Description

MADAGASCAR – MALAGASY LANGUAGE / EARLY MADAGASCAR IMPRINT:

William Edward COUSINS (1840 – 1939).

Antananarivo: London Missionary Society, 1873.

 

Malagasy, the principal language of Madagascar, is an Austronesian language, specifically of the Malayo-Polynesian family. Amazingly, its antecedents were brought to Madagascar in the 5th century AD by migrants who came all the way from Borneo (Malagasy is most closely related to the Maʼanyan language still spoken in Borneo). Malagasy subsequently incorporated various Bantu and Arabic loanwords due to trade and migration. From the 15th century, Malagasy was written using an Arabic-based alphabet called Sorabe.

Beginning in the mid-17th century France and Britain made several unsuccessful attempts to gain an enduring colonial foothold in Madagascar. However, King Radama I (reigned 1810-28), the ruler of the Merina Kingdom, which had unified Madagascar under its control, was ardently pro-British and tolerant of Christianity. He signed the Anglo-Malagasy Treaty of Friendship and Commerce (1817), which opened the country to the missionaries of the London Missionary Society (LMS), a British Protestant organization (founded in 1795) dedicated to spreading the gospel overseas.

The first LMS missionary, David Jones, arrived in Madagascar in 1818, followed by several others, who set up stations in various places across the island. To aid education and the spread of the gospel, the LMS established the first printing press in Madagascar at Antananarivo (Tananarive) in 1827. The press produced several important publications, but only in small print runs, including a catechism, psalms, individual books of the Bible, the Dictionary of the Malagasy Language (1835), and finally the first complete Malagasy Bible (1835). Importantly, largely through their printed works, the missionaries changed the standard from for writing Malagasy from Sorabe to the Latin script.

In 1828, upon the death of Radama I, Madagascar came under the rule of Queen Ranavalona I (reigned 1828-61), who loathed Christianity and the Western presence on her island. In 1835, she banned Christianity, forcing the LMS missions and its printing press to close, so ending the ‘incunable’ period of printing in Madagascar.

Upon Ranavalona I’s death in 1861, her successor Radama II changed government policy towards a pro-Western stance, with a toleration of Christianity. He duly invited missionaries to return to Madagascar.

In 1862, the LMS sent a large party of missionaries to Madagascar that included Reverend William Edward Cousins, who would become the era’s most famous translator and connoisseur of the Malagasy language; and John Parrett, a master printer, who brought with him a press, so seeing the revival of publishing on the island.

William Edward Cousins (1840 – 1939), a native of Abingdon, England, was accepted to the London Missionary Society as a young man, whereupon he joined the initial party that revived missionary activity in Madagascar. He soon gained a reputation for his superlative mastery of the Malagasy language and customs and was in due course entrusted to run one of the large parish churches in Antananarivo, whereupon he was known as a strident defender of the church’s independence from government interference. By the early 1870s, he was the foremost translator and writer of Malagasy, working closely with Parrett’s LMS press in Antananarivo.

Importantly, it had been discovered over the years that the 1835 Malagasy Bible, while a great achievement in its time, contained many errors. In 1872, Cousins was charged with being the ‘Principal Reviser’ for making a new translation of the Bible in Malagasy, a project that took 14 years of painstaking labour and that was completed, to great acclaim, in 1887. Cousins retired from field service in 1899, having spent 37 years in Madagascar.

Some of Cousins’ other major works include Malagasy Kabary [i.e., the laws promulgated by the Sovereigns of Madagascar], from the time of Andrianampoinimerina (1873); Malagasy Customs: Native Accounts of the Circumcision, the Tangena, Marriage and Burial Ceremonies, &c. (1876); Ny Fanekena Vaovao any Jesosy Kraisty Mpamonjy, Tompontsika: Nakambana araka ny paragrafy [The New Covenant of Jesus Christ our Savior, our Lord: Organized according to Paragraphs] (1873); Madagascar of To-day. A Sketch of the Island, with Chapters on its Past History and Present Prospects (1885); Twenty-five Years’ Progress in Imerina (1886); and the Ny Soratra masina, dia ny Testamenta Taloha sy ny Testamenta Vaovao [The Scriptures, the Old Testament and the New Testament] (1887), known as the “Revised Malagasy Bible”.

The Present Work in Focus

This is the first edition of William Cousins’ Grammar of Malagasy, based on his stellar command of the language. Published by the London Missionary Society Press in Antananarivo, it was contemporarily described as being the “By far the best Malagasy Grammar in English” [The Academy, vol. 23 (1883), p. 369] and, in many ways, it set the gold standard for how the language should be written and properly understood.

Importantly, Cousins’ lessons concern the Merina Dialect, the version of Malagasy that originated in the central highlands of Madagascar, which had since the early 19th century became the dominant and official dialect of the country.

Cousins’ work is divided into several sections, or distinct topical lessons: I. The Letters; II. Roots; III. The Derivatives; IV. The Verbs; V. The Nouns; VI. The Adjectives; VII. The Pronouns; VIII. The Numerals; IX. The Article; X. The Discriminative Particle; XI. The Adverbs; XII. The Prepositions; XII. The Conjunctions; XIII. The Interjections; XV. The Arrangement of Words in a Sentence; and XVI. Specimen of Analysis.

Interestingly, the present example of the work features extensive contemporary manuscript annotations and corrections clearly added by a deeply engaged student of Malagasy, most likely in Madagascar.

Cousins’ A Concise Introduction to the Study of the Malagasy Language was very highly regarded in its time and served the standard work on the subject for some years. It was reissued by the LMS Press in Antananarivo, with the second edition published in 1885 and the third in 1894. A French translation was issued in 1897 under the title Introduction sommaire à l’étude de la langue malgache.

A Note on Rarity

Like all 19th century Madagascar imprints, the present work is very rare. Even in its time it was said that it was “not easily obtained in England” [The Academy, vol. 23 (1883), p. 369]. We can trace 5 institutional examples of the present first edition of 1873, held by the British Library (2 examples); School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London; University of Cambridge; and the University of Pennsylvania. Moreover, we cannot trace any sales records for any other examples of the work since 1955.

References: British Library (2 examples): 12907.bb.1. and T 5592; School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London: EB87.927 /356568; University of Cambridge: S843.c.87.1; University of Pennsylvania: LIBRA 499.3 C836; OCLC: 83833108, 79566186; A Critical Dictionary of English Literature, and British and American Authors…, vol. 4 (1891), p. 397; James SIBREE, A Madagascar Bibliography (1885), p. 10; The Academy, vol. 23 (1883), p. 369; The Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine, vols. 1-2, (1875), p. 120; Trübner’s American, European and Oriental Literary Record (1880), p. 3. Cf. [re: background:] Carole HOLDEN, ‘Early Printing from Africa in the British Library’, The British Library Journal, vol. 23, no. 1 (1997), pp. 1–11.