In Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar, Tasha Rijke-Epstein provides a new way to think about the relationship between material things, identity, and contested histories of urban belonging. Covering nearly four centuries of history in northeastern Madagascar, especially the port city of Mahajanga, the book’s title comes from the Malagasy word, zanatany, meaning, “children of the soil.” Across six chapters, Rijke-Epstein shows that zanatany facilitated Comorian migrant’s claims to belonging in Mahajanga among communities where they or their ancestors arrived as guests. Strategies for creating belonging, seeking security, and even making claims on insider status in new places have informed African historiography for several decades, but Children of the Soil provides a new way to look at this phenomenon.Footnote ¹ By no means ignoring documentary or oral evidence, Rijke-Epsten demonstrates that the literal substance of urban power and community often came through the material details about buildings, building materials, trees, bodies, spirits, and water.

The book thus opens with a methodological case for centering built forms and things in urban history. “I am convinced that buildings can and ought to be taken as evidentiary sources that reveal the experiences and aspirations of those who left few written traces” (4). In each chapter, Rijke-Epstein shows how centering material things, whether currently present or formerly part of Mahajanga’s urban landscape, provide critical evidence for telling new stories about belonging and local knowledge. Rijke-Epstein thus asks readers to approach materiality as both evidence of urban claims making and as the claims themselves. This approach goes well beyond buildings to include trees, spirits, wells, placentas, underground water, and the skills used to shape these worlds. Using such hard material evidence, the author shows, helps fill in silences found in colonial and national archives, on the one hand, and in oral histories, on the other. Readers wary of the hard material turn—a focus on actants in addition to agents—need not fear being overwhelmed by the details of things. Rijke-Epstein brilliantly shows how looking at built forms enhances social and cultural analysis. In particular, Children of the Soil demonstrates that focusing on built things provides evidence for longer duree histories not defined by the periodizations of colonial archives.

Readers immediately see examples of this method in Part One, Built Power. Chapter One introduces the term “architectural tactics.” It demonstrates not only that “groups with competing aspirations sought to define new conditions of political possibility through building practices” in Mahajanga’s earlier history, but also that different materialities lent themselves to different politics (29). As city dwellers, migrants, and Sakalava royalty vied for power, Rijke-Epstein demonstrates that the latter anchored authority in a material ephemerality that allowed “ritualized acts of building and construction” to serve as ongoing reminders of royal power, space, and networks (45). This tactic, however, gave way to a new, harder materiality under Queen Ravahiny in the 1780s—potentially in response to the growing number of stone graves, buildings, and mosques constructed by Muslim traders—an indication of their growing influence and imprint on urban life. Chapter Two moves to the relationship between built things and the more-than-human world. Rijke-Epstein clearly demonstrates that “spiritual entities were understood as active presences in the unfolding biographies of built forms” (59). She thus provides a long history of the Sarabengo hilltop, a site of ancestral power and Sakalava authority that also housed both Merina and French rulers. As both of the latter attempted to enact their own forms of material politics on the hill, ancestral spirits continued to shape built forms in ways that “gathered the past into the present” (58). Rijke-Epstein variously calls this process “laminating” or “laminating over”—an analytic that emerges in each of the subsequent chapters.

Chapter Three begins Part Two, Anticipatory Landscapes. It brings readers into the colonial period, assessing how materials shaped debates over belonging and power. Rijke-Epstein asks readers to consider “architectural refusal,” a process by which the city’s inhabitants denied French colonial authorities both their labor and ideas. Even as Muslim traders, Karana, and other migrants invested time, labor, and skill constructing community mosques, cemeteries, and homes, French colonial authorities regularly faced labor shortages and the consequent stalled projects. Building on this disjuncture, Chapter Four offers a more detailed analysis of Comorian mosques as evidence of “pathways of circulating technical and architectural knowledge across the western Indian Ocean” (127). As spaces and material structures that materialized migrant claims to zanatany, Rijke-Epstein notes that mosques acted as “relational nodes” that brought together groups whose identities and contributions to the city undercut French colonial aspirations. Taken together with the previous chapter, this chapter brilliantly centers the “everyday expertise” of mosque builders instead of focusing on the unrealized aspirations of the colonial archive.

Part Three, Residual Lives and Afterlives, features one of the book’s novel historiographic contributions: its material approach to nativism and autochthony. Observing that claims to belonging have often most often been rooted in discourse, Rijke-Epstein shows that groups made claims to belonging through the details of built worlds. Chapter Five thus features Comorian-Malagasy homes as forms where intellectual debates about belonging materialized in the “spatial-material-affective process” of building claims to community and belonging by investing in “physical presences.” The author notes the specific practices—such as the burial of the dead on plots, including the Sakalava custom of placing bodily fluids in wells in houses—as a process by which families moved from migrants to zanatany (189). Chapter Six transports readers from the density and multiplicity of zanatany built worlds—including their potential to cement new social connections and claims—to an examination of colonial infrastructure, which either did not emerge for colonized populations or was built to keep them out. Rijke-Epstein thus explores forms of “technopolitical violence” evident in absent (unbuilt) water and sewage systems and in swimming pools constructed for colonizers. Noting the conventional definition of infrastructure as materialities that mobilize things, Rijke-Epstein terms this colonial system “anti-infrastructure” because it did not facilitate claims to belonging in the same ways as zanatany built worlds (214). An epilogue shows that the social bonds cemented in zanatany built worlds could also break apart, as they did during upheavals of 1976 and 1977, which saw efforts to drive Comorians (including those who considered themselves zanatany) from the city. Due to the general absence of documented memorializations of this violence, Rijke-Epstein shows that traces and stories of the upheavals endure in built forms across the city.

Children of the Soil impressively engages multiple historical fields, including urban history, migration history, histories of technology, infrastructure, and skill, labor history, Africanist and non-Africanist approaches to materiality, and historiographies of belonging. I will return to and teach the book for the author’s use of material “lamination,” a term Rijke-Epstein uses to describe the historical complexities of Mahajanga’s built worlds, accruing as they did over four centuries. Even as new residents, often migrants, added to the city’s built forms, lamination, as both a methodology (a “laminated archive”) and analytic, keeps longer histories, the more-than-human, and social and political complexities centered in Children of the Soil’s narrative. In this sense, Rijke-Epstein has given historians a new way to look at long histories of urban built worlds.