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The west called her The Female Caligula, but if half what they said is true, he was more a male Ranavalona. This famously cruel ruler of Madagascar ostensibly killed between 30-50% of the entire population during her reign via unspeakable means — yet simultaneously, she kept her country independent, repeatedly defeated the combined forces of the English and French, and instigated one of the first industrial revolutions seen outside of Europe. She, uh, also tried making a giant pair of scissors to chop invaders in half. Unequal parts conqueror, protector, and lunatic, she was, at the very least, not boring.
It’s a long entry, but you don’t want to miss anything. Well, maybe one or two things.
First: this is another one of those “history is written by the victors” deals where most of what’s known about her comes courtesy of pissed-off foreign missionaries — basically, don’t take any of the following stories at face value. More on that later (under the “There isn’t Enough Salt in the World” header).
Second: want to play a game? Here’s some bingo sheets, which should give you an idea of how dark this entry is going to get. Pick one and follow along! When you win, I suggest drinking to forget.
So, Ranavalona! She came to power when her husband died at 36 (from either alcoholism, syphilis, murder, or some delicious cocktail of all three). His sudden death left the kingdom in a weird state: he’d spent years cozying up to the British in exchange for some of their weaponry (he’d just started the nation’s first standing army!), and was starting to turn on the British when he died. The main claimant to the throne (as Ranavalona had no kids with him), however, was looking to maintain cozy ties with the British.
Well, Ranavalona was having precisely none of that shit, so she assembled a”screw foreigners” posse, and staged a coup. She took control so fast that some of the king’s elite bodyguards only found out he was dead when they saw her on the throne. When a handful of them politely raised an objection, she gently replied by having them stabbed in the gut with thirty spears. She went on to execute most of the royal family — in one case summoning a man to the capital, then killing him for abandoning his post.
She made it illegal to dance, bathe, play music, sleep on a mattress, look in a mirror, or clap your hands.
This was not an idle threat: under Ranavalona, slavery, recently abolished to appease the British, returned to one of the cornerstones of the economy. Her favorite slave was undoubtedly Jean Laborde, a shipwrecked young Frenchman whose presence drastically transformed the country. Once Ranavalona found out he was an accomplished tradesman, she set him to work with making a massive industrial complex. Within a couple years of his arrival, Madagascar was self-reliant for weaponry, ammunition, and gunpowder — one of the first industrial revolutions (if not THE first) to occur outside of Europe.
This enabled her to keep out the combined forces of the French and the British, which was no small feat. They repeatedly attempted invasions, which usually went something like this: “we’re gonna bombard the shit out of you from our boats! Okay, you’re retreating, great, we’re gonna head onto land and chase you! Wait, what the hell, there’s ANOTHER ENTIRE BACKUP FORTRESS hidden behind the one we just blew up!? Oh fuck oh fuck oh f-*death gurgle*” She’d later decorate her fortresses with the decapitated heads of invaders on pikes.
She was hellbent on being a full-on D&D Dungeon Master.
He never quite got around to making those.
Her craziest stunt, though, was definitely the buffalo hunt. At one point she decided to go hunting and brought along her 50,000 closest pals. Only problem was that there weren’t any roads going where she wanted to hunt, so she had people go ahead and make a road for her as she went. Moreover, they had to make a new town for her to sleep in every night. This went on for 16 weeks, and 10,000 workers died. No buffalo were shot.
What she was best known for in her time, though, was her hatred of foreign religion, particularly Christianity. While she’d initially been tolerant of missionaries, she quickly came to see them as an invading force when several openly advocated her overthrow. As a reaction, she delved deeper into traditional religion, particularly a rite called the tanguena ordeal, which she made practically everyone in Madagascar do (Christians first). In it, you’d swallow poison and three bits of chicken skin. If you barfed up all three pieces, you were innocent, and free to go! If you died from the poison, even if you were actually innocent, it was chalked up as a divine mystery of the universe. But if you didn’t barf up all three pieces of chicken? You were guilty, and that’s where the real trouble began.
In this next section, things get increasingly graphic. Seriously, the mood moves from “slasher movie” to “horror porn” to “Cormac McCarthy novel.” If you want to skip this, just scroll down until you see a picture of bunnies. If you want to stay in, welcome to the Tanguena Challenge: try to make it to the end without barfing (or at least yak up three pieces of chicken).
