Thirty years in Madagascar

by Thomas T. Matthews

‘She determined to introduce important changes in the government of the kingdom. She gave notice to the British Agent, and all Europeans, of her withdrawal from the treaty which Radàma I had made with the British government for the abolition of the foreign slave trade. She picked a quarrel with the British Agent because he had ridden on horseback into the village where a celebrated idol was kept, drove him from the capital, and ultimately from the island[3].’ Things had seemingly reached a crisis, and the missionaries felt that they might soon have to follow the British Agent; but this was for a time prevented by a rather singular incident.

There was no soap of any kind in Madagascar in those days. The queen had come into possession of some English soap, and thought it desirable to get the white teachers to make soap from the materials found in her own island, and instruct some of her young noblemen to make it. This is not exactly noblemen’s work, as we should think; but in those days, and in that land, every one had to do as the queen commanded, or have their heads cut off. To attain her object she resolved to keep the gods and the royal idol-keepers quiet for a time, until some of her young noblemen had learned the mystery of soap-making.

She had already proposed to the missionaries that they should confine their efforts to mere secular education, which, however, they had politely but firmly declined to do. The influence of the artisan missionaries had been of immense service to the Madagascar Mission in those early days of its existence; and mainly to their teaching must be attributed much of the skill of the Malagasy workmen to this day. There can be no doubt that the manifest utility of their work did much to win for the mission a large measure of tolerance, as this incident of the soap-making shows.

‘Having driven the British Agent from the capital and the island, and wishing next to get rid of the missionaries, the queen sent and asked them all to meet at the house of the senior missionary, as she had a communication to make to them. The queen’s messengers met them, and in her name thanked them for all they had done and all they had taught the people. The queen wished to know, they said, if there was anything they could still teach her people. The missionaries replied that they had only taught the very simplest elements of knowledge, and that there was still many things of which the Malagasy were quite ignorant, and they mentioned sundry branches of education, among which were the Greek and Hebrew languages, which had been partially taught to some. The messengers carried this answer to the queen, and when they came back they said that the queen did not care for the teaching of languages that nobody spoke; but she would like to know, they said, whether they could not teach her people something more useful, such as the making of soap from materials to be found in the country[1].’

This was rather an awkward question to address to theologians, and the ministerial members of the mission were much perplexed. Instruction in soap-making had not been part of their college training, and they knew little about it. ‘After a short pause, the senior member of the mission asked Mr. J. Cameron whether he could give an answer to that question. Mr. Cameron replied: “Come back in a week, and we may give an answer to Her Majesty’s inquiry.” At the end of the week they returned, and Mr. Cameron presented them with two small bars of tolerably good soap made entirely from materials found in the island[4].’ This incident, along with the conversations which the missionaries had with Her Majesty’s messengers, arrested for a time the backward trend of things. It revealed to Her Majesty and her heathen advisers their want of knowledge about the most common things, and their need of the most elementary education, and led to further inquiries about various matters. The tone adopted towards the missionaries and the treatment of them and their converts became more gentle and considerate.

The queen herself was so pleased with the soap that, on condition that Mr. Cameron would undertake a contract to supply the palace and the government with a certain amount of soap, and teach some of the young noblemen how to make it, things were to be allowed to go on; and the missionaries were not to be interfered with in their work. Mr. Cameron and Mr. Chick, another of the artisan missionaries, undertook contracts for soap-making and the production of other useful articles. The government wanted them to undertake a contract for making gunpowder; but this they declined. It took nearly five years to fulfil this agreement. Perhaps their brethren had given Messrs. Cameron[5] and Chick a hint to deal out their instruction as to the soap-making in homoeopathic doses, so that they might be able to accomplish as much as possible of their higher service to Madagascar before the end of the period at which the contracts expired. One most important result to the mission from these contracts was a fresh impulse to the work of education throughout the central province. New schools were allowed to be established, and, although the queen and government would have much preferred to patronize merely secular education, had the missionaries agreed to separate it from religious teaching, they were constrained for the sake of the secular instruction to sanction and countenance the religious education.

The education of the young naturally formed an important element in the work of the mission from its commencement, and under the patronage of Radàma I the work flourished greatly. Radàma never became a Christian. ‘My Bible,’ he would say, ‘is within my own bosom.’ But he was a shrewd and clever man, and his ideas had been much broadened through intercourse with foreigners, and especially through his constant intercourse with Mr. Hastie, the British Agent, and he clearly saw that the education of the children would be an immense gain to his country. Thus he did all in his power to further this branch of missionary work, and both he and Mr. Hastie showed great interest in the prosperity of the schools.

In the year 1826 about thirty schools had been founded, and there were nearly 2,000 scholars; in 1828 the schools were forty-seven, but the number of scholars had fallen to 1,400. At one time the missionaries reported 4,000 as the number of scholars enrolled, though there were never so many as this actually receiving instruction. During the fifteen years the mission was allowed to exist (1820–1835) it was estimated that from 10,000 to 15,000 children passed through the schools; so that when the missionaries were compelled to leave the island there were thousands who had learned to read, and who had by the education they had received been raised far above the mass of their heathen fellow countrymen.

The direct spiritual results of the missionaries’ work were of slow growth, and it was not till eleven years after Mr. Jones’s arrival in the capital that the first baptisms took place. This was on the Sabbath, May 29, 1831, in Mr. Griffiths’s chapel at Ambòdin-Andohàlo, when twenty of the first converts were baptized in the presence of a large congregation. On the next Sabbath, June 5, eight more were baptized by Mr. David Johns in the newly erected chapel at Ambàtonakànga.

From this time the growth was comparatively rapid and encouraging, and by the time of the outbreak of persecution two hundred had been received into church membership.