19. One of History’s Deadliest and Most Dangerous Rulers
Queen Ranavalona I went down in history as a cruel and xenophobic tyrant. Contemporaries, especially foreign ones, condemned her policies in the strongest terms, and viewed them as the acts of a psychotically dangerous madwoman. Modern historic revisionism has toned down the madwoman narrative, and placed greater emphasis on the astuteness that enabled her to protect Madagascar from European encroachment. Nonetheless, there is ample ground to consider Ranavalona an exceptionally dangerous and deadly ruler. Between massacres, mistreatment, forced labor, and widespread famines caused by her scorched earth policies and heavy handed repression, Madagascar’s population crashed.
During a six year stretch from 1833 to 1839, the island’s population is estimated to have declined from 5 million to 2.5 million inhabitants. In Ranavalona’s own home district, the population took a nose dive from about 750,000 in 1829, her first year on the throne, to a mere 130,000 by 1842. Those are genocide level figures, comparable to those inflicted by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge on the people of Cambodia a century later. Unlike Pol Pot, however, Ranavalona was not chased out of power. After a reign that lasted for thirty three years, she died in her sleep of natural causes when she was eighty three years old.