Independence Day Part II: Colonialism and Madagascar under French Rule

Colonialism gets a bad rap these days, for many good reasons. But like most events and periods of history, there is never a black and white picture of anything. And as cliché as it sounds, the history of colonialism is more than many shades of grey. In fact, it’s probably a crap shoot of every color you could possibly imagine.

I studied a lot about colonialism while in college. Whether it was colonial economies or something else related to the salve trade or the literature and art of post-colonial countries and cultures. Instead of viewing colonialism as a pure evil, which is certainly was, we should take into account that there was a variety of colonialism and that it looked very different depending on the time period, the motivations of the colonizers, and how the local population reacted to the intrusion of foreign powers and ideas.

And I’ll add a few notes about ideas and diversity here. Everyone loves diversity until another culture’s point of view conflicts with your idea of what’s right and wrong. And that goes across the political ideological board. If you’re progressive and push heavily for women’s absolute equality and the deconstruction of gender roles, then you will be at natural odds with a lot of African and Muslim cultures that believe that women and men have very different roles and that they should stick to those roles. I’m sure you love the idea of African culture (by which I assume you mean dancing and clothing as if that is all culture is) until you realize they don’t like your ideas and will gladly tell you to screw off with your ideological neo-colonial beliefs about contraceptives and abortion.

On the other hand, if you’re conservative and hold onto strong beliefs about monogamy, you’ll be in for a surprise when you find out about many remote island cultures where the idea of being committed to one sexual partner is kind of silly, and they’ll look at you and just wonder why you think differently, as if you were the one from an alien world. The bottom line is that most people like the idea of diversity until they realize that diversity means people think and believe differently than you do. And sometimes those differences are not reconcilable because they are exclusively optional. In other words, they can’t both be true at the same time, which means, if you’re placing value on things, and if one is inherently right, then the other is inherently wrong. People hate being wrong. The most common response to all this is a condescending, “Oh well they just don’t know their inherent human rights,” or, “They’re just not educated.” Educated in what? Your ideas? Your beliefs? Your preferences? The rights that your culture has conceived from thin air or using “white man” philosophy?

Anyways, the colonialism I’ll talk about occured in two stages, early colonialism of the Americas and the Easy Indies and 19th century colonialism of Africa.

Spain and Portugal were really the first European powers to colonize anywhere significantly outside of Europe. Spain did what most empires do. They conquered new territories, established new institutions and leading bodies of government loyal to the king, and mingled with local populations that resulted in a mixed race of various native populations. Just like the Romans, Persians, Chinese, and every other Empire before it had done. This is what essentially happened in South and Central America. Of course, as with all conquest, there were war crimes, tragedies, slavery, rape, torture, and the like for many decades. That is pretty much what happens when you conquer new lands, and it only more recently that humanity has collectively agreed that those things are unacceptable. And it is interesting to note that the majority of the Atlantic Slave Trade sent their slaves to South and Central America, not the United States or British colonies. This is mostly because the slaves sent to those places where not expected to live long. Thus, it was cheaper to import more than try to take care of the salves they had. In the Southern United States, there was actually a surplus of slaves such that they tried to export people to South and Central America, without much success.

The local cultures were virtually replaced by a hybrid of Spanish and local traditions. Many people are still proud of their Aztec, Mayan, or Incan heritage, which they should be. Well, as long as you’re okay with accepting that your ancestors were very adamant in obliterating their neighbors and cutting their hearts out to please the sun god and other deities. But all cultures’ value systems are equal, do not forget that.

Spain’s rule in those countries eventually waned as the Spanish monarchy began to lose power and had exhausted the resources it was pulling from its colonies. This kind of extraction colonialism mixed with imperial conquest never works in the long run because the well always runs dry, or the local populations get fed up with being treated as second-class citizens in an Empire that is supposedly “theirs too”. Most of these independence movements occurred in the 19th century, long after Europe lost interest in the Americas with the rise of the United States which was aggressively pushing its boundaries further west.

Portugal, on the other hand, didn’t really have much interest in conquering anyone else. Most places the Portuguese went, they conquered a small track of land, fortified it to the teeth, and used their money to influence decision making all over the place. They did this mostly in India and in various parts of Oceania, including Japan for a short time. The Dutch did a similar colonial strategy but had most of their conquered territories seized by other colonial powers, such as New York which was originally New Amsterdam.

It was different in Brazil, however, where there was certainly a type of extraction colonialism. Sugar cane plantations required an incredible amount of labor which the natives refused to do. So, the Portuguese bought slaves from African tribes across the Atlantic. As the Portuguese Empire began to wane, it let go of its colonies or lost them to other powers.

This kind of colonialism was practiced widespread. But colonialism took a strange turn in the late 19th century with the Berlin Conference in 1884 when the European powers came together and divided Africa in what is called the Scramble for Africa. More or less, the European powers wanted these places in Africa for a multitude of reasons, which we will get to. Nonetheless, they didn’t want what happened in the Americas, expensive wars fought between European powers over territory outside of Europe. So they all made a deal, without the knowledge, consent, or input of African peoples, not to fight each other and respect whatever boundaries they drew on very inaccurate and undetailed maps. The colonialism of this era can be divided into three types and is represented by four major powers.

