The Norwegian Mission’s Literacy Work in Colonial and Independent Madagascar by Ellen Vea Rosnes (review)

Astonishing it is that Malagasy schoolchildren were once required to identify “our rivers” as “La Loire, La Rhone, La Seine,” all rivers of France (107). Disturbing it is that they had to recite by heart, “Nos ancêtres les gaulois” (83), celebrating “our ancestors the Gauls,” pre-Roman inhabitants of France, rather than the heritage of their own homeland. French colonial policy sought to assimilate Malagasy people into the French empire through the use of French language and culture in education. By contrast the goals of the Norwegian Mission Society schools included communication of Christian faith, best accomplished through the children’s own language. Rosnes’ book is an examination of the resulting tension, its results, and various attempts at its resolution.

After an introductory chapter, Rosnes lays out her understanding of literacy in chapter two. For her, literacy is not singular, but plural—literacies—and each are “ideologically imbedded” (19). For example, the literacy that enables governmental decision making is not the same as the literacy that enables office bookkeeping or the literacy that cultivates religious faith. Schooling has its own literacy, “bounded by culturally normative expectations of correctness, neatness, organization and time management” (24) and often distanced from the daily world of the participants. Control of each literacy and the space that will be allotted to it (45) is not an inconsequential matter for either church or government, and the resulting interplay of competition and compromise in Malagasy education is dramatic.

In chapter three Rosnes elucidates her methodology. A missionary child who grew up using Malagasy, French, and her native Norwegian, Rosnes was well equipped to research the mission archives in Stavanger and church and government archives in Antananarivo. In addition, she interviewed individuals who had been involved with the Lutheran school system in Madagascar—Norwegian as well as Malagasy, instructor as well as pupil. Her analysis understands the data in terms of two institutional frames (governmental or mission), six fields of action (for example, official educational policy, relations with the government, and relations with locals) with accompanying genres of communication, and three foci of discourse (secularism and religion, language, and identity).

Chapters four and five are the heart of the study, looking at “School Literacies During the Mid-Colonisation Period” in the 1920s, when regulations on teaching in Malagasy were stringent, and then “School Literacies During the Independence Period” in the 1950s and 1960s, when repeated governmental attempts to make Malagasy more prominent were for various reasons reversed. The colonial government discouraged Malagasy (the Merina dialect of central Madagascar) as part of the French politique des races, “an ideology promoting regionalism and fighting nationalism mainly through promoting the coastal population as a counterbalance to the Merina dominance” (50). But once established, it was a policy difficult to reverse, and French remains the language of instruction in the schools of independent Madagascar today.

Chapter six explores the literacy work in the city of Betafo where the aforementioned interviews took place; chapter seven looks at the literacies in the context of the French secular republican experiment versus the mission’s evangelizing goal; chapter eight wonders about the social effects of language choice, creation, and promulgation; and chapter nine attempts a conclusion: “that the Protestant missions’ literacy work contributed to the development of an education for Malagasy people that provided an alternative to the education of the colonial administration” (158). It showed that “you could acquire reading and writing skills without using the French language” (158), an important lesson for identity and self-esteem.

Rosnes’ book comes with maps, graphs, charts, and pictures of printed literature. She includes seventeen pages of bibliographic references, archival material, websites, and interview citations, and concludes with an extensive index. The book is an impressive effort at a nuanced understanding of an extremely complex phenomenon. It will surely be sought out by students of missionary linguistic strategy, education in cross-cultural settings, and colonial history.