ENSLAVED MALAGASY AND ‘LE TRAVAIL DE LA PAROLE' IN THE PRE-REVOLUTIONARY MASCARENES
Embargo until
Date
2007
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Journal of African History
Abstract
ABSTRACT: Malagasy speakers probably formed the single largest native speech
community among slaves dispersed into the western Indian Ocean between 1500
and 1900. In the eighteenth-century Mascarenes, Malagasy parlers (dialects)
served as a contact language, understood both by persons born in Madagascar and
by those with no direct ties to the island. Catholic missionaries working in Bourbon
and I ˆ le de France frequently evangelized among sick and newly disembarked
Malagasy slaves in their own tongues, employing servile interpreters and catechists
from their ecclesiastical plantations as intermediaries in their ‘work of the word’.
Evangelistic style was multilingual, in both French and Malagasy, and largely
verbal, but was also informed by Malagasy vernacular manuscripts of Church
doctrine set in Roman characters. The importance of Malagasy in the Mascarenes
sets the linguistic environment of the islands off in distinctive ways from those of
Atlantic slave societies and requires scholars to rethink the language and culture
history of the western Indian Ocean islands,
Description
Keywords
Madagascar, identity, cultural, slavery, Malagasy, Mascarenes, Revolutionary, Enslaved
Citation
48 (2007), pp. 457–79.