Malagasy Christianity — the Self-Carried Church

The London Missionary Society reached Madagascar in 1818, and its most consequential work turned out to be alphabetical. Within a decade Malagasy had a written form, a printing press and, by 1835, a complete Bible. Then the door slammed. Queen Ranavalona I banned Christianity in 1835 and expelled the missionaries. Rasalama, the first Malagasy martyr, was speared in 1837, and for the next quarter-century believers were hunted, enslaved, and thrown from the cliff at Ampamarinana above the capital. The church did not merely survive the persecution. It grew through it, without foreign clergy, on the Bible it had been left and hymns its own people wrote, and when the missionaries were allowed back they found far more Christians than they had left behind. Ranavalona II was baptized in 1869 and burned the royal talismans, and the church became the establishment it had once been martyred by, until the French conquest of 1895 ended the kingdom that housed it.