Dynastic History | Manjakamiadana, Rova of Antananarivo — Timber Raised by People Who Owed the Queen Work

Jean Laborde reached Imerina in 1831 after a shipwreck on the east coast and stayed on as the court's manufacturer. Between 1839 and 1840 he built Ranavalona I a great timber hall on the Analamanga ridge above Antananarivo: Manjakamiadana. The labour was fanompoana, service owed to the sovereign in place of a cash tax, unpaid and levied by household. Laborde's ironworks and manufactory at Mantasoa was raised the same way, and contemporary accounts put twenty thousand people on that site. Figures like that reach us through the court's own reckoning or through European observers estimating from outside; they describe a category of obligation more reliably than they count heads. The standing study of how the obligation worked is Gwyn Campbell's, in the Journal of African History.

Some thirty years later James Cameron, an artisan of the London Missionary Society, encased the wooden hall in granite and gave it the arcades and corner towers that fixed its image. Published accounts disagree on the year, and even on which sovereign ordered the work — a disagreement better stated than smoothed over.

The Rova burned on the night of 6 November 1995. Rebuilding began in 1997; the royal tombs were restored in October 2003 and the main structural phases finished in December 2009. The palace reopened in 2020 under a new name, Rovan'i Madagasikara. What a visitor climbs to today is a reconstruction on a nineteenth-century plan, and Cameron's stone casing is the oldest fabric standing in it.

📸 Cover: The burnt stone shell of the Rova on the Analamanga ridge above Antananarivo, photographed in 2005 before the reconstruction; area view. David Herzog, public domain via Wikimedia Commons