“When a boy learns, he may leave the village; when a girl learns, she may question it.”

(Rakotomalala, Hanitra, École, genre et pauvreté à Madagascar: Études de cas dans les régions Atsinanana et Vatomandry, INSTAT/UNICEF, 2022.)

Following the post about Malagasy women in Swahili region, I want to learn more about the education systems formal and informals girls were exposed to from now and then.

The North

I. Historical Context: The Indian Ocean as a Pedagogical Space

From the mid-18ᵗʰ century, the Indian Ocean formed a dense network of mobility between Madagascar, the Mascarenes (Île de France/Mauritius, Île Bourbon/Réunion, Rodrigues) and the East African coast.
Within this maritime system, education and religion became instruments of both conversion and cultural transfer. Girls and young women from Madagascar — especially those of noble descent (andriana) or mixed heritage (zana-malata) — were occasionally sent across the sea for instruction in convents, missions, or “maisons d’éducation” managed by Catholic or Protestant congregations.

The practice was encouraged by both missionary societies and colonial administrators, who viewed it as a means to “civilize” the Malagasy elite and strengthen cultural influence on the island.

A letter from the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1826 reports that “several young Malagasy females of rank are now placed under the care of the Sisters of St. Joseph at Bourbon, to be trained in Christian habits and the domestic arts.” (LMS Correspondence, Madagascar Series II, British Library Archives).

II. The Role of the Catholic Congregations in Bourbon (Réunion)

The Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de Cluny, established in 1817 in Bourbon by Anne-Marie Javouhey, were among the first to open boarding schools for Creole and Malagasy girls.
According to the Annales de la Congrégation des Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de Cluny (vol. 2, 1843),

“Several Malagasy pupils, daughters of chiefs or freed captives, received instruction alongside the daughters of Creoles and planters.”

These schools combined literacy, religion, and domestic education, aiming to form pious wives and mothers within the Christian household model. Yet for some Malagasy pupils, especially those from coastal noble families, this education became a stepping-stone to later roles as interpreters, teachers, or catechists back in Madagascar.

One of the earliest recorded pupils was Rasalama, daughter of a Betsimisaraka trader educated in Saint-Denis around 1828, who later helped establish a parish school near Fénérive.
Another, Marie Rahanitriniaina, was cited in Les Missions Catholiques (1874) as

“a Malagasy orphan educated at Saint-Denis, who returned to Tamatave to open a girls’ school under the direction of the Sisters of Cluny.”

III. Protestant and Anglican Networks: Mauritius as an Educational Hub

Parallel to the Catholic efforts in Bourbon, Mauritius — under British rule from 1810 — became a center for Protestant and Anglican education.
The London Missionary Society (LMS) and later the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) sponsored scholarships for Malagasy converts or their daughters to study at schools such as St Mary’s Home for Girls in Port Louis.

Mission reports from 1844 mention Raharimanana and Sahondra, two young Malagasy girls brought from Tamatave to Mauritius “to be educated as teachers and future wives of Christian pastors.” (LMS Archives, South Africa & Madagascar Correspondence).
Upon their return in the early 1850s, they contributed to founding the first Protestant Sunday schools for girls in Mahajanga and Foulpointe.

A passage from The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle (1841) records that:

“A small number of Malagasy girls, rescued from servitude or from the insecurity of the coast, are now under the guardianship of our sisters in Port Louis, learning to read, sew, and pray in both Malagasy and English.”

IV. Gender, Empire and Religious Agency

These schools reveal how religion, empire and gender intersected in the Indian Ocean. For the colonial powers, educating Malagasy girls abroad served a strategic purpose: creating moral exemplars and cultural intermediaries aligned with European norms.
For the congregations, it was an evangelical experiment, testing whether African and Malagasy women could embody Christian domestic ideals.

Yet, as anthropologist Jennifer Cole later observed of east-coast lineages, “women who moved between islands often returned with skills and capital that redefined their position within Malagasy kinship.” (Africa, 71 (1), 2001). Education abroad thus fostered unexpected forms of agency: several graduates became local catechists, translators, or founders of small parish schools on the coast between Toamasina and Fénérive.

V. Cultural Continuity and the Legacy of Transoceanic Education

By the late 19ᵗʰ century, the flow of Malagasy pupils toward the Mascarenes diminished as new mission schools opened in Madagascar itself (Antananarivo 1841, Fianarantsoa 1850).
However, the symbolic impact endured: Bourbon’s convents and Mauritius’s Protestant homes had created a first generation of women whose identity was both Malagasy and Indian-Oceanic.

These women — educated, bilingual, and often of mixed origin — transmitted to their daughters an awareness of the wider oceanic world, shaping what historian Dominique Bois later described as “la féminisation du littoral”, in which port cities like Tamatave became “spaces of women’s moral and economic visibility.” (Clio, 1997; DOI 10.4000/clio.376).

Conclusion

The religious schools of the Mascarenes thus played a subtle yet enduring role in the history of Malagasy women’s education.
Behind the rhetoric of evangelization lay a story of transoceanic sisterhood and adaptation, where young Malagasy girls crossed the sea to learn not only the catechism but the art of navigating between worlds.
Their trajectories — from Bourbon’s convents to Tamatave’s parishes — illustrate how education, faith, and the ocean combined to form one of the earliest chapters of female intellectual mobility in the southwest Indian Ocean.

Selected References

Annales de la Congrégation des Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de Cluny, vol. 2, 1843. Paris: Maison Mère des Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de Cluny.

Les Missions Catholiques, 1874, “Éducation des jeunes Malgaches à Saint-Denis.”

London Missionary Society Archives, Madagascar Correspondence Series II, British Library, 1826–1850.

British Parliamentary Papers, Correspondence Relative to the Persecution of Christians in Madagascar, 1840.

The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, 1841, “Madagascar Refugees at Mauritius.”

Cole, Jennifer, and Karen Middleton. “Rethinking Ancestors and Colonial Power in Madagascar.” Africa 71 (1), 2001: 1–37.

Bois, Dominique. “Tamatave, la cité des femmes.” Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 6 (1997), en ligne : http://journals.openedition.org/clio/376; DOI 10.4000/clio.376.