Feeding Globalization. Jane Hooper
and silver coins, approached that which Europeans had paid for slaves. By manipulating European demands for laborers and provisions as well as expanding their control over the island, Sakalava rulers maintained a tight grip on the exchanges on the west coast of Madagascar. The term merchant kings would be a more apt description for these monarchs.
MAP 3.1. Madagascar, c. 1600–1800
IDENTIFYING THE SAKALAVA
Sixteenth-century Portuguese visiting northwestern Madagascar either described the islanders they encountered as “Moors” (African Muslims) or referred to them as “Boucki” (also written as “Bouckes,” “Buki,” or “Buqua”) if they were not Muslim.13 Visitors to Madagascar suggest that these identities were not only rooted in religious differences, but were linguistic ones as well, as the Boucki spoke a language distinct from the Moors, who sounded more similar to the “Kaffirs” from East Africa14 During the seventeenth century, an Englishman identified a third group on the island, the “Hoves” (Hova), who “agree[d] in their speech” with the Boucki and lived in the interior of Madagascar.15
By the early eighteenth century, Drury noted very few differences, aside from minor variations in vocabulary and pronunciation, between the languages spoken in southern and western Madagascar. Instead he identified people by the regions in which they lived (the countries of “Saccalauvor,” “Merfaughla” (Mahafaly), “Anterndroea” (Antandroy), etc.), each distinguished by slightly different patterns of governance, land use, and social customs.16 He mentioned that Sakalava also functioned as a family name, noting that Sakalava rulers were related by blood and joined together in an “amicable alliance.”17 Yet many other eighteenth-century visitors in western Madagascar, including Dean, do not use the term Sakalava to describe the kings and queens of this region, even if the names of the leaders they encountered appear in Sakalava royal genealogies. Throughout the eighteenth century, the term Sakalava was used more frequently to describe major ports on the west coast of the island.18 In light of such inconsistencies, it is difficult to uncover how the term Sakalava was understood in western Madagascar.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the term Sakalava was being used to describe not only kings and queens, but also their subjects in the western portion of the island.19 The history of the Sakalava monarchs was recorded in a series of publications penned by foreign missionaries, government officials, and, most influentially, a French naval captain, Charles Guillain, who composed one of the earliest collections of Sakalava royal traditions, Documents sur l’histoire, la géographie et le commerce de la partie occidentale de Madagascar.20 The compilation of these traditions and, relatedly, the use of the label Sakalava, served to confirm the legitimacy of the coastal rulers who inherited power from their Sakalava ancestors.21 The writers, including Guillain, were concerned with identifying rulers with whom the French could form alliances and their writings reflected Western perceptions of statehood, leadership, and empire.22 Nineteenth-century Europeans frequently sought to fix firm boundaries around the territory controlled by the Sakalava rulers, despite the fact that the area dominated by these monarchs had been ruled through a variety of familial ties, alliances, and tributary states.23 In spite of their efforts, conceptions of nation and state rarely overlapped in any meaningful way, at least in western terms. In fact, it was likely impossible to say with certainty where the borders between one state and another lay at any given time, nor the significance of the label Sakalava for most people in western Madagascar during the nineteenth century. The term Sakalava almost certainly did not have the same connotations it would acquire by the mid-twentieth century, when it would become the label for a sizable ethnic group in Madagascar.24
The use of the identifier Sakalava in the eighteenth century, while distinct from that of later periods, nonetheless colored the political landscape and was used to express political alliances to visitors on the island. European sources, including those left by Drury and other visitors to western Madagascar, reveal that there were indeed leaders who self-identified as Sakalava and exercised sovereignty over the western portion of the island. In perhaps the most powerful connection between past and present, eighteenth-century Sakalava rulers used ceremonies and physical monuments to express the power of their ancestors.25 As Dean’s account reveals, royal tombs had been sacred places for worship, as they are today, although the shape of these ceremonies has changed dramatically. In recent years, the commemoration of Sakalava and other prominent ancestors in Madagascar has found expression, for instance, in the practice of tromba (trance) ceremonies and in fitampoha, the ceremonial washing of royal relics.26 These frequent reminders of the past reflect an abiding interest in royal genealogy. In northwest Madagascar during the 1980s, the sovereign clan could still trace their ancestors back twenty-seven generations. Nobles could name between nine and fifteen generations, commoners, about three or five, and slaves had no kin, “by definition.”27 Such differences might have existed in earlier centuries. The coastal Vezo fishermen have reported that the Sakalava used genealogy as a manner of control and domination during the years when they attempted to assert sovereignty over Vezo communities.28
The challenge for historians is to note these potent memories of genealogy and royal ancestry while not projecting a contemporary Sakalava identity onto our study of the past. Although leaders along Madagascar’s west coast represented themselves, and the trading ports that they projected power onto, as Sakalava to European traders during the eighteenth century, it does not mean that others who lived there saw themselves as part of a distinct and united Sakalava ethnic group. Indeed, the comments of the Vezo suggest that they did not.
THE RISE OF THE SAKALAVA
The few Europeans who visited the west-central coast of Madagascar prior to the eighteenth century only hinted at the political, economic, and military revolutions that were occurring within this part of the island.29 In 1616, a Portuguese priest described bloody battles between people living in the west-coast village of Sahadia and their enemies, the “Suculambes,” but we know little else about this particular set of struggles.30 By the close of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, observers noted that a powerful group was attacking communities along the entire west coast of the island, although it was rarely identified by name.31 Sakalava royal traditions, by contrast, provide detailed descriptions of the divine rulers who founded the Sakalava kingdoms.32 According to these, Sakalava ancestors were originally from the southeast of the island, their traditions suggesting Raoandriana origins and many of their religious practices echoing those found in the Anosy region of the island.33 After leaving the southeast, these ancestors moved to the north and west, halting when they reached the Morondava River, where access to fresh water and fertile soil helped convince them to stay near its shores.34 To the north was the wide Tsiribihina River, a stark break in the dry landscape, according to one nineteenth-century European traveler who described the “rich alluvial soil” between these two rivers as “remarkably fertile.”35 Archeological studies reinforce some of these Sakalava traditions by revealing that small polities lived along the rivers in the region and were probably ruled by interrelated dynasties prior to the seventeenth century. These studies also suggest that much of the export trade in the west-central portion of the island was directed toward entrepôts in northwestern Madagascar.36
Sakalava rulers may have settled along the shores of the Morondava and founded the Maroseraña kingdom in the early years of the seventeenth century.37 Traditional histories assert that the Sakalava established this kingdom not only due to their superior organization and military power, but also thanks to divine intervention, apparent in the names they provided for their kingdom and the region they ruled.38 According to one interpretation, the word serana in Maroseraña refers to the close relationship rulers forged with priests and their amulets.39 Over time, this privileged access to spirits may have contributed to a belief in divine kingship, along with the practices of ancestor worship and divination. The Sakalava renamed this region Menabe, or “very red,” the red symbolizing power and strength, as well as describing the color of the rich soil in the region.40