onkings
Page 51
startling acropolis from the middle of a vast plain of terraced rice fields crowded
with villages whose industrious inhabitants appeared, despite their complete
lack of contact with foreigners, to have mastered the agricultural, industrial, and
even administrative arts with far greater sophistication than any other inhabit-
ants of Madagascar. (Mayeur was particularly impressed that Ancove’s silver-
smiths could perfectly counterfeit European currency and that its blacksmiths
were able to manufacture functional replacement parts for European guns.)
The king took a great interest in promoting and regulating circulating weekly
markets. The inhabitants of Ancove, Mayeur observed, seemed a fundamentally
peaceful people, more interested in commerce than in war; though he must also
have noted with some professional interest that the division of the country into
numerous warring principalities, and resultant instability, ensured it was in a
position to supply unusually large numbers of slaves.
When Mayeur returned eight years later, in late August 1785, matters were
not going nearly so well for his old friend. The king was perpetually drunk, and
had become addicted to opium purveyed by Arab merchants. Tsimarofy seemed
at constant war with all his neighbors, especially Andrianampoinimerina, who
seemed, Mayeur estimated, at this point to be gaining the definite upper hand.
Finally, Tsimarofy’s own people had indicated there was a very definite limit to
their patience with his behavior.
Three years before, Mayeur reported, Tsimarofy had killed his chief wife in
a drunken rage. His people, outraged, convoked a general assembly in order to
decide whether to remove him from office and pass his formal title on to their
preadolescent son. In the end, the answer was affirmative. Mayeur summarizes
the message presented to the king in the kabary—it was presumably held at
Andohalo—in his characteristic, slightly stuffy, style:
Prince, here is your legitimate successor. He is now under our watchful care; we
wish to teach him how to govern us, because it is true that currently, if he remains
with you, he will only witness bad examples. We wish for tranquility, far from
the vexations which your continual inebriation has imposed on us. The inno-
cence of your son, and the respect that the hova have for their sovereign, mitigate
against the vow we have already taken to change our ruler. Yet the crime you
have committed against your wife, your own first cousin, which marks the very
culmination of our indignation, cannot remain unavenged, so we have assembled
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
307
to deliberate on the matter. It has been decided that you will no longer receive
either our allegiance or our tribute; that we will regard all those among us as
remain attached to you as enemies of the Hova people, up to such time as you
solemnly declare that you have completely renounced the use of strong liquor.
We have also taken a vow to allow you a fixed term to reflect on this matter. Until
that term is expired, all authority you have over us shall be suspended. Our al-
legiance will be directed to your son. (Mayeur [1793] 1913: 39)
The declaration was followed by the firing of muskets, and the conferring of
Maromanompo to the protection of the Manisotra. After the appointed term
was over, a second kabary was held, and the king determined to have remained
sober in the interim. His people therefore renewed their vows of fealty again.
Still, according to Mayeur, this newfound sobriety was short-lived. Before
long the king had lapsed, Andrianampoinimerina returned, and the resulting
popular disillusionment played no small role in his ultimate military defeat.
* * *
The role of the Manisotra and Manendy, collectively known as the Mainty
Enin-Dreny, the warrior orders of ancient Imerina, has always been something
of puzzle for historians. While referred to as “royal slaves,” they have many of
the same privileges as andriana; they seem to rank in certain ways above, in
other ways below, the bulk of the population. The understanding of the ritual
structure of the Merina kingdom developed in the course of this essay sug-
gests one way to understand this apparent paradox. Such warriors were (like
the Tsiarondahy, the palace attendants with whom they were often grouped), a
particularly intimate kind of mpitaiza andriana, not just because they protected
the king in battle, but because even in ordinary times, the king’s own children
were relegated to their care. Here their playful intimacy with little princesses
like Ravao. As a result, if the monarch was not yet of an age to rule, or else if he
was simply not acting as if he were, his sovereign power—that is, his right to
engage in arbitrary, essentially lawless violence—devolved onto them.59 This is
59. The impunity of the Manisotra probably refers to a status known as tsy maty manoto,
a privilege granted in recognition of extraordinary favors to royalty (as in the story
of Trimofoloalina: Kingdon 1889; Cal et 1908: 316–21). The Manendy, the other
major warrior caste, were said to be tsy maty manoto as wel (Rakotomanolo 1981: 7).
Those who held it could not be held accountable for certain crimes, notably, theft.
308
ON KINGS
why during Tsimarofy’s minority, the Manisotra could revert to simple banditry,
preying on foreign caravans at whim. But even when, as an adult, he attempted
to take full command of his armies, they treated him as a child again, and put
him firmly back in his place, in such a way as to ensure he was aware their loyalty
was as much to his family (whether his ancestor Andriamasinavalona, or his
six-year-old daughter Ravao) as it was to him. He was neither the eldest nor the
youngest of his lineage.
And in the end, what was true of the Manisotra was, in an attenuated sense,
true for all of his subjects as well, since, in the event of the king’s proving himself
utterly unfit to preside over the royal family (by killing his wife), they were will-
ing to temporarily convey power to a minor (his son, Maromanompo, restored
to the supervision of the Manisotra) until he could prove himself capable of
ruling even within those parameters to which he was allowed.
If so, it makes it easier to understand the fate of the historical Leiloza, and
his son Rabevola, as well. Having been expelled from his kingdom in Valala-
fotsy, Leiloza fell in with a faction of Manendy, who took on exactly the same
role: they offered him their nurturant protection, but at the same time used that
relationship as the moral basis for effectively turning bandit and launching raids
against all around.
Case 2: Radama I and the first women’s uprising
Andrianampoinimerina was ultimately victorious, and in his new united Me-
rina kingdom, he marginalized both Manisotra and Manendy, relying instead
for military support on two large hova ancestries from his native Ambohimanga,
the Tsimahafotsy and Tsimiamboholahy. These were to provide his royal coun-
cilors, who were his own principal mpitaiza andriana, and the military com-
manders who were to effectively run the kingdom from then on
. Yet, like his
son Radama, who took power at the tender age of seventeen, Andrianampoini-
merina allowed the mpitaiza only a modest role in government. Other than the
councilors, his chief mpitaiza were the guardians of the royal sampy (i.e., the
keepers of the “political” charms that protected the kingdom): it was Andri-
anampoinimerina who seems to have systematized the elaborate ritual system
outlined in the Tantara, with its pantheon of twelve royal ancestors, twelve sa-
cred mountains, and twelve national charms. Radama, once he had entered into
alliance with the British governor of Mauritius, who recognized him as “king
of Madagascar,” threw everything into the creation of his new red-coated army,
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
309
drilled and provisioned by British advisors, and no longer seemed to have found
much use for mpitaiza of any kind.
Radama also largely abandoned his father’s habit of calling grand assemblies
to consult with his subjects about policy issues; increasingly, the great kabary at
Andohalo became places to make proclamations and convey royal orders, or to
make a display of military formations, but very little else.
Radama was the ultimate adolescent king, and it’s not hard to see him as a
distant inspiration for the myth of Leiloza.60 He fancied himself a new Napo-
leon, whose portrait he in fact kept in his private chambers:61 an enlightened
despot determined to employ his unlimited powers to reshape society in mod-
ern, progressive terms. He established a school system and a civil service. He
sponsored industrial projects, and campaigns to modernize building techniques,
clothing styles, and standards of public hygiene. He divided the entire male
population of Imerina into two broad categories, military ( miaramila) and civil
( borizano), and invoked the principle of fanompoana to call the first up to service
in the army, the second, to labor teams assigned to increasingly onerous royal
corvée. At the same time, Radama played the enlightened skeptic in relation to
the mumbo-jumbo of his father’s ritual system: he was especially famous for en-
tertaining himself by posing impossible tests for astrologers and magicians and
trying to expose the various tricks and stage illusions employed by mediums.
One of the king’s most notorious comments was rendered to a French artist
hired to paint his portrait, one André Copalle, himself apparently an Enlighten-
ment skeptic of sorts. Copalle wrote the followed account of a conversation he
had with the king, after the latter’s return from a journey to the shrines of the
royal ancestors, to petition them for rain:
60. Back in the 1960s, Radama was stil an important healing spirit, at least in the
region immediately surrounding Antananarivo, and he was sometimes also known
as Rakotomaditra (“Naughty Boy”), which was the original name given to the
spirit whose doany is of Ambohitrambo later to be known as Leiloza (Cabanes
1972: 52-3). See above, footnote 12.
61. Many sources speak of Radama as modeling himself on Napoleon. After the
breakdown of his alliance with the governor of Mauritius, Radama replaced Hastie
with a French-Jamaican sergeant named Robin, who had deserted Napoleon’s army
and eventually fled to Tamatave. When the King first met him, he asked if he’d
really served under Napoleon’s orders, and on hearing that he had, “he then showed
him a portrait of the Emperor, saying, ‘behold my model! Behold the example that
I wish to follow!’” (Ackerman 1833: 49). Radama eventually named Robin his
supreme military commander.
310
ON KINGS
The prince was long returned from his pilgrimage, from which he had obtained
all the success he had wished for. Radama, moreover, did not believe in these
spells and devotions, and even less in the divine power which superstition attrib-
uted to them. He sometimes laughed at it, and told me, between us, that it was
all just a matter of politics. He questioned me one day on my religious opinions,
and, I having in my turn addressed several questions on the subject, replied to
me among other things that religions were nothing but political institutions, fit
to lead children of all ages. (Copalle [1826] 1970: 37)
The latter remark takes on renewed significance coming from the mouth of a
thirty-year-old monarch (in other words, himself little more than a child by
Malagasy standards) in a political system where kings were regularly themselves
treated as de facto minors. It sounds very much as if Radama was using his
privileged relation with foreigners to reverse all this, to cast himself as a kind of
stranger-king in the making, and, by that very token, render those who might
otherwise have been considered his mpitaiza (astrologers, sampy guardians, the
people as a whole) as so many benighted children in their turn.62
This attempted realignment did not go unchallenged. Matters came to a
head, in fact, over precisely the sort of personal household issues—the care and
nurturing of the king, and royal family more generally—that were the tradi-
tional focus of the system of ritual labor. It will be recalled that the act of bring-
ing first-fruits was also modeled on the ritual of a child’s first haircut, the point
where a child effectively begins to become a social being, capable of forming
relations with others. In commoner households, this was a ceremony presided
over primarily by women; and women continued to play a critical role in the
care and maintenance of hair—their children’s hair, their menfolk’s, and each
other’s—throughout their adult lives. This is more important than it may seem
because traditional highland hairstyles were quite elaborate and required a sig-
nificant investment of care and labor to maintain:
62. My interpretation here in part contrasts with Gerald Berg’s (1998) reading of the
same statement. Berg argues that rather than being cynical, Radama was simply
restating an ideology which made no distinction between what Copalle would
consider politics and ritual—in this I certainly agree—but goes on to argue that this
ideology was based on a notion of “the flow of hasina” from king to subjects whereby
“Merina rulers had always been considered as ‘fathers’ of their subjects” (ibid.: 70).
In fact, as we’ve seen, despite some lip service to this idea, matters were ordinarily
quite the reverse.
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
311
From all accounts the various styles of plaiting the hair were innumerable. Men
seem to have fully appreciated this mode of ornament as well as the women, so
much so that King Andrianampoinimerina is said to have had a special style for
himself, which was called Ny bóko antámpona, i.e. “The knob on the top of the
head,” as all of his hair was gathered together into one big plait at the crown of
the head. Another famous mode, called sàlo-bìta, consisted of plaiting the hair
into an equal number of very fine plaits, which hung down in an even row. . . .
The special feature of this plait consisted in the addition of a row of coral beads,
sewn along each of the exterior angles, if t
he person was of the andriana, or
noble class; whereas among the Hova, or commoners, it was the custom to sew
on small silver chains or coins. The time spent in plaiting must have been very
considerable. (Edmonds 1895: 471–72)
The careful maintenance of elaborate hairdos was, it seems, seen as one of the
main preoccupations of women and itself became a kind of paradigmatic labor:
a synecdoche, one might say, for the broader process of shaping human beings.
If responsibilities to one’s parents and ancestors could be referred to as valim-
babena, “the answer having been carried on the back,” the two main marriage
payments to a bride’s family were (and still are) called the akana kitay (“fetching
firewood”) and the alana volo fotsy (“plucking out white hairs”), in both cases a
recognition of the loss of the services the daughter might otherwise have pro-
vided to her family, in the first carrying things again, in the second, carefully at-
tending to the tresses of her aging parents. Second to bearing burdens (firewood,
babies, etc.), hairdressing seems to have been a paradigmatic form of female
labor, just as female domestic labor was the paradigmatic form of labor itself.
As on the domestic level, so on that of the kingdom as a whole. Andrianam-
poinimerina not only had a unique hairstyle, his hair had to be elaborately re-
newed before every major royal ritual. For instance, an early-twentieth-century
Jesuit source recalls this of the royal circumcision ritual, which was the occasion
of one of the great national festivals:
Under Andrianampoinimerina, when everyone wore their hair long, the first of
the holy days was consecrated to the needs of coiffure. The sovereign’s hair, along
with that of the fathers and mothers having some infant to be circumcised, had
to be plaited according to a particular rite, in the middle of the public plaza of
the capital. This initial ceremony began with the sacrifice of a white-spotted ox,
it ended with the firing of canons. (Camboué 1909: 376)
312
ON KINGS
The dressing of the king’s hair was itself a form of santatra, performed at Andoha-
lo by the most senior among Those Whose Mothers and Fathers Are Still Living
(Callet 1908: 30, 73–74; Soury-Lavergne and de la Devèze 1912: 342–43; Molet