by Faun Rice
translated ‘intimate councilor’ when it appears in the phrase ‘ mpitaiza andriana’
( mpitaiza of a prince), currently designates a nurse-maid, governess (male or
female), curer (male or female), priest or priestess who assures moral guidance, and
seems to indicate that the king was in some sense an eternal minor simply insofar
as he was andriana” (my translation from the French). This seems exactly right. Yet
this profound insight into the nature of Merina kingship was not further pursued,
as far as I’m aware, either by the author or by anyone else. Standard histories of
the kingdom continue to follow Édouard Ralaimihoatra (1969: 164–65), who
claims that the title of mpitaiza andriana was invented in the 1830s to deal with
the unprecedented situation of having a woman on the throne. Hence the entire
phenomenon has somehow been excluded from discussions of Malagasy kingship:
for example, of the seventeen essays brought together in the volume Les souverains
de Madagascar (Raison-Jourde 1983c), not one makes any mention of mpitaiza
andriana at all.
44. To get a sense of how shocking this would ordinarily be, in my experience, men
never used terms like that even to men of equal age or status unless they were drunk
and trying to start a fight.
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ON KINGS
all by themselves. In a larger sense—and this is clearly the case here—the or-
ganization of kingdom-wide ritual labor was itself directed not just toward the
material provisioning of royal households, but also toward the active shaping of
those offspring royal families produced. Everyone, in their own way, contributed
to the raising of royal children, not just in terms of feeding and clothing them,
but even in the broader sense of bringing them to full maturity: certain groups
carried out the circumcision rituals for princes, others were assigned to play
with princesses, and so on. Yet as a paradoxical result of the enormous focus
on the task of raising royal children, that task would always remain incomplete.
Kings and queens never quite grew up and never quite became autonomous.
They were, in a sense, permanent toddlers. This was both the key to their le-
gitimacy—they were cherished, their health and well-being were the common
project of the Ambaniandro, the common people or “under the day”—but also
an obvious limit to the exercise of power, since while childish displays of petu-
lance were only to be expected, as we shall see, the framing of the king as child
allowed everyone, in principle, to step in and impose gentle but firm maternal
discipline when the monarch was seen to have overstepped his bounds.45
What I am suggesting is that this is precisely the idiom through which the
relation between divine and sacred kingship here plays itself out. The idiom of
the king as dependent child provides a framework through which the arbitrari-
ness of power, even the arbitrary violence of individual kings—and there was
quite a bit of that in Merina history—not only makes sense, but can itself be-
come a token of legitimacy, if one that can also be easily contested.
The ritual system seen from the perspective of the child-king
So, why were Merina kings represented as children?
One obvious reason was that, for all they might be occasionally be hailed as
“fathers of the kingdom,” they ruled because they were children of someone else.
A king is a king because his ancestors were kings. Hence the constant invoca-
tion, at every ritual event, of the names of the royal ancestors. In the case of
commoners, this situation was reversed: their importance for the kingdom was
45. Similarly, there is a proverb everyone knows, ny marary no andriana, “sick people
are kings,” which suggests the same logic: sick people are the objects of constant
nurturant attention, must be indulged, but are at the same time helplessly dependent
on their carers. It’s no coincidence that curers can, in certain contexts, also be known
as mpitaiza.
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
295
the fact that they produced and fostered children themselves. This was brought
home most clearly in naming practices. Queen Ranavalona I, during her reign,
was known as Rabodon’Andrianampoinimerina—literally, “King Andrianam-
poinimerina’s little girl.” Her son, who became Radama II, is always referred
to in official texts as RakotondRadama, which in turn means “Radama I’s little
boy.” These names continued in use even after the rulers themselves became
quite advanced in years. Queen Ravanavalona was still being called “the little
girl” when she was eighty. Commoners, in contrast, tended as soon as they had
offspring to name themselves after their children, adopting teknonyms such as
“Rainikoto” (father of Koto) or Renibe (mother of Be).46
Similar naming practices have been documented elsewhere in the Austro-
nesian world (e.g., Geertz and Geertz 1964; Brewer 1981; Schrauwers 2004).
It seems a common side-effect of the tendency of aristocratic lines to monopo-
lize genealogies: once the royal line becomes the core organizing principle of
the kingdom, and local ancestors become unimportant, then only nobles are,
properly speaking, descendants. Certainly this came to be the case in Imerina,
where the ritual advisors of King Andrianampoinimerina, who reunified the
kingdom after its period of civil wars and is generally regarded as the founder
of the Merina state, first laid out the kingdom-wide arrangement of “twelve
sacred mountains,” each with its royal ancestral tomb of one of the “twelve who
reigned”—the great royal ancestors—which meant the memory of any local
royal ancestor who was not integrated into the new system became simply ir-
relevant, for ritual purposes. (This is, for instance, why no one remembers the
kings of Imamo buried in Fondanitra today. They didn’t make it into the new
system, so no one had any reason to remember them.)
