by Faun Rice
from the superintendence of all the arrangements of Her Majesty’s household
down to the cleaning of her royal shoes; from presiding over the council of Gov-
ernment, or the running of a province, to the shouldering of a musket in war, and
the carrying of a stone or lump of earth in peace. Any and every labor could be
exacted at any and every time at her sovereign will and pleasure.
Fànompòana for the government, whether civil or military, was bad
enough; but it was made a hundred times worse by the fact that the system
involved, not only a multitude of petty oppressions and exactions by the persons
duly appointed to carry it out, but also the fànompòaning of one another. The
theory was that the unrequited service was rendered to the Queen, but unfor-
tunately it did not end with service to royalty. The organization requisite for
getting work done for Her Majesty was a system of subordination, by means of
which any person who had authority over another could make that person work
for his own benefit, and the inevitable result was that there was infinitely more
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ON KINGS
fànompòana done for private individuals than there was for the Government.
The peoples’ lives were often made a perfect misery to them. (Houlder 1912:
37–38)
Most accounts by foreign observers from the period contain similar observations
about the simultaneous legitimacy, universality, and abusiveness of fanompoana.
The principle that royal service was by its nature the unlimited personal
power of the sovereign helps explain one of the more peculiar features of the
archival record: the fact that, much though everyone who observed the func-
tioning of the kingdom talks incessantly about it, there is almost nothing about
forced labor in the government’s administrative documents themselves. This
never ceased to puzzle me while I was doing my own archival researches. Es-
pecially after the 1860s, almost everything has been preserved: the National
Archives contains thousands and thousands of school and military registers,
property censuses, court transcripts, grievances, audits, and administrative cor-
respondence of every sort. By compiling everything I could find concerning the
area immediately surrounding Leiloza’s tomb in Ambohitrambo,30 I was able to
reconstruct a quite detailed sense of how the government worked and what the
day-to-day experience of governance was like. I was even able to reconstruct the
organization of work brigades for fanompoana, since “100s” and “1000s”, that is,
districts responsible for providing teams of either a hundred or a thousand male
or female workers for royal labor projects, were the basic administrative units.
The one thing on which I could get virtually no information was what those
teams were actually made to do. It was all the more surprising since, for all the
fact that, say, taxes were, as Houlder remarked, very light and largely symbolic,
tax assessments and receipts were meticulously registered, down to the penny.
But on labor duties there was virtually nothing written down at all.31
30. The region selected was, to be more precise, what was often referred to as “Eastern
Imamo.” It included everything between the Ombifotsy and Onilahy Rivers, from
Ambohibeloma in the north to Arivonimamo in the south. Ambohitrambo is its
center.
31. The only exceptions I could find in the region in question was one document
concerning ironworking in a town called Vatolevy, and a couple of very late registers
of people summoned for gold prospecting in the desperate days before the French
invasion. The LL series in the royal archives does contain a few more detailed
documents from other parts of the kingdom, but, again, there are far, far fewer of
these than almost anything else.
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
283
Apparently, then, the personalized, arbitrary nature of fanompoana was seen
as so essential to its nature that to subsume it within the bureaucratic apparatus
would have been seen as a violation of principle—so much so that even register-
ing who was sent on what task might be considered to compromise the absolute
power of the queen.
So, what did people actually do in service of the queen at the height of the
nineteenth-century kingdom, and how did they conceive it? The question is
important because, as foreign observers uniformly insisted, the sense of absolute
legitimacy of fanompoana as personal service to the queen was really what held
an otherwise corrupt and often brutal government together. Here, we have to
turn, I think, from lists of what people had to do—which mostly don’t exist—to
lists of what they didn’t have to do: that is, lists of tasks from which especially
privileged groups were considered to be exempt. These do exist, and they give
us a sense of what generic fanompoana was thought to consist of. The lists of
exemptions, in fact, are strikingly uniform. They almost always include four pri-
mary sorts of work which always occur in the following order:
1. Manao Hazolava, or “dragging trees.” Since Imerina proper was largely de-
void of timber, it was necessary to form crews of workmen to drag the vast
trunks needed for royal houses and palisades from the edge of eastern forests
up to the center of the country.
2. Mihady Tany, or “digging earth.” This mainly refers to leveling and the mak-
ing of embankments for royal building projects.
3. Manao Ari-Mainty, or “making charcoal.” In practice this mainly involved
transporting baskets of charcoal produced in the eastern forests to the royal
court in the capital, Antananarivo.
