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Title: Painful memories
Author: David Graeber
Date: 1997
Language: en
Topics: anthropology, Africa
Source: Retrieved on 28th November 2021 from https://davidgraeber.org/articles/painful-memories/
Notes: Published in Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 27, Fasc. 4, Religion in Madagascar II (Nov., 1997), pp. 374–400

David Graeber

Painful memories

In this essay I would like to talk about people who lost everything.

Imerina (the traditional name for the northern half of the central

plateau of Madagascar) is a place where people attach enormous

importance to the memory of their ancestors and the lands on which their

ancestors once lived. History, in Imerina, is largely a matter of

placing the living in an historical landscape created by the dead. About

a third of the Merina population, however, is made up of the descendants

of slaves, and in Madagascar, slaves are by definition people without

ancestors, ‘lost people’ (obna very) who have been ripped from their

ancestral landscapes, left unanchored to any place. These were people

who had been literally stripped of history. Even today, almost a hundred

years after emancipation, most ‘black people’ (as their descendants are

called) remain in a kind of historical limbo, unable to make a real

claim to the territories in which they live and are buried.

The question I want to ask is: what forms does historical memory take

for such people? What forms can it take?

It has become a commonplace, nowadays, to argue that historical

consciousness is ultimately about identity. Memories of the past are

ways of defining who one is in the present—and perhaps too, of defining

what kind of action one is capable of, of enunciating collective

projects (e.g., Connerton 1989; Friedman 1992). Clearly, this would

leave the historical consciousness of slaves more than a little

problematic. Slaves’ identities were created by events their descendants

would not wish to commemorate, events which not only annihilated any

link to their previous histories, but left their victims generically

incapable of producing new ones. Not surprising then that most

descendants tried their best to avoid having to admit to their ancestry.

It was embarrassing. Almost all the stories I did manage to cull about

the ‘days of slavery’ centered on the insidious means masters used to

ritually pollute their slaves—rubbing excrement on their heads, making

them sleep alongside pigs— and so destroy their hasina, a word whose

meaning in this context falls about halfway between ‘state of grace’ and

‘power.’ The ultimate message was often quite explicit: it was only by

destroying their ability to act for themselves that masters were able to

keep slaves in subjugation. But it is telling that these were just about

the only memories of slavery I ever heard recounted. It was as if,

having explained how slaves were rendered people who did not have the

right to act, or even to speak, for themselves, there was nothing left

to say.

The experience of slavery could not be directly told, as history, if

only because admitting to such a past deprived one of the authority with

which to speak. It was inherently shameful. Of course, the feeling that

one is not entided to have an opinion, or a history, is a common

phenomenon among the dispossessed of any society (Bourdieu 1984).

However, what I am going to argue in this paper is that Merina slaves

did, in fact, develop a ritual idiom with which to reflect on their

history and their condition, and even to speak to others with the voice

of authority. It was, perhaps, somewhat veiled and indirect. But here

too the ability to speak was inseparable from the ability to act; it was

through the very process of seizing the authority to speak that the

descendants of slaves, in so many cases, began to take back for

themselves the capacity to act as historical agents in their own right,

actors as well as narrators, and so perhaps to begin to recuperate a

little bit of what they had lost.[1]

Merina slavery

From around 1820 to sometime around 1850, hundreds of thousands of

people were taken prisoner by Merina military expeditions and carried

back to the central highlands of Imerina. The Merina kingdom’s army,

armed and trained by its British allies, made common practice of

massacring all the adult males of ‘rebel’ villages, and carrying off

everybody else to be sold as slaves. Sometime around 1855, Queen

Ranavalona I’s secretary Raombana wrote of these campaigns:

As to the miseries which these continual wars brought to the provincial

people, that is indescribable, for by fighting, but more deceit, that

is, the offer of life and pardon if they yield and submit, thousands and

thousands have thus been murdered in cold blood, and their numerous

wives, children and cattle seized and reduced to slavery.

Mothers are separated from their tender offspring and other relations,

as they are divided and distributed amongst different masters, and are

thus taken into different parts of the country where they never discover

one another again, with very few exceptions.

An officer who is a real Christian informed me that the pains in hell

could not be more than the pains suffered by these unfortunate people in

being separated from one another to be taken away to their different

masters. Their cries, their weepings and their lamentations, said the

above Christian, is such as almost sufficient to raise the dead from

their graves for to take their parts....[2]

It is important to remember that for its victims, the very first thing

slavery meant was a complete rupture with everything that had made their

lives meaningful: of all the ties of love, kinship, shared experience

that had bound them to a home, to parents, friends, lovers, to everyone

and everything they had most cared for. It was in this sense too that

slaves were ‘lost people,’ alone, in an alien place among people who did

not know them.

It is even more important, perhaps, to emphasize that this situation did

not end once a captive had been sold and settled in Imerina. It was

extremely difficult for slaves to create any kind of enduring ties,

either to people or to places. Free Merina lived in permanent towns or

villages on hilltops; slaves, in makeshift settlements in the valley

bottoms, near the paddy fields. These hamlets were mostly structured

around a handful of older men or women; most younger slaves had no fixed

abode at all but circulated between several hamlets in different parts

of Imerina, often between different masters, as well as between

scattered family, friends, and lovers. Many slaves managed to win a

remarkable degree of independence from their masters; they came to make

up the majority of both Imerina’s petty merchants and its petty

criminals, as well as almost all wage laborers; but the mobility which

made this possible also ensured their uprooted condition remained

permanent.[3]

The most obvious symptom of slaves’ placelessness was their lack of

proper tombs. For free Merina, tombs were—as they remain today— the

ultimate link between people and places, the anchors of group identities

(cf. Bloch, 1971). It is through collective stone tombs that each

descent group is fixed to an ancestral territory; one may spend one’s

entire life far from one’s ancestral lands, but one nonetheless expects

to be buried on them when one dies. To be buried in a magnificent tomb,

to be remembered there by one’s descendants, and to be periodically

rewrapped in beautiful silk shrouds called lambammay is the ultimate

aspiration of any important man. But the ideal is hard to achieve; to

guarantee one will not be forgotten, one has to acquire enough land to

settle a large number of descendants around one’s tomb. For slaves, all

this was nearly inconceivable. Most slaves were not buried in proper

stone tombs at all—many were buried in simple graves or improvised

pit-tombs near their settlements,[4] usually with people of very

different ancestries buried together. It was only after emancipation

(which came in 1896, a year after the French conquest of Madagascar)

that most of those former slaves who chose to remain in Imerina[5] began

to create solid and substantial tombs of stone like those of free

people. Usually, a number of families would have to pool their resources

to do so. To acquire the land to keep one’s descendants around was even

more difficult. Almost all ‘white’ Merina claim their ancestors forbid

them to marry or sell their ancestral land to the descendants of slaves;

when they make exceptions, it is only for vastly inflated prices. In the

village of Betafo, where I did my fieldwork, for example, almost every

‘black’ (mainty) family that had managed to establish itself over time

had only been able to do so because of some exceptional windfall: a gift

of land from former masters (for whom they were also obliged to work as

sharecroppers), a military pension, an unusually advantageous

marriage....[6] The majority still spent their lives traveling between

places which were not really theirs; for most, lives of endless striving

ended only in failure and oblivion, to be buried in the tomb of a

distant relative in a land where they had likely never lived.

