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THREE

The Sakalava

From Warriors to Merchants

THE ENGLISH VESSEL THE Sussex was returning from a visit to China in 1738 when strong winds suddenly tore apart the ship’s sails and damaged the mast. The crew panicked. Their commanding officers decided to board another English ship sailing in company with the Sussex, but sixteen men chose to stay on the damaged vessel.¹ Four days after the departure of their officers, the remaining sailors sighted St. Augustin Bay. Upon entering the bay, the men signaled to the people on the shore to approach by hoisting a flag and firing several guns toward the beach. Two men, including a “linguester” (linguist) who could speak English, approached the vessel in a canoe. These newcomers brought with them a jar of honey, a present from the “King of Barbar.” The king’s representatives asked the captain to go ashore and visit with the king at his residence to the north, in the port of “Toliar.” They were informed that the king had just returned from war and had plentiful slaves and provisions for the Englishmen.

Despite this demonstration of trade and hospitality, the two islanders were suspicious of the English. They asked why so few men were on board such a large vessel and did not believe the evasive lies they were told, that most of the men were doing work in the hold of the ship. The “King of Barbar” was even more knowledgeable about the typical conduct of EIC traders. When the sailors tried to use “China ware” to purchase provisions, the king informed them that he knew that these goods were “private trade” and not typically used for such purchases. Feeling vulnerable to attack, the crew left the bay, traveling as fast as they were able in their rapidly disintegrating vessel.²

As the Sussex sailed along the west coast of Madagascar, it literally fell to pieces. Only a handful of sailors, including one named John Dean, made it to the shore alive. Once they arrived, the four men sought assistance from a variety of individuals: a Frenchman (perhaps a former pirate) who had lived in Madagascar and spoke the language of the islanders, a number of “headmen” who were constantly going off to war, the wives of the headmen who sheltered and fed the castaways, and the king, “Renauf,” who lived in “Moharbo” (Mahabo).³ According to Dean, the European arrivals were largely treated with indifference, as the king and other leaders were more interested in pursuing war with neighboring communities than helping them return home, although the visitors were generally able to obtain food and shelter from the islanders. Dean, the sole surviving crew member, was finally rescued by an English vessel visiting the king’s port of “Youngoult” (Young Owl, Iongoeloe, near Morondava) about a year later.⁴

Upon his return to England, Dean wrote a brief account of his time in Madagascar. His writing touches on dress and culinary practices, as well as the political organization of the state. The king in Mahabo ruled the west-central portion of Madagascar through violence but also exercised ritual authority over his subjects. One of the king’s chief friends and a “man of power,” Rabbalow, was frequently “out on the scout, with about fifty armed men.”⁵ Dean’s comments suggest that these military excursions were aimed at acquiring both slaves and cattle. Dean also described pausing at the town of “Munghavo” where “most of the deceased kings are laid in small houses.” Each time the king’s entourage passed through, “they killed an ox, beat drums, blowed their conches, and fired guns over the houses of the deceased kings.”⁶

Dean’s sketch of leadership in western Madagascar can be compared with the better-known account provided by Robert Drury.⁷ Drury, another shipwrecked sailor, spent about fifteen years living in southern and west-central Madagascar several decades before Dean set foot on the island. According to his published account, Drury encountered numerous monarchs during his stay on the island during the first years of the eighteenth century. At the time of his visit, the Sakalava king of “Moherbo” (Mahabo), “Rer Trimmonongarevo,” ruled over the port of Morondava, home to individuals who supplied milk and other provisions to European vessels.⁸ Drury outlined how the king’s brothers had formed predatory states directly to the north and south of Morondava and described personally observing their battles for control over land near St. Augustin Bay.⁹ Less than four decades after Drury’s stay on the island, the kings Dean encountered had consolidated their control over trade from the entire west coast of the island, which they used as a base for military operations against their enemies.

