Thirty Years in Madagascar

This is a remarkable survivor's account from the twilight of the missionary era. Thomas T. Matthews arrived in Madagascar as a young man and stayed for three decades, witnessing the island's transformation from a fragmented kingdom into a French colony. His memoir captures a world in flux: ancient religious practices yielding to Christianity, the brutal economics of the slave trade, and the complicated hopes and betrayals that attend any collision of civilizations. Matthews writes not as a distant observer but as a man who planted churches, learned languages, buried colleagues, and came to love a people not his own. The book endures because it offers an intimate, unvarnished look at a pivotal moment in Malagasy history, told by someone who was there for every chapter of it. For readers interested in missionary history, colonial Africa, or first-person accounts of worlds that no longer exist.