onkings Read online

  theme of king as child works itself out in this literature. I’l start with a story

  that I heard while I was carrying out my own fieldwork in 1990 and 1991,

  about an arrogant prince who literally fell from power. Stories like his, it seems

  to me, raise obvious questions about the nature of authority in the highlands:

  first and foremost why, if kings real y did receive the unquestioning devotion of

  their subjects, as all foreign observers insisted they did, are they now remem-

  bered largely as bul ies and tyrants? To understand that, in turn, wil require an

  examination of the overal organization of the kingdom itself, conceived as a

  vast structure of ritual labor; then, reexamining moments in the past when royal

  authority was challenged through that lens. Finally, I will ask whether the ap-

  parently exotic formulations of Merina kingship, in which the people regularly

  represented themselves as “nursemaids” of the king, might not also provide in-

  sights into more general questions about the nature of social authority.

  1. The name “Merina” is rarely used nowadays, and even in the nineteenth century

  was one term among many (Larson 1996). Generally speaking, I avoid the term

  when speaking of the contemporary descendants of those known in the literature as

  “Merina,” but it seems appropriate in this historical context.

  252

  ON KINGS

  INTRODUCTION: LEILOZA AND THE PROPHET OF

  VALALAFOTSY

  Leiloza, the last prince of Imamo

  I carried out my doctoral research in the northern hinterlands of the town of

  Arivonimamo, in Western Imerina. This is rolling country, dotted by small gran-

  ite mountains, valleys full of tiny streams and terraced rice fields, broken by

  expanses of tapia forest—tapia being a tree that looks a little like a dwarf oak,

  and sports silkworms from whose webs a native cloth is manufactured. This is

  what the area has long been famous for. Until the very end of the eighteenth

  century, too, this territory, along with all the lands west of the Ombifotsy River,

  were part of an independent kingdom called Imamo, distinct from Imerina to

  the east. Or, to be more specific, they were considered to have once, long before,

  been unified under a great wise king named Andriambahoaka, just as in the

  same time Imerina was considered to have been created by a great wise king

  named Andriamasinavalona. Such great wise kings always seem to have existed

  a few generations in the past, just beyond living memory. In the case of Imerina

  and Imamo, the same story was told: the great wise king, unwisely, split his ter-

  ritory between four sons, resulting in endless civil wars.

  In the case of Imamo, however, these rival princes did all share a single tomb.

  In the nineteenth century, this tomb was known as Fondanitra (“in the heart

  of the sky”), a huge stone structure which sat atop the sugar-loaf mountain of

  Ambohitrambo—a mountain that dominates the landscape of the region, vis-

  ible for miles around.

  The mountain, and the tomb, is still there; and it’s still a place of pilgrim-

  age. But now the tomb is remembered not as the burial place of the collectiv-

  ity of Imamo’s kings—just about all of these have been forgotten—but as the

  tomb of a boy named Lailoza, or Leiloza, remembered as a childish, tyranni-

  cal young prince who, it is said, never actually came to the throne of Imamo.2

  Still, everyone knows his story. According to the legend, Leiloza was so literally

  high and mighty that he refused to walk along the hillside paths like ordinary

  humans, but instead employed the women of the kingdom constantly weaving

  silk, which he had turned into giant cable bridges between Ambohitrambo and

  other nearby mountains; bridges reserved for his personal use. This caused such

  2. The name means “the great disaster,” though used of a person loza can also mean

  “fierce” or “angry.”

  THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING

  253

  suffering that one day, his father could no longer stand it, and cut the cable

  while his son was on the bridge, sending his only child plummeting to his death.

  The place where he is said to have fallen is a village now known as

  Manjakazaza, which literally means “a child rules.” “Because he was just a child,”

  people told me, “but he bossed everyone around.” ( zaza fotsiny fa nanjakajaka;

  cf. Graeber 2007a: 90).

  These elements of the story appeared in every version I heard, or am aware

  of. Some added further embellishments: random executions, whimsical or-

  ders—in one version, the prince is even said to have forced all the women in

  the kingdom to cut off their hair to provide materials for his bridge. By at least

  the 1960s, such actions had become proverbial. One French ethnographer who

  worked in the region cites an informant as follows:

  This Leiloza loved to make the population suffer for his own pleasure; now, he

  had a herd of cattle; sometimes, he would give the order to take the entire herd

  up some hill for no reason, and then bring them down again; hence the saying

  “Akaro toy ny andry ombin’i Leiloza.” [Go up the hill like those minding Leiloza’s

  cattle.] (Augustins 1971: 553)3

  When asked why Leiloza acted the way he did, people would usually just say

  that he was maditra— a word that can probably be best translated as “naughty,”

  since it’s mainly used for children who misbehave. In dictionaries it’s some-

  times translated “stubborn,” in the sense of actively resisting parental authority,

  rather in the way English-speaking parents will say a child “won’t listen” when

  they mean “won’t do as he’s told.”4 It’s unusual to spend any length of time

  with a Malagasy woman taking care of, say, a toddler without hearing the word

  evoked at least once or twice, often called out in a chiding tone that seems

  3. Augustin’s informant continues: “Or again, when, at Antongona, a village twenty-

  five kilometers away from Ambohitrambo, something was burning. Leiloza would

  say ‘put out that fire at Antongona, the smoke from it might choke me.’ And from

  that comes the saying ‘ Efa ho lava ny afon’Antongona,’ ‘interminable like the fire of

