Colonial Conquest in Central Madagascar: Who Resisted What? Ellis, S.; Abbink, G.J.; Bruijn, M.E

Colonial conquest in central Madagascar: who resisted what? Ellis, S.; Abbink, G.J.; Bruijn, M.E. de.; Walraven, K. van Citation Ellis, S. (2003). Colonial conquest in central Madagascar: who resisted what? In G. J. Abbink, M. E. de. Bruijn, & K. van Walraven (Eds.), African dynamics (pp. 69-86). Leiden [etc.]: Brill. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/9618 Version: Not Applicable (or Unknown) License: Leiden University Non-exclusive license Downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/9618 Note: To cite this publication please use the final published version (if applicable). 68 De Bruijn & Van Dijk of the various layers of ethnie identities, which arose over the centuries and which is largely unknown, is only beginning to unfold through new research. In 8 * a number of instances the opposition between strangers (conquerors) and the original population may have been an important dividing line. In summary, the daily reality for the ordinary people living under Fulbe rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must have been one of conflict and political instability, in which they sometimes participated actively and of which they were at other Colonial conquest in central Madagascar: times the victims. How this influenced their daily lives will forever be hidden as Who resisted what? there is a silence about their fate in the oral traditions and written sources of these times. Stephen Ellis A rising against French colonial rule m central Madagascar (1895-1898) appeared in the 197Os as a good example of résistance to colonialism, sparked by France 's occupation of Madagascar. Like many similar episodes in other parts of Africa, it was a history that appeared, in the light of later African nationalist movements, to be a precursor to the more sophisticated anti-colonial movements that eventually led to independence, in Madagascar and elsewhere. In the light of the later history of nationalism, however, it is instructive to revisit the rising of the menalamba in Madagascar and to reconsider the episode. On 22 November 1895, less than two months after French colonial troops had taken the Merina royal capital at Antananarivo in their conquest of Madagascar, there was a violent uprising in a district immediately to the west of Madagascar's premier city. The violence was directed at local officiais of the royal government and at prominent Christian converts, but what most shocked Europeans was the murder of other Europeans: the local missionary family, British Quakers who had lived in Madagascar for more than twenty years. William Johnson, his wife Lucy and their baby daughter were hacked to death by a mob of perhaps a thousand people. French troops retaliated by laying waste the area surrounding the scène of the Johnsons' murder, burning houses and killing people more or less randomly in the belief that sévère punishment would prevent any répétition.' Nevertheless, throughout the followmg weeks there were reports from many parts of central Madagascar of local disputes of various 1 S. Ellis, The Rising of the Red Shawls: A Revolt in Madagascar, 1895-1898 (Cambridge, 1985). 70 Ellis Colonial conquest in central Madagascar 11 sorts getting out of control, fights breaking out at markets, unpopulär village officials being attacked and church buildings being damaged. In many places there were reports of exceptionally serious raids by cattle rustlers, sometimes in bands hundreds strong, and some including Malagasy army deserters with breech-loading rifles. There were fantastic rumours of impending doom and disaster. The French were officially committed to propping up the royal administration of Queen Ranavalona III, previously regarded by European states as the ruler of Madagascar although the state that she reigned over had never in fact controlled more than half the island. Her government was also, to a degree the French had underestimated, in an advanced state of collapse. The establishment of a protectorate was the result of lobbying by the French Foreign Ministry, which had recently achieved some success with a similar policy in Tunisia and which in principle wished to avoid any more expensive form of rule in Madagascar. This policy was contested by others in the administration in Paris, however, including some in the war ministry, members of the French expeditionary force in Madagascar and the small number of French private citizens who were already living on the island, most of them dirt-poor Créoles from the island of Réunion. Antananarivo» BETSIMISARAKA In March 1896 there was a wave of attacks on administrative posts of the Merina royal government in several parts of the central highland région. The attacks were obviously coordinated, to the point that French officials in Madagascar sensed at once that this was of a different order from ordinary cattle-stealing or even from the attack on the Johnson family four months previously. Rumours spread that the rising was secretly being