The keepers of these royal tombs were, paradoxically, a group of men called
the velond-rai-aman-dreny, “Those Whose Mothers and Fathers Are Still Liv-
ing,” whose task it was to present various kinds of santatra, or “first-fruits,” at
royal ceremonies. From the late eighteenth century, they were drawn from eight
key ancestries, and these were considered to have the very highest and most
exalted position in the great system of royal service that anyone could possibly
46. In the nineteenth century, virtually every hova official who served in the government
bore such a teknonym. Since it seems unlikely that each one had children, one
has to assume that some had adopted or fostered children just to be able to do
so. Monarchs, on the other hand, only became defined as parents on their deaths:
Ranavalona I, known in her lifetime as “King Andrianampoinimerina’s little girl,”
became Ranavalonareniny, “Ranavalona the Mother,” afterwards.
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ON KINGS
have. These santatra were not limited to rice. Almost any object dedicated dur-
ing a ritual was considered santatra. Santatra of one sort or another had to be
brought for every major action or project the monarch undertook, from the
/> building of a new cattle pen to a military expedition, every time the monarch
appeared in public, and, crucially, at every major ritual marking the life-course
of royal offspring: birth, first haircut, circumcision, marriage, and so on. Hence
Those Whose Mothers and Fathers Are Still Living were sometimes said to
“care for ( mitaiza) the king when living, and bury him when dead” (Callet 1908:
260, 1185).
Whereas the cult of ancestors focused on the great kings of the past, first-
fruits were all about creating something new. Technically, all this followed from
the logic of Malagasy astrology.47 As our sources emphasize, all these rituals
were created by court astrologers and followed the basic astrological princi-
ple that, just as the fate of a child is determined by the hour of its birth, so
is the success or failure of any undertaking determined by the moment of its
beginning. Still, destinies are never inexorable. Hence, much of the Malagasy
astrologer’s art, then as now, consisted of “adjusting” or “repairing” destinies
( manamboatra vintana), through the assembling, manipulation, preservation, or
disposal of various symbolically potent objects: in this case, animals for sacri-
fice (not just oxen but eels, or forest animals like hedgehogs), rare woods and
plants, incense, honey from a living hive, baskets, stones, and even the unbroken
coins presented to the sovereign. These are the objects brought (literally “car-
ried”) by Those Whose Fathers and Mothers Are Still Living, and the Tantara
provides us with elaborate lists of them. So, despite the fact that these are the
same men and women who take care of the royal tombs, their principal work is
not commemorating the past, but preparing the way for the future. Insofar as
royal ancestors are relevant to these rituals, they, too, rather than the ancestors
in famadihana nowadays (who are locked back in the tomb after the ritual), are
something to be propitiated and then shunted off to someplace safe where they
cannot interfere with everyday human affairs. As the French colonial ethnog-
rapher Charles Renel (1920: 157–58) observed when speaking of santatra: the
ancestral order being seen as fixed, the creation of anything new was always a
47. There is a traditional system of astrological calculation common to the island, which
is based on the Arabic lunar calendar; at one time, knowledge of it was a monopoly
of certain in-marrying groups of Muslim immigrants and the Merina court
employed some of these, but by this time it had also been more widely popularized.
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
297
certain sense an act of defiance, and, therefore, seen as requiring an act of propi-
tiation directed at the ancestors themselves. This is presumably why calling such
actions “first-fruits” made sense to begin with: in each case, there is a similar
logic of appealing to authorities (whether king or ancestors) to lift some taboo
or restriction they could otherwise impose, and in doing so, subtly, banishing
them, at least temporarily.
* * *
All this matters because presentation of santatra was the apogee of the system
of ritual labor as a whole. First-fruits were presented either at moments when
subjects performed some great project for the king, or when royal children were
being shaped into proper adults. The obvious implication is that these two mo-
ments were in some a sense equivalent—that royal service, even if it involves
dragging trunks or making charcoal, extends the principle of caring labor for
the royal household to the population at large, infantilizing the king at pre-
cisely the point where the royal will was, by definition, absolutely sovereign and
unconditional.