The kings depicted by both Dean and Drury demonstrated their power through the use of violence and demanded ritualized obedience from their inferiors, but the accounts left by the two sailors tell us little else about the beginnings of these states in western Madagascar.¹⁰ When Europeans halted at the coast of Madagascar during the seventeenth century, most were unaware of transformations occurring within the island. European knowledge was limited to the “continual quarrels” and “bloody wars” between “petty princes” that they observed during their brief visits.¹¹ By the eighteenth century, however, European reports from their time on Madagascar supported the experiences of Drury and Dean. Although European sources are limited both in scope and content, they do suggest that Sakalava kings and queens preyed upon weaker communities that provided food to the leaders at gunpoint (or spearpoint) or as tributaries. In the southwest, the English and Dutch negotiated for rice and slaves with a King Baba who resided in the port of Toliara, just to the north of St. Augustin Bay. Morondava, a new port located in the west-central Menabe region, was controlled by a powerful king who provided Europeans and Americans with plentiful slaves and provisions. The northwest was no longer dominated by Muslim merchants and leaders, as Sakalava kings and queens began overseeing exchanges with Europeans in this region as well.

Sakalava rulers have been described by historians as “slave-trader kings,” and indeed their power to dominate the export trade from the island was central to their control over western Madagascar, although they chose to monopolize not only the sale of slaves, but also of rice and cattle.¹² The value accorded to these desired provisioning items, priced in firearms 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 Motifs of strength and fertility are interwoven in other traditions on the founding of the kingdom. In one of these, the ancestors placed the bodies of “a man, a woman, a magnificent red steer, and a goat” into a deep pit. Then they poured the blood of the steer over the others.⁴¹ Another tradition described how divine intervention, in the form of an enormous red bull descending from the sky, led a Sakalava king to victory over his opponents.⁴²

From its base in Menabe, the kingdom gradually expanded to dominate the west-central region within a few decades, according to traditions, and Sakalava rulers tried to maintain good relations with the groups they encountered and eventually conquered.⁴³ Neighboring states became tributaries to Sakalava royalty, either willingly or after defeat by Sakalava forces. Sakalava rulers integrated prominent families into their own through a process of intermarriage and blood-brotherhood ceremonies (fati-dra). The fati-dra ceremonies, described at length by European visitors to the island in later years, served to create quasi-familial alliances between the royal family and local leaders.⁴⁴ Sakalava rulers also married into these families and, from them, may have adopted many local religious practices, including ancestor worship. Thanks to these ceremonies and marriages, the descendants of rulers from incorporated communities were now celebrated as part of the Sakalava ruling family and dynasty. Sakalava rulers also allowed the groups they conquered to remain on their land, thus benefiting from the commerce and labor of their newly acquired tributaries.⁴⁵ By the early eighteenth century, Europeans observed that tributary groups sent the Sakalava royalty annual gifts in the form of silk, rice, sheep, vegetables, and slaves, in return for peace.⁴⁶ Tributary leaders appear to have retained, at least ostensibly, some of their independence and freedom, as long as they continued to send regular supplies of food and slaves. In remembering the process of incorporation into the Sakalava state, the Vezo fishermen of the west coast stated that, despite being tributaries to the Sakalava for the past few centuries, they were never fully subservient.⁴⁷

Sakalava traditions insist that the expansion of the state was due to the military power of their rulers. European observations suggest two other reasons why neighboring groups joined the Sakalava state: for protection against a growing slave trade and to safeguard food supplies. Other communities in the region may have agreed to be incorporated into the expanding Sakalava state as they sought protection from slave raiders, who seem to have been expanding their activities throughout Madagascar in response to demands from both European and non-European slavers.⁴⁸ Although large numbers of slaves were not exported directly from the west-central coast until later in the seventeenth century, the slave trade from the northwest coast may have been carrying away men, women, and children from the interior of the island decades earlier. For instance, in 1665, a Frenchman living on the east coast of Madagascar described the devastation wrought by predatory slave raiders operating throughout the island.⁴⁹ These attackers likely targeted the west-central region of the island as well, given the trading links that existed between port cities to the north and the Menabe region. According to seventeenth-century Portuguese visitors, the Sakalava king Andriamandazoala had at least five hundred armed men at his side in 1613.⁵⁰ People living on the west coast of Madagascar may have desired the stability and protection of these men. By the early eighteenth century, men living in western Madagascar told Drury that they came willingly to the Sakalava king’s side, knowing that they “fight for their own security and ease, and when they get any plunder from their enemies, they think themselves sufficiently rewarded.”⁵¹ Drury also argues that Sakalava rule had enabled the country to grow “not only vastly populous, but rich, and the people live in plenty as well as peace.”⁵²

