Ranavalona

OMG! We’re back for season four and we are so excited!

Today we’re talking about Ranvalona I, the first queen of the Merina people of Madagascar. Ranavalona has gone down in history as having a very, very bad reputation, so we’re here to dive in. Was she that bad or is it … ya know… racism?

Or both?

After an amazing intro/disclaimer from Trashy Divorces, we dive into this crazy story while sipping a cocktail called The Madagascar Mule

The magic part of the Madagascar Mule is this delightful vanilla extract that we highly recommend! You can find the full recipe here.

Ranavalona started from a place of total obscurity to be adopted into the royal family. Then, she went from a damned wife among many wives to becoming the first female sovereign of her people. So, yeah. She should be known in history as a trailblazing feminist right?

Well… there may have been like… a lot of slavery and genocide. So….

But just like ever other wicked female we’ve discussed before- was she really as bad as people say? We want to hear your opinion!

As we mentioned in the episode, one of the only books on her is very skewed by the white men that had an axe to grind, but it was also a pretty interesting read (and it just looks pretty punk rock to have on your shelf) The Female Caligula:

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp, which is a pretty awesome service that we could all probably use in 2020. (Yay! We finally got a sponsor, and what cool one too!)

But for real. We want to know what you think about Ranavalona. Total tyrant or totally misrepresented or somewhere in between? Cheers, bitches!

Some really great sources I found to research home girl were:

Intro music by J Sparks Featuring Beyond Belief.
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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