  Antongona’” (ibid.). This story I never heard myself, but it seems to distantly evoke

  myths where upstart heroes challenge the divine powers by setting fires to send

  smoke to heaven to choke the children of God.

  4. Hence Richardson defines maditra as “obstinate, stubborn, pertinacious” (1885:

  123). This makes sense because the root, ditra, also refers to things that are hard and

  resistant, such as a knotty piece of wood that cannot easily take a nail.

  254

  ON KINGS

  simultaneously indignant and at least a little bit bemused. Yet the same word,

  maditra, was also employed to refer to princes, kings, or other figures of high

  authority when they behaved unjustly and arbitrarily. In one early source, the

  bad prince of Ambohitrambo is actually referred to not as Leiloza, but simply as

  Rakotomaditra, or “Naughty Young Man” (Callet 1908: 573 n. 1).

  Leiloza, then, is the very embodiment of selfish, childish, royal behavior.

  The curious thing is that this term, madi
tra, is not really a generic word for

  irresponsible or headstrong behavior. It’s used when referring to children or

  figures of authority—especially royalty—but only rarely anybody else. When I

  was still doing my fieldwork, I often wondered why this should be. What was it

  about powerful people, and recalcitrant children, that people found analogous?

  It also always struck me as curious that while one might think the real hero

  of the story was Leiloza’s father—he, after al , was the one who was ultimately

  willing to sacrifice his own posterity for the sake of his subjects— his name was

  never mentioned. I often asked; but few were even wil ing to speculate as to

  what it might have been.5 Leiloza’s fame, in contrast, has only increased since his

  death. This is in part because his death redeemed him. He has become a royal

  ancestor, one of a pantheon of spirits called on to possesses mediumistic curers,

  and help them to cure the sick, answer vows, and battle the designs of witches.

  His tomb has become a doany, a portal and a place a pilgrimage—perhaps not

  nearly so important a one as Andriantsihanika, the most famous royal tomb in

  Imamo, located further to the west, but this is largely because Ambohitrambo

  is far from any paved road, and Andriantsihanika is very close to the highway.

  Most large mountains are said to be marked by royal tombs of one sort or an-

  other, and many of these have become doany, a word which literally means “cus-

  toms office,” opening on a kind of spectral universe inhabited by heroic figures

  from “Malagasy times.” They are referred to collectively as “kings” ( andriana).

  But the stories associated with them tend to be, like Leiloza’s, markedly anti-

  monarchical in tone. Andriantsihanika, for example, is remembered now as a

  descendant of a king who voluntarily abandoned his andriana status and be-

  came a commoner because he “didn’t want to have slaves” (Peetz 1951a). Others

  were magicians who defied unjust royal power, women betrayed by royal friends

  or lovers, or simply notable historical figures—diviners, water-nymphs—with

  5. One informant suggested “Ratrimo,” but there’s no other record of such a figure.

  Augustin (1971: 553) suggests Andriantokanandy, but this seems to be taken

  somewhat arbitrarily from a different royal genealogy.

  THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING

  255

  no particular relation to royalty at all. Some bear the names of documented

  historical rulers, but rarely, if ever, even in those cases did I hear anyone who

  frequented, made vows and offerings at, such rulers’ doany have anything good

  to say about their behavior when they were still alive. Perhaps few went so far

  as Ratsizafy, the old and venerable astrologer in the community where I did my

  own fieldwork, who insisted that all the famous kings of Madagascar were actu-

  ally witches, who only since their death had returned to cure the diseases they

  once had caused (Graeber 2007a: 302). But everyone seemed to feel that dead

  kings were very much preferable to live ones.

  Still, there was a universal acknowledgment that, however cruel and disas-

  trous monarchs might have been in life, as soon as they were placed inside the

  stone chambers of the tomb, everything changed, and monarchs were immedi-

  ately transformed into “holy spirits” ( fanahy masina) capable of protecting the

  living from the very disasters they used to inflict on them in life.

