Whoso Media.
Hello, and welcome to cool people who talk about pirates sometimes. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and I'm talking to a cool person about pirates sometimes whose name is Molly.
Hi, Molly, Hey, Margaret.
I suppose you have a last name, Molly Crabapple, Molly Krabapple. If you've listened to part one, you know who Molly Crabapple is. If you're listening only to part two, you might still know who Molly Crabapple is because her stuff's a lot of places, and if you don't, you should look it up. But Molly Crabapple is a like a conflict journalist with art and it's cool. Thank you, our producer of Sophie Hi, Sophie Hi, our editor who I
forgot to shout out last time. I'm so sorry. Rory is Rory Hi, Rory Hi, Riy you have to say hi to Rory too. All those we can't continue, Hey, Rory, my brain doesn't work right? And are they? Musical was
written for us by unwoman. So this is part two about the real Libertalia, rather the cool shit that indigenous rebels were doing in Madagascar and how it relates to the sometimes cool and complicated shit and sometimes terrible shit that pirates from the rest of the world were doing in Madagascar, and how cultures come together and do weird and interesting things and sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not. And there's no clear moral line to easily draw in
this week's episodes, but it sure ain't boring. So there's this pirate haven in Madagascar, except instead of a cool anarchist utopia, it's a slave trade port, and in order to fence their stolen goods. I guess it's one of those things where it's like when you're just like kind of in the crime world, you're just like fucking around with people who are bad also, you.
Know, yeah, yeah, pretty much like the.
Jain Collective was totally working with the mafia. And it's like very narrowly hidden subtext. You know, it's just cool people do crime and bad people do crime. Crime is not a useful metric by which to judge morality. This slave trade port, sorry, this pirate haven in Madagascar wasn't really operating under the European model of settlement in slavery, but more like the Arab and indigenous model, which doesn't
make it Again. Whatever I've said, my piece about that they were actually coordinating with locals to purchase war captives and sell those into slavery. And everyone is intermarrying, and it wasn't wildly distinct from local culture in a lot of ways at the time. This doesn't make it good, but it certainly better than the legal settlements. Rather than like leading slave raids, various conflicts between various groups would lead to small scale warfare which produce captives who could
be sold into slavery. And so at this point it's worth talking about the Malagasy culture of northeast Madagascar itself. Madagascar overall was not actually particularly egalitarian, but definitely not a modern state structure or anything like that. And honestly, it's funny because this, like not a galitarian society, is so much more a galitarian than the societies that probably anyone who's listening to this lives in. Currently, there was an established class of priests, and there was a growing
class of warriors who are above everyone else too. Those are the things that like keep it from being moregalitarian.
And what's the what religion are the priests doing?
Yeah, so it's really interesting. It depends on what part of the island you're on. They're doing different indigenous practices. But even though there's no qur'an in sight, most of the rest of the island is doing what they would call Islam, but it does not map to other people's understanding of Islam particularly And then in the northeast part, it's Jewish in that same way where it's also not.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, it's like a folk memory of what being Jewish might have been this. Yeah, it's like, yeah, like this faint trace of something.
Yeah. And David Graeber, who was Jewish, was kind of also been like and I think that they, you know, I think some Jewish cultural traits carried on. They like spent a lot of time actively discussing philosophy with each other and not.
Agreeing on things and nitpicking, nitpicking the culture of graduate students, that's our culture.
Yeah, yeah, and again I won't say that, but grab did and you can.
And as a Jewish woman, I will say that it's no surprise that the culture of rabbis produced Marxists.
Yeah, absolutely, it makes sense. So Northeast Madagascar was a clan structure. That whole region had about fifty clans of several hundreds more than one thousand people in each clan, and these were split up into these large families, and you have villages and stuff. Most people are growing rice.
To quote Graber about the economics in any given village, there was a great hall where everyone ate their midday meal together, and collective granaries where each family kept their own stock, but also a collective store any family coul in case of shortfall. This was by no means in a galitarian society. Well, everyone had access to the means to sustain life, not everyone had equal access to the
means to create it. Just as the heads of villages had multiple wives, so each clan had a dominant lineage that managed to keep a large proportion of its daughters to itself. It's funny that this is the like nonagalitarians. It's so much more a galitarian than how we live now.
I mean, it seems like the losers of the nonagalitarian society are all of the guys that get no wives because one guy is getting a lot of them.
Yeah kind of. And then like and actually a new clan split off all the time, started by women who were unhappy with what was going on. And overall it's a patriarchal and patrilineal culture, but it's like not completely and that's also not universal across Madagascar, where there's more of like they would, oh there's a word for it, I don't remember, but instead of matrilineal or patrilineal, there's a like botham version, you know, where people keep track
of both they're both their parents families. And that's like what was happening in Madagascar overall. But northeast Madagascar was like ostensibly led by men, but in really complicated ways that we're going to talk about, where women actually exerted a lot of power. These large families in the clans themselves had sort of formal leaders who Europeans immediately called kings, but these kings never centralized power and specifically they had
like basically no executive power. Sometimes these clans would fight. I'll talk about decisions or whatever, spoil it already spoiled it. They make decisions by consensus and assemblies that anyone who's affected by a decision can come participate in.
And what makes you a king then, besides that you have a lot of wives kind of that that's it. That's it.
I think it's like, and you also kind of like are doing the like I have so many daughters, and I control what's happening to my daughter. Like, honestly, there's some like patriarchy involved in it too, right, and you're like wealthier more likely. Yeah. I think it's so interesting because this happens all over the world where we just like show up, like Europeans will show up and be like that there's a kingdom, and people are like, what, okay, if we say we're king, will you leave us alone?