4. Mitondra Entan’Andriana, or “carrying royal baggage.” Most often this in-
volved transporting imports bound for the court from the port of Tamatave
to the capital, but it could include any number of other transport duties,
including literally carrying the palace baggage when the monarch was
traveling.32
32. This follows the same order as the list given by Standing (1887b: 358), though I left
out Standing’s fifth category (building and maintaining roads and bridges) since it
does not appear in any Malagasy-language account. For evocations of the standard
list in nineteenth-century legal cases, see National Archives IIICC 365 f1:43–48
(Tsimadilo, 1872), IIICC37 f2 (Ambohitrimanjaka, 1893); for standard lists of
exemptions in the Tantara ny andriana, see Callet (1908: 411 [Andriamamilaza]
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ON KINGS
Once again, in every case, we have tasks which centered on dragging or carry-
ing heavy objects—usually, in baskets on one’s back or on one’s head. (“Digging
earth” might seem a partial exception, but in fact anyone who has ever taken part
in a large-scale digging project knows the lion’s share of the labor does in fact
consist of hoisting and carrying away containers of displaced earth.)
Now, obviously, to some degree the list is just reflective of material reali-
ties: nineteenth-century Imerina lacked beasts of burden or wheeled vehicles;
even the now-ubiquitous ox-carts had not yet come into general use; it was also
notoriously lacking i
n decent roads. As a result, just about everything had to
be moved by human beings, and often with great difficulty. But there’s clearly
more to it. Many of the more onerous tasks reported by foreign sources (tending
royal cattle, repairing streets and bridges) are conspicuously absent from the list.
Choosing these tasks as paradigms of fanompoana clearly drew on a sense that,
in the kingdom as in the household, carrying things for someone else was em-
blematic of subordination. Indeed, in the case of royalty the principle was taken
even further, because, as noted above, royals and officers of state did not walk on
the ground for long distances; like foreign visitors, they were carried everywhere
on palanquins borne on the shoulders of trained bearers. Royal bearers were
themselves a class of relatively esteemed specialists, of a status similar to royal
warriors (in the documents they are referred to as alinjinera, or “engineers.”)
Important court figures, or local grandees, tended to keep specially trained bear-
ers of their own, who usually formed an elite corps amongst their slaves.
Still, bearing the palanquin remains one of the most potent symbols of op-
pression ( tsindriana again) throughout Madagascar: as on the East Coast, where
memories of colonialism always seem to focus on the way local people were
arbitrarily summoned to carry officials and missionaries and planters about.33
and 545 [Antehiroka]); see also entries in the Firaketana (an early-twentieth-
century Malagasy encyclopedia) for Ambohibato, Ambohimalaza, Ambohimirimo,
Andriana, and Antsahadinta, all of which provide variations on basically the same
list.
33. A later ethnographer working on the East Coast reports:
Countless people—both those who had lived through colonial times and those
who were born well after it was over—told me about the palanquin. They never
failed to mention the fact that people riding in them urinated and defecated
on those below. Josef once commented, with his usual gentle, rueful smile,
“They must have deemed us Betsimisaraka less than human to act that way.”
Surely there is no more appropriate symbol of one people’s exploitation by
another than the image of the colonial official carried on the very backs of
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
285
Thus the lists of exemptions will, when they come to the fourth, occasionally
write, instead of “not to carry the royal baggage,” tsy milanja andriana: “not to
have to carry the king” (e.g., Domenichini 1982: 15)—or, even more colorfully,
tsy mibaby andriana, “not to have to carry the king ‘like an infant on one’s back”
(Callet 1908: 545).34 And in nineteenth-century Imerina, at least, one of the
most dramatic images of royal power—and one which, as we’ll see, made a
profound impact on the popular imagination—was the rounding up of people
to carry royal baggage when the monarch set out on a trip. This practice became
particularly destructive during the reign of Queen Ranavalona I (1828–61);
whenever the queen traveled abroad, she brought her entire court and enor-
mous quantities of furniture and provisions with her, so much so that she was
obliged to send ahead agents at each town along the way calling up almost
the entire able-bodied population as porters. This was a very ambivalent de-
mand, since carrying royal baggage was indeed personal service to the crown
and hence seen as inherently legitimate; but the results were usually frequently
lethal. Since those recruited were not fed, and the queen’s party tended to absorb
all available provisions in the regions through which it passed, hundreds if not
thousands would perish of a combination of exhaustion, hunger, and disease.
“Never,” wrote the queen’s secretary Raombana, after one particularly disastrous
trip to Manerinera, “was an excursion of pleasure more productive of famine
and death” (n.d.: 488).
