ABSTRACT
It is appropriate to begin an account of Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo’s life not with his own birth date, but with another date that was in a sense to define the boundaries of his personal investigations in life: October 1, 1895, the date of the final surrender of the Malagasy armed forces to the French, signalling the effective onset of French colonial rule in Madagascar. Less than a decade after this turning point in Malagasy history, Rabearivelo was born in Madagascar’s capital city, Antananarivo. He spent his entire life in and around this city, whose occupation by the French testified to the larger subjugation of the nation. He grew among a people not yet fully accustomed to the daily indignities of colonial rule and whose memories of recently lost independence remained vivid. But the remembrance of defeat at the hands of a foreign army was just as vivid, so that the notion of political independence seemed irreversibly associated with Malagasy pre-colonial history, something to be recalled rather than a future possibility to be anticipated.
