Merina Kingdom

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A V-shaped object of reddish material, kept in a box among a king’s jewels on the hill of Ambohimanambola, was held to guard not a man but a realm. It was Kelimalaza, the Little Famous One, and where it traveled, the well-being of a people was understood to travel with it. To grasp the kingdom that rose in the central highlands of Madagascar is to begin here, with a thing the size of a hand that bound the fortune of a dynasty to the unseen, because the Merina state was governed as much by its sacred objects as by its army.

King Andrianampoinimerina (reigned 1787–1810), who unified Imerina from Antananarivo. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Merina are a highland people of central Madagascar, and the kingdom that bears their name grew out of Imerina, the upland region around the great hill on which Antananarivo stands. They are an islander people of doubled descent. Their language belongs to the West Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family, and roughly nine-tenths of its core vocabulary is shared with Maanyan, a tongue of the Barito river country in southeastern Borneo, some seven thousand kilometers across the Indian Ocean. Their blood carries that crossing and another: a Bantu inheritance carried over the Mozambique Channel from the East African seaboard. Genetic study of the highland Merina finds a population in which Austronesian and African lines are interwoven, the Asian component dominant in the highlands and the African component heavier toward the coast, the admixture itself reckoned to lie roughly twenty-seven generations back. The settlement of the island is dated to the latter centuries of the first millennium, the Austronesian arrival placed near a thousand years ago and the principal Bantu movement some three centuries after it. The Merina are thus neither a transplanted Asian colony nor an African people who learned an Asian speech, but a genuinely insular synthesis, and the religion of their kingdom — the cult of ancestors housed in stone, the binding of sovereignty to talismans — reads as the synthesis made visible.

The unification of Imerina

For most of the eighteenth century Imerina was not one kingdom but a country of feuds. After the death of King Andriamasinavalona around 1710 the highland realm broke into four principalities, and the strife among them ran on, in raids and reprisals, for some seventy-seven years. Out of that long fragmentation came the figure who is remembered as the founder of the unified state. Born around 1745 under the name Ramboasalama, he took the throne of the hill-town of Ambohimanga in 1787, displacing his uncle Andrianjafy, and reigned thereafter as Andrianampoinimerina — a regnal name that announces an ambition, for it carries the sense of the prince at the heart of Imerina.

He worked by treaty as much as by spear. In 1793 he took Antananarivo; the following year he restored it as the political capital; and by 1795 he had drawn back together the whole of Imerina as it had stood at its widest under Andriamasinavalona. He reorganized the capital, fixed its markets and its corvée labor, codified custom in spoken law, and set the royal compound — the Rova — on the crest of the highest of the city’s hills, in keeping with a Merina sense that height, orientation, and the sacred run together. From about 1800 his aim widened past the highlands toward the island itself. Royal envoys went out to the surrounding peoples bearing a choice: submission as vassals, or war. He died in 1810 with the work begun and, by the tradition preserved of his sayings, willed to his son the rest — that the sea should be the boundary of the rice-field, which is to say of the kingdom.

Radama I and the opening to the missionaries

That son was Radama I, and under him the highland kingdom became an island power and, for the first time, a state that dealt steadily with Europe. By military campaign and centralized administration he extended Merina authority over much of Madagascar; by 1825 he held nearly the whole eastern coast from Fort Dauphin to Vohemar, and by 1828 he had achieved the first effective unification of the greater part of the island — on the order of two-thirds of it — under a single crown. The instrument of that reach was a standing army drilled on European lines, paid for and partly armed through an alliance with the British governor of Mauritius, who recognized Radama as king of Madagascar.

King Radama I (reigned 1810–1828), who extended Merina rule over most of the island and admitted the first missionaries. — engraving from William Ellis, History of Madagascar (1838), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

With the British alliance came the missionaries. The London Missionary Society reached the capital in 1820, and Radama set them to work — not, in the first instance, to save souls, but to build a state. They opened schools that taught letters and trades to the sons of the nobility and the cadres of the new bureaucracy and army. In 1820, working with the Welsh missionary David Jones, the court fixed a Latin alphabet of twenty-one letters for the Malagasy language, and with it came the printing press, the printed Bible, and a literate administration. Christianity entered the highlands in the baggage of literacy and craft, an instrument of statecraft before it was a faith of the heart — but once the Word was in print and in the schools, it could not be confined to the uses the king intended for it.

The sampy: dynastic talismans and the architecture of sovereignty

Beneath the new administration lay an older order of power, and at its center stood the sampy. A sampy was a charged object — wood, animal teeth, beads, metal, often bound up with substances and kept in a horn or a casket — through which a more-than-human potency was made to dwell among the living. The kingdom recognized twelve great ones, the sampin’andriana, the royal sampy, twelve being a number weighted with completeness in Merina cosmology. They were not private charms but palladia: guardians of the realm itself, each with its keeper, its taboos, its festival, and its sphere — to shield the monarchy, to strike the enemy in war, to govern the weather, to turn aside disease.