There is an irony here, because the very difficulty of creating tombs

and ancestors meant they came to take on a very different meaning for

the descendants of slaves than for the other two thirds of the Merina

population. As I have argued elsewhere (Graeber 1995), attitudes of

‘white’ Merina towards ancestors are profoundly ambivalent. People do

wish to be remembered as ancestors when they die; but in part for that

very reason, the memory of existing ancestors is seen as an imposition

on the living, supported by the constant threat of punishment for lapses

of memory or neglect of ancestral restrictions. Memory itself is felt as

a kind of violence. As a result, the famadihana rituals in which the

bodies of the dead are periodically removed from the tomb to be

rewrapped in new lambamena, have a dual meaning too. While represented

as ways of remembering the dead, their covert purpose is to make it

easier to forget them: reducing ancestral bodies to dust so their names

can be forgotten; then, locking them inside the tomb. For the

descendants of slaves, on the other hand, it was not the pressure of

history and memory that was felt as a kind of violence, but the very

lack of it, and for that reason, ancestors took on a far more benevolent

countenance. It is hard to be certain, but I did find that descendants

of slaves were much more likely to insist that ancestors really did

provide concrete benefits for their descendants, and I had a strong

feeling that, while the form of mortuary ritual was the same, the

content was slightly different; that there was an honest piety in

‘black’ attitudes towards the dead often lacking in their ‘white’

neighbors.

The first story I have to recount, in fact, is largely about how

difficult it is for ‘black people’ (olona mainty) to lay claims to

Merina mortuary ritual.

The story of Rainitaba

The community of Betafo, the focus of my own fieldwork which I conducted

between 1989 and 1991, consisted of something like 13 settlements and

perhaps 400 people, occupying a stretch of rolling country about forty

minutes’ walk to the north of the town of Arivonimamo. It was a

community divided between the descendants of an andriana, ‘noble,’

descent group, and the descendants of their former slaves. The latter

made up about a third of the total population.

The main reason they were there was because shortly after emancipation,

members of the wealthiest andriana families had given their former

slaves a large grant of land to encourage them to stay on. Almost all of

it went to two men, who were, at the time, the chief men of a hamlet

called Antandrokomby which sat, like most slave settlements, on the edge

of a stretch of terraced rice fields. Both men built substantial tombs

and kept large numbers of descendants around them; in fact, most ‘black

people’ in Betafo were descended from one of them in some way or

another. Betafo was also a somewhat anomalous community because on the

whole, its ‘black people’ were doing rather well: partly because with

their greater acclimatization to wage labor, they had been better able

to adapt to the economic crisis that had hit rural Madagascar since the

late 1970s; also, because some of the families that had not originally

received grants of land had been able to capitalize on their reputations

as astrologers and magicians to acquire enough money to buy land from

their increasingly impoverished andriana neighbors. On the whole, in

fact, Betafo’s mainty were, by the late ’80s, doing rather better than

the andriana) certainly that was the andriana perception of the matter.

But there were some mainty families who held on more tenuously. One of

the most famous was made up of the descendants of a certain Rainitaba, a

man who had, apparently, also lived in Antandrokomby, but who had

already died, leaving behind only a single daughter, before the land was

distributed in 1896.

It had never been a prosperous family, and most people I knew in Betafo

were convinced that it had entirely died out. Nonetheless, everyone had

heard Rainitaba’s story.

The story goes like this:

When Rainitaba died, his children wrapped his body and buried it in the

tomb, but when they opened the tomb to rewrap him, the body had

disappeared. Only an empty cloth remained. Later, Rainitaba appeared in

a dream to his daughter and told her he had taken the form of a snake

and abandoned the tomb, becoming a Vazimba spirit in the waters to the

east of the village of Betafo.

Some would repeat the story with amusement, others with a trace of

scandal. But almost always, the narrator would then go on to point out

the course of Rainitaba’s meanderings since death. First he descended to

the waters around the spring to the east of the village—a secluded spot,

full of shade trees and quiet pools, where people used to be afraid to

take children after night lest ghosts seize them and they waste away and

die. Later, he followed the waters that flowed by the rice fields to the

north of Betafo downstream until he reached the ruins of

Antandrokomby—by then long since abandoned. Near the ruins was a reedy

pool, and there he was supposed to have resided for some time, before

again disappearing. No one was quite sure what happened to him since,

but most were sure he was not in Betafo any more.

Now, there is every reason to believe that a man named Rainitaba did

indeed live in Antandrokomby in the 1870s or ’80s[7]; his daughter,

Rabakomanga, was still living there with three sons of her own when she

died (probably at the age of 45 or 50) in 1912. She was apparently the

one who had the dream in which her father revealed that he had left his

tomb, but, after that, almost ail of her descendants were said to have

had dreams of him, and sometimes unrelated people, too. I was told

Rainitaba would always appear whenever one of his descendants conceived

a child, and would often give advice about how to ensure a healthy

birth.

It was only after I had been working in Betafo for some time that I

discovered that there were still several descendants of Rainitaba living

in Betafo or, anyway, quite frequently around. The most notable was

Razanamavo, an old, poor woman who spent most of her time doing odd jobs

for her slightly better-off neighbors in the mainly quarter of Betafo,

or seeking work in town. She didn’t really have a house in Betafo, but

lived in an outbuilding—litde more than a shed really— which a man named

Armand had given her as an act of charity. Most people in Betafo did not

have any idea of her ancestry; ordinarily, most tended to forget she

existed at all.

I first met Razanamavo in town. Armand—who was a good friend of

mine—kept a room in the town of Arivonimamo, from which he conducted a

small business selling bananas; people from Betafo often used to gather

there, or drop by seeking news. Once I happened by while Razanamavo was

visiting, and Armand’s wife, Nety—always helpful in tracking down bits

of Betafo history for me—immediately seized the opportunity to see if we

could get her to tell us something about her famous ancestor.

