Malgachisation

The colonial language order and the demands that preceded the policy

Under French colonial rule (1897–1960) Malagasy remained the language of local communities, but French was the language of schooling, administration and documents. After independence in 1960 the First Republic likewise kept French as the official language, and during the troubles of 1971–1972 the use of French itself was criticised by the population. The demand was first raised in May 1972. On 13 May, around 100,000 secondary-school students struck across Madagascar, demanding among other things the abolition of the cultural cooperation agreement with France and the replacement of French-derived curricula and French teachers with curricula centred on Malagasy life and culture taught by Malagasy teachers. After Tsiranana's government fell and Gabriel Ramanantsoa's transitional government took over, an official malgachisation policy began to take shape. The term fanagasiana itself dates to the first decades of the twentieth century, as a concept born in contact between Malagasy and Europeans, and Richard Andriamanjato's AKFM demanded malgachisation of society, including nationalising foreign firms and communalising productive land, with rejection of French values and language.

Institutionalisation: statutes and the school system

It was within the Democratic Republic of Madagascar (the Second Republic, 1975–1992) that a malgachisation policy was established. The arrival of socialism in 1975 brought the nationalisation of the Malagasy economy and the democratisation of power and of teaching; Malagasy took on an ideological dimension tied to the socialist system, and the Malagasy Socialist Revolution Charter served as the expression of the new language policy. In Second-Republic political documents, the malgachisation of teaching is defined as harmonising the content and methods of teaching with the imperatives of the Revolution, that is to say the building of a socialist and genuinely Malagasy state. The stated language of instruction for 1975–1991 was Malagasy, against French under 1960–1975. Law No. 78-040 of 17 July 1978 set the general framework of education and training, renamed the education system MINESEB, and established a commission to develop a malagasy iombonana (common Malagasy), effectively a bridge between the official Merina-based Malagasy and the regional dialects.

From schooling to administration and the economy

In education the policy meant reinforcing the teaching of Malagasy at school at the expense of French: introducing Malagasy as the language of instruction at primary level and part of secondary level, reforming curricula to include national history and Malagasy culture, and training Malagasy teachers to progressively replace foreign staff. It aimed to improve access for pupils who did not know French and to build national identity through schooling. Beyond schooling, malgachisation covered administration and the economy: progressively replacing foreign staff, promoting Malagasy officials, expanding the use of Malagasy in administrative documents, and, in some economic sectors, strengthening citizen participation. From 1975 under Didier Ratsiraka this combined malgachisation with socialist policy. The policy also included replacing colonial place names with pre-colonial Malagasy names: Diego Suarez became Antsiranana. It involved deliberate language planning, creating technical and administrative terminology in Malagasy, translating administrative, educational and technical vocabulary, and debating Malagasy spelling and standardisation. Under the First Republic, from the early 1960s Tsiranana's government had created Malagasy-language commissions for technical and legal terminology, and various ministries (notably Justice in 1964 and Agriculture in 1965) developed their own vocabularies, but proponents of malgachisation found this insufficient.

Regional and social conflict: the Merina charge

In the face of the policy, the charge was that it was a Merina-imposition project: the official Malagasy promoted was the former central-highlands (Merina) variety, and coastal populations saw making Merina the official Malagasy as an attempt to impose Merina dominance, generating resistance in various regions to protect other dialects; a malagasy iombonana was promised as a transitional compromise. The sociolinguistic literature confirms this conflict: the Malagasy official language, standardised since the First Republic, is the former dialectal variety of the central populations, and the disagreement of the coastal population with the choice of a language named Malagasy was closely tied to its political and social connotations, with the French–Malagasy diglossia overlain by a Malagasy–Malagasy diglossia. The burden also fell unevenly across classes: after French was replaced by Malagasy as the language of instruction there was a shortage of books or educational programmes in Malagasy, while economic and political elites sent their children to private French-sponsored and Catholic schools, leaving roughly 1.5 million students trapped in the public system.

Outcomes and assessment

Scholars attribute the failure of the malgachisation of teaching less to the principle than to means: lack of human and linguistic resources, an insufficient lexical supply, and gaps in technical terminology that limited the domains in which Malagasy could expand, especially in schools and universities; a decade passed without concrete results. The learning of both languages suffered from code-switching and interference, and the return of French (refrancisation) became inevitable as French regained the status of language of instruction. By 1990 several schools still taught in French, and teachers struggling to teach in Malagasy still used French; severe rejection of French caused major harm, leading the Malagasy government to temporarily retain French, which coastal populations accepted in preference to the official Malagasy. Malagasy-language accounts report that the policy disappointed the population, that most participants in education judged that students did not master written Malagasy, and that Malagasy-speaking students found no work with a Malagasy diploma from 1983 onward. The state provided too few and poor-quality Malagasy textbooks, teachers were untrained and too few, there was no monitoring of teaching, and students mastered neither Malagasy nor French. A specialist essay on Ratsiraka's legacy argues that after two decades of socialism and Malgachisation (use of Malagasy as an educational language) under Ratsiraka, Madagascar had one of the worst education systems in the world; the same account states that there was a determined push for Education for All but that it was an experiment without proper planning or resources, trying in a few years what had not been done for generations, and that instead of educating everyone the reform produced students who did not know what they were expected to know at their grade levels, several generations of Malagasy, especially those completing secondary education from the 1970s to the 1990s, being widely known as the Sacrificed Generation. Positive results claimed for fanagasiana are also recorded: national pride and unity, a step toward genuine cultural and intellectual independence, a nationwide debate on Malagasy identity, and the valuing of oral tradition and traditional knowledge. Malagasy-language accounts add that fanagasiana increased access to schooling for the whole population, including rural residents who did not master French, while inadequate teaching materials and teacher training created new inequalities among Malagasy. The scholarly assessment concludes that despite its symbolic, constitutional and ideological status, Malagasy remained in a weak position against the instrumental value of French as a vehicular and external communication language, and that the school, chosen to promote Malagasy, progressively confined it further to a minorised status. A 2008 Malagasy press tribune libre asserts that the malgachisation of teaching was decided contrary to common sense by Ratsiraka's national-socialist policy and was a major source of discord used by opponents of national unity; this is polemical advocacy, not established fact. The same letter records the recurring argument that malgachisation meant the merinisation of teaching, perpetuating the intellectual backwardness of populations of the periphery, and that Malagasy lacked sufficient vocabulary to express modernity; its author disputes the first argument and treats the second as an enrichment problem rather than a defect. That letter characterises the 1975 malgachisation as badly thought out and badly executed, and as having totally discredited the Malagasy language.