The Malagasy Uprising (; ) was a Malagasy nationalist rebellion against French colonial rule in Madagascar, lasting from March 1947 to February 1949. Starting in late 1945, Madagascar's first French National Assembly deputies, Joseph Raseta, , and Jacques Rabemananjara of the Mouvement démocratique de la rénovation malgache (MDRM) political party, led an effort to achieve independence for Madagascar through legal channels. The failure of this initiative and the harsh response it drew from the Socialist Ramadier administration radicalized elements of the Malagasy population, including leaders of several militant nationalist secret societies.
On the evening of 29 March 1947, coordinated surprise attacks were launched by Malagasy nationalists, armed mainly with spears, against military bases and French-owned plantations in the eastern part of the island concentrated around Moramanga and Manakara. The nationalist cause was rapidly adopted in the south and spread to the central highlands and the capital of Antananarivo by the following month, with the number of Malagasy nationalist fighters estimated at over one million.
By May 1947, the French began to counter the nationalists. The French tripled the number of troops on the island to 18,000, primarily by transferring soldiers from French colonies elsewhere in Africa. The colonial authorities sought to fight on the physical and psychological fronts and engaged in a variety of terror tactics designed to demoralize the population. The French military force carried out mass execution, torture, war rape, torching of entire villages, collective punishment, and other atrocities such as throwing live Malagasy prisoners out of airplanes (death flights).
The estimated number of Malagasy casualties varies from a low of 11,000 to a high of over 100,000. The nationalists killed approximately 550 French nationals, as well as 1,900 Malagasy auxiliary men of the French army. By August 1948, the majority of the nationalist leaders were killed or captured, and the Uprising was effectively put down by December 1948, though the last armed resistance was only defeated in February 1949.
The violent repression of the nationalist insurgency left deep scars in Malagasy society. A generation of the managerial class was wiped out, creating challenges for the country when it achieved independence in 1960. Madagascar's first three deputies were arrested, tortured and kept in prison until they were given amnesty in 1958. Another leader who survived the conflict, Monja Jaona, was also jailed for nine years and then founded the Madagascar for the Malagasy Party (MONIMA), which has had considerable influence on Malagasy politics. France classified most documents related to the Uprising, and the French government maintained silence on the subject until French president Jacques Chirac termed it "unacceptable" during an official visit to Madagascar in 2005. Several Malagasy directors have set films in the period of the Uprising. In 1967, the Malagasy government declared 29 March an annual holiday, and in 2012, a museum dedicated to the Uprising was inaugurated in Moramanga.
Background
By the close of the 19th century, Madagascar was largely under the control of the Kingdom of Imerina, with its royal palaces at its capital in Antananarivo. Although the kingdom had existed since the early 16th century, it expanded its control beyond its traditional borders in the 1820s under King Radama I, who the British government officially recognized as the sovereign over the entire island of Madagascar. After several failed attempts to impose its authority over the island, France used military force to capture the royal palace in September 1894 and exiled Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony upon officially colonizing the island in February 1895. Queen Ranavalona III was allowed to remain as a figurehead until the emergence of a popular uprising, termed the Menalamba rebellion, for which the queen was held responsible. The rebellion was harshly crushed, and the queen was exiled in 1897.
The Menalamba rebellion was only the first manifestation of ongoing opposition to French rule that occasionally erupted in violent clashes between the Malagasy and the colonial authorities in Madagascar. Secret nationalist societies began to form in the 1910s. Conscription of Malagasy soldiers to fight for France in World War I strengthened resentment of foreign rule, and in the interwar period these nationalist organizations proliferated. Germany's defeat of the French Army and occupation of France in 1940, the imposition of a Vichy regime in Madagascar and the subsequent capture of the island by the British in 1942 further tarnished the colonial government's image. Popular anger was especially aroused by its policies of forced labor in lieu of taxes, involuntary conscription into the army to fight in World War II, and the required contribution of large quantities of rice per head annually.
Malagasy hopes for greater sovereignty were stirred by remarks given by General Charles de Gaulle at the Brazzaville Conference in 1944, where de Gaulle announced all colonies were thereafter French overseas territories entitled to representation in the French National Assembly, and promised citizenship rights to residents of its overseas colonies. Despite the partial implementation of these reforms, forced labor on French-owned plantations and other rights abuses in Madagascar continued unabated. The nationalist secret society Panama (Patriotes nationalistes malgaches) was founded in 1941, followed in 1943 by another called Jiny after a type of local red bird. Both organizations, which sought to achieve independence by force if necessary, saw their membership swell during this period.