You know?
Yeah? Yeah, well you decide that we're quote unquote civilized enough not to invade us.
Yeah. And sometimes these clans would go to war with each other, and I think, actually, I think that these kings were like war chiefs a lot of times also, which put them on equal footing with pirates in a lot of ways. Right, Sometimes the kings would just sort of fight duels with each other, and then during any given war, captives were often taken. And then these captives were generally ransom back to the original families or they
were married into the families that captured them. This is like a way you like go get men to make everyone not in bread this ye go, it's not whatever. I'm not trying to put a moral judgment one way or the other.
It's obvious. So they're kidnapping. They're not doing the usual thing where they're like kidnapping women and forcing them to marry. They're kidnapping dudes and forcing them to marry in.
Actually, you know what, now that I'm thinking this through, a lot of the people are being old as slaves, are also women and children, So I think they're just capturing people during these raids. But that's my conjecture based on what I read. And this does not create chattel slavery, but of course foreigners, including Arab traders and European traders, turned it into like funneled people into chattel slavery and the sort of modern what we think of the North
Atlantic slave trade and stuff like that. And this whole system of conflict kept any given clan or family from taking too much power. They were often rich and they were surrounded by pirate treasure and shit, but they didn't have a lot of control over other people. The political decisions, including criminal trials, basically were made it consensus based assemblies called cabarety, and these would involve whoever had an interest in whatever decision was being made. Most were on a
household or clan level. Sometimes they were regional, like probably the one that is about to kill all the pirates was probably a regional cabaret, but we don't know. Also, there was like women only ones for like like if the shit involved women, then only other women were involved, which is better gender politics than a lot of Now, there are two ways of looking at the way women
were treated in the society. One, the primary way that is written down by European anthropologists and by European visitors is that women were more or less property. They were regularly kidnapped and given away. Teenage daughters of important men in particular were given away, especially to foreigners like pirates like Yasically you show up and they're like, ah, nice to meet you, foreigner. Here is my sixteen year old daughter. Fuck yeah, no, it's not the best. Men often had
multiple wives. These are all true statements, but they don't address the reality of what was happening. According to the Malagasy view of what was happening, and when pirates married Malagasy women, interestingly, it brought men into the sphere of these important families, so it was like I'm a little bit confused I could read this both ways. There's a real implica that a lot of the pirate men just basically like, like the son in law now just goes
and like lives with father in law, you know. But I believe also women were going and living in these coastal towns. And we'll talk about the coastal towns in a minute. The way that Malagasy women wrote about what was happening is wildly different than the way that European men were talking about what was happening, even though they're describing the same thing.
So how did they describe, for instance, like your dad given you to the newly arrived pirate dude, so I.
We arrived pirate dude.
I like that.
So they were describing what they were doing as putting on love charms and going down to the ocean to attract men.
So they were just like they're having fun.
They've done witchcraft to get them to show up. They're like, fuck, yeah, I got a guy. I went fishing at the ocean for a guy.
Wow. Wow.
So that's very different.
Yeah, and they would marry these men and not be subordinate to them.
So wait, they're like, oh, there's plenty of fish in the sea, but there's like.
Literal men in the sea.
They're like, oh, I'm gonna put a cute outfit on and perfume and go to the sea to find a man, just like me going to a bookstore being like.
Do you read? Are you?
Are?
You look at me? I'm so alluring? Yeah, yeah, that's that is the implication of what's happening. And they were like, hell, yeah, my powerful witchcraft pulled a man out of the sea, you know, honey.
Okay, yeah, you know, good for you. And then they're like, and my dad will be a good choice for my my sea hookup.
So I again, I don't know how it relates to the I don't know how often they're like, dad, why do you give me to this guy? Right? I don't know as much about that, but by and large, I think that the way that they are viewing marriage is as an economic relation and not as a romantic relation.
And specifically it's an economic relation between equals in a way that it wasn't in Europe at this time, right, And so that's like part of why Europeans could easily be like, oh fuck in her property and being given around because it's like, well, women were property in England in Europe at the time.
Right, Yeah, they couldn't even own property.
Yeah, And I don't know about the property rights of women. I do know about how women ran all the finances. So actually that has some implications. But any man who mistreated his wife would be killed, cursed and killed, probably poisoned. But it was like not presented as like I'm going to poison you. Instead it was like, oh, I don't mess with these women though, And then there's all of these stories about like and then this man died randomly of illness, you know, after he was shitty to his wife.
So you're just living. You're living with your wife, and you just know that at any moment, if you beat her up or get out of line, that she might just put poison in your food.
Yeah.
Basically that seems like it would make them be respectful.
Yeah.
No, And overall that seems to be what happened. And men were necessary basically as the bread winners of get the fuck out of here. I don't even want to see you. Why aren't you on the ocean robbing people and giving me stuff? Shit?
Man?
And so men couldn't be trusted with finances, and so women were in charge of the money. Most of the merchants at all of these port cities of pirates, whether they were married or not, were women, and so women are kind of running the economic sphere.
Except for the pirate kings.
Yeah, it's like the only specific pirate king. Okay, so when I'm talking about these coastal cities, I'm actually talking about post that pirate king getting run out of town, and I'm going to talk about him getting run of town after I finished the like a side about the Malagassy folks, and I don't know, I suspect there were also probably European traders as well, but the people who were kind of like interfacing stuff coming in and out
of the islands were often women. Observers wrote with scandal about how all of the Malagasy women who were married could fuck whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted. If a pirateman had multiple wives, each must be provided with her own home, and then like if he's not home, they're allowed to do whatever they want. Basically, it reached the point where the coastal pirate towns were called cities of women because women ran them and it was mostly women
living in them. Because all the husbands are at sea. Isn't that weird how both those stories are true.
