by Faun Rice
an exclusive claim.
* * *
It is telling, then, the closest there was to an overt popular challenge to Ra-
navalona during her thirty-three years in power played on that very image of
the queen as the old king’s “little girl.” This was the event that, according to
Raombana, caused Ranavalona to make her final break with Christianity, and,
ultimately, to ban “the praying,” as it was called, entirely.
One of the effects of early Christian evangelizing was, in Madagascar as in
so many other places, the appearance of millenarian movements prophesying
the imminent end of the world. In 1834, a certain Rainitsiandavana, a minor
sampy guardian from Mandiavato to the north of Antananarivo, unlettered and
with, our sources assure us, only indirect knowledge of Christian doctrine, be-
gan to claim to have learned in visions that the end times were near, and the
dead would soon return to life. When that day came, he announced to his fol-
lowers, Ranavalona would reign as queen of the entire world, the time of wars
and recruitment drives and poison ordeals would be over, crops would grow of
their own accord, and men and women would live in universal peace, harmony,
and equality (Freeman and Johns 1840: 91–97; Rabary 1910: 54–55; Raison-
Jourde 1991: 131–38). Several hundred devotees marched with him to the capi-
tal, carrying the sampy, to inform the queen of the good news. According to
the version of events that soon became canonical in the Christian literature,
Ranavalona sent envoys to interrogate the prophet, until, finally, he was asked
whether the story of Adam and Eve implied that the queen was of the same
descent as Mozambican slaves—and was outraged when Rainitsiandavana af-
firmed that it did. Raombana, as usual, gives us a rather different view. The way
the story was remembered inside the palace was that what really terrified the
queen were the political implications of the return of the dead:
Before they could arrive in town, news was immediately spread in it, that Rainit-
siandavana has received power from God to raise the dead up to life again; and
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
325
that his object in coming to town is to raise them up; and that he will first raise
up Radama, and the sovereigns who are interred in the palace; after which he will
go about all Imerina and raise up all the dead . . . .
These reports were received with avidity and joy by the superstitious popu-
lace of Antananarivo who fully expected that they will soon see and embrace all
their dead relations again.
They whispered and asked one another who will reign when all the dead
sovereigns are raised up; whether it will be Her Majesty, or Radama, or Andri-
anampoinimerina or Andriamasinavalona, or who. Some said that Her Majesty
would not deliver the kingdom to any of them but will retain it, as she has felt
and enjoyed the sweetness of reigning. Others said that she will be obliged to
resign the throne to one of the old sovereigns who has reigned better than her.
And others in the gravest manner said that they fear there will be civil wars in
Imerina again between these sovereigns, for that each will have their partisans.
(Raombana n.d.: 41.161–65)
The queen ordered Rainitsiandavana and his main confederates be placed head
down in a ditch and drowned in boiling water; others were made to undergo the
tangena ordeal; many died; the survivors were sold into slavery.
It would appear that one critical weakness of any monarchy where the ruler
is conceived as a child whose legitimacy derives from royal ancestors is what
might happen if those ancestors actually reappear. It’s not a danger that most
kings have to worry much about. But in the northern highlands of Madagascar
from at least the time of Leiloza onward, dead monarchs were to begin appear-
ing among the living with increasing frequency.
Case 4: Radama II and the second women’s rebellion
About a year into her reign, Ranavalona gave birth to a son who, despite the
circumstances of his birth, was declared to be Radama’s offspring by some form
of mysterious spiritual conception. He was given the name Ikotoseheno, though
in official documents he is universally referred to as RakotondRadama, or “King
Radama’s little boy.” From his teenage years onward, the prince began to take
more and more after Andriamihaja, who was widely rumored to be his actual
father: aligning himself with the progressive faction at court, and becoming
the devoted companion of the few foreigners allowed to remain in the city, and
protector of the kingdom’s Christians. (The prince, however, considered himself
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a Deist.) The queen had by this point swung decisively into the camp of tra-
ditionalists; but in her eyes, the prince could do no wrong. By the 1850s, they
were operating openly at cross-purposes. RakotondRadama began cultivating
a circle of liberally minded young companions, known as the Menamaso, or
“red-eyes,” purportedly because of their fondness for wild late-night parties. As
the queen relied more and more on the pantheon of royal sampy, her son began
openly ridiculing the cult, even once setting fire to the shrine of Kelimalaza.
