Thirty years in Madagascar

by Thomas T. Matthews

When I appeared on the scene the screw-driver was seized, and a pretence was made of sending the screws home, which, of course, seemed very hard to do. When they had finished I said: ‘Yes, that is very fine, now give me the screw-driver.’ I then turned the screws and picked them out with my fingers. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘you have been cheating me for weeks, and scamping your work. I can’t stand any more of this. Go home. I give you an hour in which to leave the village, and if you have not left by that time I shall write to the prime minister, tell him the whole story, and leave him to deal with you. Apply to him for the wages due to you, and when he applies to me I will send the money. I hope this will prove a warning to you, and teach you not to cheat or scamp your work for the future, but to do honest work for honest wages.’

They left the village within half an hour, and no application was ever made to me for arrears of wages. Of course they spread false reports about me and my treatment of workmen. This led to a long delay before I could get carpenters to come from the capital to work for me; but, at last, I was so fortunate as to secure a little man who had something almost akin to genius for carpentry. He worked for me at various times for twenty-eight years. My troubles with these men were thus a blessing in disguise. Without them I should never have found my born carpenter Andrìantàvy. He was one of the pastors of a very small church in the neighbourhood of the capital, and a most trustworthy man.

The Sabbath services were always the most helpful, whether at Fìhàonana or out in the district, as one had a sense of freedom and the feeling that nothing was being neglected in order that they might be held.

The conduct of my bricklayers, and the want of carpenters for several weeks, ran me far too near the end of the dry season with my manse unroofed. Had the rains come on while it was roofless, my ceilings would have been brought down and the walls greatly damaged. As it was, we only escaped by two hours; for the thatching was finished at four o’clock, and at six we had the first rains of the season. In order to accomplish this, however, I had to hire forty men, and give up all other work to superintend them and see that the thatching was properly carried through under my own eye.

Church and manse building, even in the mission field, is very prosaic work, with little of the rainbow of romance about it, but it has to be done. In our case it was a most serious undertaking, for we were 100 miles from the ‘forest,’ and all the wood had to be brought the whole distance, with the exception of some twenty miles, on the shoulders of men from there. The building of our manse was perhaps a more serious affair than it ought to have been. In addition to all the difficulties of the situation, I, in common with most missionaries, knew nothing about house-building. I had never had to do with the building of a house in my life, except a rabbit-hutch, when I was a lad, to which an old tea-chest lent itself. I knew a little about some branches of practical mechanics. This was of more use to me than much other knowledge to acquire which I had spent a good deal of time, and not a little ‘midnight oil’; but of house-building I was wholly ignorant. In the circumstances I had just to buckle to and make the best of things. If a man only does this he will be astonished to find what he may accomplish under God’s blessing.

I have thus dwelt a little on some of the kinds of work which it falls to a missionary opening a new station to carry out, to show, if that be still required, that, as Dr. Livingstone says: ‘A missionary is not merely a dumpy man with a Bible under his arm,’ as many good people suppose him to be. The true missionary is a many-sided man, who must be prepared, and will be, to be anything or nothing that will help forward his work, without any fear of its being beneath his dignity. My experience fully bears out Dr. Livingstone’s statement that: ‘If young missionaries for Africa would spend one-half the time they have to spend over Latin verbs, in learning how to make a wheelbarrow, or mend a waggon, it would be infinitely more useful to them afterwards.’ At the same time, it is well to keep in mind, that what may be very suitable for one part of the mission field may not be so for another. A university training would be the best preparation for some fields. If his missionary enthusiasm will not carry a young man through a university course, it cannot be of the right kind, and would not carry him far in the mission field.

There is little that is sentimental or romantic about the erection of mission buildings, and yet they have a decided value of their own in showing the natives among whom he is destined to labour, that the ‘white teacher’ has come to stay, and that he means work. This most useful, necessary, and trying work is, strange to say, often one of the most thankless tasks that a missionary can take in hand. A man may be thankful if he gets off without censure for ‘erecting so many buildings at his station,’ even when he has found among his personal friends most of the money for their erection. From some fellow labourers he may incur blame for having so much to do with ‘mere secular affairs.’ Nothing which ought to be done should be regarded as merely secular, and least of all where it is to be a means of extending Christianity. ‘Christianity touches everything, or it touches nothing.’ The man who is not prepared to be anything and everything—a hewer of wood or a drawer of water—or who has not got above regarding this or that kind of work as being beneath his ‘abilities,’ ‘culture’ or ‘dignity’ to take part in or do, ought not to go to the mission field. ‘When St. Boniface landed in Britain he came with the Gospel in one hand and a carpenter’s rule in the other; and from England he afterwards passed over into Germany, carrying thither the art of building.’ It may be easy for one class of workers to look askance at another, because the circumstances of the latter may compel them for a time to be a good deal ‘among bricks and mortar.’ It is, however, quite possible to serve God and His cause even in such lowly work. In saying these things I am fighting no phantoms.

Of course things have altered, and have been very much improved in some respects during the past quarter of a century, even to the country missionary. In our time he had not only to be physician and dentist to his own family, but also to some 10,000 people. He was not only preacher, teacher, and guide to the churches and people, but amateur architect, builder, bookseller, and general adviser to his district on almost all subjects; in fact, director of practically everything, and for some years actually judge of the divorce court! Indeed there fell to him too much work of all kinds, much of which he ought not to have had to do; but then there was no one else to do it, and he had to take it up and do his best. Work under these circumstances in country districts, in these early days at least, was the most laborious, worrying, and wearying I have ever known. It was never finished, but its very difficulties and drawbacks, in my opinion, made it all the more elevated, enviable, and honourable.

I have mentioned the divorce court, or rather, the cases of divorce which came before our monthly church meetings, and on which we had to pronounce judgement. It was a most disagreeable duty which we were thus compelled to take up. There was one satisfaction about it: our judgements were seldom disputed or departed from. They were almost always loyally carried out. During the earlier years of our first term of service we seldom had three church meetings in succession without having a case of divorce to settle. But such has been the progress even in that direction, that I had only one bad case to deal with during the past fifteen years.

One day one of the best and most godly of our native pastors came to me in great sorrow. His daughter had been married—against her father’s will, I think—for some years to a petty chief of some means, but no character. He had tired of her, or had seen some one else that he fancied, and so, to get rid of her, he brought a charge of infidelity against her. She denied the charge most vehemently, but as I was then in charge of West Vònizòngo, in addition to my own district, her father came and asked me if I would, as a personal favour to him, go into the case privately first, and see where the truth lay. I agreed to do so, and on the day appointed he, his daughter, her husband, their relations, and a few friends came to the manse, and we went into the case. I had little difficulty in seeing almost from the first that it was a trumped-up charge. Few Malagasy can stand cross-examination; they soon contradict themselves. After I had quite satisfied myself that the charge was false, I took the husband and wife into my study to have a private expostulation with him.