Ramanenjana, the dancing sickness of Madagascar, 1863

Two Britons watched the same crowds in Antananarivo in the spring of 1863 and reached opposite verdicts. Andrew Davidson, a Scottish doctor who titled himself physician to the court of Madagascar, wrote that no one who saw the dancers “can doubt that it was perfectly real as a psychopathy”.³¹⁰ William Ellis, the London Missionary Society’s envoy, who read the Bible with the king, wrote that the sickness “had previously been shown to be pure deception”.⁴¹¹ Both appeared in print in 1867. Ellis says the dancers vanished from the capital when King Radama II was killed on 12 May 1863, and a Catholic mission’s memorial agrees.²¹²

The accounts we could read were written by European missionaries, Protestant and Catholic, by a Malagasy doctor in 1902, and by Malagasy tellers whose words a compiler named Callet printed in 1908.⁶¹ None was written by a dancer.

The writers

Six printed texts carry most of what follows, and they were written for different readers.

Davidson, a medical missionary, reached Antananarivo in August 1862.¹⁰ The Annales passage speaks of “nos Pères”, our Fathers, and the Catholic mission at Antananarivo was staffed by Jesuits.²⁰ A Jesuit history of 1885 says its own chapter on the Ramanenjana follows the memorial Father Finaz wrote at the time.²¹ Ellis and Sibree belonged to the same Protestant society as Davidson, and Sibree cites Ellis, so on the question of staging they count once.¹⁹ Callet’s pages give no teller and no date.

The dancers were mostly young women and slaves, and Davidson and Ellis both say Christians were not among them.²² Ellis put that point to the king as an argument that the visitation was not from his ancestors.²² The Annales says the illness “frappe spécialement les esclaves”, yet spares no one.²²

March to May 1863

Davidson dates the first rumours to February 1863, from the west or south-west. In March pairs and threes were dancing in public places with musicians, and within a few weeks there were hundreds.¹⁴ The Jesuit memorial puts the news in the capital on 12 March and the dancers’ entry on 26 March.¹⁴ The Annales has them arriving a few days before Palm Sunday, which in 1863 fell on 29 March.¹⁵

A letter quoted in the Annales estimates “plus de deux mille” convulsionnaires camped on the Mahamasina plain below the city, and says that on the Tuesday of Holy Week, by our reckoning 31 March, more than a thousand soldiers broke ranks at a review and began to dance.⁸

Ellis, by his own account, first told the king the sickness would end like other epidemics at the close of the rains. After two or three weeks he saw few cases, and then in April came reports that it was back with more violence, with dancers said to be paid to come into the city.²³ Near a building site on the Faravohitra road he watched a young woman dance along the path. He did not think she was ill: “she certainly knew what she was about”.²⁴ On another occasion, while he was photographing the site of the martyrs’ deaths at Ambohipotsy, a young woman in a light-blue scarf danced round his camera, “more like a damsel dancing for pleasure, than the unconscious subject of disease”.²⁴

Ellis reports that the king told him fresh tidings said his ancestors were coming with cannon, muskets and swords, and that the bearers of such reports brought the king presents they said the ancestors had told them to bring.²⁵ Radama issued the order that people uncover their heads to the afflicted, with a fine for refusing.¹⁶ The Annales gives the fine as 150 francs and says most whites went bareheaded.¹⁶

In early May, Ellis was reading with the king when dancers, drummers and the keepers of the idols burst in. He writes that friends told him afterwards the visit had been planned as the occasion to kill him, and does not vouch for it.²⁶ On 7 May the king announced an order that anyone might settle a quarrel by arms without punishment, and the nobles protested.²⁷ Just after cock-crow on 12 May, as it was reported to Ellis, a party of officers and soldiers went to the house where the king had spent the night.¹² Ellis says the king was strangled with a twisted girdle, and that the public announcement the next day said he had put an end to his own life.²⁸

“Dès ce moment, les Ramanenjana disparurent,” writes the Jesuit memorial: the next day none could be met in the town or the countryside.² Ellis says the same, and adds that he saw soldiers who had brought the sickness with them leap from the ranks and be brought back, and that an order to arrest them was enough to end it.²

What the dancers asked for

Each of the three main accounts lists things the dancers could not bear, and the lists do not quite match.

Davidson found the dislike of black “so common in this disease, in all its recorded epidemics, as to deserve attention”, and notes it in the child pilgrimages of the thirteenth century.²⁹ Of the pigs and hats he gives the plain reading: “Swine are reckoned unclean by several tribes in Madagascar”, and hats might be resented as foreign.²⁹

The Jesuit memorial names the dancers’ cry. “Maika” means pressed, and the crowds called them Ramaika; the Annales prints their usual shout as “izahay maikia”, “nous sommes pressés”.³² Callet’s Malagasy pages print the song the singers repeat:

The name Ramanenjana itself comes from a root for tense or stiff.¹⁸

A real illness or a staged one

Davidson wrote as a physician comparing the dancers with the choreomania of medieval Europe, and the dancers fitted. He says the afflicted complained first of a weight at the chest and stiffness at the neck, grew restless, then could not resist music.³³ On whether it was real he is blunt, and he also allows for fraud:

He grants “a certain amount of imposture” and thinks it hard to fake the look, the movements and the endurance. He supposes many of the dancers “at first either feigned or fostered” a strong impulse and then fell into it.³ The political excitement, he writes, supplied a condition for the epidemic and did not cause it, and it spread by what he calls “pathological sympathy”.³⁴ Yet he also writes that the mania “in no small degree, tended to bring about the rebellion, which ended in the death of the sovereign and his ministers”.³⁵ A newspaper account of 1864 that he quotes and calls exaggerated goes further: “The unfortunate Radama was a victim of the Ramanenjana of 1863.”³⁶

Ellis went the other way. He had told the king that “the sickness, so far as it was real, presented nothing unaccountable”.⁴ He reads the dancers as pawns. Some, he writes, were really ill, and he offered them water and medicine, but he “looked upon them chiefly as the deluded victims of evil men”.⁴ By his account the men behind them were the keepers of the idols, who gathered the offerings of cane and money laid on the stone each evening and divided them.¹⁵ After the king’s death he writes that “it had previously been shown to be pure deception”.⁴ Sibree echoed him in 1870, writing that the dancing was “adroitly fomented and made use of” by the diviners.¹⁹

The Jesuit memorial agrees that there was a plot, and says the “comédie” gave itself away: the least clear-sighted guessed a design behind the popular agitation.³⁷ On the nature of the sickness it reports a split among the doctors of 1863: some saw an ordinary morbid state, which they blamed on “exhalaisons du chanvre en fleurs”, the fumes of hemp in flower, while others saw a sickness in which fallen angels and human cunning were mixed.³⁸

Ellis reports that the king sometimes said he could not understand it, and at other times that “some of it must be true”.¹¹

The dancers’ own side

Respect for the ancestors shaped the sickness, Davidson saw: those who knew how the Malagasy honour their dead and their tombs might have predicted the form it took.³⁹ The Jesuit memorial says the Malagasy have always treated people struck by this “mal sacré” with respect, and that its writer cannot tell the tromba, a possession long known in Madagascar under several names, from the Ramanenjana.⁴⁰ Sibree, in 1889, called the dancing “a kind of Malagasy spiritualism”.⁴¹

Callet’s Malagasy tellers record what the dancers meant. They say the Ramanenjana made the Merina believe again that the spirits of the dead all go to Ambondrombe, and that under Radama II people said the affairs of the dead and the living would be mixed:

The same pages have the king’s order, in Radama’s reported words: if anyone obstructs the sick, he will hold them guilty, and the sick may take what they want.⁴³ They also have a scene at the rova, the royal compound, in which a sick person demands entry:

Read as a teller’s story, not as a record of what was said at the door, it has the dead mother as the sender, as the Jesuit and English accounts do.¹ The whole passage is on its own page.

What later scholars make of that is a different argument from Ellis’s. The French historian Françoise Raison-Jourde, as David Graeber reports her, called it “a kind of revolution through spectral theater”.⁵ Graeber builds on her. He reads the dancers as mostly women and slaves, who had the most to lose if Radama II’s plantation plans went ahead, and sees the sugar cane carried to the stone as a version of the cane carried in circumcision processions.⁴⁴ He says the guardians of the sampy came out into the streets in support.⁴⁵ Stephen Ellis, writing in 1985, calls the dance “a cry from the heart”, a way of restoring the ceremonies a king should perform.⁴⁶ In our reading, none of these depends on whether the dancers were ill.

How many

The period record gives four numbers, and none of them is 20,000.⁴⁷⁸⁷

The 200,000 figure comes from the same text, on the page before the letter that estimates 2,000. A Jesuit letter printed in a history of 1884 gives the whole town as sixty or seventy thousand people, so 200,000 witnesses cannot have been inhabitants.⁴⁸ Two dance projects, the Tangaj Collective and the National Center for Dance Bucharest, each say that “more than 20,000 people danced with supernatural resistance from February to May”, and neither names a source.⁹¹³ We could not trace the figure. The Annales page is on its own page.

Checking the telling

After May 1863

“Stopped” is true of the capital in May 1863 and not of the sickness. The dancers returned in March 1864, a year to the day after their first appearance, according to a Jesuit history of 1884; the prime minister forbade the chanting, the clapping and the gatherings at the sacred stone.⁵⁰ Queen Rasoherina’s edict ordering anyone who claimed the sickness put in irons ended it, the 1885 memorial says: those who had only claimed it dropped away, and the ones really ill were kept hidden by relatives or masters.⁵⁰ Davidson says it came back every spring.⁵⁰ Stephen Ellis writes that order in Imerina was restored only in the middle of 1864.⁵⁰ Sibree, reprinting Davidson in 1889, added that it still appeared in country places in early April, when the main rice crop ripens, and never among Christians, and that fuller information was needed on these customs and diseases.⁵¹⁴¹

A malaria thesis from Montpellier

The earliest Malagasy author we found on the subject is a doctor, Andrianjafy, who wrote a thesis for the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier in 1902.⁶ He writes that in his search of French and foreign books he found only Davidson’s description and a lecture of 1865 by Boudin.⁵² His father, an old Malagasy practitioner, had watched the Ramanenjana for more than twenty years, and the thesis is built on his observations and the son’s.⁶ Andrianjafy argues that it was a pernicious, nervous form of malaria, with choreic movements shaped by superstitious fears and sorcery.⁶ The two dance projects list malaria among their explanations; neither says where the idea comes from.¹³

Davidson wrote that he never heard of the dancing itself proving fatal, though he knew of a few deaths among patients who were held back from it.⁵³