Ambohimanga

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Every evening a team of twenty guards set their shoulders to a single disc of stone. It stood some four and a half meters across, a slab about thirty centimeters thick and weighing near twelve tons, and when it was rolled along its groove it closed the eastern gate of the hill — the gate they called Ambatomitsangana, the standing stone. Each morning the same twenty rolled it back. A wall of ditches and a ring of stone gateways could keep an enemy out; this disc had to be moved by hand, at dusk and at dawn, so that the closing of the hill was a thing repeated by living arms every day of the year. What it sealed was not a fortress in the ordinary sense. It was Ambohimanga, the blue hill, the ancestral seat of the sovereigns of the Merina highlands, and the men who rolled the stone were closing a shrine.

The blue hill

The name is built from two Malagasy words. Ambohi- is the hill or hill-town; manga is a word that carries several senses at once — blue, and sacred, and beautiful, and good — so that Ambohimanga reads as the blue hill and the holy hill in the same breath, with no seam between the color and the sanctity. It rises about twenty-four kilometers north-east of Antananarivo, at 18°45′33″ south and 47°33′46″ east, one of the crested hills of Imerina, the highland heart of Madagascar. From its summit the whole bowl of the central highlands opens out, terraced with the irrigated rice that has been worked here for centuries.

What stands on the hill is a fortified royal city, and its defenses are a system rather than a wall. Deep ditches — the hadivory, cut in places to great depth — ring the compounds, and the ring is pierced by gateways of dressed stone. The heritage description counts fourteen fortified stone gateways in all; local tradition and the site’s own reckoning name seven principal ones. Among them are Ambatomitsangana in the east, the largest and best-preserved, with its rolling disc of stone; Andakana in the west, which keeps its own stone disc and a paved approach; and Ambavahaditsiombiomby to the north-east, a natural gate formed by two boulders and reserved for the sovereign alone. The inner set of gates is credited to the eighteenth-century king Andriantsimitoviaminiandriana; a second, outer set was raised before 1794 as the works of the hill grew (Ambohimanga).

The living tradition of the hill, kept by the households settled on it and the shrine-keepers who tend its sacred places, holds Ambohimanga to have been the seat of the Merina sovereigns and holy without interruption for some five centuries. The scholarly and archaeological reading dates the fortified ensemble as it now stands to between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, with its greatest development ascribed to Andrianampoinimerina, who took the throne of the hill in 1787 and reigned until 1810. From this hill he drew the four feuding principalities of Imerina back into one kingdom before making Antananarivo his working capital — a story that belongs to the Merina kingdom as a whole, and that turns, at Ambohimanga, on a single fact of geography: the founder governed from the sacred hill first and moved the seat of power only when the kingdom was made.

The written record of the hill reaches us by more than one road, and the roads are worth keeping apart. There is the living tradition itself, spoken by the people who keep the shrine and observe its prohibitions. There is the great compiled court text, the Tantara ny Andriana — the histories of the sovereigns — preserving the traditions of the founding kings and the taboos laid on the hill — a court compilation, to be read against the court that made it. And there is the modern heritage file, the UNESCO documentation drawn up for the inscription of 2001, which records the ensemble formally: the fortification of ditches and stone gates, the royal city with its public court and sacred trees, the burial place of the kings, and the sacred landscape of wood, springs and basin around them.

Behind the hill stands the deeper and more open question of where the Merina themselves came from. Their tradition traces a migration into the highlands perhaps five or six centuries ago, one strand of the wider settlement of Madagascar by peoples of Austronesian and East-African descent. The first-arrival chronology of the island is genuinely unsettled — the datings offered range from the middle of the first millennium of the common era to considerably later — and it is treated as the open question it is in the account of the Malagasy. Ambohimanga sits at the near end of that long history, the point at which a highland people had become a kingdom with a hill of its own.

The traditional wooden house of Andrianampoinimerina in the Mahandrihono compound, the only structure surviving intact from his reign; its walls are of solid rosewood and its peaked roof rests on a central rosewood pillar near ten meters tall. mwanasimba, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The order of a sacred hill

Within the Malagasy sacred world Ambohimanga is not a ruin and not a museum. It is a working center of hasina — the sacred efficacy that runs between the living, the razana (the ancestors) and the land — at the scale of a great royal shrine, and its holiness is territorial and alive. The hill holds power the way a doany holds it, as a place where the dead remain present and answering; and its order is the order of a place where blessing is still sought and given.

That order is written first in the ground. The ditches and the fourteen stone gates mark the hill off from the ordinary country, and at Ambatomitsangana the marking is dramatized nightly by the great disc of stone. A gate that must be re-sealed by hand every evening is as much a threshold of ritual as of war: to pass in and out of Ambohimanga is to cross a line that the guards themselves redraw each day. Other gates carried their own uses — one set aside for the passage of the dead, another kept for the king — so that the very approaches to the hill were sorted by rank and by rite before a visitor reached the compounds within.

The largest and most complete of those compounds is Mahandrihono, and it gathers the hill’s holiest things into one enclosure. Here stand the royal tombs — stone crypts, each once topped by a small wooden house, the tranomasina — that held the sovereigns of the line, among them Andriambelomasina, Andrianampoinimerina himself, Ranavalona I and Ranavalona II. Here too stands the single-room house of Andrianampoinimerina, the only structure to survive intact from his reign: a simple building in the traditional style, its walls of solid rosewood, its steep roof carried on one central rosewood pillar close to ten meters tall, with silvered ornaments once set at its corners and peak. Beside it are the summer pavilions added in 1871 by Ranavalona II, who reigned from 1868 to 1883 — larger buildings of rosewood that blend the highland manner with imported Western fittings, one of them fitted on all four sides with glass. The dwelling of a living king and the resting place of the royal dead shared a single yard, and the yard was the hill’s inmost room.