In addition to protecting their subjects against enslavement, the Sakalava rulers also secured and redistributed food supplies within a relatively arid region. Exports of foods such as rice, beans, and tubers from St. Augustin Bay and Massaliege may have been stressing local communities by the mid-seventeenth century. It is telling that food, along with slaves, was included in tributary payments to Sakalava rulers. Supplies of cattle and rice were seen also as rewards for serving the king.⁵³ Furthermore, around 1527, a Portuguese visitor to western Madagascar described finding little food for purchase, and there are no records of the Portuguese attempting to purchase provisions from the west-central region during the sixteenth century.⁵⁴ It seems unlikely that large supplies of cattle and rice were for sale on the west-central coast, as rice was primarily grown further in the north and interior of the island and cattle were highly valued and seldom eaten, except on ceremonial occasions. This situation changed within the next century, at least in the west-central portion of the island. Portuguese sources describe how the king Andriamandazoala provided visiting priests with plentiful food in 1613, suggesting either increased agricultural production or the ability of the Sakalava to tap into additional supplies of food for export, through trade or frequent raiding.⁵⁵ While the Portuguese did not list the food they obtained during this visit, we do know that people in the ports directly to the north at this time possessed rice, millet, “mungo,” beans, peas, nuts, bananas, ginger, sugarcane, and limes.⁵⁶ Likewise, by the time Drury visited the island, coastal communities had devised means for supplying vessels with ample food and water during their stays in west-central Madagascar.⁵⁷ During the early eighteenth century, the Sakalava king himself owned thousands of cattle, many of them acquired through warfare.⁵⁸

According to seventeenth-century Portuguese reports, Andriamandazoala possessed a supply of unfree laborers obtained from throughout the island. One slave woman told the Portuguese that she had been marched across three countries (“pays”) before arriving at the ruler’s capital.⁵⁹ Sakalava rulers probably used a variety of strategies to acquire these laborers, with some purchased from other groups and others captured through warfare or given in tribute. Drury mentions that many of the captives seized in warfare, especially women and children, were only kept as ransom and were returned to their families once the latter agreed to ally with the Sakalava.⁶⁰ Those who remained enslaved may have been used for cattle herding, in addition to some agricultural and household labor. Royal ownership of slaves may have served to bolster Sakalava power, as it did in later periods.⁶¹

It appears, as historian Stephen Ellis has argued, that the Sakalava wars of the mid-seventeenth century predated the rise of a large slave trade with Europeans from the region.⁶² Despite the lack of slave exports to Europeans, there was evidence that Sakalava rulers were becoming more interested in engaging in trade with passing ships. According to traditions, the Sakalava ruler Andriandahifotsy (also referred to as Lightfoot, c. 1614–1683) established a permanent seat of power at his palace in Mahabo, a town along the shores of the Morondava River.⁶³ Mahabo was a convenient base for controlling long-distance trade in the region, as the Sakalava ruler could easily reach interior portions of the island along the river as well as have access to the coastal port of Morondava. By the 1730s, Andriandahifotsy was particularly revered for the role he had played in consolidating Sakalava control over commerce from the region.⁶⁴