The gathering of them into a royal collection is remembered as the work of the early king Ralambo, who drew the mightiest sampy of the surrounding country into the keeping of his line and so concentrated in the dynasty a sacred force that ratified its right to rule. Under his successor Andrianjaka the hierarchy was sharpened: the lesser charged objects were reduced to the rank of ody, personal protections that anyone — slave child or king — might carry for the guarding of a single body, while the twelve were held apart as the talismans of the crown. The most renowned among them bore names: Mahavaly, Fantaka, Manjakatsiroa, and Kelimalaza, the Little Famous One, whose protection extended over a whole community rather than a single wearer.

In the talisman and the amulet the wider esoteric world meets the Merina highlands on its own terms. A sampy is a container and conduit of efficacious power, and the logic by which a fashioned object draws and holds an unseen virtue belongs to the same family of thought that elsewhere produced astral-talismanic magic and the engraved amulet; European observers, reaching for a category, filed the sampy under what their age called fetishism, a word that says more about the observers than about the thing. The keepers read the disposition of the powers through divination — the highland reckoning of the vintana, the destiny of times and directions, by which a mpanandro, a maker-of-days, set what might be done and when. The point of the royal sampy was constitutional rather than merely protective: by holding the twelve, the dynasty held the keys of the kingdom’s well-being, and to be the heir of the talismans was, in the highland understanding, to be the rightful sovereign. The state was a religious order with an army, not an army that happened to keep some relics.

The razana and the tombs of the ancestors

If the sampy bound the crown to the unseen, the cult of the razana — the ancestors — bound every Merina household to its own dead, and the two systems together formed the spine of highland life. In the Merina understanding the dead do not depart. They pass into the condition of ancestors, more powerful than the living, the source of blessing (tsodrano) and of fertility for the land and the line, and they remain present in the affairs of their descendants, owed honor and consultation and care. The living and the razana are one society divided only by a threshold, and the threshold is the tomb.

The tomb is the most massive and the most permanent thing a Merina family builds — a stone chamber, often half-sunk into the earth of the ancestral homeland, far outlasting the houses of the living, into which the generations are gathered. The anthropologist Maurice Bloch, whose Placing the Dead (1971) remains the foundational study, showed how the tomb anchors Merina kinship to a fixed ancestral ground even as the living scatter to work and trade: a Merina may live anywhere, but belongs where the bones lie, and must in the end be brought home to them.

Royal tombs at the Rova of Antananarivo, the kind of massive stone chamber in which Merina generations are gathered. — photo by Lemurbaby, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

It is into this order that the famadihana, the turning of the bones, fits. At intervals of some years — by custom every five to seven, the date chosen by a diviner — a family opens the tomb, lifts out the wrapped remains of its dead, renews the silk shrouds, the lamba mena, rewrites the names so that the ancestors are not forgotten, and carries them in procession with music and rejoicing before returning them to the chamber. The rite turns grief into festival; weeping is set aside, for the occasion celebrates the unbroken bond between the generations and renews the standing of the dead within the family. The practice took its developed form in Imerina and spread with the kingdom — its diffusion is associated with the early nineteenth century, the era of Radama I — and it remains a living observance of the highlands and beyond, a present rite and not a memory. As architecture of the spirit the famadihana is the household counterpart of the royal sampy: both make the unseen tangible, both bind a community to a source of power lodged in a sacred thing or place, and together they explain why a kingdom could be administered as a sacred trust.

The Rova of Antananarivo

The crown’s own sacred ground was the Rova, the royal compound on the summit of Analamanga, the highest of the hills of Antananarivo. Within its walls stood the houses, the chapel, and the tombs of the sovereigns — five palaces, a chapel, and nine tombs in its developed state — so that the dwelling of the living monarch and the resting of the royal razana shared one enclosure on the city’s highest point. The dominant structure was Manjakamiadana, the palace remembered as the Queen’s Palace for Ranavalona I, raised first in wood between 1839 and 1841 by the Frenchman Jean Laborde, the shipwrecked artisan who became the kingdom’s chief technician, and later encased in stone by the missionary builder James Cameron. From that height the dynasty looked out over the whole bowl of Imerina, the geography itself a statement of sovereignty.

The Rova stood as the heart of the kingdom until 1995, when on the night of 6 November a fire swept the compound and consumed it, leaving only the stone shells of Manjakamiadana and the chapel above the gutted interior; the work of restoration has occupied the years since. The royal tombs and the burnt palaces remain the central monument of Merina kingship, and the hill keeps the orientation the founder gave it.

Conversion and the burning of the sampy

The faith Radama I admitted as a tool of state did not stay a tool, and the collision came under his widow. Ranavalona I held the throne from 1828 to 1861 and turned the kingdom inward. Reading the missionaries and their converts as a solvent of the ancestral order on which her sovereignty rested, she moved against the new religion: in 1835 the practice of Christianity by Malagasy subjects was forbidden, and within a year the foreign missionaries had withdrawn. The decades that followed bore down hard on the converts who remained. The first was put to death in 1837 — a woman of about twenty-five, Rasalama, speared at the place of execution — and through the worst of the years that followed, by the count of the missionary record, converts were fined, jailed, enslaved, and killed in their hundreds; in 1849 alone some nineteen hundred were punished and eighteen executed. The court of Ranavalona I stood as the great defender of the old order, the sampy and the razana against the printed Word.

