"Once a honey pot is discovered, all the fools rush in": Apiculture Practices and Colonial Extraction Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Madagascar

• In Event: Exploited Bodies: Race, Environment, and Visual Culture

Abstract

Histories of extractivism in nineteenth and twentieth-century Africa have shown the centrality of racial exclusion and labor exploitation in large-scale   plantation economies and mineral wealth. Less is known about ecological substances, knowledge regimes, and labor practices that evaded commodification and extraction in the face of colonialism. This essay examines the case of forest-based apiculture—as a constellation of materials, technologies, and inter-generational knowledge practices that often fell beyond, and at other times challenged, the logics of French colonial rule in Madagascar. Located at the heart of the longstanding trade routes crossing the southwestern Indian Ocean, Madagascar was an important producer of beeswax throughout the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, Malagasy beekeepers intensified production of the endemic honeybee and transformed Madagascar into the world’s third largest exporter of beeswax, supplying leather, candle, and textile industries in Europe and North America. While Malagasy beeswax was widely commercialized, honey fell beyond the reach of French investors and colonial companies; despite the rise of cash crops and the timber industry, Malagasy beekeepers persisted with apiculture as a critical element in diversified local economies.

This paper explores the history of apiculture techniques and modes of innovation through encounters with incoming technologies (Mavhunga 2014) in Madagascar during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Examining carved Malagasy honey pots as forms of visual culture, this paper probes how material culture artifacts illuminate local conceptions of technique, consumption, and the animate world at the height of colonial rule. Although the precise origins of Malagasy beekeeping are not known, this paper follows the trajectory of materials—beehives, wax, and honey—and written words—proverbs, photographs, colonial reports, and oral accounts—to chart how Malagasy beekeepers drew on dynamic knowledge regimes to meet the challenges of imperial encroachment, colonialism, and global capitalism.

Author

• Tasha K Rijke-Epstein, Vanderbilt University