The Sakalava

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Every fifth year, in the Menabe country of Madagascar’s west coast, men carry a set of relics down to a river. The relics are the dady — the bones and hair, the nail-parings and ornaments of Sakalava kings dead since the seventeenth century — and they are borne from their guarded resting place to the banks of the Tsiribihina, unwrapped, washed in the river’s brown water, dried, and shrouded again. The rite is the fitampoha, the royal bath, held at Belo-sur-Tsiribihina because that reach of water once ran through the Sakalava kingdom of Menabe. It is not a memorial. On the Sakalava roster of sovereigns the kings whose bones are bathed have not left office, and the bath is a service owed to rulers who are, in the reckoning that governs here, still reigning.

The Tsiribihina in the Menabe Region, the river to which the dady of the Sakalava kings are carried down and bathed at the fitampoha. Bernard Gagnon, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The people of the long valleys

The Sakalava are the people of Madagascar’s western and northwestern coast, some 2,079,000 of them by a 2018 reckoning — about six percent of the island’s people — spread along roughly a thousand kilometers of seaboard from Toliara in the south to the Sambirano River in the north (Sakalava people). The country they hold is dry cattle-and-grassland cut by wide slow rivers running west to the Mozambique Channel, a coast of ports and mangrove and open savanna rather than the terraced rice-highlands of the interior. The name is traditionally parsed from saka, a valley, and lava, long — “the people of the long valleys” — a gloss the ethnographic record repeats without settling; a rival derivation would trace it to the Arabic saqaliba, and the matter is left unresolved rather than decided.

The Sakalava reach the documentary record chiefly through the history of their ruling house, the Maroserana — also written Maroseranana, a name read as “those who owned many ports.” Its origin is contested. Sakalava tradition holds that the dynasty came from overseas and moved up the coast out of the southwest, from the Fiherenana country near present-day Toliara; historians have variously placed its roots in south-central or southwestern Madagascar, and the whole pre-1700 formation of the kingdom is a matter argued rather than fixed. The standard critical reconstruction is R. K. Kent’s Madagascar and Africa II: The Sakalava, Maroserana, Dady and Tromba before 1700, in the Journal of African History of 1968, which reads the traditions of dynastic origin against what can be dated and leaves the earliest layer marked as debated. Behind the ruling line stands the figure of Andriamisara, venerated as the common royal ancestor of the Sakalava kingdoms — held by one tradition to have settled beside the river that gave the people their name, and treated at greater length, as the diviner-ancestor whose relics order the northwest, in his own account under Ndramisara.

From the Maroserana house descended two great realms. The first was Menabe, in the country between the Morondava and Tsiribihina rivers, founded before 1600. It was Andriandahifotsy — remembered by tradition as reigning from about 1610, and dead by about 1685 — who made it a power: after 1610 he pushed Sakalava authority north across the Mangoky, armed in part through the trade in slaves and firearms, and came to monopolize the commerce of the west coast, welcoming European traders once early hostility had cooled, raising Morondava into a port and holding his capital inland at Mahabo. His son Andriamandisoarivo carried the migration further north. In the late seventeenth century — the founding is dated variously to about 1685 or 1690, and followed a dispute over the succession — he established the kingdom of Boina, or Iboina, and extended Sakalava power to the great port of Majunga, the modern Mahajanga, the widest of its gateways to the Indian Ocean trade in slaves, cattle, and goods.

Menabe and Boina were not a single kingdom with a northern province but two realms of one house, related as elder and younger and often at odds, and the pattern by which the second grew out of the first — a son of the ruling line carrying the dynasty north after a quarrel over the succession, planting it on a new river and a new port — is the signature of the Sakalava expansion. It moved along the coast the way the coast itself ran, from the estuaries of the southwest up to the great northern bay at Majunga, each move fixing a fresh capital and a fresh set of royal tombs. What tied the string of foundations together was trade. The Sakalava kings sat astride the western outlets of an island the Indian Ocean commerce had long reached, and they made themselves the brokers of it — cattle and slaves and forest goods moving out through their ports, firearms and cloth and silver moving in — so that the monopoly Andriandahifotsy fastened on the west-coast trade was as much the foundation of Sakalava power as any conquest.

