Missionaries, fanompoana and the Menalamba revolt in late nineteenth century Madagascar

Abstract

ABSTRACT Historians to date have considered that the Menalamba rebels of 1895–97 were primarily inspired by political and religious grievances. Missionaries were the most overt symbol of the attack by Western civilisation on traditional virtues which they wished to restore. However, the traditional interpretation fails both to account for rank and file, rather than elite, rebel motives, and to recognise the major role played by the state‐church in fomenting the revolt. Contrary to conventional thinking, economic rather than political motives were paramount in the decision to create a state‐church in 1869. Thereafter, missionaries became imperial agents, and the chapels and schools the prime institutions for the summoning of fanompoana labour which formed the chief resource of the imperial economy. This was particularly the case from late 1870s when the strain of French aggression and deteriorating conditions of trade necessitated increased reliance upon forced labour. Missionaries gave their passive, and often their active, support to the recruitment and even the supervision of fanompoana labour. As fanompoana included any service demanded by a superior of an inferior, state‐church personnel, from missionaries to school teachers, used their official status to demand a wide variety of fanompoana services, ranging from the erection of mission buildings to the purchase of religious literature. It was the totality of state‐church fanompoana, it is argued, which accounts for the rising tide of anti‐missionary and anti‐Christian sentiment amongst the populace during the 1880s and early 1890s. Whereas resistance to the French takeover was nominal, when the French maintained the old Merina administration, at the heart of which lay the oppressive institution of the church, an uprising occurred in which church property and personnel formed the primary focus of rebel attack.