Thirty years in Madagascar

by Thomas T. Matthews

‘He and his followers formed themselves into a procession, and went up to the capital to tell the queen the glorious news. The queen appointed some of her officers to hear his story. They returned and reported it to Her Majesty. She sent back to ask him if she, the Queen of Madagascar, and the Mozambique slave would be equal in those days? “Yes,” he replied. When this was told the queen she ordered the prophet and his chief followers to be put into empty rice-pits, boiling water to be poured over them, and the pits to be covered up[1].’

Such is heathenism! Missionaries are sometimes charged with a tendency to give only the bright side of things without much reference to the other. The charge is unjust. Common decency forbids more than a suggestion of what heathenism implies. The missionaries are the ‘messengers of the churches,’ whose task it is to make the darkness light, and their narratives must necessarily bear upon the results of their labours. By God’s good help and blessing, what has been done in Central Madagascar, in the islands of the South Seas, in New Guinea, in Central Africa, in Manchuria, in Livingstonia, and in other parts of the mission field, can be told; while that which the Gospel has supplanted may well be left to be the unspeakable hardship of those who have to face it in the name of their Lord, and of our common Christianity and civilization.

A famous missionary once attempted to tell his experiences as to heathenism, and got himself into trouble for his pains. Missionaries give their hearers credit for Christian common sense, and for the knowledge that there is a dark and dreadful side to missionary work, such as to justify the sacrifices of the churches and their agents in undertaking it. One significant fact may be mentioned here. While there was a name for every beast, and bird, and blade of grass, and tree, and stone, and creeping thing, there was not in the language of Madagascar a word for moral purity. Such a thing had no existence until the people received the Gospel, and learned from it to value the things that are pure, lovely, and of good report.

MALAGASY HAIR-DRESSING.

A HEATHEN WAR-DANCE.

In 1823 the work of translating the Scriptures into Malagasy was begun, and in 1824 Radàma I gave the missionaries permission to preach the Gospel in the vernacular. The natives were not a little amazed to hear a European declaring to them with fluency in their own tongue the wonderful works of God. The mission made very rapid progress for a few years. There were about a hundred schools established in the provinces of Imèrina and Vònizòngo, and some four thousand children gathered into them. These schools were not centres where a large amount of secular and a small amount of religious education was given; they were also preaching stations, visited periodically by the missionaries, where the Gospel was preached and the Scriptures were explained. The truth thus found entrance into many benighted souls, laying hold of them in a way that nothing had ever done before, proving that it was still the power of God unto salvation unto every one that believeth. Many had grown weary of their old heathenism, and were feeling after God, if haply they might find Him.

The people had often spoken of Andrìamànitra[2] Andrìanànahàry (God the Creator) as existing, and the people had been told in their proverbs, with which all were familiar, that ‘God looks from on high and sees what is hidden’; that they were ‘Not to think of the silent valley’ (that is, as a place in which it was safe to commit sin); ‘for God is over our head.’ They were told that ‘God loves not evil’; and also that ‘It is better to be condemned by man than to be condemned by God’; and again that ‘The waywardness of man is controlled by God; for it is He Who alone commands.’

In their proverbs God was also acknowledged as ‘the Giver to every one of life.’ This confession is found in the ordinary phrase used in saluting the parents of a newly born child, which was, ‘Salutation! God has given you an heir’; while His greatness is declared in another proverb which says, ‘Do not say God is fully comprehended by me.’ He was recognized as the rewarder both of good and evil; and hence their proverb, ‘God, for Whom the hasty won’t wait, shall be waited for by me.’ God’s omniscience was recognized in the proverb, ‘There is nothing unknown to God, but He intentionally bows down His head’ (that is, so as not to see); a rather remarkable parallel to the Apostle Paul’s words, ‘The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked.’ One proverb says, ‘Let not the simple or foolish one be defrauded, God is to be feared’; while another tells that, ‘The first death may be endured, but the second death is unbearable.’

In the Malagasy proverbs and folk-lore you have some few of the ‘fossilized remains of former beliefs’; and in these the people were told something of God and goodness, of right and wrong, while hints were given of a life beyond the grave, where good men would be rewarded and wicked men punished.