Ambohidrabiby

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The hill keeps two names inside one. Ambohi- is the hill or the hill-town; the rest of the word is a man, Rabiby, who lies buried at its crown, so that the place reads plainly as the hill of Rabiby and carries his name up every approach to it. Rabiby was an astrologer, remembered in the highland tradition as one of the first people of the land. And the king who made this his capital — the king who first gave the whole upland country the name it still bears, and who fixed the turning of the year to fall on his own birthday — chose, when he died, to be laid not in a tomb of his own but inside the stone chamber of the grandfather the hill was named for. A founder who set the calendar sleeps in the grave of a diviner older than the kingdom.

The hill of Rabiby

Ambohidrabiby (also written Ambohitrabiby) rises about twenty kilometers north of Antananarivo, reached by National Road 3, in the Antananarivo-Avaradrano district of the Analamanga Region (Ambohidrabiby). Today it is a rural municipality of some eleven fokontany — the small settlement-quarters into which the highland countryside is divided — with a population of 7,873 recorded at the 2019 census. On its summit stands what the village remembers as the seat of a king, and beneath that seat the tomb the whole hill is built around.

The man in the tomb reaches the record as Rabiby. In the Merina royal tradition — preserved above all in the Tantara ny Andriana, the vast compilation of highland royal history and custom that Father Callet gathered at the Antananarivo court in the 1870s — Rabiby is remembered as a vazimba and a renowned astrologer, and as the maternal grandfather of the king Ralambo, though a variant of the same tradition makes him Ralambo’s father-in-law instead (Twelve sacred hills of Imerina). To call Rabiby a vazimba is to place him among the first people of the highlands, the masters of the land who stand before the remembered dynasties; whether that word records an older people absorbed by later arrivals or names the land’s first masters in the tradition’s own idiom is a question argued in full in the account of the vazimba, and it is not reopened here. What matters for the hill is the shape the tradition gives it: a height named for a vazimba diviner, holding his grave.

Ralambo enters the hill’s story as the king who moved his court to it. His father was Andriamanelo, remembered as the first male king of the line, and his mother Randapavola; the early Merina genealogy runs back through the vazimba queens Rangita and Rafohy who stand at its head, so that the dynasty descends, at its source, through vazimba blood. Ralambo began his reign at Alasora, the seat of that early line — itself one of the hills the tradition later counts as sacred — and from there relocated the working capital to Ambohidrabiby, taking up, the tradition says, the former hill of his grandfather Rabiby (Ralambo). The move made a diviner’s burial-hill into a royal seat, and it set the pattern the place has kept ever since: the living king governed from the height where the ancestor already lay. A highland capital of this age was a hill-town in the plainest sense — a crested height ringed with ditches and worked terraces, holding a royal compound and the tombs of the line, sited so that height and orientation carried their own charge. Ambohidrabiby was such a place before it was a memory of one, and the grave at its crown was there before the court came up to it.

The dates the tradition gives for Ralambo’s reign run from about 1575 to about 1610, and some tellings carry the close to 1612. These are not fixed by any external record. They belong to the reconstructed king-list of the Tantara itself, the chronology worked out from the succession of remembered reigns, and they are given here as the tradition’s own reckoning rather than as a documented fact. That reckoning is exactly what the modern scholarship set out to test. Alain Delivré’s L’Histoire des rois d’Imerina: Interprétation d’une tradition orale (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), a 448-page study grown from a Sorbonne thesis, subjected Callet’s compilation to historical criticism for the first time and asked what kind of past a king-list transmitted by memory can actually be made to yield. The reign-dates of Ralambo are the object of that inquiry, not its conclusion — a chronology to be read with its transmission in view, not a milestone to be marked on a fixed line.

