When Sālote Tupou III ascended to the throne of Tonga at eighteen years old and pregnant, she immediately had to contend with the legacy of a predecessor who was little more than a figurehead, a government packed with ministers whose families had literally rioted in the streets when her father married her mother instead of their dynastic ally, major financial problems for both her family and her nation, and the dangerous dance to keep Tonga as free of British imperialist intervention as possible—all while raising an infant son. Oh, and did I mention the global pandemic that wiped out around eight percent of the Tongan population a month after she was crowned?
But against all hopes or fears, Queen Sālote pulled off 45 years of active, assertive, rule, and left her own legacy of a strong and independent Tonga.
Although it’s important to fight western culture’s tendency to infantilize women by referring to us by first name, like children, Tongan customs make it even more important to do the reverse. The moment she became queen, Sālote claimed an ownership of “Sālote” so total that she had the power to forcibly rename any other citizen with the same name. The royal power to rename (which we will meet again) also helps illustrate the strongly personal nature of political power in Sālote’s Tonga—a quality that her opponents hoped to mobilize against her.
Tonga is a South Pacific country composed today of 36 inhabited islands and 133 uninhabited ones, north and slightly east of New Zealand. In 1900, when then-Princess Sālote was born, the population was around 20,000, class stratified, ethnically homogenous and nominally Christian (with a strong sense of traditional customs: Sālote and her husband Tungi married twice, once in a Christian ceremony, once in a Tongan one).
Political intrigue and animosity sprang out of sprawling dynasty rivalries. An aristocratic individual’s rank was calculated using their maternal and paternal families, and it was not necessarily static throughout one’s life. It was a semi-scandal when Sālote’s father chose a woman of lower (but still noble, of course) rank as his wife, but it was also a shrewd political decision. The rival candidate’s family controlled much of the government administration, and clearly had designs on strengthening their own political power at the expense of his family’s.
Of course, that meant those same rivals were helping run the country when Sālote became queen. And if they couldn’t have shadow power in a centralized government, they were going to do everything they could to divide the country and distribute power to local chiefs. But from the earliest years of her reign, Sālote would have none of it. She needed a powerful friend, and she found it in everyone’s favorite ally: the British Empire.
No, really.
Don’t go thinking the British had anyone’s best interests except their own in mind. Throughout Sālote’s life, Tonga was in a state of “Friendship” (an official euphemism) with England. In practice, that meant Tonga could cling to its sovereignty but was required to accept and accommodate British advisers—but this lighter-touch relationship would last only so long as Tonga’s political and economic situation suited the Empire. At the beginning of her reign, the threat was direct annexation; later, that those “advisers” would make themselves de facto rulers.
Whatever Sālote thought about imperialism on a sweeping or theoretical level, she saw how to make the specifics of Tonga’s situation work for her. Britain’s goal was to expend as little effort as possible on the island country? A good way to do that was to build a stable centralized government. In other words, exactly the thing that would benefit Sālote and her dynasty at the expense of her rivals.
She found a willing and, as his writing shows, greatly admiring ally in the Agent & Consul assigned to Tonga, Islay McOwan. McOwan had won Sālote’s personal loyalty and political allegiance in his skill helping maneuver Tonga through the influenza pandemic; Sālote had returned the favor in its aftermath as she established a public health infrastructure nearly from scratch. Although Sālote made a point of flouting his advice from time to time, to prove her independence, she wielded McOwan’s support of her to increase her legitimacy in the eyes of the bureaucrats. (And, of course, to let him do a lot of the hard work when it came to reforming Tonga’s messy financial situation.)
Sālote ultimately succeeded in her quest for unity and an end to fighting among the leading dynasties (not to mention the triumph of her own family over theirs). And fittingly for the person who inspired an AskHistorians Snooscot, I want to focus on the role of history in this success.
Even from childhood, when she grumbled about having to return to Tonga from her New Zealand school earlier than she wanted, Sālote was a “lover of information.” With respect to strengthening her reign, three types of information mattered in particular. The first was gossip. At the royal palace, she surrounded herself with women charged with knowing everything that had happened and reporting to her. (Elizabeth Wood-Ellem, Sālote’s main biographer, has a great anecdote where one of Sālote’s confidantes gets a job at the telephone exchange, and people in the know have to stop communicating by phone because they know the queen will find out everything they say. Big Sister is watching.)
