onkings
Page 52
1976: 41; Bloch 1986: 122–27, 135). Similarly, in the early part of Radama’s reign,
the king wore his hair long, in a style so full of plaits and curls it was said to take
up to three days to properly dress it (W. Ellis 1838, I: 287). In the spring of 1822,
however, Radama made a momentous decision: to sheer off his locks, and adopt
a military-style crewcut in the European fashion. What’s more, orders soon went
out that all subjects of miaramila status were to cut their hair in the same way.
This order was the culmination of a series of reforms that had the cumulative
effect of transforming fanompoana from a system of ritual labor, focused on the
royal household, to the organizing principle of a modern state. The unlimited
power of the sovereign to call his subjects up for labor was being used to justify
everything from the responsibility of children to attend mission schools, to the
calling up of recruits to be sent to war, or simply to be stationed for indefinite
terms in coastal fortresses—the latter leading to serious rates of mortality from
malaria and other diseases.
Against the above innovations, a spirit of daring resistance was evinced by a
number of females in a neighboring district [Avaradrano], and a large meeting
was held, to which the discontented repaired. Information of these proceedings
soon reached the capital. About two thousand soldiers were immediately sum-
moned; they renewed their oaths of allegiance, promising that whoever should
be found guilty of creating a disturbance, even if their own parents should be
implicated, they required but the king’s order or permission to put them to death:
after these assurances of fidelity, the soldiers were ordered to guard the capital.
On the following day, four or five thousand females assembled at Ambatoraka, a
village to the east of Tananarivo, and sent a kabary, or message, to the king com-
plaining of his having adopted foreign customs, and having allowed his people
to be taught by Europeans. In reply, Radama sent to ask them what were their
grievances; if they were too heavily taxed, or if they were displeased at having
their sons employed in the army; whether he were their king or not, and whether
they had chosen some other king in his stead? They replied to these questions in
the negative; but said, they were the nurses of the king,63 and complained because he
63. Larson, who reproduces this passage, oddly renders the word incorrectly as
“caretakers,” but correctly notes the Malagasy word was “probably mpitaiza, a word
suggesting the relationship between nurse and child” (2000: 249).
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
313
had adopted the customs of the foreigners; had allowed them to teach him and
his people; had changed the customs of the ancestors; and finally, he had cut off
his hair, and drank spirituous liquors. Radama sent back a message to ask if, be-
ing king, he had not a right to do as he pleased with his hair without consulting
women; reminding them, it was the inalienable right of the twelve monarchs to
do as they pleased, and added, that he would presently give them a proof of this,
by taking care that their hair should never grow again. (W. Ellis 1838, I: 288,
emphasis mine)
According to Ellis, five ringleaders were identified and summarily executed
with bayonets. Others were flogged to within an inch of their lives. The rest of
the “rebellious females” were surrounded by troops, held for three days without
food or water, and forced to watch the bodies of their companions be “devoured
by dogs and birds.” Finally, the king proclaimed the survivors would be allowed
to return to their homes “to attend to their domestic duties, but must leave the
business of government to himself ” (ibid.: 289; for a detailed analysis of the
events, see Larson 2000: 240–53).
This was the most overt popular challenge to royal policy during Radama’s
reign and it was quite in keeping with traditional forms. The protestors repre-
sented themselves as mpitaiza andriana (“nurses of the king”). The fact that this
was an all-women’s assembly appears new—at least we have no record of earlier
all-women’s assemblies in the highlands—but this might just be due to the bias
of our sources, which overwhelmingly represent the perspectives of men.64 At
any rate, it’s easy to see how, if the plaiting of hair was a major part of women’s
daily occupations, and was an intrinsic part of the gradual process of rendering
and maintaining their children as fully human, then abruptly removing this
responsibility by forcibly shearing their children’s heads might seem the most
vivid, and obviously outrageous, aspect of a series of royal edicts designed to re-
move them from domestic control and turn responsibility for their growth and
64. In other parts of Madagascar, women’s kabary have been documented, but not in
Imerina itself. The Tantara’s account of these same events, recorded almost a half
century later (Callet 1908: 1078–80), is already beginning to downplay the women’s
role (claiming it was men put the women up to it), which suggests that if there had
been women’s revolts in earlier times, we wouldn’t necessarily have any record of
them. Neither do we have any way of knowing if women were prominently involved
in Andriamampandry’s revolt, or the kabary held to temporarily remove Tsimarofy,
though women were presumably present in some capacity as they generally do
participate in highland kabary.
