I first came to understand slavery in its most intimate and deeply rooted dimensions when I was in tenth grade. Our history teacher, Mr. Dinel, showed us La Controverse de Valladolid, and that moment has stayed with me ever since. It followed a much earlier and deeply unsettling experience in fifth grade, when a substitute teacher asked us to find out whether we were descended from Andevo or Hova. The scandal that followed revealed how alive those categories still were. Between those two moments, I began to understand slavery as more than a distant historical system. I came to see it as something woven into social memory, identity, silence, and inherited wounds.
Some votes carry a meaning that extends far beyond diplomacy. They engage memory, historical truth, and the way a country chooses to stand before itself.
In the film version of La Controverse de Valladolid, the scene unfolds like a tribunal of conscience. Learned men sit in judgment while Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda debate whether the Indigenous peoples of the Americas are fully rational human beings endowed with rights, or whether they belong to what Sepúlveda, drawing on Aristotle, calls the category of “natural slaves.” The violence of the scene lies in its intellectual and moral force: powerful men calmly placing another people within either full humanity or a condition suited to domination.
Its disturbing power comes from the fact that the argument appears in the language of civilized reasoning. Sepúlveda presents the Spanish as more rational and more civilized, and from that claimed superiority derives a right, even a duty, to govern peoples he describes as inferior, barbarous, and incapable of proper self-government. Las Casas responds by affirming that Indigenous peoples possess political organization, laws, and reason, and therefore belong fully within the human community. What unfolds is a struggle over the transformation of difference into legitimate subjugation.
One precision matters here: the Valladolid debate belongs to a moment before “race” took its fully modern, biological form. Its vocabulary is theological, philosophical, and civilizational. Yet it clearly prepares the ground for racialization, because it normalizes the sorting of whole populations into superior and inferior groups, and gives conceptual structure to conquest, forced labor, and coercion. In that sense, it illuminates one of the early paths through which slavery and colonial domination came to be rationalized.
On March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Ghana-led resolution declaring the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and chattel slavery to be the gravest crime against humanity. For many African and Caribbean states, this vote carried more than symbolic value. It formed part of a wider movement toward truth, recognition, and reparative justice.
In that context, Madagascar’s reported non-participation calls for reflection.
It calls for reflection first because our history is closely bound to these questions. Madagascar has been shaped by systems of domination, forced displacement, the circulation of bodies under coercion, and social hierarchies that still await fuller collective examination. In our country, the history of slavery still calls for language, attention, and shared work. Historical truth creates the conditions for appeasement, and recognition opens the way toward meaningful forgiveness.
It also calls for reflection because a vote at the UN carries political, diplomatic, and moral meaning at once. In periods of transition, institutional fragility, or diplomatic dependence, votes become sites of negotiation, exchange, alignment, and strategic caution. That is part of the reality of multilateral politics. For precisely that reason, participation carries significance. It expresses a balance of power, a hierarchy of priorities, and a conception of responsibility.
And for that reason, an instruction to vote FOR would have carried real weight.
Voting FOR would have marked a direction. It would have signaled a willingness to engage our own blind spots with maturity. It would have affirmed a desire to deepen our national relationship to history, memory, and the legacies of enslavement. It would have shown that Madagascar seeks a place within a global conversation on justice with clarity and purpose.
It would have been a sign that historical truth strengthens a nation by making it more lucid and more mature. It would have been a sign that lasting reconciliation grows through recognition. It would have been a sign that Madagascar is ready to enter that process with seriousness.
This is about neither repeating international slogans nor applying external frameworks mechanically to our own history. It is about recognizing that some moments matter because a country’s voice gives shape to a direction. On this resolution, that direction appeared clear to me: to stand on the side of recognition.
Perhaps the deeper question is when Madagascar will choose, fully and collectively, to step into this work of memory, truth, and responsibility.
A country builds its future by meeting its history with courage and clarity.
And perhaps this is where La Controverse de Valladolid returns with particular force. What unfolded there reached far beyond a sixteenth-century theological dispute. It illuminated one of the moments in which domination acquired the authority of reason, morality, and civilization. Before race took its modern biological form, human difference was already being ordered into hierarchy, and hierarchy was already being shaped into legitimacy. The path toward racialization thus emerged through arguments, institutions, and silences that gave endurance to unequal recognition.
For that very reason, this history continues to speak to us. It invites us to recognize how these structures endure in memory, in social categories, and in political hesitation. Our responsibility today is to bring that legacy into the light and to affirm, with greater consistency and maturity, a shared and equal humanity.