Harries, Patrick

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Book Reviews 191nial and postcolonial Congo-Brazzaville, will learn from this fine book.Florence BernaultUniversity of WisconsinMadison, Wisconsinbernault@facstaf.wisc.eduPier M. Larson. Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an IndianOcean Diaspora. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xx + 378 pp. List ofFigures. List of Maps, Tables, and Graphs. Archives Abbreviations. Index. $108.00.Cloth. $35.99. Paper.Debates around creolization and ethnicity have dominated discussions onthe history of ways in which Africans and their descendents have identi-fied themselves in the Americas. In Ocean of letters, Pier Larson takes thesedebates to the western Indian Ocean, where he examines the construc-tion of a Malagasy-speaking diaspora in the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies. In the process he turns to a history of language and reading todecipher the ways in which these settlers forged a sense of identity tied tothe Big Island and its political communities. Set within the constraints ofchanging structures of demography, religion, slavery, politics, and imperial-ism, this is cultural history at its best."The Indian Ocean is not the Atlantic" (350), Larson helpfully informsus toward the end of his book, acknowledging Hubert Gerbeau. Europe-ans formed only a small part of the swirling populations brought to theMascarene and Comoro islands from Arabia, Africa, India, and Madagas-car. Even at the Cape, men and women of "Mozambican" and Madagas-can descent made up close to a third of the population in the first half ofthe nineteenth century. Larson moves away from the archives and travelaccounts of the region, dominated by French and English, to focus on thevarious speech forms carried to the islands by waves of Madagascan immi-grants. He is particularly concerned to trace the fluctuating strength ofthese language communities over time and in space. This allows him to testsociological theories in the light of evidence drawn from a very wide rangeof primary and secondary sources. The result is an analysis set against the"cultural survivals" found by historians in recent work on Atlantic Americaand the process of "creolization" thought to dominate language and life inMauritius. Negotiating his way through these two extremes, Larson devel-ops a theory of "creolite-as-versatility" that sees language and identity asresources to be exploited with agility rather than as components of a zero-sum game. This leads him to argue that Madagascan identities and "ances-tral tongues" existed alongside, and successfully interacted and competedwith, other language forms into the middle of the nineteenth century, espe-cially French-based Creole in Mauritius. His book calls for scholars to taketerms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1353/arw.2011.0005Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 10 Jul 2017 at 14:57:06, subject to the Cambridge Core192 African Studies Reviewseriously the historical role of language in the construction of identity, andspecifically for them to recognize the major role played by Madagascans inthe history of the western Indian Ocean.The history of the transcription of language forms in Madagascarstarts with local diviner-healers who produced texts in Arabic script func-tional to their calling. When the French established a small colony on thesoutheastern corner of the island in the mid-seventeenth century, Catho-lic missionaries continued this tradition, producing small catechisms, thistime in Latin script. The French took this linguistic tradition to Bourbon(Reunion) when they abandoned their foothold on the Madagascan coast;and when they occupied lie de France (Mauritius) in the wake of the depart-ing Dutch, they peopled both islands with large numbers of Madagascanslaves. It was this community that, for the hundred years before the end ofthe slave trade in about 1830, "probably first forged... a proto-Malagasynational identity" (105). This community also fused its various dialects intoa creole language that served for about sixty years after 1730 as a broadlingua franca for the many ethnic peoples brought to Mauritius as slaves. Itwas only once Mauritian-born Creoles came to dominate the slave popula-tion that Malagasy lost its role as "an inter-ethnic contact language" (105),although many people continued to speak it into the 1850s. This challengesthe view that slaves imported from various parts of Africa and Madagascargave up their languages and adopted French, or a French-based Creole,in Mauritius. It is not to argue that Malagasy "survived," but rather that itchanged and adapted, and was spoken, together with other languages, atspecific moments for specific reasons.This brings us back to the "Ocean of Letters" in the title. In the lateeighteenth-early nineteenth centuries, the linguistic work of French mis-sionaries and Mauritian colonists compressed Malagasy as an oral mediuminto a standard form. This written language reflected their religious andscholarly concerns rather than the real world of the slaves, who spoke (dif-ferent) versions of Malagasy. Once the British seized control of Mauritius in1810, they increasingly turned to Welsh Protestant missionaries who couldserve as imperial emissaries in neighboring Madagascar. The Welsh mission-aries based their version of the written "Malagasy" language on fieldworkand a close study of the highland Merina dialect. The language transcribedby the Welsh particularly served the interests of the British, for alongsidetheir guns and ammunition, it helped advance the imperial frontiers ofBritain's powerful Merina allies on the Big Island. This new, standard lan-guage, built around a translation of the full Bible in 1835, would soon dis-place the earlier, more diverse version of the language developed by theFrench Catholics and colonial scholars.The new written Malagasy language spread to the Mascarenes and eventhe Cape as the Merina cut their ties with Britain and suppressed the prac-tice of Christianity. This took waves of exiles literate in Malagasy into thecorners of the western Indian Ocean just as the end of slavery in Mauri-terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1353/arw.2011.0005Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 10 Jul 2017 at 14:57:06, subject to the Cambridge CoreBook Reviews 193tius allowed Malagasy-speakers to form their own settlements of freemen.Together with the introduction of mass literacy training, these factors ledto a renaissance of the Malagasy language and a resurgence of Malagasyidentity in the late 1830-'40s. But this was not a Malagasy tied to one singlepolitical kingdom on the Big Island, for it came to reflect the influenceof several languages, especially French, and portrayed the entire island ashome. In this way, the "inchoate Malagasy national identity" arising in Mau-ritius (291) was the product of an entangled creolization.A frenzy of letter-writing, or Briefwut, fed this process as ex-slaves andChristian refugees expressed their belonging in messages composed inthe Malagasy language. Pier Larson is at pains to stress that historians haveignored the importance of the Malagasy diaspora because of their igno-rance of this language and its history. This history of "invisibility" restedon the earlier refusal of slave masters to take an interest in the culture ofservile laborers considered little more than commodities. It was also builtinto the letters and reports of missionaries, such as those at the Cape, whoremained ignorant of the language and culture of Malagasy slaves and free-men. Pier Larson successfully challenges this invisibility in Ocean of Letters,and through a keen eye for the relationship between language and identity,both recaptures this forgotten history and makes an important contribu-tion to debates about creolization.Patrick HarriesUniversity of BaselBasel, SwitzerlandPatrick.Harries@unibas.chD. A. Low. Fabrication of Empire: The British and the Uganda Kingdoms,1890-1902. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xix + 361 pp. Bibliogra-phy. Index. $111.00. Cloth.Anthony Low is arguably the most comprehensive British historian of theBritish Empire; he is certainly the doyen of British historians of East Africa.From 1951 to 1958 he taught at Makerere University College, Uganda; for awhile he was Uganda correspondent for the London Times. After five yearsin Canberra he moved to the University of Sussex, where he took a lead-ing part in setting up the School of African and Asian Studies. From 1973to 1982 he was back in Canberra, where he became vice-chancellor of theAustralian National University. Then followed a decade in Cambridge, Eng-land, as professor of the history of the British Commonwealth.Low's first research, for an Oxford doctorate, concerned relationsbetween the British and the Baganda up to 1900. His first major publica-tion, in 1960, was a brilliant analysis of the negotiations that resulted in theUganda Agreement in 1900. As a seminal investigation of African agency,it was comparable in importance to Terence Ranger's 1967 study of theterms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1353/arw.2011.0005Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 10 Jul 2017 at 14:57:06, subject to the Cambridge Core

Book Review: Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora: Larson Pier M. . Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xx + 378 pp. List of Figures. List of Maps, Tables, and Graphs. Archives Abbreviations. Index. $108.00. Cloth. $35.99. Paper

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