Nearby lies the Fidasiana, the public court: a broad open ground shaded by a great sacred fig, where the sovereign’s word was given and traditional justice was done. The fig trees of the hill are themselves objects of care and pilgrimage, and the court beneath them was where the invisible order of the ancestors met the visible business of rule. And through the compounds runs water held to be charged with power. Two stone-covered springs feed a stream reckoned to carry the force of purification; a lake, Amparihy, was made by hand — dug, by the reckoning of the record, no later than the eighteenth century — to supply two ceremonial pools built within the compound, whose water served royal blessing and the great passages of life. Oral tradition says Andrianampoinimerina threw pearls and silver rings into the lake to inaugurate it.

The conduct of the hill is fixed by fady, the order of prohibition. A body of taboos ascribed to Andrianampoinimerina still binds behavior at Ambohimanga: prohibitions against pork and pigs, against maize and pumpkins and onions, against hedgehogs and snails, against cooking with reeds, and against cutting or gathering wood from the sacred forests on the hill. To these the record adds a further and more pointed measure: Ranavalona I, who held the throne from 1828 to 1861, forbade swine at Ambohimanga on account of their association with Europeans, who had promoted pork as a food in the decade before. The fady are not quaint survivals but the living shape of proper conduct in a sacred place, carried forward as the will of the ancestors made durable — a food a forebear refused becoming a food the hill refuses still.

And the hill is climbed. Pilgrims come to Ambohimanga to honor the razana — from Madagascar and from the diaspora beyond it — and they leave their offerings at the sacred places: zebu horns fixed to the trunks of the sacred trees and set at the tombs, together with honey, sweets, coins and money, and blood. The royal tombs remain, in the living understanding, the resting place of the ancestors, and they are addressed as present. So too are the springs and the sacred wood. The offering is not a memorial gesture but a transaction with the living dead, who bless and who warn, and whose nearness is the reason the hill is worth the climb. The full theology of that relation — the tomb, the blessing, the honoring of the dead — belongs to the account of the razana; at Ambohimanga it is simply the working assumption of the place.

A capital kept holy

The afterlife of Ambohimanga runs through kingdom, conquest and heritage, and it begins with a departure that changed nothing about the hill’s sanctity. When Andrianampoinimerina made Antananarivo the seat of his government, he did not make Ambohimanga less holy; he left it holy and governed from the plain. The sacred hill went on legitimating the dynasty precisely as the place the kings had come from — the source of their line, the ground of their tombs, the shrine to which the living monarch belonged even while he ruled elsewhere. The political capital moved; the sacred capital stayed. The dynasty’s claim on power was, in the end, a claim on the ancestors housed at Ambohimanga, and no relocation of the court could transfer that.

Just how much power the hill’s tombs held can be measured by what was done to them under conquest. When France annexed Madagascar and moved to break the resistance of the Merina, colonial authorities in 1897 removed the royal remains from twelve tombs at Ambohimanga and carried them to Antananarivo. The record and the later scholarship read the act the same way: it was aimed at severing the living from their royal razana, at cutting the line between a defeated people and the ancestral dead who still legitimated resistance. That the colonizers reached for the tombs, and not merely for the throne, is the exact measure of how much the tombs mattered. The crypts at Ambohimanga were rebuilt in 2008, though what they had held was taken away more than a century before.

The royal tombs in the Mahandrihono compound at Ambohimanga, the resting place of the Merina sovereigns and still a place of pilgrimage and offering. Lemurbaby, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The hill’s standing among the highland royal sites was raised again by a loss elsewhere. On 6 November 1995 a fire gutted the Rova of Antananarivo, the palace complex on the capital’s highest hill, destroying its buildings and much of what they held. After that fire Ambohimanga stood as the best-preserved royal ensemble of the highlands, its wooden house and its tombs and its gates substantially intact where the capital’s rova was ruin. In 2001 UNESCO inscribed the Royal Hill of Ambohimanga on the World Heritage List under criteria (iii), (iv) and (vi) — the only cultural World Heritage site in Madagascar. The inscription reads the hill as an exceptional witness to the highland civilization that developed between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries and to the joined cults of kings and ancestors; it records that the site has “maintained its spiritual and sacred character both in ritual practice and the popular imagination for the past 500 years”, and names it a place of worship to which pilgrims still come to seek renewal, blessing and protection, and the most significant symbol of the cultural identity of the people of Madagascar.

The scholarship that frames what the hill embodies has, at its center for Ambohimanga itself, the historian Gerald M. Berg, whose “Sacred Acquisition: Andrianampoinimerina at Ambohimanga, 1777–1790” (Journal of African History 29:2, 1988, pp. 191–211) reads the founder’s early years on the hill as a deliberate gathering of the sacred — sovereignty built not only by treaty and spear but by the assembling of hasina at a holy place. The wider anthropology of the highlands, above all Maurice Bloch’s studies of the tombs and the ancestral order, reads the Merina relation of the living, the dead and the land at the very register Ambohimanga stages in stone: a kingdom whose foundations were its ancestors, and whose ancestors were housed on a hill.

In the Madagascar of the present — a churchgoing country that has never laid down its ancestral observances — Ambohimanga is at once a monument and a working shrine. It is guarded and ticketed and studied; it is also climbed by pilgrims who leave honey and coins and zebu horns at the tombs and the trees, and who address the ancestors as answering. The kings who built the hill left it for the plain, and the plain became the capital of a kingdom and then of a republic. The hill stayed where it was, and stayed what it was. Its holiness never depended on the court being there; it depended on the dead being there, and the dead have not moved.

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