The first kind of colonialism is pure extraction and exploitation. This was practiced mostly by the Belgians and the Germans. Both the Belgians and Germans ravaged their colonies in southern and central Africa, most notably the Congo, Namibia, and Rwanda where the Belgians established a “racial difference” between essentially two homogenous tribes, the start of what would eventually become the racially driven Rwanda Genocide. The Belgians and Germans wanted raw resources to fuel their factories and military complexes. They enslaved, slaughtered, and collectively destroyed the native populations with the sole intention of extracting as many resources as possible in the shortest period of time. This was the most brutal kind of colonialism, and the countries left behind in their wake still struggle with civil wars, famine, tribal conflicts, and extreme poverty.

The second kind of colonialism was a type of globalization mixed with a racial superiority complex mostly practiced by the British. The British Empire was expanding, and there was no doubt about who ruled the waves. Britain saw itself as the host of a stable, secure, and prosperous global order. This global order was meant to lift the world out of the darkness it had lived in for so long, and only the dominate Anglo-Saxon race was enlightened enough and had the industrial power to make it happen. Thus, the British went about conquering African and other communities establishing a white Anglo-Saxon ruling class that was served by the lesser native populations. It was, to the British, their way of establishing order in an increasingly globalizing and chaotic world. There was an order to how things should be, and the British believed they were the ones to put it in that order. Of course, carving order out of chaos requires some horribly nasty actions, like exploitation, war, etc. But these atrocities were well worth the safety and security that Britain was trying to establish in the crazy world, allegedly.

The last kind of colonialism, and the one that pertains the most to Madagascar, was French enlightenment colonialism. Ever since the French Revolution, France believed that it had a divine, well not really divine because there was no religion in the French Revolution, to spread the glories and benefits of the revolution, that of egality, liberty, and fraternity, to the rest of the world. That’s why the European Coalition Nations feared Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution, because they posed a threat to the established monarchial order of not only Europe, but the entire world. The French believed that race didn’t matter. If one could speak French, read French things, enjoy French things, and do French things, then one could be French. In fact, it’s illegal to collect data on race in France. They’re all FRENCH, no matter the skin color, theoretically that is. Thus, just like the Fire Nation from Avatar the Last Airbender, France set out to spread the Revolution of France to the world, carrying with it the torch of Lady Liberty to enlighten the forgotten and oppressed peoples of this dark and cruel globe who were imprisoned by their own ignorance and ancient traditions. Kind of sounds like a type of ideological neo-colonialism I spoke about earlier.

Anyways, France went about setting up French everything. French schools, French national assemblies, French railways, the metric system, the French Franc, French justice systems based on the Napoleonic code, French education systems, French theater, French music, French literature, French everything. France was going to francophone the world, dammit! At least, that’s what they said, and what they did in most places.

This process was pretty clean cut in West and Central Africa where the abundance of tribes made a unified local culture and set of traditions nearly impossible to identify. When nobody understands each other anyways, a lingua franca kind of sets a level playing field for most people. Thus, French colonialism went pretty well, by their standards, so much so that the French set up a French colonial government in Dakar, Senegal, which ruled the rest of West Africa. But Madagascar was a different story.

Unlike West Africa, Madagascar is a single island with 18 tribes that, more or less, understand each other and hold, at least in theory, several core common traditional religious beliefs. The things that differ from tribe to tribe are mostly arbitrary, but the core principles remain. Thus, Madagascar was a different case, one in which the French would have to beat the Malagasy out of them.

France set up a French-speaking Malagasy ruling class, which was nothing less than a puppet of the colonials that came to the island. Most of these ruling Malagasy sent their children to be educated in France, a tradition that is carried on to this day. Malagasy literature was forbidden, schools were changed, education was French, and Malagasy became a very taboo thing. Mind you, Madagascar is big, so Malagasy held on strong, to the point that few Malagasy actually speak French fluently, which is also a result of the extreme Malagasy-ization policies taken post-independence. Only about 20% of the population speak it fluently, and the rest know numbers and few phrases. The weird thing is that many major classes at school are taught only in French. I had some students who didn’t speak French at all, which means they were taking advanced classes in a language they didn’t understand. What?? So now when I see Madagascar on a map of “francophone countries”, I usually scoff under my breath, “Pff, francophone my a*s.”

Onward, France whipped, or sure as hell tried, the Malagasy out of the Malagasy, something they didn’t have to do in West Africa because there was no unified or homogenous culture there to resist the advances of francophone everything. As a result, the French colonial government was brutal, and because Madagascar does not have many natural resources, there wasn’t much concern about what went on here. But it was all about egality, liberty, and fraternity, right? Just as today it’s about equity, freedom, and diversity, right?

And that is how colonialism went on in Madagascar until the War for Independence in 1947. At that point, things got worse until Madagascar won permanent independence in 1960. But that’s for next time.

For now, know that you are in my prayers each morning. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised.