In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The island of Madagascar, over a thousand miles long, is located in the Indian Ocean opposite the coast of Mozambique. According to the best evidence now available, it was not inhabited until around 600 or even 800 ce; its first inhabitants came from somewhere in what is now Indonesia. While people have been arriving from Africa ever since, and the population is now thoroughly mixed, the language spoken throughout the island, Malagasy, is an Austronesian language—its closest relative, Maanjan, is spoken in Borneo.1 Imerina2 compromises the north of a high plateau that runs down the center of the island. For most of Malagasy history it was something of a backwater . When Nicholas Mayeur—the first European to write a description of Imerina—passed through in 1777, he found it broken into a dozen warring principalities. While technologically advanced (its smiths, he said, were capable of producing their own muskets, and even of counterfeiting European currency ) it was politically disorganized. Raiders from the coast regularly carried off its villagers to be sold to European or Arab slavers, and shipped off to European-owned sugar plantations on Mauritius or Reunion. All this began to change after King Andrianampoinimerina (1789–1810) managed to clamp Imerina’s fragmented polities together into a strong, centralized state. Seven years after his death, British envoys arrived at the court of his son, Radama I (1810–1828), and offered to recognize him as king of Madagascar if he agreed to outlaw the export of slaves. They also agreed to provide money, missionary teachers to create a school system and literate civil service, arms, and military training. Within a decade, Radama’s red-coated, British-trained musketeers were established in bases the length and breadth of the island, and Imerina had gone from a victimized backwater to an imperial power controlling almost the whole of Madagascar. With Radama’s wars 33 ROYAL AUTHORITY 2 of conquest, captives started to flow into the Merina country rather than out of it. Before long a fair proportion of the population was composed of people kidnapped from the coasts. These were the ancestors of the “black people” who remain in Imerina today; even after their liberation in 1895, the former slaves were never absorbed into the wider population. After Radama died power passed to a clique of military officers, who ruled in the name of a series of queens; the first, Ranavalona I (1828–1861), Radama’s widow. Ranavalona I is mainly famous for breaking the alliance with England and for expelling the missionaries, and promoting a pantheon of “royal idols,” or sampy, as a kind of religion of state to rival Christianity. After some uncertain efforts to find a middle ground, Ranavalona II (1868–1884) converted to Protestant Christianity: she marked the act by having the “idols” burned.The Merina government hoped to reestablish an alliance with England as well; but in the end, England proved an indifferent protector. The British government turned its back when a French expeditionary force marched on Antananarivo in 1895, and Madagascar became a French colony. It was a continual irony of French rule that, while the colonizers always claimed to be protecting coastal people from Merina domination, they were also always forced to rely on Merina civil servants to run the country. Imerina had an enormous advantage in education—there had been a functioning school system in place for decades before the French invasion. Most of the children of the old elite—the “Merina bourgeoisie,” as they came to be known—managed to quickly reposition themselves as functionaries, doctors, pastors, teachers, merchants, pharmacists, and engineers. What I am mainly interested in, however, is not the perspectives of such people, but of what are in Imerina called olona tsotra, “simple people,” the vast majority who continue to spend most of their time in small towns like Arivonimamo, rural communities like Betafo, or the poorer districts of the capital—and who even members of the elite tend to refer to on matters they consider distinctly “Malagasy.” What I would like to do over the next few chapters is to explain how authority is seen to work among such “simple people,” about legitimate, and illegitimate, ways of acting in the world. I’ll start by talking about royal authority. Since there have been no actual royalty in Imerina for a century, it is, perhaps, less important to understand what the Merina kingdom was really like than to understand what people think it was like now. Still...

Share