That's amazing, because, yeah, the Europeans, they had no frame to interpret a world where like, first of all, where a woman who was married could sleep around, right, where a woman would control all of the commerce, where a woman would poison her husband if he gave her a black eye. They had no way to imagine or I mean, I'm sure they had a way, but they hadn't. They
refused to imagine women as equal humans. And so if you can't see women as equal humans, you cannot understand at all what's going on.
Right, And then you're still talking about like a fundamentally right, you're still talking about a slave society, right, And so on some level, the giving away daughters, it's like, well, people are capable of becoming property temporarily in the society or even permanently in the society. But then like when men are captured, they're often married into the family or whatever. Right,
so it's just different. Like I feel like this is one of the best examples of cultural relativism I've ever seen, where I can tell the story that does not look good, and then I can tell the story that sounds cool as shit, and they're both true in that it's kind of not good and it's kind of cool as shit, you know, at the same time. And yeah, that is the Malagasy people on the northeast coast at the time. This is the culture that these pirates are showing up
and intermarrying with and hanging out with. And so you've got this first pirate settlement off on the island, and they're sending a few slaves here and there. It's basically in their best interest to make sure the various clans keep fighting each other because that produces captives which they can turn around and sell. And so there's an economic incentive for them to go around and stir up shit. So that's not good.
And they are stirring up shit. Do they know how they stir up shit?
I don't know how they're stirring up shit. What I do know is specifically late they're going to be the fucking mediators, my god, and so I know the shift, but I don't know what they were doing beforehand.
Being gospy bitches. They were being like, oh this one, sure, yeah, yeah, this one says that your communal cafeteria has shitty food and the meat is dry, you just do something about it.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, they just cointel prode that shit, and their primary interest is fencing stolen goods. But then the New York City businessmen were like, you send far too few slaves. And so the pirate king he's kind of like he thinks forced but whatever, fuck him. He starts stepping it up. And what he does in he didn't write in the script sixteen ninety seven. Mm. Yeah, he tricks a bunch of people into coming into his fort
and then he scoops them up and sells them. And this is entirely outside the social contract of like the way slavery is supposed to work around here, right, So the locals burn his fucking fortress down and slit the throat of every pirate they.
Saw, I mean understandably.
Oh yeah, except a bunch of the pirates had been given a heads up by their wives who they were actually nice to and had nothing to do with any of it, and weren't there that day.
And they never they never retaliated against those pirates. Did those pirates have to go away forever? Did they just like leave until.
Oh they wipe out the fucking town, Like it is.
The ones who're the ones who have not been there that day.
No, I know what I'm saying is there's no one to retaliate against them. They show up and they slit everyone's throats. That time, that period of slavery on this island is over. In one attack, they wipe out a slave trade port.
Wow.
Yeah, that particular pirate king, he escaped the knife because he was out at sea. I don't think he was tipped off. And he just never goes back. He's like, I'm fucking out of here.
He knows it's fucking over.
Yeah, And basically all the pirates realized their allegiance is not to fucking Europe or to sl They are at war with the whole civilized world. After all. They stop slave trading, and they cut out the trying to stir up conflict between groups, and they more go native. I don't know the proper way to use. I know it's a shitty phrase. I just don't know.
They become Malagasy, they integrate.
More so, they do more of that. They're still distinct and their children are going to become this kind of separate clasp and we'll talk about that later. And they moved to the mainland, and then slavers avoid northeast Madagascar for decades because well, the pirates will still attack slave ships.
Because it turns out that that was highly effective.
Yeah yeah, and they're probably not doing it because they're like we individually. But honestly, I'm will into bed. The average pirate who believes in this all galitarian shit might be like kind of anti slavery. I don't know. I mean, obviously some of them weren't, you know, I could see it. So the place that inspired Libertalia fell destroyed righteously, and what rose and stay were these cities of women and then a whole crazy rebellious confederation that is really fucking interesting.
But before we talk about it, I want to talk about medieval weapons. Have you purchased medieval weapons lately? If you haven't purchased a new medieval weapon, your soul has a sword shaped hole in it.
Sword shaped holes is also what happens when you don't purchase medieval weapons and someone else around you has.
I know, those without swords can still die upon them. That's our slogan. Anyway, here's other ads ed, Rebecca, So I'm going to tell you about another pirate. This is going to lead to the weird legend stuff that people are going to build. There's a guy named Henry Avery, and he's like in the like list of like he's not Blackbeard, but he's like up there right. He's one
of the the guys people talk about. He was active for all of two years and he pulled off the greatest haul in pirate history probably and he was never caught. He's one of the only motherfuckers that didn't get caught him.
And the Chinese pirate queen.
Oh does she get away in the end? That rules?
She did. At the end, she was so powerful that the government like cut a deal with her and she got to like retire with all her money.
Yeah, that makes sense. Most of Avery's folks, who we know where they ended up. They just like showed up to the Americas and were like, Hey, if we give you like a shit ton of stolen stuff, can you just not kill us? And America was like, yeah, that sounds up our alley, you know. But most Golden Age pirates got their start in a similar way as our
guy Avery, unpaid wages. The Charles two was a ship that wasn't paying its sailors and there was a big old warship, and so the sailors were like, well, we want to get paid though, and they were like, well, we're not going to pay you right now. And they were like, there's a lot of us, and so they mutinied.