As the queen, increasingly ill-tempered and arbitrary, began flying into rages
at the slightest provocation and sentencing dozens at a time to death, her son
adopted the habit of simply walking into prisons holding those he considered
unjustly accused, releasing their fetters, and providing them money for a safe
trip home. Some claimed he’d released literally thousands in this way (Régnon
1863: 57–64; Anon. 1900: 486). It’s not clear whether his mother simply wrote
it all off as youthful hijinks, or whether her advisors were afraid to tell her this
was even happening.
In 1855, six years before his mother’s death, RakotondRadama had already
signed a secret entente with French representatives promising to open the coun-
try to foreign investment once he came to power. He also began putting his
Menamaso companions into positions of authority, particularly in the judiciary,
as counterweights to the traditionalist military elite who controlled public af-
fairs. And when he did finally come to power, in 1861, at the age of thirty-one,
he moved swiftly to reverse almost all of his mother’s policies. Indeed, if Queen
Ranavalona might be said, on taking power, to have attempted to put into effect
the demands of the women’s uprising of 1822, the new King Radama II might
well be said to have tried to institute a kind of liberal, this-worldly version of
Rainitsiandavana’s millenarian vision of 1834—the one his mother so brutally
suppressed. Radama called an end to military recruitment; he sharply reduced
the employment of forced labor, abolishing capital punishment and the poison
ordeal; he declared freedom of religion, abandoned most spectacular public rit-
ual, eliminated customs tariffs, and opened the country to foreign trade. He also
made clear his ultimate aim was to abolish slavery, and to dissolve the kingdom’s
standing army entirely.
Within a very short period of time
, this did indeed lead to something very
like an apocalyptic scenario.
The problem with Radama’s project was that while his mother’s isolation-
ist strategy might have seemed cruel and barbaric, given Madagascar’s larger
geopolitical situation, it actually made a lot of sense. The moment the country
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
327
was opened, and particularly the moment it was made legal for foreigners to buy
land, Antananarivo was instantly invaded by a small army of corporate agents,
diplomats, speculators, purveyors of get-rich-quick schemes, and flimflam art-
ists pretending to be any of the above. The kingdom’s infrastructural develop-
ment, even its mint, was turned over to one giant French conglomerate that
under Napoleon III’s encouragement proposed to give itself the historically un-
promising name of the French East India Company; foreigners began buying
up slaves and establishing sugar plantations in the plains surrounding the capi-
tal; and word began to spread that foreign interests were preparing to acquire
large chunks of the island wholesale.
Before long the capital was subsumed by a sense of social breakdown and
rampant criminality. None of this was helped by the fact that, under the in-
fluence of the Menamaso and some French advisors, the young king’s own
court began to very much resemble that of Tsimarofy: marijuana, hashish, and
opium, now being produced in quantity alongside the rum being distilled at
the new sugar plantations, were openly consumed in nightly champagne orgies
at the palace. Again, sexual indulgence of this sort, for all it disconcerted the
missionaries,75 was not in itself considered particularly scandalous—this was
more or less the way a young prince was expected to behave—but in the context
of the times, the combination of intoxication, foreign influence, erratic policy
decisions, and immature self-indulgence clearly must have been seen as a repeti-
tion of just the sort of behavior that sparked rebellions against male monarchs
in the past—only now, writ exceptionally large.
In the late winter of 1863, rumors began to reach the capital of an epidemic
of spirit possession, a “dancing mania” as the missionaries came to call it. Those
affected first felt stiffness and fever, and reported feeling as if they were strug-
gling under a heavy weight; gradually, they fell into a trance-like state, marked
by the constant need to dance. Here is how its beginnings were described by
75. A typical comment:
The ruin of poor Radama was accelerated, and his untimely end very much
hastened by the conduct of some French officers and others who got to the
capital, and who aided and encouraged him in his sins, and in those orgies that
were practiced in his palace. They probably taught him many sins he had never
dreamt of before. They had champagne suppers night after night, for weeks
and months, followed by scenes that dare not be described, and for many
months the poor King could seldom be said to be in his senses. (Matthews
1881: 20)
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ON KINGS
Radama’s court physician, one Dr. Davidson, assigned at the time to diagnose
the phenomenon, in an article he was later to publish in the Edinburgh Medical
Journal:
In the month of February 1863, the Europeans resident at Antananarivo, the
capital, began to hear rumors of a new disease, which was said to have appeared
in the west or southwest. The name given to it by the natives was Imanènjana,
and the dancers were called Ramanènjana, a word which probably comes from a
root signifying to make tense. . . .