314
ON KINGS
development over to foreign-trained schoolteachers and drill sergeants working
directly for the state. From their perspective, there simply was no meaningful
distinction between “domestic duties” and “the business of government”; and
reminding Radama of the people’s role as mpitaiza andriana, and admonishing
him over his own domestic misbehavior—drunkenness, consorting with for-
eigners, neglect of customary usages, making major changes in how his very
physical person was to be maintained without prior consultation with those
charged with maintaining it—was the obvious way to make this point.
In doing so, they also not only cast the king in the role of nursling, but
also identified themselves, at least tacitly, with his own royal ancestors. In the
Tantara, the delegates are instructed to appeal to the “twelve kings,” none of
whom ever shaved their heads.
We have come to admonish you, Sir, do not cut your hair because this is not a
custom observed by kings. . . . King Andriantsimitoviaminandriana did not cut
his hair. Andriambelomasina ruled and never cut his hair. Andrianampoinime-
rina, too, ruled and never cut his hair. And now we have you, Radama, and you
make soldiers, and you shear off all your hair. (Callet 1908: 1079)65
Radama’s personal reaction, as remembered inside the palace, is recorded by
later court historian Raombana:
With the greatest brutality (for he was rather drunk or completely drunk, I do
not know which), he exclaimed that these abominable women want to stir a
rebellion to upset him from his kingdom, but that he will disappoint them, for
that he is not a child, and that he will be beforehan
d with them and cut short the
rebellion which they meditate against him. (Raombana 1994: 79.803–4, empha-
sis mine)
Any act of mass political contestation—and this is true above all of nonvio-
lent ones—is an act of political theater in which the audience is not just the
65. “Mananatra anao izahay, Tompokolahy, fa aza boriana ny volonao fa tsy fomba fanaon’ny
Andriana nanjaka izao mibory volo izao. . . . Nanjaka Andriantsimitoviamanandriana,
tsy notapahina ny volony; nanjaka Andriambclomasina, tsy notapahina koa ny volony;
nanjaka koa Andrianampoinimerina, tsy notapahina koa ny volony. lty mby aminao
Radama, ka manao miaramila hianao, ka hianao no manao sanga ka borianao ny
volonao. ”..
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
315
government, but if anything, even more, those charged to carry out the govern-
ment’s orders. Successful rebels tend to be keenly aware of this. You win if you
can either create a situation where those sent to shoot you refuse to do so, or else
convince the government that those they would otherwise be inclined to send to
shoot you cannot be relied on, and therefore that compromise is the only course.
In Madagascar itself, movements of nonviolent resistance against standing gov-
ernments, starting with the Forces Vives in 1990, have tended to prepare the
ground beforehand by using family connections, or often church ties, to reach
out to the commanders of the security forces to ensure their neutrality before
street actions began. Clearly, the rebels of 1822 were employing a similar strate-
gy. According to the Tantara, the great assembly that made the decision to hold
a women’s march on the capital also decided to send women primarily from the
province of Avaradrano: this was, significantly, the home province of the bulk of
Radama’s officer corps and most loyal troops as well. This no doubt explains the
king’s initial panic: calling in thousands of troops and asking them to swear to
follow his orders to execute dissidents “even if their own parents should be im-
plicated”—since there was a very real prospect that that this exact circumstance
might arise. Once he did secure that loyalty, the game was effectively over.
Or at least it was for the moment. In the longer term, it’s not nearly so clear
who really won.
Case 3: Ranavalona I, the toddler queen and the return of the dead
On the surface, Radama’s victory in April 1822 would appear to be absolute. The
survivors were terrorized into silence; no further movements of public opposi-
tion occurred. In retrospect, some of the demands of the women’s assembly—for
instance, that all foreigners be immediately delivered over to them—seem so
presumptuous that one wonders how those who made them could have imag-
ined things might turn out any other way. But a mere twelve years later, their
core program had been largely realized. A woman sat on Radama’s throne, and
she did indeed call in these same foreigners for ultimate expulsion; ancestral
customs put into abeyance by Radama were, indeed, restored. What’s more, all
of this was carried out under the aegis of the very officer corps to whom the
women of Avaradrano had so—apparently—unsuccessfully appealed.
What happened?
According to the standard history, after Radama drank himself to death
at the age of thirty-six in 1828, several high officials, led by a general named
316
ON KINGS
Andriamihaja and an old judge named Andriamamba, effected a kind of coup.