Actually, Nety had previously wondered whether Razanamavo would be

willing to talk to me at all: ‘she might consider it embarrassing,

having an ancestor who was a Vazimba.’ But at first she seemed quite

happy to tell us. Rainitaba, she said, was originally a nobleman from

Betsileo. ‘Back then, you know, people would be bought and sold’ she

said. ‘And that was the origin of Rainitaba. He was a lost person.’ He

had been captured and sold into slavery in Betafo. The fact that people

referred to him as a Vazimba did not bother her. What bothered her, she

told Nety, was that people said he had turned into an animal. ‘Rainitaba

is not an animal,’ she insisted, ‘but a Vazimba—a person, a person like

a Kalanoro.[8] Haven’t you ever dreamed of him?’ Nety hadn’t. Well,

Razanamavo said, many have; he used to appear to her grandmother and her

father regularly. He had appeared to her, too, before the birth of her

first child.[9]

Razanamavo had an oddly distant manner of speaking, somehow absent; she

crouched wrapped in a yellow cloth staring off into the courtyard as she

talked, as if looking at something far away, or perhaps nothing at all,

and never once gazed at the other people in the room, even when she was

more or less speaking to them. In part she was probably exhausted from

an afternoon at work; but her manner seemed to complement the content of

her discourse, which was much more evocative and dreamy than the usual,

matter-of-fact style of historical narration. After telling her story,

and answering a few of Nety’s questions about her relatives, she seemed

to just fade away, staring off as if so lost in thought that she didn’t

even notice anyone was talking to her, until after a little while, we

gave up and started talking about something else.

Razanamavo’. He, you know—our grandmother said that when he was about to

die, he said: ‘I am about to die now, so take me to the north of the

village, to the dam. And as for me’ he said, ‘don’t bury me in a tomb

but just release me in the current of the river. And get a lamba

arin-drano [10] he said, ‘like you would for burying a son-in-law.’

And they said: ‘maybe we won’t put you in the river, because we’d be

embarrassed.’

‘No, don’t be embarrassed,’ he said, ‘because you’ll receive a great

blessing if you do it that way.’

But they didn’t do it. They just buried him normally and left him there.

Someone: This was Rainitaba?

Razanamavo: A little hole like that they buried him in—there was no

tomb, no entry to the west. Later they got ready to do a famadihana [to

move him into a proper tomb], and looked for the cloth, and they set the

cloth around him nicely.

‘If you do this thing, then a great blessing will come to you.’ Then the

water flooded... he was dead. ‘I don’t like lambammd he said, ‘but lamba

arin-drano, and...’ those were to be the mourning clothes. ‘So your

children will never become poor, nor the generations of your descendants

to come ...’ This is something they all dreamed, all of them absolutely.

But we didn’t get the blessing because we didn’t do it. They put him in

the center of the top shelf to the north of the tomb, and he still

hasn’t been moved to this day.

Once, there were a good number of descendants, but there are few left

any more.[11]

She too told how he had moved from the pool to the east of the village

to the one near Antandrokomby. She wasn’t sure where he had gone after

that, but she suspected he had finally returned to his original home in

Betsileo.

The ‘little hole’ she refers to was a temporary grave—it seems that when

he died, his daughter simply buried him—as was often done by

slaves—until such time as a group of slaves could pool enough money to

create a proper tomb. The opportunity only arose around 1910, when

several ‘black’ families got together to build a collective tomb on a

hill overlooking Betafo to the northeast. Rabakomanga contributed some

money to the effort, and when the tomb was done had her father’s body

wrapped properly in cloth, and then transferred it to one of its most

prominent shelves. It was after this, the first time they returned to

perform a famadihana,, that they found the body gone.

At the time, Rabakomanga was by no means penniless; she had apparently

received a small amount of land from her former owners, which she had

passed on to her sons.[12] Her sons apparendy were not able to hold on

to much of it. What land there was was sold or mortgaged off. Those who

remember her sons, Ingahivelona and Rakotonanahary, remember them as

landless laborers, and desperately poor. In fact, the history of

Rainitaba’s family was always represented as one of loss, poverty and

dispersal. They never received the blessing that they were offered. They

scattered; now they’re gone. In fact, it is one of the ironies of their

history that it took me a long time to realize that the lineage had been

really quite prolific: most of Rainitaba’s grandchildren had numerous

sons and daughters. Some died in infancy; others were fostered by

relatives in other places. Almost all of them would leave Betafo before

they were thirty, there being no property to speak of or reason for them

to stay. When once or twice I tried to make lists of their names, I

found it was impossible: people would just shrug and said something to

the effect of ‘oh, there were lots of them. Who remembers? None of them

live around here any more.’[13]

About Vazimba

Unrealized promises, currents, dispersal, disappearance ... the

traditions surrounding Rainitaba seem to echo the sense of loss and

displacement inherent to the experience of slavery, and to make it a

figure for the lineage’s own eventual dispersal, its withering away as a

presence in Betafo. In fact, it is a very complicated story, which draws

together a series of very old ideas and images—some Merina, some

Betsileo—into a narrative so powerful that it has gone from an obscure

piece of family history to an essential part of the historical

consciousness of the community, a story everyone could repeat.

Part of how it could do this was by seizing on the richness of the term

‘Vazimba,’ a word which can be used to refer to ancient aborigines, lost

ancestors, or dangerous spirits of the water—categories which tend to

overlap considerably. It might be helpful to explore some of the term’s

meanings: not least because it has become something of a notorious issue

in the scholarly literature.

The so-called ‘Vazimba problem’ has, in fact, generated a very long and

(in my opinion) largely poindess intellectual history. It all started in

the 19^(th) century, when early missionaries heard stories about dark,

diminutive Vazimba spirits lurking in wild places, and concluded that

they must reflect the memory of an ancient ‘aboriginal race’ that had

occupied the highlands of Madagascar before its present-day inhabitants

(see Berg 1975, 1977). The logic seems to have been this: the people of

Imerina tended to have straight hair and more Asian features than most

other Malagasy. Therefore, they had to be the descendants of recent

immigrants from the Malay archipelago.[14] The Vazimba, then, would have

to be the people already living in the highlands when they arrived:

backward, dark-skinned savages, originally from East Africa. For English

and French missionaries working in Imerina, this soon became a matter of

simple common sense. There was some speculation the Vazimba might have

been pygmies; others argued that the Crace of pygmies’ (called Kimosy)

was an even earlier strata the (perhaps pastoral) Vazimba drove out,

before they were in turn put to flight by conquering Malays.

Needless to say, no evidence was ever produced to back up any of this,

and there would be litde reason to go into it were it not for the fact

that this picture of Malagasy history has become entrenched in

schoolbooks and, therefore, that anyone who has been to school has been

exposed to it. When the descendants of free Merina call themselves

‘white people’ today, in contrast to the descendants of slaves, who like

people of the coast are called Cblack’ they draw on this picture of

Malagasy history.[15] On the other hand, popular conceptions of Vazimba

themselves seem to have changed little from the ones Gerald Berg (1977:

7–12) documents for the early 19^(th) century—the stories that

missionaries first seized on and misinterpreted.[16]

First and foremost, Vazimba were ancestors whose bodies had been lost.