Following the end of the Second World War, several key Malagasy nationalist leaders attempted to achieve independence for Madagascar through legal means. At the first post-war constituent assembly convened in Paris in November 1945 to draft the constitution of the French Fourth Republic, Madagascar was represented by two doctors named Joseph Raseta and Joseph Ravoahangy. Together with future writer Jacques Rabemananjara, in early 1946 they formed the Mouvement démocratique de la rénovation malgache (MDRM) political party, whose platform was built on national independence from France.
All three leaders were the descendants of Hova who had been politically prominent in the former Merina royal court. The movement was pacifist, and while it sought independence for Madagascar, it embraced the French vision of the island as part of the global Francophone economic and cultural community. Their platform garnered mass support that cut across geographic, ethnic and class divisions, and in November 1946 the trio were elected to represent Madagascar as deputies (députés) in the French National Assembly. The Malagasy deputies submitted a bill to grant independence for Madagascar from French rule, but French deputies rejected it.
The deputies attracted the disapproval of France's Socialist Prime Minister, Paul Ramadier, and the Minister of the Colonies, Marius Moutet. The French had humiliatingly had to ask Britain to yield Madagascar after World War II ended, and French political leaders suspected that Britain or South Africa would attempt to wrest Madagascar from France. The MDRM quest for independence was therefore received as a blow to French prestige and authority, and it raised the specter of the violent conflict launched by Vietnamese nationalists in French Indochina the month before.
Moutet responded stridently, declaring a "war against the Malagasy autonomy movement". The refusal of the French government to support a democratic process toward independence for Madagascar drew criticism from the United States government, which strongly denounced the French reaction and criticized its leadership. It also radicalized the leadership of the militant nationalist groups in Madagascar. Sensing the worsening mood in the country, on 27 March 1947 deputies Raseta, Ravoahangy and Rabemananjara jointly issued a statement, urging the public to "maintain absolute calm and coolness in the face of manoeuvrings and provocations of all kind destined to stir up troubles among the Malagasy population and to sabotage the peaceful policy of the MDRM."
Independence movement
Nationalist insurgency
The Malagasy Uprising began on the evening of 29 March 1947, the evening before Palm Sunday. The timing had additional significance as the historic date of the traditional Merina Kingdom fandroana new year's festival, historically celebrated by a ritual period of anarchy followed by the Merina sovereign's reestablishment of order. Malagasy nationalists, chief among them the members of the nationalist secret societies Panama and Jiny, coordinated surprise attacks in the eastern part of the island at the Tristani police camp near the rail line at Moramanga, in the coastal town of Manakara and at several points along the lower Faraony River where key French plantations were located. Furthermore, a unit of the Tirailleurs Malgaches (Malagasy colonial troops) mutinied at Diego-Suarez and defected to the rebels.
Most historians share the view that the militants escalated the conflict toward violence on the basis of false information transmitted by duplicitous individuals or groups attempting to neutralize the nationalist influence. Members of VVS and Jiny involved in the initial attacks have stated that their organizations were obliged to attack after the signal to take action was transmitted to them by a group that was later discovered to have secret ties to the national police. Researchers have documented reports of nationalists whose member organizations joined the conflict upon commands issued by the colonial police and French settlers living in Madagascar. Despite the role of the militants in leading the uprising, the colonial authorities immediately held MDRM responsible for the movement and responded by targeting the party's members and supporters. The extent to which the MDRM was actually involved in the uprising is disputed; most leaders of the party later claimed that they were innocent, whereas French intelligence maintained that the party had forged links with foreign powers like United Kingdom to channel arms and ammunition to militants. Later appraisals suggest that the MDRM was infiltrated by members of militant secret societies before the rebellion, and that though members of the party aided the insurgency, the party as whole did not.
The French generally suspected that the rebellion was secretly supported by foreign powers, most significantly by the United Kingdom. Two British nationals, namely ex-Major John Morris, and Major Nicholson who worked at the British consulate in Antananarivo, were accused of stirring up Malagasy nationalist activities. Morris was eventually expelled from the island as a result. There also circulated rumours about American support for the rebels, though no evidence emerged to support these claims. In fact, the rebels were almost completely isolated from outside aid, and extremely poorly supplied with modern weaponry. They likely never possessed more than 150 rifles and three machine guns. Most rebels had to resort to spears, and had minimal protection from the firearms of the French military. Nevertheless, the rebels invented encirclement, ambush and human wave tactics that allowed them to defeat their better armed opponents on several occasions.