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