The stone tomb of Ralambo at Ambohidrabiby — the burial chamber of his grandfather Rabiby, in which the king was laid at his death. Lemurbaby, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

A bath made into a year

What the hill holds, beyond the tomb, is a cluster of foundings. Ralambo is the king in whom the ordering gestures of early Merina rule are gathered, and three of them are set at Ambohidrabiby.

The first was an act of concentration. Ralambo is remembered to have drawn the mightiest sampy of the surrounding country into the keeping of his line — twelve of them, twelve being a number weighted with completeness in Merina cosmology — among them Kelimalaza, the Little Famous One, whose guardianship extended over a whole community rather than a single body. A sampy was a charged object through which a more-than-human potency was made to dwell among the living, and to gather the greatest of them into one dynasty was to concentrate in the crown a sacred force that ratified its right to rule. The talismans themselves, their keepers and taboos, and the great public burning of 1869 that ended their public cult belong to the account of the Merina kingdom, where the royal sampy are treated in full; at Ambohidrabiby they mark simply the moment the hill became a store of sacred power as well as a seat of government.

The second was an act of naming. Ralambo was the first to give the central highland territory he ruled the name Imerina — the land of the Merina — so that a country acquired its name from the hill where he sat. The name has outlasted every capital the Merina have since kept, including the one at Antananarivo that eventually eclipsed this hill. The same tradition credits Ralambo with setting other durable institutions of highland noble life, circumcision and polygamy among them; the founder is remembered less as a conqueror than as the king who fixed the forms his people would keep, the calendar first among them.

The third, and the one most bound to the calendar, was the founding of the fandroana, the annual new-year festival that nineteenth-century European observers called the Royal Bath (Fandroana). The tradition roots the festival in a discovery of Ralambo’s own. By the remembered account the king came upon an unusually fat wild zebu, made a burnt offering of it, and, tasting the cooked meat, judged it fit for people to eat — and set a yearly holiday to keep the finding. Whatever weight one gives the story, it fixes the character of the feast: the fandroana is a festival of the fattened ox as much as of the bath, and its calendar and its meat are held together in the one founder. Ralambo is credited with fixing it, and with fixing it to fall on Alahamady, the first day of the first month of the highland lunar year — a day held to be his own birthday, so that the turning of the calendar and the renewal of the king were made a single act. Alahamady is the Malagasy name for the first lunar month, taken from the Arabic al-hamal, the Ram, and answering to the zodiacal Aries; the new year it opens falls near the full moon of March, at the close of the rains and the start of the rice harvest that is the staple of highland life. The festival’s foods carry the king’s own remembered discovery, that the fattened zebu could be eaten: the beast is taken grilled, or kept as jaka, a preserve of zebu meat sealed with fat in a jar and buried for the year, made and eaten for this holiday alone. And at its center the sovereign bathes in water made sacred and sprinkles it over the gathered people to carry the blessing of the new year into the country. The inner working of that rite belongs to the account of the fandroana itself; here it is named only as the hill’s founding gift — a bath turned into the frame of a year.

Beneath all three foundings runs the older logic that makes the hill more than a memory of statecraft. Ambohidrabiby is a seat of hasina, the sacred efficacy that passes among the living, the ancestral dead and the land, quickening the field and the child and ratifying rightful rule. A hill that holds the tomb of a founder holds a source of that potency, and in the highland understanding the source cannot be moved. Like any sacred height, its conduct is ordered by fady, the prohibitions that guard a holy place and mark it off from ordinary ground. When the seat of Merina power later passed to Antananarivo, the later capital could draw on the blessing housed at Ambohidrabiby but could never carry it away, because the blessing was fixed to the ground the founder lay in. The honoring of the ancestral dead in their tombs — the whole relation of the living to the razana, the family dead who bless and govern from the stone — lives in full in its own account; at this hill it is simply the working assumption of the place, a founder resting in a first-person’s grave so that his line might draw on the potency of both at once.

The sacred hill and its keeping

The afterlife of Ambohidrabiby runs through the memory of the highlands, the Christian centuries, and a present in which the hill is still climbed.