Good for them, Good for them as a freelancer who has often gotten paid later or not gotten paid at all. Yeah, I salute you, pirates.
Yeah exactly, mutineers. You'll get the death penalty if you go back to port. So they're like, all right, we're pirates now, all because your boss has tried to get you to work for free, almost like that was a big hole thing during the seventeen and eighteenth century.
They didn't pay you for that children's book you illustrated.
Nope, nope. So it's time to just go to war against the world exactly. And I feel like there's a lesson in here somewhere about how, for example, unpaid wages are the largest category theft in the US today. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that workers in this country now not talking about the old seventeen hundreds, are robbed of fifty billion dollars a year, which is one hundred times
more than the combined sum of all robbery. So all these motherfuckers run out there and buy guns to protect themselves from robbery, are pointing the guns in the wrong direction, is all I'm saying. Anyway, before criminally actionable things get said, back to ye oldie times, that's obviously what we're talking about. We're only talking about ye oldie times, which.
Is safely in the past and has no relevance to the present whatsoever.
No, I can't even imagine any comparisons that could be made, like the one I just made. So Avery and his friend's mutiny and they elect Avery captain, and so they renamed their ship the Fancy, which is a cool fucking name for a pirate ship.
The Fancy. Yeah, yeah, does that like Swarowski crystals are their pasties?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Well, it's pretty soon gonna have the most treasure a ship has ever stolen on it.
So I hope they're doing some like glam shit with that Fancy.
That's one of the things that's so fucking weird about pirates is so interesting. They're stuck doing glam shit because they can't always fence that shit, and so they're just like walking around like covered in jewels, because you can't sell this like rare jewel that everyone knows that if you sell it, you'll get murdered by the state, you know.
So you always you always have to dress fancy.
Yeah, And so they sailed to the Indian Ocean. I think they start off off the coast of Spain and been more certain about things. And they go to the Indian Ocean and they join a fleet and they attack some fuck off rich ships from the Mughal Empire. I promise you, the Mughal Empire. This is where they come up. The amount that they stole is calculated now to be somewhere between two hundred to four hundred million dollars in today's money.
And the Mughal Empire then, like the level of fanciness that the Mughal Empire is, there is no fanciness like that in Europe. Europe is a backwater. Then. I mean, these are the people who are building the taj Mahal. These are the people that if you went to like a party in England then it would smell like shit
and I don't know, stale beer. If you went to a party in the Mughal Empire, it would smell like one thousand two roses that were arranged in a lot ornate persian ate patterns in giant golden flagons of water. It is the most it is the most lavish place on earth. So whatever they eluded from the Mughal Empire is shit though. Make a European's eyes pop.
Yeah, And this is like, this is more than even the pirate King of Madagascar because this happens before they all get their throat split a couple of years earlier, I think sixteen ninety five whatever. But even the pirate King of Madagascar could not realistically fence all this shit. This theft was an international incident. It almost got England kicked out of India, like, it almost ruined international trade because India or the Mubile Empire was like, this is
y'all's fault, and England was like, we're really sorry. We swear they hadn't. They had not yet conquered India obviously, so this.
Could have been like a cautionary thing that kept the Brits out from take colonizing India.
I know, Avery almost saved the day, but instead England declared avery the enemy of all humanity and the world's first international manhunt was.
On most wanted man in the Ship, the Fancy.
Yeah mm hmm, and his crew, who disappeared to the Americas, where they bought their way in. I think a lot of them went to Ireland. I read two sources that seemed to disagree about that, and twenty four of his crew were arrested and six of them were hanged. Avery himself was never caught. There are a thousand stories about what he did next. There's a he went and retired rich. There's a he got screwed over by diamond merchants. Oh
my god, that's probably an anti Semitic conspiracy theory. There's a he got screwed over by diamond merchants and died poor. And there's a like he became a spy for blah blah blah, and just no one fucking knows.
What do you think happened to him?
Honestly, maybe because of what I just read. I think he married his way into a Malagassy family and was like, I'm good.
And he was just enjoying, like the beautiful weather and the yeah, cool society, gossiping at the communal table.
That's like my best guess. But I don't have a good sense of him as a person. He kind of has that thing where the reputation around him is that he was like a little bit more of like a proper gentleman and like a family man, and he ust less. Because actually a lot of those people would be the people who get elected captain, because people were like, oh, we like that guy is like a little bit calmer and shit, you know, and are more likely to be literate.
Often it was like the literate people who were elected captain. But I don't know. I don't know what happened to him, But I do know what happened to his reputation, which is that the pirates on Matta Gascar did this wild
scam against the entire world with his legacy. By the early seventeen hundreds, about ten years later or so, they announced that Avery was there with ten thousand men, and that they had set up an entire country, a utopian democratic society, and they sent out emissaries all over the fucking world, or scam artists independently just decided this would
be fun to do. Basically, people claiming to be emissaries showed up to all over Europe, and the Ottoman Empire to try and convince them to make treaties with this fucking pirate kingdom.
What did they call the pirate kingdom?
I don't know. I'm like annoyed by this. I'm annoyed that I don't know the answer to that. England and France and the Netherlens told them to kick rocks when the emissaries showed up. But they made allies in Sweden, Russia and the Ottoman Empire and Sweden actually signed some treaties before they figured out they were being lied to.
No.
