A Drop of History 84

Ranavalona I, queen of Madagascar
Obsessive, nymphomaniac, ruthless… but a great queen

Along the sea route from Europe to India, just after rounding the Cape of Good Hope and close to the eastern African coast, there is a large, oblong-shaped island, Madagascar. A rich island, strategically positioned, which soon found itself in the sights of the great colonial powers, Britain and France, when trade with India was an important source of wealth. But both powers were unlucky enough to stumble upon a diabolical woman who, at the head of her people, gave them a right run for their money. That was Ranavalona.

She was the wife of king Radama I, who was charmed by the Westerners and tried to transplant the white people’s habits to the black people of Madagascar. He abandoned idols, banned torture and granted trade rights to the English and French. Then he died of excessive whisky consumption and was succeeded by his wife, who was his exact opposite. Traditionalist, religiously bigoted, xenophobic, but primarily ruthless. To avoid having anyone contest her position, as soon as she ascended the throne, she murdered all the relatives of her dead husband. And since spilling royal blood was taboo, she had them all buried alive, in order to be conventionally in accordance with the custom.

She showed her intentions towards foreigners at her enthronement ceremony, by seating the official ambassadors together with the royal concubines. At the end of the ceremony, all the people, including the foreigners, passed before her, dropping a coin into a basket in order to buy back the rights of life and death that the new queen had over them. The English representative, Robert Lyle, wrote a letter mocking the whole affair, but it ended in the hands of the royal spies. Enraged, the queen ordered him shut in a hut full of snakes. By morning, Lyle had gone insane.

Ranavalona, whose name means “smooth silver water”, went on to perform acts of unimaginable cruelty, as well as foolishness, during her reign. She reinstated the tanguena ordeal, which her husband had banned. It involved a poison, apparently used to break enchantments. If the queen considered that someone was becoming a liability, she would proclaim them bewitched and order them to drink tanguena to break the spell. In reality, they were given a powerful poison that killed instantly, and then the queen would announce that the spell was too strong to be broken. 150,000 opponents of hers were dispatched through the ordeal.

She staged a formal execution of whisky barrels, because her husband had died from that foreign drink. She closed all foreign schools and executed Christian priests. Then she went on to kill with horrible tortures the natives who had converted to Christianity. Common practices included boiling them alive, dismemberment, impalement, or setting hunting dogs on them. When she was informed that the native girls who had converted to Christianity remained virgins until marriage, she gathered them in a lavish ceremony and sent in her soldiers to rape them in public.

When she gave birth to a boy, she declared to the people that he was a son by her husband, Radama. Nobody objected, although Radama had been dead for two years at the time. Whenever she decided to visit another part of the island, she would drag along with her an escort of the entire population of the capital – fifty thousand people who, living on local produce, caused a famine wherever they went. The French tried to disembark on the island twice, but failed. As much of a xenophobe as Ranavalona was, she still kept a French adventurer, Jean Laborde, as a lover; he was a good craftsman and had built her foundries to make guns and cannons.

She was an avid smoker and had a whole band playing the British anthem “God Save the Queen” whenever she was with one or another of her lovers. She was hysterical, often unjustifiably harsh, but a great queen. At a time when the colonialists were gobbling up the entire world, she kept her island free and intact. During her funeral, as her gunners fired cannon shots in the air, the wind carried off a good quantity of gunpowder and scattered it among the crowd. One spark was enough to turn the funeral into a raging inferno. All the nearby villages and most of the people present were burned to a cinder. Even in death, she proved what she had replied to Griffith, an English pastor who had told her that God did not allow what she was doing: “In Madagascar, man, I am God.”

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 42

Capital and hands
The rich man’s capital, the poor man’s empty hands

Developed countries, over the last five centuries, have had the capital. The losers of these centuries, the poor countries, have had the cheap workforce. Developed countries were able to invest their capital internally and manufacture more and more advanced equipment, which balanced the lack or expense of hands. On the contrary, poor countries always had to face the urgent problem of overpopulation, which dramatically swelled the number of mouths to feed and hands to occupy.

In Europe or North America, a five-year period of significant public or private investments can raise the income per capita by $1000, at the end of the five years. In China, India, Central or Latin America and Africa, the constantly swelling population annuls in advance any raise of the country’s total revenue. Between 1950 and 1990, the population of China increased by eight million per year, and that of China, by ten million per year. What financial policy would be capable of overcoming such monstrous population growth and raise the average income?

The situation was not formed by some divine discrimination in our world. It was during the period of initial capital accumulation that the colonial metropolitan centres crushed the economies of the countries considered poor today.

The league of European and Japanese allies broke up the Chinese industry in the early 20th century. The British shut down the traditional textile artisans in India. The Spanish and the Portuguese forbade by law the development of industry or light manufacture in Brazil, Argentina and Chile. The Americans prohibited even the packaging of the fruit produced in Central America. Bananas had to be transported to the US in order to be packaged before distribution, so that not the least industrial base could develop in the Honduras, Nicaragua or Venezuela. So what remained in those countries? Countless unskilled hands, vegetating without hope.

André Chevrillon said about India, in 1923: “Here, labour distribution exceeds all limits. One man drives your coach, another opens the door of whatever building you are about to enter. If you drop your handkerchief, yet another will pick it up for you. When a European moves, even if he is a common soldier, he moves with him an incredible number of locals, who live off him.”

“And how much do you pay them?” he was asked. “All of them together in a day get much less than what a shoeshiner in the streets of London demands for a shine,” he answered.

Beautiful world, moral, angelically created.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2002, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2007, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 20

The feminine face of Africa
Manager by day, primitive by night

After World War II, the whole of Africa remained under the control of the major European powers. The English, French, Belgian and Portuguese had divided the Black Continent into zones of influence. They were colonialists, granted; they exploited precious resources, no doubt; but they also made some rudimentary efforts to create some kind of infrastructure in those countries. A bit of education, a basic state mechanism, a rudimentary banking system, things convenient for themselves as well. But their efforts were in vain. The local societies remained immobile, absorbed in their traditional way of life and unfaltering convictions, centuries old.

A certain French sociologist did something unprecedented for Africa in 1958. He conducted a survey in Porto-Novo, Dahomey [Benin], seeking to research that social stagnation that did not allow the metropolis to acquire any modern executives, capable of doing their work in the colonies. The survey results were published in the French press in 1959, but what is even more impressive is the sociologist’s personal insights.

He had visited a state timber company, which was run by a young African, a graduate of some French university, familiar with the European mentality and methods, dressed in the latest Parisian fashion, and everything in the organisation of his business looked hopeful. But when he visited that young westernised manager in his home, our sociologist only narrowly escaped a stroke. He had a talk with the manager’s wife, who said the following, word for word:

“When my husband, a few years after our marriage, took other wives, he entrusted the money to me, because I was his first wife. I would give the junior wives their share. I selected the other two wives he took, because I knew what he wanted and what they could give him. They greet me kneeling and do the chores I assign them. I kneel to greet my father-in-law, my mother-in-law, the uncles, aunts, elder brothers and elder sisters of my husband. I don’t kneel before his younger brothers and sisters, but I owe them respect. I serve all my husband’s family, run errands, bring water for all and give food to his uncles and my in-laws. But later my daughters-in-law will serve me too.”

The French sociologist left, flabbergasted, and sent a message to France: “The westernisation of our subjects is nothing but a fragile shell. Beneath that, old Africa is still there. Forget them.” And that is exactly what happened. Within ten years, they were indeed forgotten. Black Africa was liberated and returned to its own self, the one with the terrible faults and numerous merits – its true self, nonetheless.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2002, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2006, All Rights Reserved