In that memory the hill is counted among the Twelve Sacred Hills of Imerina — the hills that were ancient capitals, birthplaces of the line, or the burial-sites of its dead, and that the tradition holds set apart as holy (Twelve sacred hills of Imerina). Tradition credits the first setting-apart to Andrianjaka, Ralambo’s son and successor, who reigned about 1610 to 1630 and whose name is bound to the founding of the royal city on the hill of Antananarivo; and it credits a second designation to Andrianampoinimerina, who reigned from 1787 to 1810 and who is commonly said to have installed one of his wives on each of the twelve. Which hills make up the twelve is itself contested in the record. More than twelve heights around Antananarivo claim the standing, and the count varies with the teller and the era, so that the roster is not a fixed canon but a title claimed by more sites than the number allows. Ambohidrabiby’s place among them rests not on any settled list but on the two facts the hill can show for itself: it was Ralambo’s capital, and it holds his tomb. When Ralambo died the succession passed to Andrianjaka rather than to the eldest son, by the reckoning the tradition preserves; the seat of the young kingdom soon moved on to the hill of Antananarivo, and the political center of the Merina never returned to Ambohidrabiby. But the tomb did not follow the court. The founder stayed on his hill, and the hill kept its standing as one of the sacred heights precisely because he did.

The sacred hill (colline sacrée) of Ambohitrabiby, the height that held Ralambo’s royal seat and his tomb. Cactus0625, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0.

The scholarship that frames the hill is, first of all, the criticism of the very chronology on which its dates depend — Delivré’s reading of Callet’s Tantara, which asks what a king-list carried in memory can be made to prove. Around that sits the wider anthropology of the highland dead and their landscape. Maurice Bloch’s Placing the Dead (Seminar Press, 1971) supplied the frame for what a royal grave does to a height: a founder’s burial fixes the hill itself as a permanent seat of blessing, the one point in a scattered kingdom that cannot be moved. Gerald M. Berg’s work on the Merina sovereigns reads the gathering of the sacred at a royal hill as an instrument of sovereignty in its own right, sacred acquisition set beside conquest; and Susan Kus’s archaeology of the settled Imerina landscape reads the highland hills as a built order in which height, orientation and the sacred run together. None of these takes the tradition’s reckoning at face value, and none dismisses it: they read the hill as a document to be interpreted, which is what a place transmitted by memory is.

Madagascar is a churchgoing country that has never laid down its ancestral observances, and Ambohidrabiby is at once a heritage hill and a working one. A Protestant church of the FJKM, the united highland communion, stands in the village alongside the older sanctities of the height, in the ordinary highland arrangement by which the chapel and the ancestral tomb keep their places on the same ground without contradiction. Ralambo’s tomb — the stone chamber of his grandfather Rabiby — still stands at the crown, and the site is visited as the place of the founding king, a height climbed by people who come to honor a founder and not only to see a ruin. Near the new year the village keeps the memory pointedly: the tomb of Ralambo is a stop on the observance of the day he is remembered to have set. The new year Ralambo is remembered to have fixed has proved as durable as the name he gave the land. Abolished under the French colonial administration after 1897 as a rite that tied the Malagasy too closely to their sovereigns and their dead, and kept quietly through the years of that ban, it has returned since the 1990s as a public celebration — revived across the highlands as Alahamady Be, the great Malagasy new year, still reckoned by the first full moon of March at the close of the rains (Alahamady Be). This hill is not the only one to keep royal tombs and a royal memory; that role it shares with the blue hill of Ambohimanga to the northeast, and with the tomb-villages of the plain such as Antsahadinta. What is particular to Ambohidrabiby is the pairing at its crown. The king who named the country and set its calendar was buried in the grave of the diviner the hill is named for, and the country still keeps the year the way that king is remembered to have taught it — turning, each March, on the day he was born.

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