Background
He was born on June 23, 1914, at Maraontsetra on the east coast.
He was born on June 23, 1914, at Maraontsetra on the east coast.
Educated at Tananarive where he was at first destined for the priesthood and went on to study at the Jesuit Seminary.
Not ordained, he entered the French administrative service as a clerk in 1936. Most of his spare time he spent writing and he edited the literary magazine “Revue des Jeunes de Madagascar”. After making his mark as a poet with a prize from the Alliance Universelle de la Poesie he was sent as a member of the Madagascar delegation to Paris in 1939
for the 150th anniversary of the French Revolution. Because of the outbreak of war he stayed as a student in France taking an arts degree.
On his return to Madagascar in 1945 he was one of the founders of the nationalist organisation the Mouvement Démocratique de la Renovation Malgache. In the November 1946 elections he became a member of the French National Assembly for the east coast of Madagascar.
Elected in September 1960 for Tamatave he became a member of the National Assembly and a few weeks later was appointed Minister of National Economy. In 1965 he became Minister of Agriculture and two years later Minister of Foreign Affairs—a post he held until the military take-over in May 1972.
Arrested at the outbreak of the rebellion in Madagascar he was sentenced to death in 1948. When the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment he was detained in the maximum security prison at Nosy Lava, then transferred to Calvi on the west coast of the isle of Corsica. Released in 1956 he remained an exile in forced residence in France, continuing his writing and having poems published by "Presence Africaine". As part of the independence agreement of June 1960 he received an amnesty and returned to Madagascar.