If a man or woman drowned or died in a far-off country and their body

was not recovered, they were often said to have ‘become a Vazimba.’ This

could be a simple figure of speech; one did not necessarily mean

anything more than that the person would never become a proper ancestor,

never be wrapped and placed inside the tomb. But, more often, the term

Vazimba was applied to the ghosts of such unfortunates, dangerous

spirits, angry because they were cut off from proper relations with

their descendants.[17]

For all they lacked bodies, Vazimba were always identified with a

specific place. Most often, their ghosts inhabited marshy places far

from human habitation: little springs or pools between the rice fields,

grottoes often marked by the presence of red fish or red crabs, knots of

bamboo, reeds and rushes, sometimes, in certain kinds of tree. One might

occasionally encounter a Vazimba by a rock or spring on an isolated

hillside or even amidst the crags of a mountain, but it was unusual to

find them far away from water.

I heard a lot of speculation about the origin of such ghosts. One medium

from Arivonimamo told me they were usually ancestors whose descendants

no longer ‘took care of them.’ If descendants stopped conducting

famadihana, stopped keeping up the tomb, eventually the ancestor’s

fanahy or soul would leave the crumbling tomb entirely to settle in

watery places, having become a fierce creature full of resentment

towards the living. Others suggested most Vazimba were the spirits of

travellers from other parts of Madagascar—Bara, Sakalava, Betsileo— who

happened to die while passing through, and were buried hastily on the

spot by whoever found them there. Others would point to the existence of

Kalanoro: small human-like creatures rumored to live in distant lakes

and marshes. Vazimba, they suggested, were the ghosts of Kalanoro.

Finally, some (for instance, Betafo’s schoolteacher, or one of its

former pastors) did speak of Vazimba as if they were a former

population, long since driven away, and therefore, whose ancestors no

longer had any descendants to remember them.

Many refused to even speculate. The important thing about Vazimba,

Armand’s brother Germain once told me, is that you don’t know what they

are or where they come from. They are by definition mysterious,

invisible, a kind of unknown power:

Germain: Vazimba are a kind of thing that isn’t seen. They don’t show

their bodies like, say, people do, or the divine spirits who possess

mediums and cure people. If you carry pork to a place where one is, then

that night, as soon as you kill the light you look and there’s this hand

moving towards you. As soon as you light the candle again, it’s gone.

Or, say you’re washing your face in you don’t know what... and likely as

not your face will swell up hugely like this, and it absolutely won’t go

away until you bum incense over it. You take it to someone who will make

offerings, and then you’re cured. But that’s all you know—you have

absolutely no idea what was in the water.[18]

As this quote makes clear, when people thought about Vazimba, it was

usually not as a matter for abstract historical speculation but as one

of immediate practical concern. One discovered that a place was haunted

by Vazimba because someone had taken ill. A child playing in the fields

had drunk some water from a reedy pool, or taken fishes that they

shouldn’t have, or they had been tending pigs or taking some other

polluting substance to the place where a Vazimba was. Such children

would often fall into a fever, or parts of their body would swell up;

usually, they would be tormented by dreams or apparitions. Vazimba were

normally invisible; when they did appear, it was almost always in the

nightmare visions of an adolescent or a child. Normally they appear

either as horribly mutilated—fingerless, noseless—reaching out to snatch

the children, or else, especially with older children as extremely

attractive members of the opposite sex, trying to lure them into their

watery domains. The ritual for expelling Vazimba was similar to rituals

for expelling hostile ghosts: the curer would burn things, there would

be incense, smoke. But one would usually also leave offerings at the

place, almost exactly those one would give to ancestors at famadihana:

rum or honey, candies, ginger, suet, bananas, bread. If nothing else,

these rituals would ‘clean’ the place of the pollution that had offended

the creature and made it ‘fierce,’ to soothe it, placate it, and at the

same time, ensure it remained confined there.[19]

Some places thus develop reputations. I knew at least seven in the

eastern half of Betafo alone where there were rumored to be Vazimba; I

wouldn’t be surprised if there were more. Often it was not entirely

clear, because people differ on whether there is still a Vazimba in a

given spot, or if there is, whether it is still masiaka, ‘fierce,’ still

a force to be reckoned with.

For present purposes, what is really important is the relationship

between Vazimba and slaves. This relationship appears to be

longstanding. Many of the captives brought to Imerina quickly developed

ritual ties with local Vazimba.[20] It makes a certain sense that they

should feel an affinity, since Vazimba were themselves figures of loss

and dispersal. The one common feature in all stories about Vazimba is

that they involve people being uprooted, cast out of their proper place.

Vazimba are people who have been driven from their homes, ancestors

whose descendants have dispersed and forgotten them, who have themselves

left their solid tombs to enter confused, watery places, like slaves,

then, their defining feature is that they are lost; they embody the

complete negation of those ties of descent that bind the living to

ancestors buried in ancestral soil.[21] If slaves were people wrenched

from their ancestors, Vazimba were ancestors lost to their descendants.

It is not difficult, then, to understand why slaves might have seized on

these images as a way of capturing their own experience—and in many

cases at least, translating it into a source of power with which to

restore some of what they’d lost.

Nymphs and Mediums

The only well documented example of how such ritual ties first developed

is a story preserved in the Tantara ny Andriana, a collection of 19^(th)

century Malagasy texts (Callet 1908: 240–243; Dahle and Sims 1984: 197):

about a woman originally from Betsileo, who became the medium for a

Vazimba spirit named Ranoro.

First, a word about Ranoro. Ranoro remains, even today, probably the

most famous Vazimba in Madagascar (Domenichini 1985: 416–445; Rajaofera

1912; Aujas 1927: 16–17; Peetz 1951; Haring 1982: 358–359; see Bloch

1991).[22] She is considered one of the most ancient ancestors of a

large and historically significant descent group called the Antehi-roka,

whose territory is just to the north of the capital. The Antehiroka are

sometimes described as ‘Vazimbas themselves—if only because they were

the original inhabitants of the hill on which Antananarivo, the Merina

capital, was later built, displaced when it was taken over by an early

king.

According to the story the Antehiroka ancestor Andriambodilova was

strolling by the banks of the river Mamba one day when he chanced on

Ranoro, a beautiful water nymph (zazavavindrano), sunning herself on a

rock. He proposed marriage. Ranoro was not necessarily disinclined, but

she warned him that marriage with supernatural beings was difficult;

there were always all sorts of taboos. If he wished to marry her, he

would have to agree, among other things, never to use salt or even to

pronounce the word.

Some versions explain the reason for this unusual demand. Ranoro knew

that if she abandoned the waters to marry a mortal man, it would mean

never again seeing her father, whose name was Andriantsira, ‘Lord Salt.’

Therefore, she made him promise never to say or do anything that would

remind her of him. He agreed, the two married and had children. But one

day many years later, during a domestic argument, he spat it out in

anger, calling her ‘daughter of salt.’ No sooner had she heard the word

than she turned her back on him and walked to the banks of the river,

dived in, and was never seen again. The place where she disappeared, a

rocky grotto by the river, has been a place of worship ever since, and

her present-day descendants continue to maintain a taboo on salting

food—in fact, many versions add that any salt that comes near the grotto

immediately dissolves.

