Part Two: Pirates, Libertalia, and the Betsimisaraka Confederation

Margaret finishes telling Molly Crabapple a story about the legends and reality of pirate utopia in Madagascar.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Whoso Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
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.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
Hi, Molly, Hey, Margaret.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
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

(00:41):
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

(01:01):
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.

(01:22):
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

(01:42):
of in the crime world, you're just like fucking around
with people who are bad also, you.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Know, yeah, yeah, pretty much like the.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
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

(02:09):
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

(02:32):
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.

(02:54):
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

(03:15):
class of warriors who are above everyone else too. Those
are the things that like keep it from being moregalitarian.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
And what's the what religion are the priests doing?

Speaker 2 (03:24):
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,

(03:45):
it's Jewish in that same way where it's also not.

Speaker 3 (03:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
Agreeing on things and nitpicking, nitpicking the culture of graduate students,
that's our culture.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Yeah, yeah, and again I won't say that, but grab
did and you can.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
And as a Jewish woman, I will say that it's
no surprise that the culture of rabbis produced Marxists.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
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,

(04:50):
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

(05:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
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

(05:55):
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

(06:16):
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.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
And what makes you a king then, besides that you
have a lot of wives kind of that that's it.
That's it.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
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,

(07:06):
if we say we're king, will you leave us alone?

Speaker 1 (07:09):
You know?

Speaker 3 (07:09):
Yeah? Yeah, well you decide that we're quote unquote civilized
enough not to invade us.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
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

(07:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
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

(08:19):
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

(08:42):
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,

(09:04):
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

(09:26):
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

(09:50):
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

(10:10):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
So how did they describe, for instance, like your dad
given you to the newly arrived pirate dude, so I.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
We arrived pirate dude.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
I like that.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
So they were describing what they were doing as putting
on love charms and going down to the ocean to
attract men.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
So they were just like they're having fun.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
Wow. Wow.

Speaker 3 (10:53):
So that's very different.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
Yeah, and they would marry these men and not be
subordinate to them.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
So wait, they're like, oh, there's plenty of fish in
the sea, but there's like.

Speaker 2 (11:03):
Literal men in the sea.

Speaker 1 (11:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
Do you read? Are you?

Speaker 1 (11:14):
Are?

Speaker 2 (11:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
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,

(11:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (12:05):
Right, Yeah, they couldn't even own property.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
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

(12:28):
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.

Speaker 3 (12:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:46):
Basically that seems like it would make them be respectful.

Speaker 1 (12:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
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?

Speaker 3 (13:04):
Man?

Speaker 2 (13:05):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:20):
Except for the pirate kings.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
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

(13:43):
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

(14:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
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

(14:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:48):
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

(15:09):
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.

(15:29):
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.

(15:51):
So that's not good.

Speaker 3 (15:52):
And they are stirring up shit. Do they know how
they stir up shit?

Speaker 2 (15:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (16:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
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

(16:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (16:59):
Saw, I mean understandably.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
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.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
And they never they never retaliated against those pirates. Did
those pirates have to go away forever? Did they just
like leave until.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
Oh they wipe out the fucking town, Like it is.

Speaker 3 (17:20):
The ones who're the ones who have not been there
that day.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
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.

Speaker 3 (17:40):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
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.

Speaker 3 (17:51):
He knows it's fucking over.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
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

(18:13):
don't know the proper way to use. I know it's
a shitty phrase. I just don't know.

Speaker 3 (18:17):
They become Malagasy, they integrate.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
Because it turns out that that was highly effective.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
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

(19:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
Sword shaped holes is also what happens when you don't
purchase medieval weapons and someone else around you has.

Speaker 2 (19:29):
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

(19:51):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
And the Chinese pirate queen.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
Oh does she get away in the end? That rules?

Speaker 3 (20:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
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

(20:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (21:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (21:25):
They didn't pay you for that children's book you illustrated.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
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

(21:49):
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.

(22:09):
We're only talking about ye oldie times, which.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
Is safely in the past and has no relevance to
the present whatsoever.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (22:28):
The Fancy. Yeah, yeah, does that like Swarowski crystals are
their pasties?

Speaker 2 (22:33):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (22:34):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
Well, it's pretty soon gonna have the most treasure a
ship has ever stolen on it.

Speaker 3 (22:39):
So I hope they're doing some like glam shit with
that Fancy.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
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.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
So you always you always have to dress fancy.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
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

(23:22):
today's money.

Speaker 3 (23:23):
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

(23:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
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

(24:25):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:39):
Could have been like a cautionary thing that kept the
Brits out from take colonizing India.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
On most wanted man in the Ship, the Fancy.