The royal past divides into two lines, and the division carries into every later reckoning of rank. The senior and ruling branch is the Zafinimena, the “descendants of gold”; the junior is the Zafinifotsy, the “descendants of silver,” beaten by the gold and driven north, where in the mid-eighteenth century its survivors founded a kingdom of their own. An Islamic presence entered the royal families from the eighteenth century and holds among them still, layered onto the dynastic order rather than replacing it; how deeply it reaches into the throne itself the record marks rather than settles. Whether Madagascar’s first inhabitants were a real earlier people — the vazimba — is a question argued in full elsewhere and not reopened here.

The kings who do not leave

The Sakalava met the oldest difficulty of monarchy — what becomes of the kingdom when the king dies — by declining to let their kings depart. A Sakalava sovereign does not stop reigning at death. He passes into the reservoir of royal power and governs on, and the whole royal past therefore stands ranked behind the present, reign upon reign, a roster that death has not closed. The living reckon their rulers against it, and the effect is a state whose deepest business is transacted with men three centuries in the grave.

Two institutions carry that continuity, and each has its full account of its own. The first is material. The dady are the relics of the dead kings — their bones, hair, nail-parings and ornaments — kept guarded as the proof of royalty and as a reservoir of hasina, the sacred efficacy that quickens land, line, and throne and ratifies the one who holds authority. A dynasty reduced to its relics is a dynasty that can still be washed, wrapped, served, and defended; the twentieth-century disputes over the custody of the Sakalava relics turned on exactly this, that whoever holds the bones holds the kingdom’s proof. The second institution is vocal. In the tromba the royal dead return to speak, entering chosen mediums and giving judgment, counsel and demand in the register of their own reigns — the same kings, no longer resting but present and answering. Between relic and voice the two divide the labor of a monarchy that death has not ended: the one gives the crowned dead a body to serve, the other gives them a mouth to consult.

The relics are not merely stored. They are housed at the mahabo, the royal tombs, and served there by dedicated custodians who keep them, guard the prohibitions that attach to them, and conduct the rites of washing and reclothing on the appointed years — an office of the crowned dead that runs continuously between one great service and the next. Each king brings his own fady into death with him: the foods, colors, days, and words that were forbidden in his presence in life remain forbidden in it after, so that to serve a particular sovereign is to keep the particular taboos of a particular century. The order that governs conduct across the wider Malagasy world under the name of fady is here bent to the persons of individual dead kings, each a standing set of prohibitions as much as a name.

What belongs to the people is what this arrangement makes of a society. The living apex of it is the ampanjaka — the ampanjakabe, the great sovereign, where the title is raised — and the order beneath descends from royalty to the vahoaka, the commoners, the mass of herders and traders and cultivators who are not of the ruling line. The ampanjaka does not govern alone; authority runs through a council of advisers and the custodians of the relics, and his claim to rule is precisely a claim upon the ancestral kings, hasina flowing down the dynastic line to the one who holds it now. The kingdom is thus something like a trust administered for the crowned dead — a government in which the sitting ruler is steward to a line of predecessors who have not vacated their thrones, and whose relics must be served and whose voices may still be heard. The ancestors of an ordinary Sakalava household are honored as the razana, the family dead who bless and warn a line from the tomb; the royal dead are that same seniority raised to the scale of a state, the ancestors of everyone.