Pretending the king had named his long-neglected senior wife as successor, they
quickly moved to assassinate all rival claimants. The new queen, Ranavalona,
already fifty-one at the time of her coronation, went on to reign for thirty-three
years, the longest of any historical Merina monarch,66 and while she maintained
Radama’s standing army and school system, she eventually effected a radical
break with most of her ex-husband’s other policies. Above all, she abandoned
his attempt to open Madagascar to the larger world economy, adopting in-
stead a policy of self-sufficiency which ultimately led to almost all foreign-born
residents of the island being expelled. The only ones allowed to remain were a
tiny handful of favored advisors, such as Jean Laborde, a wanted criminal from
France who was therefore assumed to owe no loyalties to his homeland, and
who, being in possession of a set of technical encyclopedias, was put in charge
of the government’s industrialization campaign.
The expulsions, the prescription of Christianity, and subsequent execution
of a number of Christian converts ensured that Ranavalona soon became the
object of intensely hostile propaganda from abroad. Foreign histories came to
depict her as a monster, a “mad queen,” even a “female Caligula,” whose end-
less wars and purges of suspected witches devastated the country—according to
some of the more surrealistic claims, killing off between a third and two-thirds
of the entire Malagasy population. Such numbers are obviously absurd, and
might be forgivable, perhaps, coming from the pens of angry exiles at the time,
with access only to sensationalistic horror stories; the peculiar thing is that it’s
still possible to find them reproduced in the works of influential historians like
Gwyn Campbell, who, completely ignoring the voluminous demographic mate-
rial in the royal archives, treat the most extravagant claims of foreign observers
as literal historical fact.67
66. Andriamasinavalona is also said in most accounts to have reigned thirty-five years,
but the dates are an approximation.
67. Campbell’s works cite only European sources, almost entirely uncritically, while
systematically ignoring almost all sources written in the Malagasy language—
whether because Campbell disdains such sources, or simply cannot read Malagasy,
I cannot know. For instance, in his An economic history of imperial Madagascar,
1750–1895 (2005), he provides a chapter with what he claims is a comprehensive
list of sources on nineteenth-century Merina demography containing no Malagasy
sources that have not been translated, and shows no awareness of the fact that
Ranavalona’s government actually carried out a census in the 1840s, and that the
census documents still exist, easy accessible, within the Malagasy National Archives.
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
317
* * *
A real social and economic history of Ranavalona’s reign thus remains to be
written. What evidence we do have from sources inside the country (and there’s
actually considerably more of it than historians like Campbell let on) suggests
largely continuity with what was already happening under Radama. Young peo-
ple continued to be drafted into the army and sent off on military campaigns
against “rebels” in the provinces; these continued to lead to massacres and a
constant flow of coastal women and children into highland slave markets; all
much as before. Inside Imerina, the main change was a withdrawal of state au-
thority. While the government kept a firm hand on the capital and major ports,
it seems to have left small towns
and rural communities in the highlands largely
to themselves: the administrative apparatus set up under Andrianampoinime-
rina, and vastly increased under Radama, fell into abeyance.68 True, when gov-
ernment intervention did occur, it was often spectacularly destructive. Much as
under Andrianampoinimerina, whole communities were sometimes put to the
poison ordeal ( tangena) on suspicion of being in possession of subversive mag-
ic.69 And the queen’s notorious pleasure excursions—these were the ones which
led to the rounding up of thousands of subjects as porters— did wreak havoc on
the communities through which they passed through. But state intervention of
this sort was sporadic at best; there is no evidence that such depredations, when
they did occur, were significantly worse than they had been under Andrianam-
poinimerina or Radama; the difference was that otherwise, for the most part,
rural communities were largely left alone.
Meanwhile, in the capital, the royal household became the focus of endlessly
baroque and spectacular forms of public ritual.
As Pier Larson (2006) has pointed out, Campbell’s numbers are often bizarre: he
once estimates the population of all of Imerina at 25,000, and, at the same time,
the population of its capital at 800,000. Yet for some reason his argument that
Ranavalona’s regime committed autogenocide on a scale two or three times worse
than Pol Pot is taken at face value by numerous historians.
68. During Ranavalona’s reign, internal administrative documents in the National
Archives largely disappear, aside from census documents and some judicial registers.
Military and diplomatic correspondence, however, continues unabated.
69. Those who underwent the tangena were forced to imbibe water infused with
scrapings of a poisonous nut, and three pieces of chicken skin. If they vomited up
the chicken skin, they would be considered innocent; if they did not, they would be
pounded to death with pole-like pestles used to pound rice.
318
ON KINGS
Since the unification of the island, Madagascar has witnessed a continual
ebb and flow of state power in the countryside. In many ways, the regime of Ra-
navalona I seems to most resemble that of President Didier Ratsiraka between
1975 and 1993: he, too, cut off most external trade and expel ed foreign-botn