  The uniformity of this attitude surprised me. Almost no one had anything

  good to say about past monarchs—this despite the fact that almost everyone

  had learned at least a little Malagasy history in primary school, where histori-

  cal monarchs were presented in a far more favorable light. In fact, the only real

  exceptions I encountered were a handful of educated history buffs who had

  memorized the names and dates of ancient rulers from textbooks. They, at least,

  would often take the view common amongst the intelligentsia and see at least

  some of the past rulers as nationalist heroes of one sort or another. But I never

  heard such sentiments from anybody else. Ask an ordinary farmer, trader, or la-

  borer, one would invariably hear some variation of the same story: the andriana

  of “Malagasy times” ( tany gasy) had abused their authority, they had kept slaves,

  or treated their subjects like slaves, or both; and for this they had been punished,

  like Leiloza’s father, by the loss of their posterity. Even after they were deposed,

  many insisted, they often proved infertile, or their children came to bad ends,

  their numbers dwindled, the few left falling into madness or poverty. This was

  God’s judgment, said those who considered themselves pious Christians. The

  less pious cited the famous Malagasy proverb, “divine retribution may not exist,

  but what you do comes back” ( ny tody tsy misy fa ny atao no miverina).

  Such statements were all the more striking because in the nineteenth century

  there is simply no sign of such sentiments at all. They are nowhere to be found

  in the voluminous Malagasy literature of the time, which tended to represent

  ancient kings as wise and benevolent founders of contemporary institutions.

  Neither can one see anything like it in the observations of foreign visitors, who

  256

  ON KINGS

  would uniformly remark on the absolute, unquestioning devotion of the Merina

  population to their queen. Yet as soon as the colonial period (1895–1950) be-

  gins, such stories seem to pop up out of nowhere. So how did popular views of

  royalty change so rapidly?

  My first attempt at an answer to this question—the one I develop in my

  book Lost people (Graeber 2007a)—was that the change of attitudes had some-

  thing to do with the shock of colonization. Practically the first thing the French

  colonial regime did after conquering Madagascar in 1895 was to dissolve the

  monarchy—but they also abolished slavery at the same time. The fact that un-

  der the police state regime that followed, Christianity became about the only

  institutional form in which it was possible to express nationalist sentiments,

  combined with the continued presence of a population of ex-slaves living in un-

  comfortable proximity to their former masters, created an environment where

  slavery became a continual source of guilt and embarrassment. It became the

  kind of issue that everyone didn’t want to talk about, but almost invariably

  ended up talking about anyway: a reality that had to be so constantly hidden

  it ended up seeming the hidden reality behind everything. When I asked rural

  people about precolonial history, almost no matter what I asked about, my in-

  terlocutors would half the time assume I was really asking about slavery.

  All powers of command—whether royal or colonial power—seemed to fuse

  together in people’s minds as so many extensions of the principle of slavery, of

  making one person an extension of another’s will.6 As a result, even wage labor

  was frowned upon, at least among adults. Curiously, this moral condemnation

  of relations of command was particularly marked among the descendants of the

  free population, the descendants of hova (“commoners”), or andriana. The actual

&
nbsp; descendants of slaves, who constituted roughly a third of the population, do not

  feel they are in a position to be nearly so punctilious about such matters: in fact,

  they were not only more likely to become Zanadrano, that is, mediumistic cur-

  ers who still tended the tombs of royal ancestors, they were also the most willing

  to join the actual military, work for wages, or otherwise subordinate themselves

  to others in ways that would ultimately extricate themselves from poverty.

  6. Hence, people would often refer to both kings and the French as having treated

  their ancestors as slaves, slaves were often described as “soldiers,” and fundamental

  institutions of the royal period, such as fanompoana, or royal “service,” which

  was once what distinguished free subjects from slaves, were now seen as simple

  euphemisms for “slavery.”

  THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING

  257

  In fact, the cult of the Zanadrano, which has also existed at least since the

  colonial period (cf. Peetz 1951a, 1951b; Bernard-Thierry 1960; Cabanes 1972),

  has been dominated, from the beginning, by descendants of slaves. Royal tombs,

  for example, the kind that become places of cult, are almost invariably accompa-

  nied by small outlying tombs of figures who are usually referred to as the king’s

  “soldiers,” who still serve their old masters, and whose spirits do the hard work

  of actually fighting the witches and retrieving the evil charms they have planted

  in patients’ houses, fields, wells, and gardens. It would often be explained to me

  that the word “soldier” here was really just a polite way of saying “slave.” It was

  the presence of such slave-tombs that marked the royal tomb as royal. But at the

  same time, the mediums, too, would refer to themselves as the “soldiers” of the

  divine spirits who—wicked in life, benevolent in death—possessed them and

  rendered them extensions of their will.

  Such was my reading at the time. I still stand by it. It’s clear that the shock

  of colonization, and the end of slavery in particular, did play havoc with existing

  conceptions of authority. And there is certainly no precedent for any of this in

  the cult of the “twelve sacred mountains,” each with its purely benevolent royal

  ancestor, that existed under the monarchy. Still, political ideas don’t come out of