The reversal was swift once it came. Her son Radama II, reigning briefly from 1861, reopened the kingdom, proclaimed freedom of religion, and welcomed the missionaries back — the Jesuits in 1861, the London Missionary Society in 1862 under William Ellis — before he was overthrown and killed in 1863. The decisive turn fell to Ranavalona II. In 1869 she and her prime minister, Rainilaiarivony, were baptized, the court converted, and the kingdom was declared a Christian state. The same year the royal talismans were brought out and burned. In a public fire — beginning, pointedly, with the sovereign’s own — the twelve sampin’andriana and the lesser sacred objects of the clans were committed to the flames, their authority transferred, by decree, to the Bible enthroned in their place. The act was a coronation in reverse: the palladia that had made kings were unmade by a king, and the source of legitimacy was relocated from the ancestral talisman to the Christian God, with the monarchy as its custodian. The cult of the razana, rooted in the household tomb rather than in the dynasty’s charms, was not abolished and did not end; it persisted and persists alongside the new faith. But the public order of the kingdom had changed its foundation, and the smoke over Antananarivo in 1869 marked the moment the highland state set its sovereignty on a new ground.

Queen Ranavalona II (reigned 1868–1883), under whom the court was baptized in 1869 and the royal sampy were publicly burned. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

That ground would not hold the kingdom long. After two French campaigns the colonial column reached the capital in 1895 and shelled the Rova; the queen surrendered, a protectorate treaty was signed on the first of October, and on the first of January 1896 France annexed the island. In 1897 the monarchy was dissolved and Ranavalona III, the last sovereign, was sent into exile, first to Réunion and then to Algiers. The state that Andrianampoinimerina had drawn together out of four feuding principalities lasted, as a crown, a little over a century.

Trade, neighbors, and an African comparison

The Merina rose in the highland interior, but their island sat athwart the western rim of the Indian Ocean trade that for centuries had carried gold, ivory, slaves, cloth, and the monsoon between the East African coast and Asia. The coral-stone towns of the Swahili seaboard and great emporia such as Kilwa lay across the Mozambique Channel, and the same Indian Ocean world that fed those ports washed Madagascar’s coasts and shaped the trade — in arms, in slaves, in goods — through which the highland kingdom armed and financed its expansion. The relation is one of context, not of kinship: the Swahili are a Bantu people of the mainland coast and the Merina an islander synthesis of the highlands, distinct in language, descent, and polity.

As an instance of African statecraft the Merina kingdom invites comparison with Aksum, the early Christian power of the Ethiopian highlands, not for any common origin but for a parallel of form: a highland realm that bound its sovereignty to the sacred, monumentalized its kings in stone, and at a decisive moment exchanged an ancestral religious order for Christianity as the charter of the throne. Where Aksum took the cross early and carried it forward, the Merina court reached it late and by a sharper break, and the contrast lights up both — the long Christian continuity of the one against the deliberate, public renunciation of the talismans that founded the other.

The textual and scholarly record

The kingdom comes down to us through the converging testimony of its conquerors-in-faith and its own oral law. The indispensable contemporary witness is the missionary William Ellis, foreign secretary of the London Missionary Society, whose two-volume History of Madagascar (London: Fisher, Son & Co., 1838) set down at length the customs, the religion of the sampy and the razana, and the early persecutions, drawing on original mission documents; Ellis returned to the island in person in the 1860s. The royal oral tradition was gathered later in the great compilation of the Jesuit François Callet, the Tantara ny Andriana eto Madagasikara (the histories of the sovereigns), the principal indigenous source for the deeds and sayings of Andrianampoinimerina and his line.

Modern scholarship on the religion is anchored by Maurice Bloch’s Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages and Kinship Organization in Madagascar (Seminar Press, 1971), the first full ethnography of the tombs and the turning of the bones, and refined by David Graeber’s reinterpretation of the rite, Dancing with corpses reconsidered (American Ethnologist, 1995). On the founder’s consecration of his power, Gerald M. Berg’s Sacred Acquisition: Andrianampoinimerina at Ambohimanga (Journal of African History) reads the early reign as a deliberate gathering of the sacred. The doubled descent of the people — the Borneo and the Bantu lines — is established by genetic work such as the study of selection for African ancestry in the Malagasy (Nature Communications, 2018), confirming from the genome what the language and the customs already told: that the highland kingdom was the work of an islander people made of two worlds.

The objects themselves did not survive the fire of 1869 — that was the intent. What survives is the country they ordered: the tombs on the ancestral hills, the silk-wrapped dead who are carried out and honored and laid back, the law and the lineages, and the burnt summit of the Rova above Antananarivo, where the houses of the kings and the kings themselves were kept on one high ground. The kingdom set its sovereignty first in a box of charged objects and then in a printed book, and both decisions were acts of the same conviction — that a state is held together by the right relation to powers it cannot see.

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