Beyond current events, though, Sālote was learning something equally valuable from the older women among them: Tongan tradition. This did not just mean proper acts, like what presents to send for a baby’s birth and first birthday, but the history of the islands and their people. In Tongan culture, knowledge of local history really is a kind of power—possessing it bestows increased status on the person. Sālote’s familiarity with her country’s political past and cultural present, even independent of her actions, helped increase her legitimacy as ruler.
The third critical way that Sālote wielded her knowledge of history for political gain was her knowledge of genealogies. Both the straightforward knowledge of biological relationships and the skills to interpret what those relationships said about an individual’s rank belonged to older, chiefly Tongan women. And with “skills to interpret,” it doesn’t take much effort to read “ability to manipulate.”
Sālote’s in-depth knowledge of the genealogies of her own family and of her rivals helped her to overcome the greatest obstacle to her legitimacy: her mother’s low rank. Instead of looking at Queen Lavinia’s individual position, Sālote pointed out, we should trace the many lines of her family back through the generations and see how many different royal families she was related to (spoiler: a lot).
For a queen who nursed her country back to health (literally) after a pandemic and manipulated the British Empire to her own ends, it’s kind of a shame that Sālote is most remembered for her attendance at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. As the story goes, on the way to the event itself, the skies began to rain, but Sālote let her head be drenched rather than pulling up her hood. Because the English queen was going to be crowned, the Tongan queen followed her country’s custom of refusing to parallel the act by setting something on her head. It’s a great story and shows off Sālote’s political skill in flattering a country she needed to keep happy—but it’s also a very safe story of a woman of color showing deference to a white European.
Fortunately, there are so many other reasons to remember Sālote. Maybe it’s her vindictiveness. Remember the royal power to rename? Don’t get on her bad side, or she might rename you Luseni (horse food), or even worse, a name that—thanks to a Tongan euphemism—is the equivalent of “sl*t.”
Or maybe it’s my personal favorite story recounted by Wood-Ellem:
The Queen had founded a dramatic company called Hengihengi ‘a Tonga (Dawn of Tonga), which performed plays. Before [World War II] it acted out legends, but during the war, in order to raise funds for the Red Cross, the Queen wrote and produced a play about an air raid, in which her First Aid group played out the roles for which they had been trained.
Or maybe it’s nothing so outrageous or instantly noteworthy—just the small steps that over the years accumulated enough to become “Wow, she worked quietly to build a stable and sovereign government in the face of the British Empire during the most tumultuous years in the history of the world.”
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Further Reading:
Elizabeth Wood-Ellem, Queen Sālote of Tonga: The Story of an Era, 1900-1965 (Auckland University Press, 1999) – I cannot recommend this book highly enough as both a biography of Sālote and a history of 20th century Tonga. It’s very smooth reading and packed with little stories, all while providing enough background detail on Tongan culture to understand them.
If you want to read about other queens and princesses, including how to save them (and what to do when they don’t want to be saved, thank you very much), you can also check out my book, How to Slay a Dragon: A Fantasy Hero’s Guide to the Real Middle Ages
It’s difficult to know how to start this biography of Empress Zewditu, given that most readers are not going to have a sense of the context of Ethiopian politics in the same way they would if I were to discuss a member of European royalty – and each step going back requires another to explain that context, and another, and another. So I am going to make the call and pick up with the conflict between Yohannes IV and Menelik II, the latter of whom was Zewditu’s father.
Yohannes IV (1837-1889) was the Emperor of Ethiopia from 1871 until his death. Through descent and marriage, he was well-connected within the Ethiopian elite, and he rose to power over the course of years of civil warfare. Menelik II (1834-1913) was the son of the Negus of Showa, a state in the Ethiopian Empire, and after he inherited that crown he stayed out of the conflict that saw Yohannes made emperor. Once Yohannes was crowned, he had to contend with external threats from Egypt and the British, and by the late 1870s Menelik was challenging him internally as well, though Yohannes won out. The two settled into a relationship in which Menelik uneasily accepted his subordinate status, but concentrated on expanding Showa (and therefore Ethiopia) southward rather than challenging Yohannes. However, in the early 1880s his territorial ambitions began to clash with other Ethiopian rulers, and Yohannes was forced to assert his authority, causing more direct conflict between himself and Menelik.
Unlike European practices of succession that focused on the primacy of “legitimate” birth, the Ethiopian imperial and royal families permitted the inheritance of any child of the ruler who was named successor. Menelik himself was most likely the son of a servant woman, and his daughter Zewditu (1876-1930) was the result of a relationship with a noblewoman outside of marriage – but because they were officially recognized, at least eventually, they were considered of equal birth to any child theoretically born of a ruler and his queen consort. As a result, Zewditu was married to Yohannes’s son and crown prince, Araya Selassie Yohannes, in 1886 as part of the attempt to deal with their fathers’ conflict. Araya died of smallpox two years later, leaving her a twelve-year-old widow, and she returned to her father’s court.
