1 case tagged “tangena ordeal”
Accused: Ranavalona I (born Rabodonandrianampoinimerina; also known as Ramavo, Ranavalo-Manjaka I, and Ranavalona reniny)
In a single year, 1838, an estimated 100,000 people died by her command, forced to swallow poison from the tangena nut and then prove their innocence by vomiting chicken skin. She ruled Madagascar for thirty-three years, expelled every Christian missionary on the island, mounted the skulls of approximately twenty-one Europeans on pikes along her coastline, and oversaw a population collapse that cut her island's people nearly in half. Her name was Ranavalona I, and for three decades she was the most feared sovereign in the Indian Ocean world. Western contemporaries called her the 'Mad Monarch of Madagascar,' the 'Bloody Mary of Madagascar,' the 'Female Caligula.' Revisionist historians see something else entirely: a pragmatic anti-colonial strategist who kept her island free from European domination at any cost. Both portraits carry weight. Born a commoner around 1778, she seized absolute power through a palace coup, eliminated the legitimate royal heir and his entire family, and never looked back. She died quietly, in her own bed, in her own palace, at approximately eighty-three years of age. France did not colonize Madagascar until 1896, thirty-five years after her death. The full story of her reign is one of blood, genius, and the terrible arithmetic of survival at the height of empire.