European sources confirm that Andriandahifotsy began to take tentative steps toward forming a relationship with European merchants visiting western Madagascar, although this period was marked by considerable misunderstandings, as the following story makes clear. According to French merchant François Martin, a group of forty-five Frenchmen sailed to the west-central coast of Madagascar in the mid-seventeenth century.⁶⁵ The French commander found a welcoming river inlet and went ashore to negotiate with a local ruler, named “Lahe Foutchy” (likely Andriandahifotsy). The French narrator described Lahe Foutchy as not only one of the richest lords of this region, but one of the greediest. After the king refused to sell the Frenchmen provisions for cheap prices, the French commander led his troops inland into a region rich in cattle and, the French hoped, gold. On their march into the interior, the French forces encountered an army numbering twelve to fifteen thousand men, all armed with spears. The men, led by Lahe Foutchy, massacred all of the soldiers save one, a Portuguese man who later escaped to the French trading post at Fort Dauphin.⁶⁶

A few years later, the French sent another ship to explore the western coastline.⁶⁷ In passing the region controlled by Andriandahifotsy, the French captain sent representatives to the shore, where the sailors met with some islanders. They appeared peaceful, so the French ship came to anchor along the coast. Around four or five hundred people approached the shoreline with refreshments and several of them asked for permission to see the ship. About fifty came aboard, including, Martin remarked, the wife of one of the local leaders. The captain remained onshore with some of his soldiers to sign a trading agreement with an unnamed local monarch, perhaps Andriandahifotsy.⁶⁸ The people visiting the French ship suddenly seized the French pilot and fired the cannon on board the ship. At that sound, locals on the shore fell upon the French, who had not brought their weapons ashore, and massacred all of the unarmed men. On board, the visitors killed two French sailors and injured three or four others. As the sailors reached for their weapons, the islanders jumped into the ocean and swam ashore. The woman remained on board, but they quickly discovered she was a “slave,” wearing noble clothing as a disguise. How they determined this deception is unclear. The pilot quickly set sail from the coast with only six healthy sailors aboard. He returned to Fort Dauphin with news of the deaths and the French mourned the loss of their compatriots, especially the captain and commis (trade commissioner).⁶⁹

The French narrator, Martin, retold these two events to provide an example of the problems Europeans encountered in negotiating with groups on the west-central coast of Madagascar and to serve as a warning to merchants. He probably had heard these stories secondhand, but they still served as cautionary tales to the French. In both episodes, the Sakalava ruler demonstrated his mistrust of Europeans, maybe arising from his knowledge of European conduct elsewhere on the island, as the French and English were both attempting colonies in Madagascar during these years. The story of the girl, if we accept Martin’s argument that she really was a slave dressing as a noblewoman, suggests recognition of shared European and Sakalava ideas of hierarchy.

Martin’s account concludes on a more peaceful note. Shortly after the second massacre, a Sakalava king sent a troop of soldiers and representatives overland to Fort Dauphin, where they had an audience with French colonial officials. Following negotiations, the ruler apparently made peace with the French and agreed to welcome them as traders into his territory.⁷⁰ Indeed, by the end of his reign, the king known as “Lightfoot” supplied hundreds of captives to at least five European slave ships.⁷¹

THE EXPANSION OF THE SAKALAVA

At the close of the seventeenth century, a newly enthroned Sakalava king, Andriamanetriarivo (“Rer Timmononngarevo,” “Timovareva,” ruling from roughly 1685 to 1712), decided to use military force to expel both of his brothers from the Menabe region.⁷² Rather than continue fighting for control of the kingdom, one of the brothers led a group of armed supporters south to St. Augustin Bay. Battles between the Sakalava and people who lived near the bay had begun decades earlier, during earlier periods of Sakalava expansion, but this new incursion brought fresh waves of violence to the region.⁷³ Known as the “northern enemy,” the Sakalava continued to attack communities near St. Augustin Bay into the early eighteenth century, when Drury himself observed the clashes.⁷⁴ The repeated efforts by Sakalava rulers to conquer the south, rather than venturing into the more fertile interior of the island, may have been prompted both by opportunity (perhaps there were stronger opponents to be found in the more populated interior) as well as a desire to benefit from the export trade from St. Augustin Bay.⁷⁵

