Madagascar: the insurrection of March 1947 traced at the Museum of the Photo of Antananarivo

Audio 01:25

At the Gendarmerie Museum in Moramanga, in eastern Madagascar, a replica of one of the three wagons where Malagasy nationalists were shot in 1947. © Laetitia Bezain / RFI

Text by: Laetitia Bezain Follow

5 mins

On March 29, 1947 in eastern Madagascar, groups of insurgents took up arms and revolted against the French settlers.

A bloody repression of the French army follows.

Portraits of nationalist heroes by Malagasy photographer Pierrot Men and the film

Tabataba

are shown at the Photo Museum to commemorate the event.

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In the projection room, the faces, the marked members of men and women parade and bear witness to their past as insurgents.

A page in the history of the Big Island often little known in detail by the population and young people in particular.

" 

March 1947

for me is still a mystery,"

says Stéphane, 21, one of the visitors

.

I just learned about everything that had happened.

This is a milestone in history, everyone knows that.

When we say March 29, we just think of violence, a great violence, but we do not ask ourselves about the differences of ideas of the people of the city and of the people of the countryside.

 "

Divergent strategies

Differences in strategies for freeing oneself from colonization as told, a floor below, in Raymond Rajaonarivelo's film,

Tabataba

, " 

noise 

" in French.

"There is the MDRM party (

Democratic Movement of Malagasy Renovation) which is for a debated independence, therefore without weapons,

explains Tsiory Randriamanantena, historian and director of the Photo Museum

.

A second struggle ensues which will be the armed struggle.

We see these two approaches which are totally different and which are today confused because when we say

"movement of 1947",

we are also talking about the MDRM which in fact has nothing to do with the insurgency itself, so armed struggle.

The party has been wrongly accused of being the instigator of this movement.

All the archives are open for 1947. All things are said, but they are not necessarily understood.

 "

 “ 

For example,

specifies historian, 

the very objective of these insurgents, because the insurrection was above all a response to the colonists who plundered the lands in the eastern part of Madagascar, hence the strong movement in that part. , these are things that are not necessarily understood today.

At some point in Madagascar's history, the event of 1947 was sort of rewritten.

During the First Republic, members of the MDRM party, which had nothing to do with the insurrection, were heroised and then during the Second Republic, President Didier Ratsiraka had heroised the combatants in order to establish a kind of nationalism in Madagascar.

For us, the objective is also to do memory work and to pay tribute to these people who fought for Madagascar.

 "

Often considered as the beginning of a long process of decolonization in French-speaking Africa, this insurrection, bloodily suppressed by the French, has left nearly 100,000 dead.

►To listen: Decryption - Madagascar 1947: repression and crisis of the colonial order

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