“May Madagascar Live Long and Never Kneel”: Autonomous Medical Industries in Madagascar’s Democratic Republic (1975–1992) and the Politics of Memory

Abstract When the Covid-19 pandemic circulated worldwide in 2020, the Malagasy government responded by reviving domestic medical industries. In order to produce “#MadeinMadagsacar” anti-viral treatments, the state reclaimed a pharmaceutical factory in the capital city, Antananarivo, that had manufactured domestic drugs during the island’s socialist Second Republic (1975–1992). Drawing on extensive ethnographic and archival research on Malagasy medical politics, this paper examines how popular coverage and state media narratives of the pandemic response drew a direct through line to images of the socialist era’s embrace of anti-imperial autonomy in order to animate present-day rejections of global medical inequality. It first surveys the island’s socialist medical industries—particularly efforts for pharmaceutical manufacture and distribution—in comparison with earlier colonial-era policies, then illustrates how the revived factory became a key symbolic locus for pandemic response. Finally, it synthesizes scholarly analyses of the politics of memory in Madagascar to argue that novel pandemic conditions potently reformulated popular engagement with socialist medicine on the island.