It might be helpful to turn again here to the above-quoted passage about the
presentation of first-fruits of the rice harvest to the sovereign. In fact it occurs
at the very end of the exposition on santatra in general in the Tantara (Callet
1908: 48–61), as if this is what everything is leading up to. Recall the language:
“This was the custom from olden times: to honor him, as he is the child nur-
tured by the people, as he is the master ( tompo) of the land and the kingdom.”
Tompo means both “owner” and “master.” It refers not only to command of land
or other resources, but also to command over others’ labor. It’s also the root of
fanompoana, which literally means “the action of making someone else an owner
or a master.” So even the king’s mastery of his people, or ownership of the land,
is not an intrinsic quality. The people make him the master and owner by doing
whatever he says.48 What’s more, that willfulness, the tendency of the master
to give orders, the pure arbitrariness of sovereign power, is also what reduces
the sovereign to a permanent minor, and hence a cherished object of devotion.
48. In a similar way, the misconception that hasina “flows” can largely be traced back to
the existence of the abstract noun fanasinana, from the verb manasina, an identical
construction which means to “the action of causing someone or something to have
hasina”—for instance, by making offerings or observing taboos (cf. Graeber 2007a:
37–38).
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ON KINGS
As representatives of Queen Ranavalona I’s subjects announced to her in one
famous speech, spoken on the occasion of her assembling her people for fanom-
poana, royal service was a matter of performing “whatever your heart desires,
whatever sweetens your belly, whatever you wish to do with us, your playthings”
(Cousins 1873: 42).49 She was the sovereign with the power to do with her
subjects what she would. But by that same token she was ultimately a beloved,
but helpless, dependent child—and thus not fully responsible for her actions,
because in a certain sense, like any child, she stood outside the adult moral or-
der. If a toddler breaks the teapot, you might get angry, but you can’t really say
it was “wrong” of her to do so. Similarly, since it was the sovereign’s right to do
anything she liked, she could be “naughty,” but she couldn’t actually be wrong.
POPULAR CONTESTATION, WOMEN’S REBELLIONS, AND THE
RETURN OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD
At this point, I think, it is possible to pull the threads of this essay together.
The reader will recall that I began by describing how, after the abolition of the
monarchy in 1895, almost all past kings were immediately recast in the popular
imagination as oppressive and unjust, even as spoiled children, and suggesting
that this apparent overnight transformation couldn’t really have come out of
nowhere. At this point, we can certainly understand where the notion of the
king as child was coming from. It’s the linchpin of the system of ritual labor on
which the kingdom was founded. The question, instead, is how is it that royal
immaturity came to be considered objectionable, and not endearing.
The other question is why the uneasiness with royal power first manifested
itself in a broad rejection of male kings in favor of female ones. Why did kings
come to be viewed like the contemporary image of Leiloza, as self-indulgent
child
-princes endlessly making up oppressive new tasks for their subjects, while
even notoriously violent and tyrannical female sovereigns like Ranavalona con-
tinued to inspire the devotion of their subjects?
It might not be possible to answer this last question definitively, but if we
reread Merina history through the terms that have been laid out so far in this
essay, it becomes a lot easier to understand. If nothing else, the story begins to
49. “Fa izay sitrakv ny fonao sy mamin’ ny kibonao sy tianao hatao aminay amin’ ny
filalaovana.”
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
299
look very different to the received official history. Because, in fact, at just about
every point in that history where one finds an acute crisis of royal authority,
one also finds these same themes cropping up: the childishness of displays of
arbitrary royal power; the people as nursemaids, or as embodiments or avatars
or royal ancestors, or both.
* * *
Now, it’s easy enough to see how the notion of the people as nursemaids could be-
come a language of political protest. And indeed it regularly did. Here’s a speech
reported to have been made by representatives of the town of Alasora, appealing
to King Andrianampoinimerina to remove the local lords ( tompomenakely) who
had been appointed to rule over them:
Children are sweet, but when they bite the breast, they must be pushed away. . . .
Don’t give us any more children to take care of, but if you please, let this become
land directly under your own control. Alasora is a place of abundance, but those
who’ve wound up here in the past have revealed the evil of their ways; let us no
longer take care of them, because you have naughty children, and we the people
have been fooled. (Callet 1908: 1043)50
Oral traditions suggest that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
nature and extent of royal power were under constant negotiation. While in
principle, there were no limits at all on what a king might do, and kings did,
often, act quite arbitrarily, the mpitaiza andriana had the power to admonish,
chasten, or even mobilize the people to remove them. This was particularly true
of royal councilors, who at the time acted as the principal representatives of