Europeans branded Madagascar's Queen Ranavalona mad; historians now see a defiant sovereign
For more than a century Western books called Ranavalona I the Mad Monarch of Madagascar. Since the 1970s scholars have recast her as a ruler guarding her island's independence against European encroachment. Both portraits hold some truth: her 33-year reign kept foreign powers at bay, yet Madagascar's population may have fallen by half.
Born Princess Ramavo in 1778 near Antananarivo, she was betrothed to Prince Radama as a reward after her father exposed a plot against the king. The marriage was loveless and childless. When Radama became king in 1810 he executed several of her relatives, and she spent many days socializing with the Welsh missionary David Griffiths, a friendship that lasted three decades.
Radama died without children in July 1828. Custom favoured his nephew Rakotobe, but courtiers delayed announcing the death, and a group of army officers hid Ramavo, won over judges and the keepers of the royal idols, and rallied the troops. On 11 August 1828 she declared herself Radama's chosen successor and took the name Ranavalona, meaning kept aside. Following royal custom, she then had her rivals, Rakotobe among them, put to death. She was the first woman to rule the Kingdom of Imerina since its founding in 1540.
She steadily distanced the island from Europe. She ended a friendship treaty with Britain, restricted the London Missionary Society and in 1835 banned Christianity among the Malagasy, after which almost all foreigners left within a year. In place of foreign trade she relied on fanompoana, forced labour owed as tax, to build public works and support a standing army of 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers that pressed her rule across the island. War, disease, harsh labour and the tangena poison ordeal used as a trial drove death rates sharply up.
She still used foreign skills when it suited her. The Frenchman Jean Laborde built her wooden palace, Manjakamiadana, between 1839 and 1842, the largest building in the royal Rova compound until a 1995 fire destroyed it. Her son Radama II, who favoured the French and signed the Lambert Charter with a French representative in 1855, took the throne only when she died in 1861 at 83.
Source: Ranavalona I
