Thirty years in Madagascar

by Thomas T. Matthews

One man was suspended from church fellowship by one of the mother-churches in the capital. After some two years he applied to be readmitted, and as the pastor, deacons, and members were satisfied as to the sincerity of his repentance he was received back. As a thank-offering he gave the amount he calculated he would have given to the church during the time of his suspension, had he been in membership. After the church meeting he went up to the pastor and asked, in seeming astonishment, if that was all. The pastor said it was, and asked what else he expected. The penitent said, ‘Are you not going to beat me?’ ‘Beat you?’ said the pastor. ‘No, certainly not; we would never dream of doing anything of the kind.’ ‘Well, but,’ added the man, ‘I was a very prominent member of the church, and by my fall I greatly disgraced you all, and I feel that I so richly deserve a beating that I would be much happier if I got it.’ ‘It is not the custom of the church to receive penitents back into fellowship by thrashing them,’ answered the pastor. ‘You have been received back into membership, your thank-offering has been accepted, and you must go home feeling thankful and happy.’ ‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘but I would go home much happier, and with a quieter conscience, if I had had a good beating; for I feel I so richly deserve it, that the best thing I could get would be a good thrashing.’ It was all that the pastor could do (and only after a long talk, and the most positive refusal to touch him) to get the man to go home without his coveted beating!

Our mission district of Anativolo, where we had fourteen preaching stations, with their small village schools, under the charge of three untrained evangelists, was utterly ruined during the year 1888 by a band of brigands from the forests of the north. They came as far south as within forty miles of the capital! At one village in the Vònizòngo district four men were killed, and thirty women and children carried off to be sold to the Sakalava tribe on the west coast. It was five years before we got these mission stations in Anativolo restored; then the march of the French expedition from the north-west coast, and after that the rising against the French rule, ruined the work for another three years, and the district is now so sparsely populated that I fear it will never again be what it was.

We left the capital in April, 1888, for the small London Missionary Society sanatorium on the hills at Ambàtovòry for our annual month’s holiday. I had seldom looked forward with more longing to our month of rest, expected more from it or received less. On the night of Wednesday, May 9 (the night of the large local weekly market for the neighbourhood), I was sitting reading in our small parlour. About ten o’clock my attention was attracted by a slight scratching at the Venetian shutter-door of the French window, which opened on to the walk. I looked up from my book, and thought that the cat had been shut out. I turned again to my book. I had hardly done so, however, when with a crash the Venetian shutter-door was torn open, the French window burst in, and a band of burglars sprang into the room, and I saw the gleam of their long Malagasy knives and meat-axes! So utterly unexpected was the thing that I was stupefied for a few seconds. I scarcely realized what had happened. As I had been sitting opposite the open door of the room I sprang through it, closing it behind me, to which act I may have owed my life, although I hardly think they would have harmed me, unless I had offered resistance. I rushed upstairs to the bedroom, where I found my wife in a state of terror; she had been startled from sleep by the crash. She thought the house had been struck by lightning. I had taken my small bull-dog revolver with me for mad dogs, with which we were rather bothered in those days (I had shot five of them in our own yard during our first term, and one in our own kitchen), and now I went to get it in case it might be needed. Unfortunately it had been hanging in the lobby, and passing it in my hurry, by the time I had discovered my mistake the burglars had secured it. It would have been of no use to me, however, even if it had been in the bedroom, as the only three cartridges I had brought with me were in my courier-bag, which was hanging on the back of the door of the room into which the burglars burst. As there was no weapon of any kind in the bedroom, not even a stick, we could do nothing except remain quiet—a very difficult thing for me to do while the house was being ransacked—and commend ourselves to the care of God. After recovering from the shock and fright of my first surprise, I wanted to go out and attack the burglars with anything I could find; but my wife and our good old nurse, Rafàra, held me back. The former said if I went out of the room, and they caught sight of me, they might fling a knife at me, which might cost me my life.

The band was a notorious one, and had been the terror of that countryside for years. The leader had been often in prison, and his character was well known; but he had always escaped being put in chains or being sent to penal servitude, doubtless by bribing the judges. His assistant was the son of the so-called superintendent of police for the district, who informed his father that if he gave any information that would lead to his capture he would do for him! The majority of the band were most desperate fellows, on whose breasts had been made seven times the scars of the blood brotherhood, which pledged them not to turn queen’s evidence if it cost them their lives. There were two lads among them from whom much better things might have been expected, and one of them was reported to have provided the knives for the night’s work! As treasurer of the missionary fund of the ‘Union’ I had had £100 handed over to me, just before leaving the capital, and it was probable the burglars had heard of that, and believed I had taken the money with me. Twenty of the band were caught, and sixteen sent in chains to the Malagasy Botany Bay; but none of the property stolen was ever recovered, only its value was refunded by the authorities from the sale of the property belonging to the burglars.

THE OLD SCHOOL, AMBATONAKANGA.

THE NEW SCHOOL, AMBATONAKANGA.

GROUP OF SCHOLARS, TEACHERS, AND CHRISTIAN WORKERS.

Hugh Miller says: ‘There are two periods that are favourable to observation, an early and a late one. A fresh eye detects external traits and peculiarities among a people, seen for the first time, which disappear as they become familiar; but it is not until after repeated opportunities of study and a prolonged acquaintance that the internal characteristics of a people begin to be rightly understood.’ This is especially true with regard to Madagascar and the Malagasy; for while there was, and is, much about them and the history of Christianity in the island, as also about their present and future, to deeply interest and indeed fascinate any one who has a spark of missionary enthusiasm in him, still it is only to those who have had repeated opportunities of studying the people, and a prolonged acquaintance with them, and the work in all its phases, that the internal characteristics of the people, and real conditions of the work, can be rightly known. As it was in our Lord’s time, and is at home now, the rich do not crowd into the Kingdom, and it is left chiefly to the common people to hear the Gospel gladly, and press into it; so, with few exceptions, it has been in Madagascar. The higher the social scale the more profuse was the profession, the less the real practice. From many points of view both the capital and the country districts might have been compared to a stagnant pond, on which the green slime of ages had gathered thickly. When the living waters of the Gospel flowed into the pond a commotion was caused, bad odours were generated, and much was brought to the surface that had long been hidden by the slime or embedded in the mud. The only hope of clearing away the filth was to keep the living waters streaming into the pool. Purification in such a case could not be the work of a day; the filth was the accumulation of ages. Twenty years could not do much.

We found even in our last year, before taking our second furlough, that the mother-church and congregation of A-kànga was far from being a pure one. Our first troubles that year began with a controversy with regard to Christians—especially pastors, preachers, and Sabbath-school teachers—countenancing theatres, operas, and balls. The poison of so-called civilization, frivolity, and indecorum had been introduced, and was affecting certain sections of the community. Those of us who had the courage of our convictions with regard to such primrose paths and gilded roads to ruin felt it to be our duty to set our faces like flint against them, and denounce them both in public and in private. As a result we had the honour of being for a time the best-abused men in the capital. We were held up to ridicule as bigots, and charged in the public press with being enemies to the public weal. We were hindering Madagascar in her march towards civilization. The line of demarcation, however, between the precious and the vile, between those who feared the Lord and those who feared Him not, became more distinct at this time than it had been since the ‘killing times.’ The sifting process had, in a measure, begun; not in the way we would have chosen, but perhaps in the way that most clearly showed who really had in them the root of the matter, and preferred the house of God to any of the synagogues of Satan.