And Daniel Dafoe, the Robinson Crusoe guy, was a really important writer and wrote about Salien and shit all the time, and pirates and shit. He like wrote this whole thing about how interesting all this was, and then ten years later when he found out it was like a lie, he wrote this like long, like it's a lie. He's like also the guy who like myth busted it.
He actually like did a correction of himself in a way that is exceedingly rare.
Yeah, that's true, I know, right. Props to you, Daniel Dafoe. I don't know anything about you as a person. And one of the reasons that this is so interesting is this is the grand scale version of what pirates did anyway, which was create wild myths about who we are so people don't fuck with us. And it's going to kind of lead to what people are then going to do with what Graber presents is a myth that still is pervasive, basically like this concept of like mock kings and mock kingdoms.
With the fall of that small island community, pirates were moving to the mainland and they set up a bunch of port towns all over the northeast of the island. And we know a little bit about how they function. We have educated guesses. We know, for example, that a pirate we believe the sources are iffy or the sources say this happened, but you know whatever. We know that a pirate crew moved on to mainland Madagascar at the end of seventeen oh three and elected a guy named
Nathaniel North as their captain. And this is the first time we see the sort of evidence of people saying, hey, this system worked on a ship, why not try it on land. What if we like elect the guy who's in charge and then make most of our decisions by direct democracy. This place was called Ambo Navalla, and we don't actually know where it was. There's some guesses and
these pirates once they moved on to land. According to that not really trustworthy, but the only actual source book about pirates, they became conflict resolution specialists with the locals.
Because they had this cultural memory of having started so much shit, they knew how to de escalate it.
So instead of promoting conflict because it led to more captives and therefore more slaves, they were running around listening to both sides of issues and helping people find peaceful resolution. And the book goes on at length discussing their strategies, but not necessarily their motives behind it. There's self interest
here first. The one I can tell you what their self interest was is that internally they developed a lot of conflict resolution methods because they absolutely needed to provide show a united front to the outside, because if they were seen as divided, people would probably come raid them and you know, fuck them up right.
And there would also be a lot of extreme conflict if you're strapped on a ship with each other.
Yeah, no, totally, Well now they're on an island, but yeah, it was stly in so many of you. You know, and I think that doing it for other people, it's either getting presented as this like quirky moral good they're like motive isn't really that I was able to figure out explain, but it certainly makes them useful to the locals and makes people like you if you're the person
who always like makes everything work okay, you know. These pirates and many many others married locals and got involved in local politics, basically becoming part of the large clan families in some cases and in other cases, they would set up these like cities of women on the coast, and then a local group of five clans elected themselves or picked it. I don't know how they picked it ended up with a high king and they formed the
Sokoa Confederation. These folks, they're slightly further to the south, and they were landlocked or they didn't specifically control a port, and they didn't want to be landlocked, so they conquered the ports, and they were dicks about it. According to some sources, they were just absolute tyrants. Their leader was a guy named raman Gano, which is more of a title than a name, and it means he who does exactly as he pleases.
Oh god.
Yeah.
So so Elon Musk comes.
Yeah, he's our main villain here.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a war that's gonna there's gonna be a rebellion in a war. It's kind of one of the main things that we're gonna talk about the rest of this episode. And there's only one fucking source on it again, and this is a different source. This source is that a French spy, years later, working for a European con man, went around and interviewed the rebels about what they had done forty years earlier.
Okay, okay, I'm gonna go to Tangent. You're gonna forgive me. So why does a fucking con man have a spy And does the spy know that the guy is a con man or does he think that he's like a lost Romanov monarch? What the fuck tell me? You gotta tell me?
Oh my god. It was so complicated that I was like I started writing into the script and then I was like, this is so complicated. It he was trying to prove some shit about the way that Matta Gascar was so he could like sell some shit to some Europeans. Like he was like he like wanted to basically, I think, like sell settlements or something.
So he's like selling fucking time shares to the Europeans, and he has a spy to like get Intel to sell to sell like fake time shares.
I don't think you're wrong, but I also don't know if you're right. I basically like this part of it. I was like, oh my god, this is so complicated. The thing that it is was so complicated that I was like, I'm going to simplify this. But if I had thought this through and realized that you were my guests, I realized I should have done the European con men more justice that.
I was going to just like tear you down that rabbit hole, you know.
Yeah, and this is where our history comes from, right, So this is not a reliable source. But this man does seem to be genuinely really and he fell doun a fucking rabbit hole. He was like, I want to know about this fucking confederation of rebels that's going to form. But he's talking to people and he builds his hagiography, right, like the making of a saint about this man who
we're going to talk about soon. The sort of the person who's presented as the grand leader of this confederation, and it absolutely emphasizes this great man of history narrative of what's to come. But that narrative is not held up by anthropological evidence. So Graber's claim is that this is another mock king. This is a war chief who has now been They're like, oh, yeah, we totally have a high king. Don't fuck with us.
Oh wow wow. So this guy does not actually have any of the power of a king. He's a guy that was good in battle, and then when the battle is over, he's no longer in power. But they make him like almost like a mascot, like a mythological figure.
Yes, and no, he still has some of the same power as like kind of the like heads of clans and stuff we were talking about earlier, where he can like summon up some warriors and he sort of gets as many wives as he wants and stuff. But he all the decisions are still being made by consensus decision making councils that take days.
Oh god, oh god, and have the most truculent person ever keep everyone from taking care of their kids.
That night, Yeah, they had the people's mic. It was great.
Oh fuck man.