Yohannes was killed in 1889, during a battle in the war between Ethiopia and Sudan. He had named as heir his surviving son, Mengesha Yohannes, but Menelik was able to successfully put himself forward as the next Emperor. In his reign, Italy would try to make serious inroads into Ethiopia with the consent of the European powers (apart from Russia, Ethiopia’s Orthodox ally), but Menelik would rebuff them decisively in battle at Adwa in 1896, forcing them to sign a treaty acknowledging Ethiopia’s independence. Ten years of peace with external enemies followed, although the Ethiopian state of Tigray would continue to be troublesome, and Ethiopia experienced an economic boom and a boost to its international status.
But Menelik was an older man and in poor health, and he died in 1913 of natural causes after having suffered multiple strokes. A regent had been appointed in 1910, and in 1911 Iyasu, the teenage son of Menelik’s eldest daughter, Shoaregga, arranged to become the regent. He became the emperor on his grandfather’s death, but his brief reign was not a successful one – while his impulsive and brash behavior was seen as appropriate to royal manhood, it was not conducive to peace and prosperity. In 1916 he was deposed with the help of the European allied powers, and was replaced with his aunt, Zewditu. Her coronation was planned as a massive spectacle to emphasize her right to the throne as daughter of a previous emperor and smooth over the fact that she was taking the place of that emperor’s chosen and still-living heir. It used a great deal of Christian symbolism to contrasts with friendliness Iyasu had shown toward Islam, stressed Ethiopia’s right to be an independent and powerful player in world politics (rather than an Italian protectorate or colony), and emphasized the continuity and long history of Ethiopia’s empire with traditional symbols and rituals even while incorporating innovations to show its current and potential modernization.
While Zewditu’s coronation was historic for the fact that she was the first woman to rule Ethiopia alone (apart from the dubiously-historic Queen of Sheba), unlike her predecessors she had no actual power to direct the empire. She had been completely uninvolved with politics before her accession, but was deeply devoted to her new role as head of state – even to the extent of divorcing her husband upon request to prevent his family from gaining power. (He was a relative of the previous empress consort, a woman with a history of placing her family members into powerful positions, and who had wanted Zewditu in power precisely to keep a foothold in governance.) More active in governance was the cousin who was chosen as a regent and heir for her, Tafari Makonnen. The two initially coordinated to modernize the country and improve its standing on the international stage, from streamlining its administration to banning slavery and joining the League of Nations, although Tafari was certainly the more active partner.
The end of Zewditu’s life was stressful. She had grown more opposed to Tafari over the course of the 1920s, with members of her faction going so far as to try to have him arrested for treason in 1928. Her ex-husband was embittered by the divorce that kept him away from power, and pushed against the reforms with the encouragement of Italy and Tigrean dissenters. This erupted into violence in the late 1920s, and he died in battle in 1930. Zewditu died two days later of typhoid, and Tafari was chosen as her successor by a council – Emperor Haile Selassie.
The great difficulty in discussing Zewditu as a person is that she was a purely ceremonial leader. Women are hard to find in history (the field of history, not in the historical record) when they have not been able to exert significant political power and thereby forced historians to pay attention to them. Zewditu’s legacy also has to contend with the fact that Haile Selassie’s autobiography is the most prominent source on their relationship, and autobiographies are inherently primary sources with angles and biases to take into account. Despite her high rank, she is in much the same situation as uncrowned elite women whose basic dates are known and little else.
Sources and further reading:
Paul B. Henze, Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia. Palgrave (2000)
A. D. Roberts (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 7, 1905-1940. Cambridge University Press (1986)
Hanna Rubinkowska, “A New Structure of Power: The Message Revealed by the Coronation of Zawditu (1917)”. Annales d’Ethiopie 28 (2013)
Heran Sereke-Brhan, “‘Like Adding Water to Milk’: Marriage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Ethiopia”. International Journal of African Historical Studies 38:1 (2005)
Like so many other individuals whose languages have perished under colonialism and whose story archaeology now tells, we know more about who the Señor de Sipan was in death than in life. It would have thus be inappropriate to attempt a traditional briography in the same way that our other Snoos have received. We know that the Lord of Sipan was ruler of a Moche kingdom in northern Peru. We know that he was buried around 680 AD and died at 35-45 years old. We know that his burial is the most lavish and intact of any that have been identified in all the Moche region; I could go into all 450 objects in the chamber, but that has been done better here. We know the burial was part of the final phase of the huaca pyramid's construction. This was shortly before a period of substantial upheaval in Moche society, when centers like Sipan were either abandoned or radically remodeled. And that's about it.
