There were many indications of improvement and progress that could not always be tabulated, or reported, such as: the gradual but most decided improvement in the social condition of the people, and especially in their view of the marriage relation. More attention was also devoted to personal cleanliness, comfort, and decency in clothing. There was still a love for finery, and a weakness for gaudy colours among the women folk; but even they showed signs of an improvement in taste. Many huts, which had been little better than filthy pigstyes seven years before, became clean, tidy, decent, and comfortable. This led to an improvement in health and morals; for you cannot have anywhere dirty overcrowded homes and good morals any more than good health. Prayer and praise began to rise from firesides, amòrom-pàtana—formerly given over to heathen folk-lore and filthy communications. Bible-reading took the place of story-telling and gossip. Health so far improved that in our village of Fìhàonana, and a few near, with the exception of mild attacks of malarial fever, sickness so decreased that I had not one patient where formerly I had ten. Typhoid fever, which had been the plague of the place, and which, had they followed my advice to the full, I believe we could have stamped out, or nearly so, was greatly diminished.
With the improvement in the huts and homes, there was also an improvement in the church buildings. The large mud huts were replaced by handsome brick buildings, with platform pulpits, and, in a few cases, with tiled roofs and glazed windows.
CHAPTER X
THE DEAD PAST
‘All the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord.’—Numbers xiv. 21.
In former times the Malagasy used to hold great feasts, rum-drinking and horrible orgies at the funerals of all people of any consequence. The corpse was rolled in a silk làmba, while all clothes, dresses, and jewellery belonging to the deceased were placed in the family or royal tomb, as the case might be, along with the corpse. I remember the death of a very old and famous chief, ‘the head of the black people.’ It was stated that his corpse was rolled in eighty-four silk làmba! It was also the custom to fill the mouth of the corpse with cut money—silver cut up to the size of broken rice. If the deceased had been fond of rum during his or her lifetime, water-pots filled with it were placed in the tomb!
The Malagasy of Central Madagascar had been in the habit for ages of opening the tombs of their ancestors at stated periods, removing the rotten làmba, and rolling the bones in new làmba. To purchase the new làmba a levy was made on the descendants and clansmen of the deceased. Even the slaves of the various families were expected to contribute to Ny mamàdika ny màty, i. e. ‘the turning of the dead,’ which were often occasions for great gatherings at which there were feasting and drinking, music and dancing, for which bands of musicians and female singers—both being generally of the lowest and most abandoned of the community—were hired, and heathen orgies and hideous debauchery were the order of the days and of the nights.
After the general acceptance of Christianity in the central provinces, there were often religious, or semi-religious, services and often preachings at those gatherings; but, as the after conduct of many was hardly consistent with such religious exercises, we were compelled to decline countenancing them and now they have almost died out or been put a stop to.
Such were some of the customs of former times connected with the burial and turning of the dead, and probably similar customs are still rife in those parts of the island on which the new light has not yet dawned—two-thirds of the island being still in heathen darkness. About a million, perhaps, of the people of the central provinces have been reached in some way, and some at a few points on the coast; but the rest—some three millions—are still in a state of heathenism. There murder, infanticide, slavery, drunkenness, polygamy, obscenity, war and all the other horrors of heathenism and degradation are rampant.
But on the other hand, to show the change that was coming over the people as to their views of death and their burial customs, I may mention that the first legacy was left to the church during that year by the wife of a petty chief, who was one of our village pastors. I was invited to preach at her funeral, which was conducted in a quiet, decent, and most orderly manner. There was no feasting, drinking, music nor dancing, and her money was left to the church instead of being buried with her corpse.
Our good Christian queen gave an example during that year of her desire to be a nursing-mother to the church. An officer of high rank in the native army, who had been married for some years to a woman of lower social rank than himself, divorced her as she had no family by him. As he was a member of the church in his native village he was first remonstrated with, and then suspended from church fellowship for divorcing his wife without proper cause. Being a person of some consequence in his own village, he resented being excommunicated and, in a measure, disgraced in the eyes of his relations and fellow villagers; but as the church refused to readmit him, unless he took back his wife, he began in various ways to persecute the pastor, office-bearers, and members of the village church. It was a ‘child,’ that is, connected with and under the care of the mother-church of Ampàribè in the capital.