Following the conquest of southwestern Madagascar, European visitors to the region in 1698 noted a dramatic change.⁷⁶ When they arrived at St. Augustin Bay, the merchants were directed to trade at Toliara to the north for the first time.⁷⁷ In the bay and at Toliara, Europeans now dealt with two rulers, holding the ceremonial titles of “King Baba” (also written as “Kinne Baba,” “Barbar,” “Baubau,” or “Bawbaw”) and “Prince William” (“Will” or “Ouil”). From his home in Toliara along the Fiherenana River, King Baba had access to stores of rice and slaves. The ruler in St. Augustin Bay, Prince William, was subservient to King Baba. As one observer noted later, Prince William “appears to me to be appointed by and to derive his authority from the king of Baba.”⁷⁸ In spite of this dependent relationship, Prince William was still a powerful merchant in his own right. He was responsible for supplying Europeans with water, cattle, and miscellaneous other food items such as fish, poultry, and fruit, although he rarely had quantities of rice or slaves for sale. For those, Europeans learned that they had to negotiate with King Baba in Toliara.

The titles of Prince William and King Baba appear to have been hereditary and adopted to reflect European (particularly English) terms of nobility.⁷⁹ The titles of prince and king were conscious choices, as the words are not related to Malagasy or East African words for king or ruler. It is hard to be sure of the exact origin of these titles, as we have little evidence beyond European observations.⁸⁰ Given the long history of Euro-American visits to this part of the island and the presence of English speakers among the islanders, it would be hard to believe that the use of the titles was accidental. It seems far more likely that their use was a conscious effort at “similitude,” to use Jeremy Prestholdt’s terminology. Prestholdt deploys the term to describe how people in the Comoros strategically adopted cross-cultural practices, for instance in echoing the European political formations that they wanted their visitors to acknowledge.⁸¹ In southwestern Madagascar, the titles of Prince William and King Baba were readily adopted by European visitors, who would request to see these rulers upon their arrival at the island.

Judging by the frequency and size of food exports from Toliara, as well as comments made by the king himself, King Baba had access to the production of large tracts of land in the interior worked by laborers, including slaves, who grew food and oversaw the herding of cattle.⁸² The growth of the provisioning commerce following Sakalava conquest suggests that the king also drew upon trade routes and tributaries in the interior of the island to provide him with reliable supplies of desirable exports. The firearms, gunpowder, and bullets King Baba and Prince William acquired from the Europeans spread far into the southern interior of the island throughout the eighteenth century, further confirming that trade routes stretched across portions of southern Madagascar.⁸³ Without these routes, the coastal rulers would have been unable to sell rice or other foodstuffs to European merchants, but we know little about the apparatus for this trade.⁸⁴ It does seem that the export of food and slaves typically went hand-in-hand in this part of Madagascar, as slaves would carry food to the coasts and then would be sold to visiting slavers, although fewer slaves were exported from this (less populated) part of the island than elsewhere in Madagascar.⁸⁵

European observers also described frequent wars between King Baba and neighboring groups.⁸⁶ The close proximity of antagonistic neighbors to the south and east, along with the need to secure trade routes in the region, meant that King Baba and Prince William had to be able to raise a strong army of supporters and build fortifications.⁸⁷ Prince William tried to prevent Europeans from trading with the Mahafaly “Prince Grimm” who lived to the south of the Onilahy River.⁸⁸ Even when Europeans were able to strike up a trading agreement with the Mahafaly leader, they discovered that he lacked the supplies of provisions and slaves commanded by Prince Will and King Baba.⁸⁹ Archeological findings confirm that warfare was frequent in southwestern Madagascar and some communities moved to more defensive locations in the drier interior of the island, fearing attacks by coastal groups. Evidence provided by European observations, paired with the construction of larger earthwork forts throughout southern Madagascar by the eighteenth century, suggests that coastal leaders were trying to protect themselves against rivals who may have wished to control exchanges with European visitors themselves.⁹⁰