After a time, however, it reached the Capital, and in the month of March
began to be common. At first, parties of twos or threes were to be seen, accom-
panied by musicians and other attendants, dancing in the public places; and in
a few weeks these had increased to hundreds, so that one could not go out of
doors without meeting bands of these dancers. It spread rapidly, as by a sort of
infection, even to the most remote villages in the central province of Imerina, so
that having occasion to visit a distant part of the country, we found that even in
remote hamlets, and more wonderful still, near solitary cottages, the sound of
music, indicating the mania had spread even there. . . .
Those affected belonged chiefly, but by no means exclusively, to the lower
classes. The great majority were young women between fourteen and twenty-five
years of age; there were however a considerable number of men to be seen among
the dancers; but they certainly did not exceed one fourth of the entire number,
and these also belonged mostly to the lower orders of society. (Davidson 1867:
131; 1889: 21–22)
The sudden appearance of musicians everywhere might seem puzzling, but there
is a longstanding tradition, throughout Madagascar, of musical diagnosis and
cure. If there’s any reason to believe an illness might be caused by some invisible
being wishing to make itself known—and there are many such: Bilo, Tromba,
Salamanga, etc.— it is necessary first of all to determine what sort of spirit it
is by the sort of music it responds to; then, if possible, to allow the intruder to
dance itself out, and in the process, to express any message it might be intend-
ing to convey. The latter is important. A frustrated spirit might well prove fatal
to its host.
The Imanenjana soon took on a character halfway between an epidem-
ic and a popular uprising. One French historian (Raison-Jourde 1976; 1991:
269–84) has even labeled what happened a kind of revolution through spectral
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
329
theater—which seems about right: I would only add, one that soon came to
combine the most salient themes of 1822 and 1834. Certainly, women, slaves,
and enslaved women in particular had the most to lose if Madagascar real y did
become a plantation economy under the aegis of foreign corporations and inves-
tors.76 Yet anyone contemplating open defiance of the government would surely
also be aware of the fate of the women who marched on Antananarivo under
the last Radama—or, for that matter, of what had happened to Rainitsiandavana
himself. Somehow, in the visions and trances of the dancers, in the stories re-
constructed by those who tried to cure them, in subterranean political al iances
that thus began to be made, a form of rebel ion began to take shape that proved
utterly impossible for the government to suppress. We do not know precisely
how the pieces came together, but we know what happened when they did.
At first, the kingdom filled with rumors. Neither Western medicine nor
Christian exorcism seemed to have any effect on those afflicted. Royal ances-
tors, it was said, were returning in some form, but there was not yet a consistent
narrative as to why and which. William Ellis, envoy of the London Missionary
Society, caught the king at a point, quite early on, when rumors were just begin-
ning to reach the palace:
When I went to the king I found him greatly excited by some reports of a new
kind of sickness which had made its appearanc
e in some of the villages at a dis-
tance from the capital. These reports had been coming in from different parts for
two or three days past. The people, he said, had seen strange sights in the air, and
heard unearthly sounds. The spirits of his ancestors had been seen in the heavens,
and were coming to Antananarivo, and some great events were about to occur,
but what, he did not know. He did not believe, he said, in ghosts, but since the
reports came from such a number of people—nearly forty—and continued for
three days, he did not know what to think of it. “Was it a sign,” he asked, “of the
end of the world?” (W. Ellis 1867: 253)
Ellis assured him it was not, since that would only come after all nations were
converted to Christianity.
76. This is not really the place to enter into the matter, but the 1860s began to see a
broad change in the conditions of slavery in Imerina, whereby many slaves began
winning increasing de facto, if not de jure, autonomy. While Radama II aimed to
abolish slavery entirely, whether or not he had done so, establishing a plantation
economy would certainly have reversed these trends decisively.
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Gradually, the stories did begin to coalesce. Women were being possessed
by the spirits of royal baggage carriers. It will be recalled that one of the most
dramatic forms of oppression under the old regime had been the queen’s peri-
odic pleasure excursions, for which all the finery of court had to be transported,
and thousands of villagers swept up to be employed as porters, given no food or
provisions, until many collapsed and died. Now the spirits of these unfortunate
victims were descending from Ambondrombe, the mountain of the dead, be-
cause Ranavalona I was determined to come and admonish her son for having
allowed the Christians to return to the capital (he had even visited their chapels
and accompanied them in their prayers!). The Tantara gives us a sampling of the
kind of stories that began to circulate—some that spoke of just the kind of civil
war between former monarchs some had feared in the days of Rainitsiandavana.
The following account, for instance, appears to have been partly occasioned by
the sighting of distant forest fires along the slopes of Ambondrombe: