Overview

'The seven Christians stood together in the bright sunlight, bound with strong ropes, singing a hymn to their foreign Saviour as the spearmen advanced. Around them a crowd of jostling men, women and children, over sixty thousand strong...cheered enthusiastically as the spears were driven home and, one by one, the men and women fell and writhed on the sandy ground, their hymn fading slowly into silence, replaced by the groans and shrieks of the dying. Above the still-squirming bodies, on a ridge, a score of crosses stood in mute witness, carrying their ghastly burdens, some of whom still lived despite the day and a half they had hung upon the wood.' As European colonial powers scrambled for control of Africa, a leader arose in the red island of Madagascar who, with ruthless determination, thwarted all their ambitions. This bastion of native defiance was no mighty warrior, but a diminutive woman of middle years, Ranavalona Manjaka, Queen of Madagascar, known to her subjects more simply as Ma Dieu.Under Ranavalona's despotic rule, hundreds of thousands of her people - possibly one-half of the entire population - were murdered, starved, or simply worked to death by her express command. In stark contrast to her benighted subjects, the Queen gloried in an eccentric and debauched lifestyle that put the worst of the Roman Emperors to shame. Small wonder European history remembers this sanguinary queen as the Female Caligula.

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9781911405191

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".."".jaw-dropping..."" ( Conde Nast Traveller, November 2005) .."".a new book reveals the extraordinary excesses of the woman whose enemies met the most unspeakable fates..."" (Daily Express, 2005)"

.. .jaw-dropping... ( Conde Nast Traveller, November 2005) .. .a new book reveals the extraordinary excesses of the woman whose enemies met the most unspeakable fates... (Daily Express, 2005)

Author Information

Keith Laidler earned his PhD raising a baby Orang-utan as a human infant, and trying to teach it to talk. He followed this with a 3-year stint as writer-producer for Anglia TV's renowned 'Survival' series, when he visited various exotic locations including the Caribbean and the mountains of Oman. Since that time, Keith has earned his living as a freelance writer and film producer, producing award-winning documentaries for the BBC and National Geographic, and penning books on Pandas, Giant Otters, the Turin Shroud, our present-day Surveillance Society, a Chinese Empress and a psychopathic Madagascan Queen. During the course of these adventures he has spent time with the SAS, visited forbidden vaults in Tibet, been lost in the rainforest for three days, mugged, attacked by killer bees, arrested by secret police, and threatened with execution by a drunken soldier during a Ghanaian coup. Keith is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a past member of the Scientific Exploration Society.

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