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195 chapter 6 Laboring for the Colony At nineteen, Hasina is in the terminale year at the state-run lycée. His age alone confirms he is an exceptional student, because his peers are typically a few years older than he.1 Hasina consistently earns high marks in school but, as he explained to me once, he feels as though some teachers refuse to take him seriously and treat him as an outsider. His name suggests that he is of highland origins, and he was in fact born in a town outside Antananarivo. Yet Hasina considers himself to be tsaiky ny Sambirano—a “child of the Sambirano”—and his peers accept him as such, because he moved to the north when he was only five, and he has lived in Ambanja since he was eight. He has no memory of his Merina father, having been raised since infancy solely by his mother, who is Tsimihety. She herself is educated through the lycée level and has long served on the secretarial staff of Ambanja’s county courthouse. By virtue of her civil service position, she was able to acquire subsidized housing for her family, which consists of Hasina and several younger siblings. My initial interview with Hasina was a memorable one: although relatively shy in class, he is a bright, articulate young man and consistently offered detailed answers to my questions. These often strayed into complex philosophical musings on the meanings of indigenous Malagasy concepts, although he was most taken with discussions of inequality in Madagascar and beyond. In this sense, he soon became a teacher of sorts for me. In 1994, we lived within a stone’s throw of each other’s homes, and so we sometimes sat together on his veranda exploring his ideas more informally after school when he was left in charge of his younger siblings as they played in the yard. Hasina was in fact the first to alert me to the historical significance of oppressive colonial labor practices. When I asked, “What would you like to talk about if you were to address a group of my students in the United States?” he replied: “As for me, I would like to teach others where Madagascar is, and who the Malagasy people are. I would talk about their lives. I would also tell them about the pride, the dignity of the Malagasy people. And then I would talk about SMOTIG”— that is, the Service de la Main d’Oeuvre des Travaux d’Intérêt Général (Manual Labor Service for Works of General Interest). This emerged as a favored topic during our subsequent meetings as well. Although three other young men—Jaona, Félix, and Foringa Josef—also spoke of SMOTIG, Hasina communicated with great force and passion the anger and humiliation associated with oppressive colonial labor policies. Thus, throughout this chapter, Hasina emerges as a principle guide. As Hasina made clear, wartime conscription was not the only form of labor forced upon the Malagasy; they were also regularly exploited during peacetime. In 1900, the French parliament passed a law requiring colonies to be economically self-sufficient in all areas except the military, and by 1901, to “ ‘liberate’ a work-force by creating a need for money” among the conquered (Covell 1987, 20), a head tax had been instituted in Madagascar (Thompson and Adloff 1965, 310). “Voluntary labor” (travaux volontaires), “public works” (travaux publics),2 “prestations” (prestations),3 “indigenous labor” (travail indigène),4 “national service,”5 “civilian conservation corps” and “civilian labor ‘army’ ”:6 these and other euphemisms in colonial and postcolonial documents describe what was, in fact, forced or corvée labor. Among the most dreaded forms were institutionalized under SMOTIG, a program started in the 1920s and abolished, at least on paper, in 1946.7 For Hasina and his peers, SMOTIG epitomizes the degree of suffering endured on a daily basis by Malagasy during sixty-four years of colonial occupation and attempts by the French to transform the Malagasy into the willing subjects of the empire. As we shall see, the French employed a host of strategies designed to colonize the minds of their subjects. Sakalava with few exceptions, however, remained steadfast in their refusal to submit to colonial domination, especially in response to its economic and ideological demands. SMOTIG nevertheless haunts the Sambirano ’s inhabitants as a specter of oppressive colonial hegemony. A HISTORY OF FORCED LABOR Colonial Beginnings Even prior to conquest in...

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