The taboo on salt is the main claim to fame the Antehiroka had among

people I knew in Arivonimamo: it was considered the most difficult taboo

anyone had ever heard of. And salt does seem the key to the story. In

fact I suspect the whole story is a kind of play on a Malagasy proverb:

sira latsaka an-drano, tsy himpody intsony, ‘like salt fallen into the

water, it will never again return to its previous form.’ As with

Rainitaba, a broken trust leads to a very literal dissolution: what was

once a single object becomes an infinity of tiny things which flow away

in all directions.

Already in the 19^(th) century, Ranoro’s sanctuary, like her husband’s

tomb, had become a place where people came from far and wide to make

vows, and ask for favors; Ranoro is still famous for helping infertile

women to conceive.[23] But in the 19^(th) century, these were places

which slaves were not allowed to enter. The presence of slaves was

considered to be polluting, in much the same way as pork. This makes it

all the more surprising that the most famous disciple of Ranoro of that

century was, in fact, a slave—she was a woman originally from the

Betsileo country in the southern highlands of Madagascar. During the

reign of Ranavalona I (1828–1861), this woman—always herself referred to

as Ranoro—began periodically to fall into trance and be possessed

(tsindriana) by the Vazimba’s spirit. Her fame began to spread after she

cured a woman who had been struck blind for having sullied Ranoro’s

grotto; soon, even free people were beginning to frequent her, seeking

advice and cures. According to the story preserved in Callet (1908), the

news eventually reached the Queen, who ordered the woman to be put to

the poison ordeal. When she survived, Ranavalona recognized her claims

to be legitimate and granted her an honorary guard of thirty Merina

soldiers.

The mortal Ranoro appears to have become a figure of some fame and

influence—despite her continued status as a slave. She is said to have

slept on an elevated bed suspended from the rafters, to have walked

across the room on a tightrope when possessed, and performed other

remarkable feats. For her last miracle, she went to Ranoro’s grotto and

dived into the water; it was only three days later, according to the

story, that she emerged. In the interim, she told her followers, she had

lived with Vazimba in the bottom of the cave, who fed on raw fish and

raw crabs. They tried to make her join them in their meals, but the food

repelled her, and having refused them, she was returned to the surface.

The spirits had rejected her. Claiming her contact had thus been broken,

the woman left and went back to find her father, who she believed was

still alive somewhere in Betsileo.

In her case at least—and hers was clearly very unusual—it was possible

to use access to Vazimba as a way of restoring the severed bonds of

descent.

Fanany: people who come back as snakes

It is worth exploring the connection to Betsileo in more detail, since

most ‘black people’ in Imerina today claim Betsileo origins.

Betsileo is the name given the country directly to the south of Imerina,

including most of the southern part of the vast plateau that forms the

center of Madagascar, as well as to the people who live there. In the

18^(th) century, they were divided into a number of independent

kingdoms; in the beginning of the 19^(th), Betsileo was conquered by the

Merina king Andrianampoinimerina. From the point of view of present-day

Merina, the Betsileo are a bit of an anomaly. On the one hand, like all

other Malagasy they are considered ‘black people’—if only because they

are much less likely to have straight hair. However, in almost every

other way, they are indistinguishable from Merina. Their way of speaking

is similar; so are their houses, clothes, and ritual practices. If any

differences are widely remarked upon, it is that Betsileo tend to be

more open and easy-going than Merina (those from Amba-lavao are widely

held to be the most talkative people in Madagascar), and are much more

sophisticated farmers: their skill at irrigation and terracing, for

example, is famous throughout Madagascar.

Nowadays, descendants of slaves in Imerina almost always claim to be

Betsileo (I met dozens, in fact, who insisted they were descendants of

the famous Betsileo king Andriamanalina). There are any number of

reasons why the identity might seem appealing.[24] Not only were

Betsileo also ‘black people’ who were otherwise indistinguishable from

Merina, they also had a renown as migrant laborers. During the 550s and

’60s, thousands used to cross Imerina every year, following the rice

replanting and the harvest; many ended up marrying local people and

stayed on. Since local attitudes towards Betsileo migrants were so

strikingly more accepting than they were of former slaves (whom most

claimed their ancestors forbid them to marry) it is easy to see how

mainty laborers already living in Imerina would wish to blur any

distinction between them.

To understand the story of Rainitaba, though, one has to understand

something about Betsileo mortuary custom. While ordinary Betsileo are

buried in much the same way as Merina,[25] the souls of royalty were

believed to transform themselves into snakes; specifically, a species of

water snake called fanany or fangany (Shaw 1878: 411; Abinal 1885:

242–246; Sibree 1880: 170; 1896: 198; Dubois 1938: 716–18; Delord 1958;

Razafintsalama 1983). Betsileo royal funerals involved a variety of

sometimes elaborate processes aimed at separating the wet portions of

the body from the dry. Sometimes the entrails were removed and thrown

into lakes, where they are thought to transform into fanany\ in other

cases fluids were drained from the corpse, and the snake was believed to

develop from a worm that fed from those fluids; the worm having been

placed inside the tomb at the same time as the dried cadaver, along with

a bamboo tube by which it can escape.

Fanany are striking-looking snakes, easily identifiable because of their

coloration, which is said to resemble that of a lamba arin-drano, with

bands of white, orange, and black. But they are rarely sighted on dry

land.

When one of these is found the people assemble and ask it if it is the

fangany of So-and-so, mentioning in succession the names of the various

chiefs who are dead; and the animal is asserted to nod its head when the

right name is mentioned. The relatives of the man at whose name the

beast moves its head then take possession of it by inducing it to

wriggle on to a clean lamba, by which it is carried to the former

residence of the dead man. Oxen are killed, feasting commences, and a

scene similar to that at a funeral ensues. A little of the blood is

presented to the fangany, after which it is set free in the neighborhood

of the chief’s grave (Shaw 1878: 411).

While this was a 19^(th) century Betsileo custom restricted to royalty,

just about everyone I spoke to in 20^(th) century Imerina had heard of

it. Certainly, all olona mainty. Almost all of them though were under

the impression that this was something that can happen spontaneously to

anyone from Betsileo.

The way I usually heard the story was this: should a fanany happen to

appear in a Betsileo’s house, the family immediately assembles and lists

the names of their ancestors, until it nods its head to tell them which

it is. After that, they feed it rice with milk and honey, sometimes play

music or otherwise celebrate its presence, but afterwards, the head of

the family makes a speech, thanking it for coming, but asking it to

leave now ‘because’ (as Nety put it) ‘you’re frightening the children.’

Here are two different stories I heard from old men from Betafo, stories

about Betsileo wage laborers which both seem to date back to around the

1920s[26]—well before the massive migrations of the 1950s and ’60s. One

was told me by the catechist from the village of Amba-ribe, in the far

west of Betafo’s territory. His uncle, he explained to me, had once

employed an ancient Betsileo cattleherd, who was also a medium,[27] and

his great-uncle had also once employed him to catch a Vazimba and move

it into a nearby moat—which he did, trapping the spirit in a giant

sobika basket. Later the medium himself grew sick and was about to die.