And so this is the best narrative we have about this war, the unreliable narrator. He said that the conquering of port towns by this Soca confederation meant quote, their young daughters were taken away and sold on board to European ships who frequented the coasts. The slightest murmur was punished by slavery and death. And basically they were doing the stuff that like European settlers had been doing. They were like state making. They were stealing everything that they wanted.
They were desecrating the tombs of ancestors. It's not a specifically state making thing, but it's a shitty thing to do. And whole towns were wiped out. And it's probable that his power wasn't so completely absolute because there wasn't really a state apparatus to like seas and wield. But they took control of everything they could. They taxed everything, they desecrated tombs, and they started doing slave raids instead of the way that you're supposed to do slavery at this time,
which is the captives. That thing that had gotten so many pirates killed a few years back. Now this Malagasy chief is doing. People were unhappy, and so they did something about it which actually involved, in addition to modern weapons, which is not a sponsor of our show, it involved medieval weapons or hand to hand weapons, because it's not specifically part of the medieval period. But Spears, you ever held a spear? It's nice this show brought to you
by Spears. Get the new Spears catalog and whatever other ads come next, and we're back. The person who is presented as the big man of history of this story is a man named Ratsimalajo, and he is an interesting fellow. He seems genuinely coal. It's just, you know, he wasn't the king of everything. Probably Ratsimalajo wasn't himself a pirate, or if he was, he didn't do it for very long. His father was a pirate. His father was an English
pirate named either Tom or Tomo. Maybe Fomo. It's probably Tomo, it's Thamo, some weird English name, and everyone's like, oh, he was the son of Tom too, or like other famous Tom pirates. He almost certainly was not. He was almost certainly the son of some pirate named Tom. There were a lot of pirates named Tom, because there's a lot of people named Tom, and a lot of people
are pirates. His dad was just some guy. But the thing is, when your dad's just some guy and a pirate, it means his dad was rich as shit, because if you're a pirate, there's two things. You are rich and doomed.
The most romantic figure on earth.
I know. I don't understand how people are so in love with it. I can't imagine. Yeah, so he's rich as shit. His mother was named Rahenna and was the daughter of one of the leaders of one of the clans, one of the people who would sort of get called a king. We're pretty sure about that. We're pretty sure that his parents' names. Everything else, we're not so sure about.
The most common story, which may as well be true, So I'll tell it like it is, is that when he was a teenager, his dad sent him off to England for an education, and he was like, I don't like Englin. Fuck this. He came home and so his dad was like, all right, well, here's a ton of guns and money, go and earn your way in life. And what he did was lead a revolution, or join one as an equal among other war chiefs. Helping lead
a revolution. In seventeen twelve, he's eighteen years old. He and some of his friends are like, all right, let's go fuck this tyranny. Shut up. They sent someone down to go talk to that high king and be like, hey, look, you really wanted a port. You keep one of the ports and give all the rest back. How's that sound And they were like, no, we're in charge. Fuck you. So the rebels set up a rebel camp. Local folks are like, oh, I want to not have tyranny. That
sounds nice. And so they get together a cabrey An assembly and they figure this is going to take days, So they build little shacks and shit to sleep in while they talk.
We should have thought of that. Why didn't we think of that?
I know, I mean tense, but you know, not quite.
The same on hard concrete, nah, I know.
And also just like admitting that you're like, no, the meeting is going to take days, like that is what. That is the weird downside of horizontal life. But you know what, if you do it right, it's fun. And then here's a part that I'm curious about. The main source is that this particular Cabarey, very much as an exception to the norm, excluded women. No women allowed at our war talk party.
Why not?
Why not?
Why not?
So oh the way it's sort of presented, Okay, So one of the reasons it might have been written that way is that the source like he actually had a version where he was like, no cabarets allowed women, and then he had to like cross that out because it was like so blatantly untrue. But so like, yeah, I get him. I get the impression this guy like wasn't a big woman lover or appreciator, respect her, and I
think all of those things misogynist will call themselves. But the other argument that seems to have some credit is that this was like oddly at statement around returning rule back to the sort of linear clan structure instead of this new economic force of women in the cities, even though the women in the cities were not part of this new evil empire thing that was taking over, right, And so it was kind of like almost like a weird classes the wrong construction. But it was like a
weird thing. But I also I wonder whether it's even true because of something I'm going to say about their oath. Yeah, so they get together for days and they talk about whether or not to go to war, and they hear everyone out, and in the end they reach consensus they will form a new confederation and go to war. This new confederation is called the Betsimisaraka. Or actually it's funny because I've seen it spelled a bunch of different ways.
The Internet wants to spell it differently than Graver wants to spell in this book. They might not have an a at the end of it. I don't know. It's different sources complain with each other. This name means those who will not be sundered, Like the confederation isn't going to break up. We are a fucking unbreakable. It's a good name. And they do a bunch of rituals before they decide to go to war. Right, These meetings kind
of sound fucking interesting, right. You go for several days, you camp out, you argue ship for a long ass time, and at the end they do both a pirate ritual, which was that they drank seawater mixed with gunpowder.
What the fuck? And how are they like living after this lovely pirate ritual?
Well, what's funny is that usually it was just seawater and gunpowder, but this one they also seem to have put like musket balls and stuff in it. So, which is that scene from The fucking Crow right where they like drink bullets with their fucking whiskey.
What the fuck? I must have blocked that one out in my goth upbringing.
Yeah, the very beginning of the Crow, the like arsonist crew that's like running around being the batties. They're like fired up, and then they like take a shot and drink a bullet or I guess a cartridge because it has all the stuff, and so that's like weirdly accurate pirate thing.
I'm starting to believe that there aren't any women at this assemblies, that they're doing this fair enough.
There's only one line that makes me think otherwise, okay, and probably there weren't women. Now Ratsimalajo is the only partly white person in attendance. Probably there's a lot of like the way that this whole rebellion has talked about it. It's talked about as if all of the sons of the white pirates and the non white Indigenous women are
the people who rose up. But like there's a lot of anthropological reasons that that is not to believe that is not the case, mostly in that most of those people were children at the time, but pirate culture is rubbing off on folks. The other ritual they do is a malagassy ritual. They each cut their own stomachs the tiniest bit to draw blood the way that we might like prick a finger or like cut a palm in like other literature, you know, they're not like gutting themselves.
And then they soak a piece of ginger root in everyone's blood, and then they swear an oath to one another, and then they eat the ginger. Here's the quote. They swore a solemn oath to take back their land, to stop letting their wives and daughters be sold off overseas, and to stop letting their husbands die. Oh and that's the line where I'm like, wait, you said no women allowed, but their oath is like, let's stop letting husbands die.
And I'm not. I mean, I don't know. Maybe they're queer, but like I feel like that would have come up.
I don't know.
And this was a war basically to prevent the creation of a state, to preserve the lineage clan structure. Along the way. They put a lot of work, but not like infinite work into making sure the war captives would be returned to their families. They were like very into like, no, no, we ran some people back instead of selling them away overseas. This did not turn into a like let's free all the slaves thing. And they went to war and they
won first. At first they win, they trapped the high king in his mountain fortress, and the piece from what they originally offered. They're like, hey, you can have one port, but just stop fucking taking everything over. And they agreed to those terms. But then they break the truce and the war goes on for years. It lasts from seventeen twelve to seventeen twenty. Eventually the new confederation, the Betsimisaraka,
they win. During this war, the pirates in the coastal towns, some of them maybe went and fought and stuff, but like overall they're kind of staying out of it, except they're helping the rebellion behind the scenes. The pirates pretended to play both sides, but they supported the rebellion. They sold over priced muskets to the enemy in order to get prisoners free, and then supplied the rebels more honestly, and this is like, this would be such a fucking
good setting. I would watch the shit out of a long ass series set in this war. Hell's yes, Hell's yes, you're talking about like some guns, because there's some guns available, but that mostly really shitty guns because the colonial center doesn't like sending it's good guns out overseas. But Ratsimlajo he actually has some really good guns, and so like
that's one of the main reasons that they win. And then there's this whole thing about how like it's still the like heroic warfare where there's a lot of like one on one fights and duels in the middle of battles and shit, while mixed with modern warfare where the like overall grand strategy was around disruption of supply lines. And it's just like it's like it's like a strategy dream.
Like, so it's the exact moment where everything is changing, but where you still could possibly have this notion in your head that warfare was romantic.
Yeah, and it's not near the colonial center and no neither side is armed by the colonial center, so you have yeah, and uh. Along the way, Ratsimalajo during the first Truce, he's made the high king of the whole confederation.
That's what everyone says but there's no evidence to back that up that he actually took any there's a lot of there's no state formation that ever forms, there's no sense that he centralized any control, and other contemporary sources are very clear that he was just one war chief among others, or even there's multiple things that are like, oh no, here's this other guy's second in command. Oh shit,
he might not even been a war chief at all. Right, there's like two different guys that he's like, Ah, is that guy's second in command? Like he is the guy that they're like, Oh, you're the guy. That's fine, we needed the.
Guy, Like you're the charismatic figurehead.
Yeah, only I think that to present to the outside world.
Yeah. Yeah.
Although after the war, it does seem like he kind of becomes one of these sort of you know, like quote unquote and I don't mean to when I say quote unquote kings, I'm not trying to put it down. I'm rather saying, like, fuck the European assumption that everyone's a king, you know, and the rumors in Europe are that there's this great high king and this powerful kingdom because they're doing the pirate thing, They're like, got powerful ruler leave us the fuck alone, and they win, and
for thirty years there's peace in this confederation. Ratsimalajo is the king in his way. He has a rich court, but lots of people have rich courts. Again, the greatest treasure hall in history has come here and couldn't be sold, you know.
So everyone is hanging around with rubies and diamonds, and there are liberated women wearing their love charms to the ocean, and it is the best party ever.
Yeah, or none of that's true, you know, It's like it's like, yeah, it's like seems like that is that is a very likely way of reading it, And I suspect it's like one of those things where it's like I suspect a lot of people experience the society that way, and other people experience the society very differently, you know. And with his power as one of the kings, he can summon soldiers, but like only some of them, he has no particular executive power. Malagasy culture in this confederation
becomes explicitly more egalitarian than Malagasy culture elsewhere. The priest caste and the warrior cast are more or less gone. Clans are no longer ranked against one another. There is an exception. The Zana Malata is the sort of new class formed by the mixed race descendants of pirates, and they form a sort of nobility, and that's why there's kind of this like rumor. That's why the legend is that these are the people who like fought to build
the confederation, whereas like, they almost certainly weren't. But what's interesting is that the raising of them to power was actually the raising of their mothers to power, right, because they're children at this time, and so it's all of the women of the cities who are like, all right, we're going to build this like weird new merchant nobility. And yeah, they created a mock kingdom which was already more a galitarian than what we fucking live in now.