Ranavalona’s methods of execution included:
Still here? Fine, here’s the worst one. At one point, she was to have four people executed, including an incredibly pregnant woman. As the four prayed fervently for help, her guards built a massive fire to toss them in. Soon, though, it started raining, dousing the flames. The guards kept rebuilding the fire until the storm broke, revealing a triple rainbow. Many people took this — as well as the pregnant woman suddenly giving birth — as a sign that the accused were divinely protected, and fled the scene. Undeterred by this, though, the guards threw the newborn in the fire, followed by his mother and the other three.
THAT IS THE WORST THING I HAVE EVER WRITTEN. OH GOD. BUNNIES BUNNIES BUNNIES. HERE ARE SOME BUNNIES.
She held onto the throne for decades, foiling multiple coup d’etats with the grace of a veteran supervillain. As an example: when her son, the prince, partnered with Laborde and several Europeans (including Ida Laura Pfeiffer, a very unfortunate 60-year-old tourist and fellow Rejected Princess) to try and oust her, she not only discovered their plot, but toyed with them for months. She would terrify them by spontaneously sending the military in… only to have them do random, benign tasks, like picking up presents. She would randomly summon the terrified Europeans to do impromptu piano performances and dance recitals, during which she would stand on a balcony overlooking them, completely silent throughout. She held a 6-hour-long meeting on how, exactly, she was to execute the treasonous Europeans, only to surprise them the next day by merely banishing them.
Their banishment, however, was a death sentence in everything but name. When the poor conspirators finally left the capital, they did so with a military accompaniment. Said accompaniment repeatedly led them on long detours through malaria-infested jungles and prevented them from contacting any doctors, turning a 7-day journey into a 53-day-long ordeal. She knew she could not have gotten away with outright killing Europeans, so she just made it increasingly likely that they would die of malaria. It worked, killing all but two of them.
Three years later, Ranavalona died peacefully in her sleep. She was 83. Afterwards, her son took over and undid virtually all of her major decrees within the first month, to the relief of many.
A lot of what you just read was racist imperialist bullshit.
The truth of the matter is probably somewhere in between. She was undoubtedly a hardline ruler, if not an outright despot, and it’s indisputable that a great many died under her reign. But she saw herself, not unreasonably, as a sovereign at war, and in that context she was an arguably fantastic leader. By associating herself so strongly with the native beliefs, she legitimized her reign. This enabled her to make the country self-reliant, strengthen her own nation’s culture, and repel the team-up invasion efforts of the two most powerful nations in the world — a feat that her successors failed at, to dire consequences.
Oh, what’s that? You think that everyone lived happily ever after once she died? HAH! Here’s what actually happened:
Like I said, her son Rakoto undid everything in her reign immediately: abolished the tanguena ordeal, ended slavery, established freedom of religion, and opened the borders to outsiders. Foreign merchants were allowed to trade without even paying duties, as long as they didn’t sell weapons or ammunition.
Fast forward a year: the country is awash in imported alcohol (one contemporary described one out of four buildings being a liquor store, and the townsfolk permanently drunk). The upper class is furious at Rakoto for not enforcing import/export duties, and destroying their livelihoods. Rakoto starts losing it, and institutes dueling as a method of solving disputes. Finally, the island is simultaneously wracked with a deadly plague and a spasm-inducing cholera, which makes it appear that people are uncontrollably dancing. Many consider this the ghost of Ranavalona coming back to haunt them.
Within thirty years, the island became a French colony, and stayed that way for over a hundred years. Christianity spread like wildfire and became one of the dominant religions. As recently as 2001, people on the street talked matter-of-factly of Ranavalona as one of their country’s greatest villains — for her brutal treatment of the people, yes, but often more for the refusal to accept European culture. One person surveyed remarked, “there is no development in Madagascar if there are no Europeans in Madagascar.”
That is, of course, one small sample, and should in no way be taken as representative of the whole. But it, and the rest of the study, is indicative of a lack of critical rigor as regard’s Ranavalona’s actual history, even in her native Madagascar.
Lawrence of Arabia followed in the century-old footsteps of this shipwrecked “Desert Queen” – who herself was following the much older ones of fabled Queen Zenobia.