organized by Queen Ranavalona, the figurehead of the protectorate government, or by some of her courtiers. There were even rumours that British missionaries were in league with the insurgents in spite of the murder of some of their own. Although these rumours were essentially false, the fact that they were so widely believed says much about the nature of the insurrection as well as about divisions among the French. This was, after all, the period of the Dreyfus affair, when French men and women were bitterly split on a great range of issues, especially those concerning the rôle of the army.2 The insurgents, who later became known as menalamba (red shawls), were to keep some semblance of organization until 1898 and posed a serious 2 S. Elhs, 'The Politica! Elite of Tanananve and the Revolt of the Menalamba: The Map 3. l Ethnie groups of Madagascar Création of a Colonial Myth m Madagascar, 1895-1898', Journal of Afneem History XXI, u (1980), 219-34. Among the documents that Dreyfus was accused of ha ving given to the German government were those relating to the French invasion of Madagascar! 72 Mis Colonial conquest in central Madagascar 73 embarrassment to French rule. In August 1896, a senior French officiai on thé claiming it as a precursor of its own nationalist struggle.4 The first modern book island reckoned that 300,000 people were living in areas under menalamba on the menalamba was published in 1976 by a Malagasy radio journalist who 3 control. In retrospect, however, it is clear that there was never thé remotest had devoted a series of programmes to the subject, representing the menalamba chance of thé menalamba forcing thé French to abandon their aim of exercising as nationalists who had fought to preserve the island from foreign rule, and formai control over Madagascar. On the contrary, the seriousness of the including a whole series of revolts between 1895 and 1905 within this uprising caused thé government in Paris to develop a more rigorous policy, category.5 It comes as no surprise that the menalamba should have been declaring Madagascar to be a French colony and sending a military governor identified as nationalists or proto-nationalists at a time when Madagascar was with wide-reaching powers, General Gallieni, to sort out the problem. governed by a radical regime that based its legitimacy on its rejection of neo- While äs many äs 100,000 Malagasy may have died from violence and colonialism. In the years immediately after independence there were many hunger during the uprising, the number of deaths of French soldiers and African governments and their supporters that identified themselves in public civilians, more from disease than enemy action, was in the hundreds. The with earlier anti-colonial movements. An obvious place to start looking for a enormous différence in casualty figures is évidence of the superiority of French radical anti-colonial pedigree was in the records ofthose people who had fought arms but perhaps also indicates something about the menalamba. It may, for against European intruders in the period of conquest or of early colonial rule. example, suggest that the insurgents did not conceive of themselves as a single- This was the golden age of African nationalism: the period from 1945 until, minded anti-colonial résistance movement. Before exploring this idea further, perhaps, the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980. It was a period when it was however, it is userul to describe briefly the literature produced by Africanist growingly apparent to people all over the world that colonialism had become an historians on collaboration and résistance between Africans and colonial anachronism, a politically unjust dispensation whose time had passed. occupiers. Investigating the extent to which Africans had resisted colonialism was thus both interesting and politically useful. It was in roughly these circumstances that collaboration and résistance to Collaboration and résistance colonial rule were constituted as a field of formal historical inquiry by historians of Africa intent on recovering the historical records of a continent that Particular historical objects or phenomena - in this case, the menalamba rising Europeans had often dismissed as being without history.6 A pioneering work in - are liable to differing interprétations as times change and new générations ask the new history of African nationalism was Terence Ranger's book on questions about the past that seem most important or interesting in the light of résistance to colonial rule in Rhodesia, published in 1967 when Ranger was current circumstances. Madagascar remained a French colony from the time of working at the University of Dar es Salaam's history départaient, a nursery of the menalamba until 1960, and for 12 years afterwards its first post- talented scholars, in a city that was one of thé main diplomatie hubs of the independence government continued with many of the policies inherited from southern African libération struggle.7 colonial times.

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