Word: madagascar
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Atop a hill in Tananarive, the capital of the great French island of Madagascar, stands a rose-colored palace that once housed the royal rulers of the land. Pointing to it one day last August, Charles de Gaulle, the first French Premier ever to set foot on the island, solemnly told a throng of 30,000: "Tomorrow you will be a state once more, as you were when that palace was inhabited." Last week, having voted an overwhelming (79%) yes for De Gaulle's constitution, the Malagasy, as the inhabitants of Madagascar are known, took the general...
...Better to Advance." Lying 250 miles east of the African mainland, larger than France and Belgium combined, Madagascar had a highly developed form of law and government before the Europeans ever got a foothold there. Its people are not African, being predominantly of Malayo-Polynesian stock. Nor are its plants and animal life. Madagascar is the home of the wide-eyed lemur, of some 800 known varieties of butterflies, nearly 300 kinds of birds, half of which are found nowhere else. It is also the home of the once proud Merina tribe, which conquered the island...
...results in the overseas territories were as astonishing. Only French Guinea, in the control of tough anti-Gaullist Premier Sekou Toure, voted no. Senegal, Niger, even supposedly sullen Madagascar came through with thumping oui majorities...
Savage Memories. At his first major stop-the large (230,500 square miles), lush island of Madagascar off Africa's East Coast-De Gaulle met with a lukewarm reception. In Tananarive, Madagascar's shady, boulevarded capital, a crowd of 30,000 gave him only sporadic applause even when he pointed dramatically to the baroque hilltop castle of the last native queen of Madagascar and declared: "It can be occupied again by the chief of the Madagascar state...
...reason for the crowd's reserve was obvious. De Gaulle was the first French Premier to dare even to appear in Madagascar in the past decade. The island's 5,000,000 inhabitants (who are divided into 20 distinct ethnic groups, but go by the collective name of "Malagasy") have not forgotten the savagery with which French troops put down the Madagascar revolt of 1947.* The political choice that De Gaulle offered Madagascar and the territories of French Equatorial Africa and French West Africa was 1) self-government within a federation (with foreign affairs, defense and economic policy...