Decisions continue to be made in consensus based assemblies. Unfortunately, pirates were cleared out of the area by Western European powers around seventeen twenty four, and so the slave trade comes back. So even during this like a galitarian, beautiful confederation, slave trades back. And then the Great Confederation fell apart after Ratsimalaju died, and the argument that the most likely
reason why it fell apart when he died. Is that the Zanomalada the new sort of powerful nobility or whatever. A lot of them don't want their kids to even marry other Zanamlada. They want their kids to marry foreigners. They want their kids to marry hey, because there's this whole concept there of the sort of like the foreigners this interesting and powerful person worth bringing in. They bring in the riches and do all of this stuff, right, and so there's this like, if you marry a foreigner,
we will become more powerful. Unfortunately, what instead happened is that enough people who had enough power married enough foreigners that they fell under foreign influence and basically betrayed the island. So that's how it ended. But along the way they did this like crazy experiment that was like kind of weird and kind of misogynistic at its core, but also fascinating and egalitarian. And it's so messy and it's so interesting. That's how I feel about it.
And it's so interesting on two levels, right, Like there's the the level of the actual fact, like all those fucking alliances, like a spy for a con man, that people dripping rubies, like all of the stuff that's unknown. But then there's also the cultural residence right of the legend.
I mean, I just remember like being this weirdo, you know, kid hanging on the anarchist bookstore because I lived literally in one room with two roommates that we divided up, curtains that had no window, and a fucking suck, so I need to be in the anarchist bookstore and you know, reading sort of I'm not going to call them history books, but basically like these sort of cultural the like flickerings, the cultural flickerings produced by this and being inspired as
on a different way to live. And I think that something I've thought a lot about when I'm trying to write history. It's like there's the real truth, which is always more messy and sordid and treacherous and fucked up that you can possibly imagine, and has no clear moral lesson. But then there's also the poetic afterlife, which often does have a clear moral lesson because it's imposed on that that influences so many other things in the future and
is fascinating in its own way. And I always think the interaction between how do I put it, the beautiful and inspirational bullshit that that drives the presence versus the twisted, treacherous but fascinating and human story of the past. That interaction obsesses me and I feel it's so much here.
No, that makes so much sense, because that is absolutely what's happening. And the thing that I love honestly about Graver's work, and then also just one of things I love about fiction is just saying, like, look, I'm not going to paint a better society, I'm just gonna paint a different one. Or maybe it's better, but it's not perfect, because one, there is no perfect with society. And two, just like things don't have to be the way they
are because they can be different. They have been different before, they will be different again. It's something we need to know because, to constantly quote our Solo Gwin, we live under capitalism. Its power seems inescapable, so do the divine right of kings. We struggle to imagine that things could
be different. And one thing I love about Graver's anthropology is an anthropology in general and specifically like anthropology that stops looking at things from such a white European point of view, even though Graver's you know, a white man, but like is trying to undo a lot of that work is just saying things can be fucking different, And I think.
It's so essential because the way the things are is collapsing around us. I mean, you were just you were just delivering mutual aid in this like unforeseen climate disaster. We're literally places that are so high above sea level or seeing the houses being wiped away. So it's like the physical, practical reality of the world is telling us that things are going to change, and so we have to realize that there are other ways of ourselves living.
Yeah, and one of those ways is we could have fucking granaries where if you don't have enough food, you can just go get food at it.
That would be the yeah, yeah we can.
You don't even have to declaric communism or whatever. You can have a weird non egalitarian society where people just don't fucking starve to death and no one is means testing people getting food.
Yeah, we could have that. We could have that.
Yeah. Well, what people can also have is information about how to follow you and your work.
So you can go see my art at mollikrabapple dot com, or you can follow Instagram, which where I post all of my obsessive, obsessive drawings and I'm supposed to plug my two projects. So I have a book about the Jewish Labor Boond, a Jewish anti Zionist revolutionary party that I've been working on for five years. It's not coming out for another year.
Books are like that.
Yeah, yeah, I just believe in it. Believe in it. It's going to come out. It's called here, where we live is Our Country.
And that's such a good title.
Thank you, thank you. It was the Boons slogan, and it was such a defiant thing, right because they're living in these countries that are so racist, that want nothing more than to expel them, and they're like, no, here is our fucking land. And if you don't like it, we have brass knuckles.
Oh yeah.
And then my other book that I'm doing with Indian historian Ruby Lal is a children's book about nor Jahan that Ruby is writing and I'm illustrating. It's called Tiger Slayer because nor Jehan hunted tigers with a musket from the back of elephants.
Yeah, I mean it's cool.
Yeah, yeah, what do you say?
Yeah, I'm on tour. If you want to see me talk, I'm going to be reading fairy tales set in the same world as my book, because I decided it would be boring to go around and just read a part of my own book that you might have already read
by now. It's a book called The Sapling Cage about a young trendswitch who has to disguise herself as a girl to go off and join the witches, and then has to defend the world from what's a thinly veiled metaphor for climate change and the destruction of the environment. And I will be reading fairy tales from that at a whole bunch of different places around the US. And if I'm not coming to your city specifically, it is because I dislike you personally, and that's the way it is.
But you can check out my tour dates by going to my substack or my Instagram. My website's down so you can't go there. So if you guys, thing you want to plug, Yeah, I'll plug.
A sixteenth Minute of Fame host by Jimmy Loftus. We've got a fun one coming out in this next month or so, all about viral hippo moo dang and why me be Zoo's not a great idea?
Maybe? Hell yeah, I love how Jamie takes the like, hahaha, here's the funny, quirky thing. Now let's learn how the fucking world works.
It's literally that. That is literally the episode. But yeah, all.
Right, talk to you all next week.
Bye, you see you later.
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