Laboring for the Colony and Nation

Abstract

Throughout the colonial era in Francophone Africa, male youth were prime targets for exploitative labor practices, and Madagascar stands as an especially pertinent example, where young men and boys were regularly forced to serve the French empire as foot soldiers and corvée laborers. Their work efforts – and lives – were essential to the defense of France in wartime; further, it is they who built the complex infrastructure that simultaneously served the needs of the island’s domestic army, foreign-owned plantations and a colonial administrative network. Colonial policies were driven, too, by the ideological assumption that manual labor would prove transformative to Malagasy, among whom such experiences were believed to implant a new enthusiasm for capitalist production. From a Malagasy perspective, however, enforced labor practices were simply poorly disguised forms of enslavement. The legacy of these oppressive practices proved troubling to subsequent efforts at nation building where, again, youth – and especially, educated secondary students – were conceived of as embodying the future of the independent state. This article explores the interconnectedness of nationalism, labor ideology and youth culture, where secondary school students’ politicized understandings of the past prove central to their contemporary readings of personal and national independence in Madagascar.