Speaker 2 (24:58):
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.

(25:18):
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.

Speaker 3 (25:33):
What do you think happened to him?

Speaker 2 (25:35):
Honestly, maybe because of what I just read. I think
he married his way into a Malagassy family and was like,
I'm good.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
And he was just enjoying, like the beautiful weather and
the yeah, cool society, gossiping at the communal table.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
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.

(26:10):
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

(26:32):
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

(26:56):
to try and convince them to make treaties with this
fucking pirate kingdom.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
What did they call the pirate kingdom?

Speaker 2 (27:02):
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.

Speaker 3 (27:19):
No.

Speaker 2 (27:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (27:37):
He actually like did a correction of himself in a
way that is exceedingly rare.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
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

(28:01):
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.

(28:23):
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

(28:44):
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

(29:05):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
Because they had this cultural memory of having started so
much shit, they knew how to de escalate it.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
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

(29:44):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
And there would also be a lot of extreme conflict
if you're strapped on a ship with each other.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
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

(30:25):
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

(30:47):
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

(31:08):
title than a name, and it means he who does
exactly as he pleases.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
Oh god.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:15):
So so Elon Musk comes.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
Yeah, he's our main villain here.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:22):
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

(31:42):
done forty years earlier.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
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?

Speaker 2 (31:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:42):
I was going to just like tear you down that
rabbit hole, you know.

Speaker 2 (32:45):
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,

(33:06):
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

(33:27):
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.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
Oh god, oh god, and have the most truculent person
ever keep everyone from taking care of their kids.

Speaker 2 (34:12):
That night, Yeah, they had the people's mic. It was great.

Speaker 3 (34:15):
Oh fuck man.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
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

(34:39):
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

(34:59):
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

(35:19):
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

(35:40):
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

(36:01):
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.

(36:21):
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

(36:43):
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.

Speaker 3 (37:02):
The most romantic figure on earth.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
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,

(37:26):
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

(37:46):
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.

(38:10):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:27):
We should have thought of that. Why didn't we think
of that?

Speaker 2 (38:29):
I know, I mean tense, but you know, not quite.

Speaker 3 (38:32):
The same on hard concrete, nah, I know.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
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

(38:55):
our war talk party.

Speaker 1 (38:58):
Why not?

Speaker 2 (38:58):
Why not?

Speaker 3 (38:58):
Why not?

Speaker 2 (38:59):
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

(39:23):
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

(39:46):
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

(40:07):
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

(40:30):
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.

Speaker 3 (40:54):
What the fuck? And how are they like living after
this lovely pirate ritual?

Speaker 2 (40:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
What the fuck? I must have blocked that one out
in my goth upbringing.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (41:35):
I'm starting to believe that there aren't any women at
this assemblies, that they're doing this fair enough.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
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

(42:01):
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.

(42:23):
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,

(42:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
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

(43:13):
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

(43:34):
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

(43:56):
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,

(44:17):
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

(44:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (44:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:57):
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

(45:20):
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

(45:43):
that they're like, Oh, you're the guy. That's fine, we
needed the.

Speaker 3 (45:45):
Guy, Like you're the charismatic figurehead.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
Yeah, only I think that to present to the outside world.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
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

(46:15):
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,

(46:36):
you know.

Speaker 3 (46:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
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

(47:06):
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

(47:27):
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

(47:47):
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.

(48:07):
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

(48:32):
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

(48:56):
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.

(49:16):
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.

Speaker 3 (49:33):
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,

(49:54):
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

(50:16):
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

(50:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:59):
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,

(51:19):
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

(51:39):
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.

Speaker 3 (51:59):
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

(52:19):
that things are going to change, and so we have
to realize that there are other ways of ourselves living.

Speaker 2 (52:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
That would be the yeah, yeah we can.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (52:43):
Yeah, we could have that. We could have that.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
Yeah. Well, what people can also have is information about
how to follow you and your work.

Speaker 3 (52:54):
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

(53:16):
out for another year.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
Books are like that.

Speaker 3 (53:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
And that's such a good title.

Speaker 3 (53:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:59):
Yeah, I mean it's cool.

Speaker 3 (54:01):
Yeah, yeah, what do you say?

Speaker 2 (54:03):
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

(54:25):
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

(54:45):
you can't go there. So if you guys, thing you
want to plug, Yeah, I'll plug.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
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?

Speaker 2 (55:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (55:12):
It's literally that. That is literally the episode. But yeah, all.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
Right, talk to you all next week.

Speaker 3 (55:19):
Bye, you see you later.

Speaker 1 (55:26):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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