Rova of Antananarivo

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The highest ground in the Merina capital carried the largest building in the kingdom. The stone palace of Manjakamiadana rose from the summit of Analamanga in three grey tiers, thirty meters long and twenty wide, its steep roof and corner towers lifting near thirty-seven meters into the highland sky; a traveler climbing from the rice plain saw it before he saw anything else. But the holiest rooms on the hill were not in that palace. They stood in the northeastern corner of the enclosure — low houses of wood, set close together with their gable peaks aligned in a single line, which the Malagasy called the Fitomiandalana, “the seven set in a row.” Each was a trano masina, a sacred house raised over a grave. A dead sovereign lodged in one of them was housed more durably, and honored more highly, than any living king in his palace of stone.

The enclosure on Analamanga

The full Malagasy name of the place is Rovan’i Manjakamiadana, the royal enclosure of Manjakamiadana — a rova being the fenced compound of a highland lord, and Manjakamiadana carrying the sense of a reign at ease, a rule that need not fight to keep its ground. It stands on Analamanga, the highest of the crested hills on which Antananarivo is built, in the central highlands of Madagascar at roughly 18°55′ south and 47°32′ east.

The living tradition and the compiled record trace the enclosure to the earliest highland kingship. The great court text, the Tantara ny Andriana, remembers the height as taken and settled by Andrianjaka, who fixed his residence there in the early seventeenth century, by the usual reckoning around 1610 to 1625. That text is indispensable and partial at once: a compilation assembled by a Christianizing court and best read with its setting in view. What it records is a founding by force and by rite together. Andrianjaka is said to have sent a garrison of a thousand soldiers to seize the strategic summit from the vazimba, the first people who held its springs and ground before the Merina came; from that garrison the capital is remembered to have taken its name, Antananarivo, the town of the thousand. On the height he raised his first houses, among them Besakana, the throne-house whose name means “great breadth,” where the sovereigns of the line would after him be enthroned. And he set aside the northeastern quarter for the royal dead. His own tomb, built in 1630, was the first of the row that became the Fitomiandalana.

The complex the world eventually came to know, however, is largely a nineteenth-century monument, raised at the height of the Merina kingdom when the highland state ruled most of the island. The great palace Manjakamiadana was built in wood in 1839 and 1840 for Queen Ranavalona I, who reigned from 1828 to 1861, by Jean Laborde — a shipwrecked Frenchman who became the queen’s industrial artisan and built much of her material world. It was Laborde who imported from France, in 1840, the bronze voromahery, the eagle that stood over the palace gate; the voromahery was the emblem of the sovereign’s own reach, the far-seeing bird of the highland crown. Thirty years later the wooden palace was given the form the world remembers. The Welsh artisan-missionary James Cameron, sent to the island by the London Missionary Society, encased Laborde’s timber house in a shell of grey stone in 1867, on the order of Ranavalona II, who reigned from 1868 to 1883 — a casing of dressed masonry, with arcaded verandas and towers, wrapped around a wooden core, so that the palace stood as stone without and timber within (Rova of Antananarivo).

Around Manjakamiadana stood the older houses of the enclosure, each with its office. Besakana remained the throne-house, the seat of enthronement. Mahitsielafanjaka — Mahitsy for short — built in 1796, held the royal sampy: the guardian palladia of the crown, the objects in which the hasina of the kingship was gathered and kept. The missionaries who watched them called them idols, but they were nothing of the kind; a sampy such as Manjakatsiroa, the royal palladium lodged at Mahitsy, was a keeper of sacred force, tended and consulted as the guarantor of the sovereign’s power, and Mahitsy was accordingly the seat of ancestral authority within the walls. The Tranovola, the “silver house” of Radama I’s era, carried silver ornament worked into its fabric; the Manampisoa, raised for Queen Rasoherina, added another royal dwelling of rosewood and ebony. And at the enclosure’s edge stood the stone royal chapel, the Fiangonana. Its foundation stone was laid on 20 July 1869 and it was inaugurated on 8 April 1880 — eleven years’ work, more than thirty-five thousand hand-chiseled stones, a tower some thirty-four meters high, and a slate roof unmatched on the island. Its architect, the LMS builder William Pool, raised it for Ranavalona II after the queen’s own conversion to Christianity, so that a stone church stood inside the same walls as the houses of the sampy — the mark, in masonry, of a court that had changed its gods within a single generation.