But the dead do not bury themselves. Elaborate burials like that of the Señor de Sipan, especially those associated with public architecture, can tell us much about what values had currency in a society and what messages elites hoped to communicate through public ritual. These burials, and the memory of them, can tell us much more about who someone was to those around them than who they were themselves. Hear I present two narratives of who the Señor de Sipan was and is to those who have encountered his burial.
680 AD, near modern Chiclayo, Peru:
A polyrhythmic chorus of drums drowns out the distant sound of the Pacific waves behind you as you stretch your neck to peer through the silent crowd and glimpse the empty plaza at the foot of two adobe pyramids. Soon, it is joined by shell and bronze tumpets, and you guess from the movement of the crowd that the procession is approaching.
When the procession reaches the peak of the shorter pyramid, you see at its front three men, three young women, and a long wooden coffin. That is, you assume that must be what is behind the brilliant gleam of light, a miniature sun that has come to rest here on earth. It's a metallurgist's trick, of course. You have seen the smiths hard at work producing the gilded sheets that would turn simple cloth banners into rippling oceans of gold, that would adorn these honored guests in the . And yet, there is something inescapably sublime. The thousands of dangling adornments sway in the breeze, reflecting the desert sun at as many angles, never letting your eyes focus on just one spot. The cacophony of distant sounds is overwhelming and you believe, for a moment, that there is perhaps a meeting of two worlds atop the adobe huaca.
The crowd of 5000 who have gathered at Sipan today is easily four times that which celebrated here fifteen years ago, you reckon. You had gathered then to commerate the burial of the Bird Priest, a man you did not know but whose image you had seen in paintings on grandmother's "good plates," the ones she saved for holidays. Now, his nephew was being placed to rest, in the same huaca as the priest. The Old Lord, too, lay in the same monument; they say he was the first in this line of rulers. Two hundred years had passed since his time, and his own monument was now the foundation for a pyramid that each generation had added its own layer to until it reached its present imposing height.
Like the Brid Priest, you have never seen this "Lord of Sipan" before, but you know he must be important. There are guests dressed in the styles of distant valleys, some so distant you cannot recognize their patterns. Even from your position, you can see the new priest lay the larger-than-life royal regalia in the coffin: a nosepiece, intricate ear spools, a nearly two foot tall crescent headdress, two even taller backflaps, and a gold and silver scepter. As the filled coffin is covered and lowered in the burial chamber, the six people who had arrived wtih the deceased followed down a steep ramp; they would remain with the Lord for eternity.
The burial complete, the crowd slowly disperses. It is only now, as the thousands bustle through the makeshift town that sprung up overnight, that you consider the logistics of such a gathering. The route to Sipan was not short for many families; those who traveled farthest had brought goods to trade, so their trip might serve a dual purpose. Familiar faces from nearby valleys were offering lodging, evening meals, and riverside pastures for tired llamas. Those without local connections settle for simple woolen tents propped up by sticks to block the sun and windblown sand. They gather around 100-gallon jars of chicha corn beer and share the dried fish and corn that were stockpiled for major events like this. The Lord had represented the political ties that brought all these groups together, aided by priests and military generals. But was it their authority that had grounded this dynasty for centuries, or was it the complex system of economic interdepencies across the river valleys, a system most visible at these events? Certainly the Lord's political power had not been purely symbolic, for the tension of the unsettled question of succession is palpable even in the smallest transactions this evening. Despite the shared language, cosmology, and history of everyone around you, you fear that lesser nobles will be unafraid to exploit a power vacuum. And with the coming El Niño event likely to damage fisheries and farms more than usual, you know the kingdom cannot afford a weak leader.
Ohhhh yiiis some mainstream recognition for granddad Senor de Sipan!
Sadly we don't know a lot about who he was as a person, but his wondrous tomb is seen as a Peruvian equivalent to King Tut's tomb. A true cultural treasure trove, that gave us a rich glimpse into the culture of the Moche kingdoms
Fantastic write ups from everyone. The new snoo's have been incredible and the work done to bring them to life, both writing and art, has been phenomenal.
What's the process for adding these? Can we submit historical figures to be added, or can we make snoo art of them ourselves to be used?