Royal Authority

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.

Imerina 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 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, it might be useful to start with a brief glance at royal ritual, since it’s perhaps the best way to understand basic assumptions about the nature of society and cosmos that continue to provide the grounds for human action to this day.

“Royal Iaols”

“When Europeans first went up to the interior province of Imerina in the early years of the present century, wrote the missionary James Sibree in 1880, “they found a number of idols held in veneration by the people.” In addition to “the household idols or sampy common to every house, and those held in special veneration in different villages and districts,” were some fifteen or sixteen particularly which were seen as protecting the sovereign and the kingdom as a whole (Sibree 1880:298).

Actually, these “idols” were, as Sibree himself went on to point out, simply elaborate versions of objects referred to as ody, usually translated “amulet” or “charm.” There were an infinite variety of ody: ody meant to prevent the bearer from being attacked by crocodiles, to guarantee the success of a journey, to inspire sexual desire, or make one’s opponent’s tongue trip over his words in court. They tended, though, to have very specific purposes. Sampy provided a more general protection for whole social groups. Their keepers would, periodically, assemble the people under their protection and have them sprinkled with water in which the sampy had been washed to fortify against sorcery, disease, and other dangers. “Royal sampy” (sampin’andriana: Domenichini 1977, Berg 1979) were believed to have the power to bring together a kingdom, and protect it against hail, locusts, bandits, foreign armies, witchcraft, famine, rebellion, and disease. They always accompanied the king during public ceremonies and military campaigns, as the material embodiments of royal power. When missionaries arrived in Imerina in 1817, dubbed the sampy “idols,” and dedicated themselves to their extirpation, the result was an ongoing political crisis.

Why they should have been labeled “idols” at all, on the other hand, is not all that easy to understand. True, in some ways they did resemble the idols of the Old Testament. They were material objects that were also thought of as intelligent beings; they were both oddly shaped pieces of wood, sometimes said to have human or animal form, and invisible spirits with their own names and personalities; they had their own keepers and houses and one occasionally even hears of their being “fed” and “clothed,” much like Mesopotamian or Biblical idols. But in at least one sense, the identification is downright bizarre. The Old Testament condemnation of idols, after all, is based on their being images—specific, visible objects as opposed to a universal, invisible God. But sampy were in no sense images. “It is difficult to answer the inquiry of what shape and appearance are the national idols of the Malagasy,” writes one missionary (Ellis 1838 I:399), “because, so far from their being publically exhibited, it is considered impious to endeavour to get a sight of them.” In fact, like ody, sampy were made up of pieces of rare wood, bark, or roots, along with beads and silver ornaments, which were always kept hidden inside in a horn, box, or small satchel. Even when sampy were brought out on the end of poles to be displayed before the people, they were wrapped in red silk cloth.

Such objects could be referred to generically as fanafody, “medicine,” classed together with simple herbal infusions, and indeed even royal sampy were dipped in water and sprinkled on the king’s subjects. Still, most Malagasy sources (e.g., Callet 1908:82–85) were careful to stress that their power did not derive from any intrinsic virtue of the ingredients, but from the will of an invisible spirit that operated through them.

It is a peculiar feature of the Malagasy cosmos that the spirits that inhabit it are largely invisible, formless, nameless, incorporeal. With few exceptions, they are generic beings, completely lacking in defining features. “Spirits” embodied the possibility of creativity, action, or growth, a power that in Malagasy is referred to as hasina. As sheer potential, they were undefinable; spirits were generic beings, invisible, which hid away in deep caves or could only be glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye; they disappeared as soon as one stared directly at them. The ambiguity was itself a way of saying they are powerful, that they could not be defined by what they were, but simply their capacity to act, create, or have perceptible effects on the world (Graeber 1996b).

When spirits do acquire names, or more specific identities, it’s by association with some object—a rock, a tree, an ody—through which they can act. Such objects are said to be masina, usually translated “sacred,” but which mainly means to have hasina, which is precisely the invisible capacity to affect the world in visible ways (Delivre 1974:144–145). Hence, the power of an ody or sampy was identified with some generic spirit or disembodied intelligence that could be appealed to in prayers and otherwise treated like conscious beings; but without the charm itself, the spirit’s power was simply an abstraction. The specific powers of a particular charm were based on its particular ingredients—or even more, of their names—which determined how this generic capacity or hasina could actually make itself known. By this ritual logic, one might say it was the fact that the ingredients of charms were hidden from sight that gave them their capacity for action.

Intentions, Desires, and a Kind of Social Contract

Two things are critical here, I think. First, ody were capacities. They almost never worked on the owner, but gave the owner the capacity to have effects on someone else. Rifle charms never make their owners impervious to bullets; they make those shooting at their owners miss. Love magic does not make the user beautiful; it invokes desire directly in another. Rather than acting on the holder, the hidden elements of charms were, ultimately, identified with their holders’ own ability to act upon the world.

Second, all of this involved a kind of flickering awareness that it really was human beings who created the world that they lived in. Spirits were nothing in themselves. They were little more than raw potential. They only became specific powers—the capacity to do some specific thing, rather than sheer capacity in the abstract—through association with a specific object. Even more important, the connection between object and spirit was not simply fortuitous. It was always the result of human action: someone made the object, or dedicated it, or made offerings or vows to it, or otherwise imbued it with hasina. If a piece of wood had the power to ward off hail, or a spring to cure infertility, it was because someone wanted it that way. Even the invisible powers lurking in rocks and trees are ultimately the result of human purposes.

The way people talked about “medicine” often seemed only one or two tenuous steps away from social science. Not only that it was ultimately human intentions that shaped the social world, but also, that this was largely through the power of words. Words themselves could be said to have hasina in so far as they are persuasive (Delivre 1974:143), and it was, ultimately, the names of the various objects that made up ody (a bead called “capable of bringing together,” a root called “to turn aside” . . .) that determined what they could do.

In the nineteenth century, it was once common when making an appeal to the invisible powers, to accompany one’s words with an object—a bit of wood, a bead, a silver ornament—whose form represented, in visual form, the action one was asking those powers to take. Most often, one would place such an object in a bowl on the ritual shelf in the northeast corner of one’s house. If one’s prayers were in fact answered, the object would preserved permanently; it would become an ody, the embodiment of a force capable of carrying out the action on a regular basis. As such it would no longer be displayed, but hidden in a horn or a box or a sack, wrapped in red silk, or otherwise put out of sight (Graeber 1996; cf. Ellis 1837, 1:435; Callet 1908:56; Chapus and Ratsimba 1953:91n134).

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