Case file · High strangeness
The ramanenjana dancing mania
In early 1863 thousands of people in Madagascar were seized by ramanenjana, a compulsive dancing in which they said they carried burdens for the spirit of the late Queen Ranavalona I.
1863 CE · -18.91, 47.52 · status: explained
The account
Dancers, many of them slaves and young people, danced to exhaustion, sought out sacred stones and tombs and attacked those who refused to make way. The outbreak reached the capital in the months before King Radama II, who had opened the country to missionaries, was murdered in May 1863. The doctor Andrew Davidson described it as a 'dancing disease'.
The sceptical view
Davidson saw it as a mass hysteria; historians read it as a protest by traditionalists against Radama's Christian and European reforms.