Ramena: However, when he was about to die—and he was very old—he

wouldn’t let them wrap him in a lambamena, or bind him. They put him in

the bottom of a sobika, and covered it up with earth. Three days later,

when they looked again, sure enough he wasn’t in there any more. The

hole was wide open.[28]

The refusal of proper shrouds of course echoes the story of Rainitaba,

as does the disappearing body. But Ramena leaves the rest ambiguous. An

old man from Andrianony told me a much more explicit story about a

Betsileo laborer who turned into a fanany:

Ramwao: It was a long time ago, back when they used to drive cattle over

the rice fields instead of harrowing them. And there was a hireling of

Rakotomanga’s, who lived in Antanety. He was Betsileo. The man had been

hired to harvest rice, but he got sick and died while he was working in

the fields. So they buried the Betsileo in the ground above the rice

field. After he’d been in there for a year, he came out as a fanany.

Came out as an animal.

And having come out as an animal, he went up to Rakotomanga’s house. And

they said ‘What?’ And they said: ‘Are you what’s left of So-and-so?’ The

creature nodded his head. They gave it rice. The creature ate the rice

(they say it was really huge, but I didn’t see it with my own eyes) and

after a while, they told it ‘if this is truly you who are here before

us, then leave us and go home. Go back to your ancestral lands.’ When

the creature had its fill of rice, it headed off. And when it had

arrived there, then the man had a dream where it told him ‘I have

arrived at my ancestral lands.’[29]

Such stories—about isolated Betsileo workers—already overlap with ideas

about lost travelers who die away from home and become Vazimba. But in

this case, transformation contains the possibility of resolution; a

number of people told me that Betsileo who happen to die and are buried

far from home will almost always turn into serpents and go home.

At this point, it is clear how the story of Rainitaba—which probably

also took form in the 1920s—patches together elements taken from Vazimba

stories with those about fanany. According to his descendants,

Rainitaba was an andriana from Betsileo who had been kidnapped and taken

to Imerina. When he died, he refused to be tied down and contained like

a Merina ancestor; instead, he wanted his children to release him in the

currents of the river, wrapped in a Betsileo cloth that was colored like

the coat of a fanany. When they couldn’t bring themselves to so

completely offend the sensibilities of their Merina neighbors, he made

the transformation on his own; but as a result, they lost the blessing

he would otherwise have given them. His subsequent history had him

following the course of the waters downstream, but also in a sense,

moving backwards in time: from Betafo to his old settlement of

Antan-drokomby, and finally, back to Betsileo once again. But as with

Ranoro (who was also sometimes said to have moved steadily downstream,

ever further from her former home), returning home meant orphaning one’s

own descendants.

Of course, it is only now that his descendants have almost entirely

dispersed, that people say he’s abandoned Imerina entirely. For decades,

he lingered in the waters around Betafo, visiting his grandchildren in

their dreams, suspended halfway in a movement of escape he could not yet

bear to bring to its conclusion.

One reason the story seemed to strike such a chord with people was that

it encapsulated something fundamental about the experience of slaves and

their descendants. Perhaps, one can even say, the experience of slavery

itself. There are those that have proposed that slaves are by definition

human beings who have been wrenched from the society which formed them,

the web of social ties which has made them what they are; plunged into a

kind of ‘social death’ (Meillassoux 1991; Patterson 1982). From this

perspective, slavery as an institution is founded on the destruction of

social worlds, and it is in fact the moment described by Raombana, when

children are tom from their mother’s arms and families broken apart,

which makes a slave a slave.

It is difficult to assess the full implications of such a moment for the

historical consciousness of those who passed through it. Rarely do large

numbers of people go through a rupture so utter and extreme. It brings

to mind Elaine Scarry’s (1985) observation that physical pain empties

worlds of their meaning. In normal life, one is invested in a thousand

ways in one’s surroundings, in people, places, projects, things one

cares about; so that one’s sense of self expands outwards to imbue and

become entangled with a much larger social world. One effect of extreme

physical pain, she says, is to empty these investments of all meaning;

one’s sense of self collapses into the narrow confines of the hurting

body. For that moment nothing and no one else is real. The scene

described by Raombana in a way reverses this: the victims are, for the

most part, physically unscathed, but as they are lead off from burning

villages, most of the men they have ever known lying dead in bloody

pools, women and children dragged from each others’ arms; in a matter of

hours, the entire universe of social relations in which they have come

into being was utterly annihilated. The result, as Raombana’s friend

himself observed, was a trauma so intense that no mere physical pain

could possibly surpass it.

All this does not mean that memories of such a moment are likely to

become a part of historical consciousness. In fact they are just the

sort of events that would not; that one would normally suspect survivors

would prefer never to have to talk about. Certainly the memory of them

is not preserved in oral histories of the present day. But if for slaves

and their descendants, that one moment, when worlds dissolved away,

seems to have reverberated endlessly, it is because such experiences did

not stop. Dispersal, families drifting apart, people uprooted from their

memories: for most, it was repeated with every generation.

It also took place within a cultural milieu which placed an

extraordinary emphasis on the politics of memory. The manipulation and

transformation of such memories—particularly, women’s memories of their

parents and ancestral homes—was a constant theme of Merina ritual. In

marriage negotiations, for instance, the suitors’ family offered a

series of cash payments which compensated either for the nurturance and

care the girl’s parents had provided her—such as the valim-babena, the

‘answer for having carried an infant on one’s back’—or services the

daughter herself would no longer be able to provide—the akana kitay,

‘gathering firewood,’ or alana volo fotsy, ‘pulling out white hairs.’ In

the latter case especially, an image so intimate of a daughter poring

over her father or her mother’s head, searching for white hairs to pluck

out, evokes a whole world of domestic sentiments: protective affection,

the fear of aging and resultant loss, the pain of ruptured domesticity

when the woman moves away. The money, officially meant to ‘ask for the

parent’s blessing’ for the marriage, can equally be seen, I think, as

compensation for that pain. In famadihana the evocation of

emotionally-charged memories becomes even more explicit. When one places

the corpses of women’s relatives on their laps, the effect is to break

the power of women’s most vivid, intimate memories of people that they

loved. It evokes that entire world in order to efface it, to free the

living from their attachments to the dead.

For women who had been carried into slavery, evocation of such memories

could only serve as a reminder of acts of such irreparable violence,

that the entire world of those memories had been brutally destroyed. It

is hardly surprising that the Betsileo woman should have felt such an

affinity with the figure of Ranoro. Ranoro was a woman who could not

bear to hear her father’s name; the memories it evoked for her would be

too painful. It was a story about salt dropped in water, things that

could never be brought back together or attain their previous form. In

this one case, of course, the story may have taken on a different level

of poignancy because the woman possessed by Ranoro believed her father

was still alive—at least, in the end she managed to win her freedom so

as to try to find him. Though one cannot help but wonder whether the

dream of finding her father was really as much a projection of her

imagination as Ranoro herself had been.