It does not seem, however, that King Baba went to war frequently with the Sakalava of Menabe. During the eighteenth century, most Europeans did not recognize any connections between the rulers of the Menabe region and those to the south, although Toliara was described as the most southern limit of the Sakalava Empire in European sources by the nineteenth century.⁹¹ Sakalava traditions recorded during the nineteenth century assert that the rulers in these regions were blood relatives and thus allied.⁹² Earlier European sources appear to confirm the existence of an alliance between the rulers of these two regions, although we know little about the networks of trade and migration that crossed western Madagascar.⁹³

Far more is known about the connections between Sakalava rulers in west-central and northwestern Madagascar. While one brother ruled over Menabe and the other brother went south to St. Augustin Bay, Andriamandisoarivo (Tsimanato, Tsimenata) journeyed north. He may have even received support from his brother’s rivals in Menabe.⁹⁴ According to traditional histories, his men fought for control of the northwestern coast of Madagascar through a series of clashes, including with Muslims long resident in the region. Throughout his march, Andriamandisoarivo relied upon an ombiasy to advise him (as the Raoandriana had in Anosy) and Sakalava traditions would later credit divine support as well as the power of an enchanted vy lava, a long iron knife, for his victories.⁹⁵ By the early eighteenth century, Andriamandisoarivo, with the support of his eight-hundred-man army, founded a new Sakalava dynasty in the north which he named Volamena, meaning red money or gold. His descendants were known as the Zafibolamena, children of the Volamena.⁹⁶ He died in the northern city of Bezavo around 1710, having cemented his name in traditions as the founder of a powerful new kingdom.⁹⁷ His kingdom contained the port of Mazalagem Nova, or Massaliege, already a prosperous center for trade, as well as the new ports of Boina and Mahajanga (Majunga).⁹⁸ Within decades, the rulers of the northern Sakalava branch had surpassed the Maroseraña dynasty of Menabe to the south in both military and economic power, as the Zafibolamena benefited from bustling trade networks already operating in the northwestern region.⁹⁹ Traditions describe the respect the Sakalava held for the communities they defeated in the north, likely tied to their desire to maintain access to commerce with the Comoros and East Africa. During their march northward, Sakalava followers reportedly respected local grave sites and the sacred trees that surrounded them. They granted religious freedom and allowed Arab and Muslim traders to continue their trade with visiting merchants.¹⁰⁰

These histories may have overemphasized the respect that Sakalava rulers paid to the people of the northwest, as the slave trade underwent a sudden burst of activity directly following Sakalava conquest.¹⁰¹ In 1695, Dutch slavers described their slaving negotiations with “Andiaximanatte” (Andriamandisoarivo?), the present king of Magelage (Massaliege) and “Maringande” (Manigare, a northwestern port). This king had used firearms, supposedly acquired through trade with the English, to overpower “unarmed tribes” in his battles for control. In a dramatic reversal of earlier slave-trading practices, the king told the Dutch that he would only accept guns, no cloth or other merchandise, in return for his slaves.¹⁰² American slave traders visiting the island during this period also reported that the king told them he had six thousand slaves for sale, obtained in his wars of expansion.¹⁰³ Two years later, when Dutch merchants returned to the northwestern ports, they discovered that slaves were suddenly more expensive, costing two guns instead of one, although, thanks to the continuation of these “internecine wars” in western Madagascar, captives remained plentiful. The king told them that he still required “good muskets with which to destroy his enemies.” Even though the Dutch were able to acquire slaves with guns during this second voyage, most of the 119 slaves died shortly after their arrival at the Cape Colony. Their poor health was due to being “prisoners of war,” or so the Dutch speculated.¹⁰⁴