The Manjakamiadana palace, the largest structure of the Rova, its wooden core encased in dressed grey stone by James Cameron in 1867 for Ranavalona II. Anai171 (Andriah Laingo), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The palace of the tombs

Within the Malagasy sacred world the Rova was never only a seat of government. It was the reservoir of the monarchy’s hasina — the sacred efficacy that binds the living sovereign, the royal razana (the ancestors) and the land into a single order of blessing. To rule from Analamanga was to hold the point where the height, the ancestral dead and the reigning power met, and the whole architecture of the enclosure was arranged around that meeting. The throne-house, the palladia, the chapel and the tombs were not a museum of separate functions but the working parts of one machine of legitimacy, whose center of gravity lay not with the living king but with his dead.

That is why the holiest rooms were the smallest. In the northeastern quarter stood nine royal tombs. Two were great stone sepulchres: one for Radama I, who died in 1828 and whose tomb was completed that year, and one for Queen Rasoherina, who died in 1868, her tomb built by Cameron in the same year. The other seven were the wooden tomb-houses of the Fitomiandalana, the row that began with Andrianjaka’s grave of 1630 and gathered the early sovereigns of Imerina. Each was a trano masina, a sacred house over a grave — and in the Malagasy order of the dead a tomb is built to outlast, and to outrank, the house of any living person. The full theology of that relation, the tomb as the durable house of the ancestor who blesses and who warns, belongs to the account of the razana; at the Rova it was simply the governing assumption of the place. To be enthroned at Besakana and, in death, to lie within one of the sacred houses was to remain present to the kingdom — still able to bless it, still able to warn it, still lodged at its highest point.

The enclosure’s great annual rite turned on the same understanding. This was the fandroana, the royal bath, the ceremony by which the sovereign’s sacred efficacy was renewed for the polity and the year was turned; it was celebrated at the Rova, centered on Manjakamiadana and on Mahitsy, where the palladia were kept and where a sacrifice attended the rite. The bath was not hygiene but renewal: the washing of the sovereign carried the renewal of the kingdom, and the water that touched the royal body carried hasina out into the people. That the year’s turning should be enacted at the palace of the tombs, under the eye of the ancestral houses in the northeastern corner, was exactly the point. The living king renewed the realm, but he renewed it in the presence of the dead who had made it, and whose continued blessing was the thing the rite secured.

So the paradox with which the hill presents itself — the towering stone palace above, the low wooden tomb-houses below — is not a paradox at all once the order is seen from within. The palace was the residence of a reign; the tomb-houses were the residence of the reign’s foundations. The sovereign in Manjakamiadana ruled by daylight; the sovereigns in the Fitomiandalana held the ground he ruled from. In the Malagasy reckoning the second was the greater tenancy, and the architecture said so plainly: the biggest house for the living, the most sacred houses for the dead.

