Thirty years in Madagascar

by Thomas T. Matthews

THE QUEEN OF MADAGASCAR ON THE WAY TO THE LAST REVIEW.

A GARDEN PARTY AT THE QUEEN’S GARDENS.

During the war messengers came to the capital from the chiefs of the various tribes to assure the queen of their allegiance to her, and among others there came representatives of the great Sàkalàva tribe, or series of tribes, who inhabit some 600 miles of the west side of the island. These messengers were very much astonished at the state of things they found in the capital. They found the Hovas living, not, as they themselves did, in huts of mud and wattle or in miserable apologies for huts, constructed of branches of trees roofed with leaves or grass, but in beautiful brick houses which in their eyes were furnished luxuriously. They found them too professedly sitting at the feet of Jesus Christ, clothed and in their right mind, worshipping God the Creator. They saw too that even the household slaves were better fed and clothed, more intelligent, and living in more comfortable houses than even some of their own great chiefs and petty kings. They came to our churches, heard the preaching, saw the schools, and visited the mission hospital. They were delighted also with the kind reception and treatment which they received on all sides, from the queen and prime minister downwards. Finally they asked: ‘What is the meaning of all this change, and what has brought it all about; for this is not as things were in the days of your forefathers or even as they were a few years ago?’ They were told that ny fìvavàhana, ‘the praying,’ had brought all the changes, and doubtless they returned home to tell of all they had seen and heard, and how kindly they had been treated. They would also report about the wonderful and wonder-making ‘new religion,’ which had wrought such changes on men and things. I do not doubt that the outcome would have been an appeal from those tribes for missionaries to teach and tell them about the wonder-making fìvavàhana, praying or religion, but for the troubles that arose, and ended as all now know.

As Tàmatàve was blockaded for nearly three years we received no mails for the first six months after the war began, while flour, sugar, and all imported provisions rose to famine prices. We sent letters to the various ports, in the hope that they might be picked up by H.B.M. ship ‘Dryad’ or some passing vessel, and carried to a British port. To the disgrace of some Mauritius merchants be it told—in all probability French-Creoles—the captains of their vessels were forbidden to take mails or passengers to and from Madagascar. One British captain—I wish I could give his name—dared to disobey orders, and give a passage to three stranded members of our mission to Mauritius on their way to England, and was discharged by his owner for so doing on his arrival in port.

Our letters lay at Tàmatàve for six months, until the British government demanded that they should be given up. They were all opened, our papers and magazines were burned, and the London Missionary Society annual warrant of expenditure for the Imèrina district committee was never forthcoming. Perhaps it was supposed by its non-arrival the Methodist missionaries—who were believed to be inciting the Hovas to resistance—would be starved out; but we simply borrowed the money needed, and quietly went on with our work, which flourished and made progress, notwithstanding all the troubles.

Meetings to pray for peace were established at centres, and it was most pathetic to listen to the Malagasy pleading for their invaders, that God would bring them to a right mind, and take them safely home to their own land. The conduct of Captain Johnstone of H.B.M. ship ‘Dryad’ during that trying time was beyond all praise. He called at the various ports for our mails, taking away any British subjects who wished to leave the island, sent up letters and papers to us in the interior, and protected and defended British subjects and interests in a way and in a spirit for which he ought to have been made an admiral; but instead of that—as we afterwards learned, to our sorrow—he was censured.

CHAPTER XIII
BIBLE REVISION AND ‘AN OLD DISCIPLE’

‘In the latter days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and peoples shall flow unto it.’—Micah iv. 1.

I became a member of the Committee for the Revision of the Malagasy Bible in 1883, and remained a member for four years—till the finish of the work. This duty proved most interesting and enjoyable. The revision was not the triumph that the translation made by the first missionaries had been—partly, I think, because it had been overlauded, which led the people to expect too much from it; partly because, while a more correct and literal translation, it was, in consequence, not so idiomatic, and perhaps because the paragraph form in which it was printed was not so popular, at least in the schools, as the old form in verses. It occupies much the same place among the Malagasy that the Revised English Version does among ourselves, with this difference, that it is the only version which the Malagasy can now obtain.

The work of the revision led us to think more highly than ever of the splendid work done by the early missionaries during the thirteen years they were in the island. Reducing the language to writing, founding churches and schools, making those noble—one might almost say marvellously idiomatic—translations of the Bible, the Pilgrim’s Progress, and other books, and so planting Christianity in the hearts of the people that it could not be uprooted, was a work that has never been surpassed in any mission field, and seldom, if ever, been equalled. There were certainly giants in the mission field in those days; but, as we have lately seen, the race has not quite died out.