To be Sakalava is to belong to that trust. It is to be a member — royal or commoner — of a people ordered around sovereigns who did not stop being sovereign, and whose most binding civic occasions are services rendered to kings long dead. It is also, in the plain material sense, to be a people of the western grasslands and the western sea: herders of great free-grazing zebu, the humped cattle that are a family’s wealth and its offering to the dead, driven in their seasons over the northwestern plains and down to the river-shores in the dry months, and traders of a coast that faces the Indian Ocean and drew Arab, Swahili, and European commerce to its ports for centuries. The two lives are not separate from the service of the kings but the ground of it. The cattle that measure a family’s standing are the same cattle offered at the tombs; the ports that made the dynasty rich are the same ports where the great shrines stand; and the sovereigns whose bones are washed are the sovereigns who once brokered the trade and counted the herds. Cattle-wealth and sea-trade built the kingdoms Andriandahifotsy and his son ruled; the service of the dead kings is what those kingdoms became.

The dismantling and what survived it

The kingdom as a state was taken apart twice. The first pressure came from the highlands. The expansion of the Merina kingdom under Radama I drove hard against the west: Ramitraho of Menabe submitted to Radama in 1822, and Radama took Majunga in 1824. In the north the Boina throne came apart under the same pressure — Andriantsoly ruled about 1822 to 1832, and the last Boina monarch, the queen Tsiomeko, held the kingdom only about 1836 to 1840 before it fell to Merina occupation, her leaders scattering to the surrounding islands. What the Merina began, the French finished. A protectorate was declared in 1895; in 1897 a French column opened its campaign against Menabe with the massacre of King Toera and his chiefs, gathered at Ambiky, and the last organized Menabe resistance was broken by 1902. The bald sequence is the record’s, and it is set down without a side taken: what ended at Ambiky and after was the Sakalava kingdom as a political fact.

What did not end was the Sakalava world. Under the republic — Madagascar became independent in 1960 — the ampanjaka persist as customary authorities: they mediate disputes, keep the ancestral order, and preside at the services, holding an office that the abolition of the kingdom as a government did not abolish as a fact of Sakalava life. And the working state-occasions of a people whose kings are ancestors go on. In the Menabe the fitampoha, the royal bath, is kept every five years at Belo-sur-Tsiribihina, where the dady of the Menabe kings are carried down and washed in the Tsiribihina. In the northwest the fanompoa be, the “great service,” is held each July at the royal shrine of Mahajanga — the Doany Ndramisara, where the relics of the Boina kings are served and washed, and to which the Sakalava world and its mediums come. The two are distinct: Menabe’s five-yearly bath in the river, Boina’s annual service at the shrine, and the record keeps them apart. The mediums who carry the royal dead are drawn now from every clan, every walk of life, and every faith — the spirits claim whom they claim — and the service reaches well past the descendants of the people whose kings founded it, into the plantation towns and migrant quarters of the north where a Sakalava sovereign exiled from his own port may be honored in a body that came for work. Most Sakalava keep the ancestral practice, the fomba gasy — the record reports roughly three in five — with Christianity, near a third, running alongside it rather than displacing it, and Islam holding among the royal houses. The Christian present of the coast does not, for most, close out the older allegiance; a family blesses its dead by both routes, and the shrine and the church stand in the same towns.

The scholarship that documents all this rests on close acquaintance with the living service rather than on the archive alone. Gillian Feeley-Harnik’s A Green Estate: Restoring Independence in Madagascar follows the northwest Sakalava reclaiming land and past through the reburial and service of a king, reading the monarchy’s afterlife as a labor the living perform. Michael Lambek’s The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar attends to the mediums who bear the royal history in their own bodies, carrying it as obligation and performance. Behind both, Kent’s reconstruction sets the dynasty before 1700 on a critical footing. The mission-era and colonial polemics against the relic-service — which named the served dead of the Sakalava with the vocabulary of idols and fetishes — belong to that history and are reported as part of it; they described the discomfort of the observer and not the institution he was watching, and the ethnography that took the Sakalava seriously has left their language behind.

The roster remains. Reign is ranked behind reign in an order death has not been permitted to break, and the living keep their place in it by the plainest means available — carrying the bones of their kings to the river on the appointed year, and listening, at the shrine, for a sovereign who has changed his body but not, on this coast, his throne.

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