The Sacrificed Generation

Youth and identity politics figure prominently in this provocative study of personal and collective memory in Madagascar. A deeply nuanced ethnography of historical consciousness, it challenges many cross-cultural investigations of youth, for its key actors are not adults but schoolchildren. Lesley Sharp refutes dominant assumptions that African children are the helpless victims of postcolonial crises, incapable of organized, sustained collective thought or action.

She insists instead on the political agency of Malagasy youth who, as they decipher their current predicament, offer potent, historicized critiques of colonial violence, nationalist resistance, foreign mass media, and schoolyard survival. Sharp asserts that autobiography and national history are inextricably linked and therefore must be read in tandem, a process that exposes how political consciousness is forged in the classroom, within the home, and on the street in Madagascar.

Keywords: Critical pedagogy

Lesley A. Sharp is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and author of The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town (California, 1993).

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Notes on the Text
Acknowledgments

I. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A CHILDREN’S HISTORY
INTRODUCTION
1. YOUTH AND THE COLONIZED MIND

II. THE PERPLEXITIES OF URBAN SCHOOLING: SACRIFICE, SUFFERING, AND SURVIVAL
2. THE SACRIFICED GENERATION
3. THE LIFE AND HARD TIMES OF THE SCHOOL MIGRANT

III. FREEDOM, LABOR, AND LOYALTY
4. THE RESURGENCE OF ROYAL POWER
5. OUR GRANDFATHERS WENT TO WAR
6. LABORING FOR THE COLONY

IV. YOUTH AND THE NATION: SCHOOLING AND ITS PERILS
7. GIRLS AND SEX AND OTHER URBAN DIVERSIONS
8. THE SOCIAL WORTH OF CHILDREN
CONCLUSION: YOUTH IN AN AGE OF NATIONALISM

Appendix 1. A Guide to Key Informants
Appendix 2. Population Figures for Madagascar, 1990–1994
Appendix 3. Population Figures for the Sambirano
Appendix 4. Schools in Ambanja and the Sambirano Valley
Appendix 5. Enrollment Figures for Select Ambanja Schools
Appendix 6. Bac Results at the State-Run Lycée Tsiaraso I, 1990–1994
Appendix 7. Students’ Aspirations

Notes
Glossary
References
Index