Reversals: The king as child
If there is an “atom of hierarchy” in highland culture, I have suggested, it is the
dichotomy between the elder child, who speaks, and the younger one, who car-
ries. Children in fact learn about the nature of social rank largely through the
experience of carrying burdens—of being literally “oppressed,” pressed down by
the weight of objects balanced on their heads, or backs, or shoulders—objects
which, significantly, belong to someone else (or, in the case of babies, since small
the Betsimisaraka? Few indeed were the older men who had not suffered the
indignity. (Cole 2001: 165)
34. Perhaps unsurprisingly since carrying the queen’s packages was considered, in a
sense, almost the same as carrying the queen herself. William Ellis (1867: 256)
notes that inhabitants of the capital were expected to doff their hats and bow down
as anything belonging to the queen passed them on the street, much as they would
if the queen’s own person were to pass.
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ON KINGS
children are sometimes obliged to carry even smaller ones, actually are someone
else). Carrying is thus both the paradigmatic form of work and emblematic of
subordination; production, creation, is, in contrast, seen as much more similar to
speaking, which can create social realities, ex nihilio. One might say, in phenom-
enological terms, that the experience of physical compression implied by being
“pressed down” by something contrasts here with the ability to expand, or extend
oneself into the world.
The contrast can be observed in the most important forms of work within
the household itself—when a man is working a forge or a woman weaving,
it is general y the most senior person who actual y fashions the object, while
younger ones scurry back and forth carrying supplies—and in formal settings
(feasts, funerals, etc.) it is meticulously applied, as elders speak first, and it is
often considered strictly taboo for them to so much as pass a plate to their jun-
iors. It recurs on the level of the kingdom: when the ruler assembled his people
to pass down rulings or ask their permission to begin some project (say, drag-
ging trees to make a new palace), it was the representatives of andriana orders
who had the privilege of speaking first (Rasamimanana and Razafindrazaka
1909: 31).35
So far, these arrangements seem simple enough. But we’ve already seen
hints—in the image of the mother carrying her baby, in the peculiar concept of
the people carrying the sovereign, like a baby—that there might be something
more subtle going on. That as with the spirit mediums, at a certain point, sub-
ordination itself was seen as “turning” into a kind of covert power. And indeed,
just as in the famadihana and possession rituals mentioned earlier, the royal ritu-
als also contained at least a potential element of reversal. The ritual emphasis on
the people’s support for the king shaded into the notion that the king was him-
self a dependent child cared for by the people. Much like a toddler, kings were
assumed to be egocentric, irresponsible, petulant, given to destructive tantrums,
certainly not entirely in control of themselves; and thus it was sometimes the
responsibi
lity of their subjects to chasten or admonish them. Some nineteenth-
century texts state the matter outright. Here is a quote from the Tantara ny
andriana about the immediate family of the king:
35. In doing so, they represented the kingdom, in the same way an elder does his junior
(Callet 1908: 288). Cousins (1873, [1876] 1963) provides samples of the sort of
kabary made on such occasions.
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
287
The Royal Family are like infants nurtured by their parents. And it’s just like
taking care of children; this is why they’re referred to as “Children and Descend-
ants.” And it’s the people who nurse, nourish, and support—and by doing so,
honor —the Royal Family. (Callet 1908: 364)36
The verb here translated “nurture” is again mitaiza, which literally means “to
nurse.”
Let me take this step by step.
Even in ordinary usage, “carrying” has a double meaning. The verb mitondra
means not only “to bring” or “to carry,” but also “to lead.” Hence one can say a
person arrived “carrying a shovel” or “leading a detachment of a hundred sol-
diers”: it’s exactly the same word. Authority itself can be spoken of as a burden,
so that one “carries” a certain responsibility or public office; active governance
is a matter of “carrying the people” ( mitondra vahoaka), and the most common
word for governance is in fact an abstract noun, fitondrana, which might here
best be translated as “the manner of carrying.” This is also the word being used
in the quote above for “taking care of ” children— fitondrana, literally how one
carries them around.
These idioms, too, go back to relations of seniority in the family. In the
household, the duties one owes to one’s elders are often framed in terms of
a kind of reciprocity. Let’s return here to the woman with the baby on her
back, which I’ve suggested is the primordial figure for labor. In speaking of
child-rearing, carrying children was often invoked as a paradigmatic image
that summed up all the work of caring for, feeding, clothing, cleaning, teach-
ing, and attending to a child’s needs which parents—and of course particularly
mothers—were acknowledged to provide. Obligations of support which adult