Despite this period of intense violence, it does seem, judging by later observations, that relations between the Muslim merchant elites in the northwest of the island and the new Sakalava rulers were quickly eased, as reported in the traditions. Portuguese visiting “Maselagache” in 1726 described dealing with the “principal Moors” and, a few years later, meeting a king who spoke Arabic fluently.¹⁰⁵ Sakalava involvement in the export trade was also clear in other European observations. One English captain described the northwestern town of Mahajanga as a bustling, cosmopolitan port in 1764. He wrote that the town, built “after the Indian fashion,” contained many stone buildings and mosques. Inhabited by “native” Muslims and others from “Surate, Johana, Mosembeck, and the Commoro islands,” Mahajanga was clearly a prosperous and cosmopolitan port. Within the city, the Sakalava rulers allowed Muslims to practice their religion freely. In return, the Sakalava instituted a series of trading controls. The king appointed a “purser authorized to carry trade on in the king’s name, in conjunction with another purser that comes down from the king.”¹⁰⁶ Sakalava kings and queens even allowed visiting European merchants to trade with local “Arab” merchants as well as with Sakalava representatives and appeared to be increasingly tapped into these networks crossing the southwestern Indian Ocean region.¹⁰⁷ A Sakalava queen married an East African (or Comorian) man around the middle of the eighteenth century, according to English and Dutch reports.¹⁰⁸ Sakalava kings and queens also incorporated Islamic beliefs and rituals into their practice of divine kingship and some converted to Islam by the early nineteenth century.¹⁰⁹

Instead of destroying trade networks along the northwestern coast, Sakalava rulers reestablished them, under their control, and continued to expand the export trade by extending their power, directly and indirectly, even further into the island. From the northwest coast, the Sakalava rulers gained significant influence over the north of the island during the eighteenth century, but we have few details about how this occurred, as Europeans largely avoided the rocky northern coast of Madagascar prior to the mid-eighteenth century. For example, a 1665 Dutch map displays, with some accuracy, ports around the coast of Madagascar, except in the north. The mapmaker labeled this region “pays incogneu,” an unknown land.¹¹⁰ By the end of the eighteenth century, following several European visits, it became clear that the Sakalava rulers indirectly controlled much of this region as well.¹¹¹ As the French observed in 1742, several coastal rulers throughout the northern region had familial ties to the Sakalava king at Boina to whom they owed tribute.¹¹²

As other Europeans began to frequent major ports dotting the northern coastline, including Nosy Be, Diego Suarez (Antsiranana), and Vohémar, they also noticed that the rulers in these locations all claimed to be blood relatives of the Sakalava ruler of Boina.¹¹³ In the 1770s, the French sent several expeditions to explore the north of the island. One representative, Nicolas Mayeur, discovered that a Sakalava leader ruled over a northern province stretching from the west coast to Vohémar in the east. The king, named Lamboine (L’Amboine, Lamboeny), lived in the extreme north of the island in Ankara and oversaw some twenty local leaders controlling smaller provinces. These monarchs ruled over smaller villages located along rivers, which both enabled the easy transportation of trade items to the coast and provided water for growing crops.¹¹⁴ Local leaders sent Lamboine annual tributary payments in rice, cattle, and slaves, which were later sent to Boina. A benevolent ruler, Lamboine exempted the communities from the tributary payments during times of war and privation.¹¹⁵

This picture of tolerance was not without violence. In 1774, the French observed that Lamboine sent five hundred armed men to attack various villages throughout the north. His army raided and stole cattle from villages not already under his control. As a result of their growing military and commercial power, the influence of the Sakalava was expanding all the way to northeastern Madagascar. By 1780, the French discovered that the Sakalava king also had an alliance with a king named “Raminti” ruling over the port of Vohémar on the northeast coast.¹¹⁶ When the French tried to negotiate for cheaper cattle prices from the people of the north and bypass the Sakalava monopoly at Boina, they discovered the extent of Sakalava control over the commerce of northern Madagascar. The Sakalava kings and queens forbade the people in the north to sell cattle directly to French merchants.¹¹⁷