Containment and Redemption

At this point, let me return briefly to the question with which I began:

about stories that can, and can’t, be told.

Students of working-class history have noted that it is relatively easy

to cull oral histories of periods of successful strikes, political

advances, in which workers had some control of their destiny; much

harder for periods of massive retrenchment or defeat. When Italian

workers told the stories of their lives, for instance, the two decades

of fascist rule often seemed to drop out entirely (Passerini 1987). In a

fascinating essay, Michel Bozon and Anne-Marie Thiesse (1986) asked:

what happens, then, to workers who have never known anything but defeat?

Their research focused on farm laborers from the countryside near Paris,

people who had begun their lives at the bottom of the social heap and

then moved down steadily: made redundant by mechanization, set to

scrabbling for endless miserable jobs wherever they could get them. They

discovered that, indeed, most found it impossible to give any account of

their lives since childhood; many found it painful to even try. Instead,

they tended to fall back on quasi-ethnographic descriptions—£how we used

to do things in the old days’—and anecdotes about their own experience

of famous historical events—mainly, of France’s wars. These anecdotes,

however, were in almost every case and themselves little images of loss

and dispersal: peasants fleeing before unearthly German horsemen, the

government fleeing Paris by balloon.... It was as if, having been told

all their lives they had no right to speak of or for themselves, they

could only do so through the borrowed authority of ‘national’ history.

Malagasy understandings of what history is, and what gives one the

authority to tell it, are rather different. Histories are, indeed,

matters of privilege,[30] but they are also intrinsically tied to

places—where ancestors lived and are buried, where famous events took

place. And there is a very deep-seated feeling that only those who live

near a place can really know its history. Even the wealthiest and most

powerful descendants of Betafo’s noble families would look mildly

irritated when I asked them about the histories of their illustrious

forbears, unable to speak about the place because their families had

long since relocated to the city. Several ended up referring me to the

descendants of their former slaves, who still lived there. In this sense

what Vazimba pools provide is not just a way to conceptualize a history

of pain and dispersal, but the right to speak of it: after all, most of

these pools were in wild places in the valley bottoms, the very places

to which slaves too were once exiled.[31]

Even if what they spoke of was, ultimately, their own sense of loss,

their own disempowerment, the ability to speak about such things itself

opened up possibilities of taking action and beginning to reverse the

situation. In the case of Ranoro this was fairly obvious; less so,

perhaps, in the case of Rainitaba. But histories keep changing, and

Vazimba provide endless possibilities of moving from speech to action.

One of the last descendants of Rainitaba everyone remembered, for

example, was an old man named Pascal, a landless laborer who had died

several years before I came, when, while working a neighbor’s field, he

had an epileptic fit and fell on his own shovel. Pascal, I was told, was

haunted by a Vazimba, who would periodically possess him. Some said it

was Rainitaba himself; others insisted it was a different, nameless

spirit, that he had first encountered while swimming in a pool to the

north of the village. All though remembered how Pascal would

periodically announce he felt the Vazimba beginning to move in him, and

how practically the entire population of the mainty quarter of Betafo

would set out across the fields to the north of the village, and then

gather to sing and clap, encouraging the spirit to emerge. The sessions

would always end the same way. After some time, the Vazimba would come

to him, and Pascal would bolt off randomly into the surrounding woods or

waters, whereon everyone would chase after him, to bring him back

again—in an endless drama of dispersal and retrieval.

These gatherings were organized with the help of another man— one I will

call Rainibe. Unlike Pascal, Rainibe was an experienced medium. This is

not how people around Betafo put it, though. Rainibe, people would tell

me, ‘had’ a Vazimba. Many insisted that he had moved out from his old

home in Betafo to found a new hamlet at the end of a long valley to the

northeast just to be closer to the field where it was. Every night when

there was a new moon his whole family could be heard out there, clapping

and singing to bring it out. Rainibe himself never admitted any of this

to me—in fact, he denied that he even worked as a curer. But this sort

of coyness was typical of people who had Vazimba, because being too

close to a Vazimba is a morally dubious thing: such spirits can not only

help one in curing, they can also take vengeance on one’s enemies,

making one little better than a witch. Most people in Betafo were very

careful not to pick a quarrel with Rainibe, and from the money he got

from curing and the fear he inspired he had managed to acquire quite a

bit of land, and to keep a very large number of his children and

grandchildren around him in his little hamlet by the fields. This was

the main thing that struck me when I would visit him in his hamlet,

occupied entirely by his own descendants. He was always surrounded by

children.

Rainibe did not entirely deny his links with Vazimba. His grandfather,

he said, had many years before been mysteriously pulled into the waters

underneath the dam to the northeast of Betafo, and wasn’t seen for days.

When he finally re-emerged, he told little, except that the spirit was

an old man with a long beard, dressed all in red, surrounded by endless

numbers of tiny children. He had stayed there for three days in all, and

all he had to eat was crabs.

‘Raw crabs?’ asked my companion, an andriana from Betafo.

‘I have no idea if they were raw or they were cooked.’ Then, deciding

this might be a bit too coy: ‘well, I guess there wouldn’t have been

cooked ones.’

‘Because you know what they say’ (everyone, apparently, knew this

story): ‘if you eat those, then they become your friend for life. But if

you refuse, they might even kill you.’

‘Yes,’ he smiled. So they say.

Just so as to show that anything is possible, let me end by noting that

towards the end of the time I was in Betafo I discovered there was

another of Rainitaba’s descendants living there. He was one of

Razanamavo’s sons, a man in his thirties named Tratra. Tratra too

claimed to be a medium. Nobody I talked to took these claims

particularly seriously: most considered him a drunken blowhard, and a

bit of a buffoon (‘if you really have spirits,’ Armand told me, ‘you

don’t go around telling everyone.’) But a few years before he had built

a little house near the ruins of Antandrokomby, just a few meters away

from the reedy pool Rainitaba is said to have inhabited before he

disappeared. He couldn’t afford to be around very often; most of the

time, like his mother, he was off looking for work. But it at least

suggests the possibility that, were one to come back in twenty years,

Rainitaba might have acquired a new and entirely different history.

Notes

I should thank Bruce Applebaum, Jennifer Cole, Jean Comaroff, Nhu Thi

Le, Stuart Rockefeller, and Hylton White for their many helpful comments

and suggestions.

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[1] I would like to thank Nhu Le for first suggesting this connection.

[2] Raombana’s ‘Annals,’ A2, no. 5: p. 74 (693–696). Raombana wrote his

history in English; in part to ensure that no one else at court could

read it.

[3] My generalizations about slavery are based partly on European

sources (e.g., Sewell 1876, Cousins 1896, Piolet 1896) but even more on

my readings of 19^(th) century Malagasy documents preserved in the

National Archives, notably court cases and the AKTA series (etat civil).