Fire and afterlife

The Rova outlived the kingdom it crowned, and its afterlife begins with an act of conquest aimed squarely at its tombs. When France annexed Madagascar in 1895 and 1896 and abolished the monarchy, the colonial administration under General Joseph Gallieni moved in 1897 to break the sacred hold of the dynasty on its own dead. Gallieni ordered the Merina sovereigns disinterred from the royal hill of Ambohimanga, about twenty-four kilometers to the north-east, and reburied within the Rova. Andrianampoinimerina, the founder-king, and others were gathered into the great tombs of the capital — their remains added to the stone sepulchres, the bones of Radama II and the founder laid with Radama I, the earlier queens laid with Rasoherina. The act stripped Ambohimanga of its royal dead and made the Rova the single sepulchre of the whole line. It was concentration as policy: to cut a defeated people from the ancestors who legitimated them, and to hold those ancestors in one place, under the colonial eye. That the conquerors reached for the tombs, and not only for the throne, is the measure of how much the tombs mattered. The last of the line to come was Ranavalona III, deposed and exiled by the French, who died at Algiers in 1917 and whose remains were brought home and reinterred at the Rova in 1938.

Then, on the night of 6 November 1995, fire swept the enclosure. It consumed the wooden structures — the throne-house, the palladium-house, the tomb-houses, the timber cores of the great buildings — and left standing only the grey stone shell of Manjakamiadana. The heat cracked the stone sepulchres in the northeastern quarter, and much of the sovereigns’ remains was lost in the burning. As the fire took hold, people ran into the compound to carry out what they could: roughly one thousand six hundred and seventy-five objects were rescued out of an estimated six thousand seven hundred that the Rova had held. The fire came as the site neared recognition as a World Heritage monument, and the official inquiry ruled it accidental — but the belief that it was set has never left, in Madagascar and beyond, and the burning remains a national wound whose cause many still refuse to call an accident. Among the human remains recovered that night was a body later identified as Ranavalona III; her remains were afterward reinterred, not in the ruined capital, but back at the royal tombs of Ambohimanga, the hill from which the colonial power had taken her forebears in 1897.

The royal tombs of the Rova, in the northeastern quarter that held the two great stone sepulchres and the seven wooden houses of the Fitomiandalana. Lemurbaby, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Restoration proceeded across the decades that followed, with early support from UNESCO. The chapel was restored, and the reconstruction of Mahitsy was finished in January 2003, that of the royal tombs in October of the same year; the stone palace of Manjakamiadana was rebuilt in phases through the years after. The work reached a public climax on 6 November 2020 — the twenty-fifth anniversary, to the day, of the fire — when President Andry Rajoelina inaugurated the rehabilitated Besakana and Manjakamiadana and announced that the site would henceforth be called Rova de Madagasikara, reopening the ensemble as a museum of the nation’s history, with the upper floor of the palace given over to projected documentaries of the Malagasy past. The reconstruction has been admired and contested in equal measure: the restored palaces recovered a form the fire had taken, but a modern Roman-style amphitheater built below the summit — the Kianja Masoandro, the “arena of the sun” — drew objection as an intrusion on a sacred and heritage height, and the renaming and re-presentation of the royal enclosure as a national museum reopened old questions about who the hill belongs to and what it is for. These are present-tense arguments, carried on by the living: the families tied to the royal dead, the heritage professionals, the citizens of a capital whose skyline the Rova still crowns.

The Rova of Antananarivo has never been separately inscribed on the World Heritage List; that distinction belongs to Ambohimanga, the older royal hill, inscribed in 2001 as the one cultural World Heritage site in Madagascar — an outcome shaped in part by the 1995 fire, which left the capital’s rova a ruin while the northern hill stood substantially intact. The scholarship that frames what these tombs and rites meant reads the enclosure as the built form of a religion of the ancestors. Maurice Bloch’s study of the highland dead, Placing the Dead (1971), set the terms most durably followed: among the Merina the tomb is the fixed point of kinship and of blessing, more permanent than any dwelling, and the relation of the living to the ancestral dead is the load-bearing structure of the whole social order. Read through that account, the paradox of Analamanga resolves into a plain statement of what the highland kingship held to be true. The largest house on the hill was built for the sovereign who ruled. The most sacred were built for the sovereigns who, in death, went on holding the ground — and the reconstruction that reopened in 2020, museum and monument and contested rebuilding at once, is the latest turn in a long argument over a height whose center of gravity has always lain with its dead.

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