southern highlands for the Lutherans. The Norwegians were followed by American Lutheran missionaries from Minnesota; they founded a small mission in Fort Dauphin in the south where they were never in competition with other Protestant missions.
After Madagascar became a French colony in 1896, the Catholic Church gained strength. Today, about one-fifth of the population (four million) is Catholic; the Church of Jesus Christ in Madagascar (FJKM), which united the LMS with the Quakers and other evangelicals, is the largest Protestant group, with about 3.5 million adherents. The Malagasy Lutheran Church (FLM), with 3 million, comes in a strong third; the Fifohazana, an indigenous revival movement, has made the Malagasy church one of the fastest-growing Lutheran churches in the world. The alliance of these three with the Anglicans in the Malagasy Council of Churches (FFKM) has been an influential