THE LIMITS OF SAKALAVA POWER

By the close of the eighteenth century, the Sakalava king in Boina was known to be a “despotic” king who treated “all of his subjects” as slaves, just as his ancestors had “since time immemorial.”¹¹⁸ Despite this description, it is far from clear that Sakalava queens and kings exercised any sort of absolute domination over communities in western Madagascar. Indeed, the continued reliance on various other elites, translators, and merchants to complete trading agreements with Europeans suggests otherwise. Rather than exercising direct rule, the Sakalava leaders appear to have controlled portions of Madagascar by forming tributary relationships with other communities and marrying into the families of their neighbors. Powerful military, religious, and political leaders thus became kin and part of the Sakalava family.

Karen Middleton has described a similar pattern of political rule among the Karembola in south-central Madagascar. She has argued that “power is concentrated at the center; at the outer margins the ruler’s power fades imperceptibly away. Beyond a core zone the boundaries of a kingdom are unstable and ill defined.”¹¹⁹ Her description has been echoed by Maurice Bloch, who explained that political control in Madagascar came from “force and cattle” as well as “ritual and hasina [the power of the sacred].”¹²⁰ Such pictures of political power suggest that the incentives for communities to supply Sakalava merchant kings with cattle, rice, and slaves may have been produced both by the monarchs’ purchasing power as well as their ability to coerce, frequently with violence, the exports of these commodities.¹²¹ Along with these more material means to power, Sakalava rulers emphasized their links to a divine past, demonstrated through royal worship and commemoration and remembered through oral traditions. This ritual power was clearly expressed to European visitors such as Dean and Drury, who observed powerful men communicating their obedience to the king and worshiping at the burial grounds of prominent ancestors.

The limits of this model of political leadership, based as it was around violence, ritual, and access to cattle, may explain the frequent conflicts that Europeans encountered during the eighteenth century. Many of these conflicts were struggles over royal succession, never simple in a world of complex familial ties and blood-brotherhood.¹²² Although the tributary model suggests more diffuse power relations than suspected by European visitors to the island who saw the Sakalava king as an absolutist despot, European records confirm that obvious hierarchical relations existed, not only between the rulers and the ruled, but also between various leaders. The adoption of the title “prince” by a leader who could sell cattle to the Europeans and that of “king” by his superior, who could supply not only cattle but also rice and slaves, does not appear accidental. Instead, it suggests that the islanders were attempting to make their political standing clear to visitors by using foreign terms of leadership to label those who could sell provisions and slaves. These terms, however, were adopted following the expansion of the Sakalava to control coastal trading enclaves, revealing that global trade had shaped, but did not trigger, political centralization in western Madagascar.

Did Sakalava rulers thus create an empire? It was not an empire in the European model, or even as successful as the nineteenth-century Merina kingdom of Madagascar, in terms of exacting labor and resources from its subjects.¹²³ It may make more sense to think of the Sakalava as related rulers who controlled the western ports of the island through a network of alliances and had to maintain their power by controlling the circulation of key imports, at first firearms but eventually silver coins as well.¹²⁴ Stephen Ellis has suggested that the Sakalava kings of Boina were political innovators on the island, developing “a new form of sovereign power by their recruitment of European military advisers and their domination of the slave trade.”¹²⁵ Yet the domination of the provisioning trade was also key to Sakalava maintenance of other sources of power, including supplies of slaves. After all, Drury noted that Menabe was one of the richest provinces on the island, not due to the slave trade, but thanks to plentiful supplies of foodstuffs. Drury describes how, during a feast following a series of successful battles, military leaders (all of whom ritually communicated their submission to the Sakalava king by licking his feet) consumed four calabashes of “toak” (toaka, alcohol), along with honey, sugar cane, rice, and a large amount of beef. It was the best meal Drury had consumed during his many years on the island.¹²⁶ This food, acquired through a complex alliance of tributaries as much as through warfare, attested to the ability of Sakalava rulers to access labor and resources on Madagascar.