[4] I never found anyone in the present who recalled how slaves were

buried, though some pointed out that there were a few, exceptionally

generous masters who set aside a shelf within their own family tombs for

slaves; others built modest slave-tombs near their own.

[5] Most of the slaves emancipated in 1895 abandoned Imerina entirely.

Some returned to their former homes—if those places existed and they

still had any memories of them. Many others moved to lands newly opened

up for farming to the west. Even among those that stayed, only a handful

remained in their former villages. Some moved to towns like Arivonimamo,

working as porters, merchants, laborers; others moved off to found their

own settlements in depopulated comers of Imerina; many sought work in

the capital.

[6] When several black families did manage to get a foothold in some

village, their kin would usually follow, and often this would lead to a

kind of ‘white’ flight: the more the children of the mainty prospered,

the more the children of the fotsy would move out, so that after a

generation or two none of the villages’ former inhabitants were left.

[7] French documents from the second decade of the twentieth century say

that he was Rabakomanga’s father, and that she was bom in Antandrokomby

in the 1860s.

[8] Kalanoro are diminutive, human-looking creatures said to live in

watery places; one often hears that they are living versions of Vazimba.

[9] Armand’s brother Germain had gone much further: he had told me she

hadn’t ever had a child and then happened to pass by the stand of reeds

where Rainitaba was, saw the animal, and immediately afterwards found

she had conceived a male child.

[10] A kind of silk cloth from Betsileo, marked by bands of bright color

set between black and white stripes, worn during Betsileo funerals, but

also on festive occasions.

[11] MV: Izy manko efa ho faty izy, hoy ig>izany Hay renibenay, iizaho

izao efa ho faty3 hoy izy, tsy maintsy tonga aty auaratanana io,

an-baragp io. Dia izaho hoy izy aza alevina ampasana fa alefasao

hanarafy an3io renirano io. Dia hovidiana lamba arin-drano hoy izy,

ohatra an’ilay alevina vinanto-lahy izany, dia hoe ‘angamba tsy

rumdefany an’iny renirano iny, fa menatr’olona izahay. ‘A-an, tsy

menatra ianareo hoy izy io, fa hahita fahasoavina be ianareo raha

vitanareo izay.’ Dia tsy nanao izy’, fa nalevina ihany dia izoy lasa

izoy.

?: Rainitaba io?

MV: I-e, lavaka kely ohatra an’izao no nilevenany, tsisy fasana miditra

eo, amin3ny atsi-nanana. Dia nanao an’anona hamadika an’ilay olona dia

nitady lamba dia nijanona tsara Hay lamba. Izy naka.

Raha vitanareo iny zovatra iny dia ho any aminareo fahasoavina be. Dia

nitondraka ny rano—maty izy. ‘Izaho tsy tia lambamena, 3 hoy izy, fa

lamba arindrano, dia.... Ireny ilay lamba jisaona ireny izany.

Fa tsy manjaiy mahantra ny zanakareo, olona farana mandimby sy ny olona

any ivelany izy. Zavatra efa vao tsiryony daholo daholo mihitsy. Fa tsy

nahazo fahasoavina izahay fa tsy nanao. Apetraka amin3ny avaratra

indrindra amin3ny afovoany sy mbola tsy qftndra hatra-min’izao. Taloha,

taranany betsaka ihany fa efa vitsy izy izao.

[12] When she died in 1913 this land was estimated to be worth about 152

francs; actually somewhat above the average legacy for Betafo as a

whole. (Though this might simply be because none of the land had been

parceled out in advance among her sons.) Her husband, who had died in

1912, appears to have left no property at all to his descendants, which

is apparently the reason he has been entirely forgotten.

[13] Ingahivelona stayed in Andrianony, the mainty quarter of Betafo,

most of his life, as did his daughter Rabakolava, now remembered mainly

because of her unusual height. She had a number of children who either

married away or, reportedly, moved to town— though I never managed to

track any of them down. In her old age she lived by herself and like

most solitary old women was widely rumored to be a witch. Her brother

Pascal only died in 1985, but his children too have also since

disappeared.

[14] The first settlers of Madagascar undoubtedly came from somewhere in

this area: this is why Malagasy is an Austronesian language. But no one

has ever managed to come up with any evidence (linguistic,

archaeological or otherwise) for such a second migration. Despite this

it appears to remain unchallenged in the literature, it apparently never

occurring to anyone that, if the first inhabitants of Madagascar came

from Indonesia, and people had been coming from Africa ever since, the

inhabitants of the most isolated central highlands would be likely to

look the most like the original inhabitants.

[15] I am not suggesting that terms like fotsy and mainty, ‘white’ and

‘black,’ sure simply the products of missionary influence: they go back

to 19^(th) century social classifications which, however, originally had

a very different meaning. For further exploration of this point, see

Graeber, 1996a.

[16] Occasionally, people I asked about Vazimba would reply with

something to the effect of ‘well, you have to understand that the

Vazimba were really an entirely separate race’ (always using the French

word, race); and then go on to cite things they had read in books about

Malagasy history, or heard professors discussing on the radio. Even

Armand (who had been to college) did this the first time I asked him

about Vazimba; but it was a one-time thing, a kind of bow to the

authority of scholarship which seemed to have nothing to do with

anything else he had to say on the subject thereafter.

[17] The word razana, normally translated ‘ancestor,’ actually means

both ‘ancestor’ and ‘corpse.’ Vazimba were most definitively not razana.

When people chanced upon forgotten skeletons in their fields or wild

places, for example, they often speculated that they were the remains of

witches or lost travelers; but even if they ended up propitiating the

spirit of the deceased, they never referred to them as Vazimba; Vazimba

lacked bodies by definition.

[18] GR: Ny Vazimba aloha dia karazana zavatra tsy hita. Izy tsy miseho

vatana ohatry ny hoe olona sa £anaharin’ilay mitsabo olona ^anadrano

ireo. Raha toerana misy azy, dia ohatra hoe mitondra hena kisoa io,

izany hoe dia nentina izany tsy maintsy atao na. . .vao maty ny jiro dia

hitanao misy tanana manatona anao; efa vao mirehitra nyjiro dia tsy

hita. Izany hoe, ianao misasa tarehy} tsy fantatra na inona. Dia mety

lasa vonto be ohatra an’izany koa, dia tsy qfaka mihitsy hono raha tsy

evoahany—misy fanevokan’ny olona azy. AnateranHlay olona fanasina, izay

vao qfaka. Dia izay no tena hoe misy... tsy fantatra mihitsy na inona na

inona no ao anatin’ny rano fa izay fotsiny.

[19] In this, the basic underlying logic was not all that different than

that of famadi-hana, which as I’ve argued elsewhere (Graeber 1995) was

largely about the containment of ancestors.

[20] The connection probably would have made perfect sense to Europeans

who assumed that Vazimba were themselves the remnants of an African

population; slaves, after all, were mainly drawn from the coastal

populations of Madagascar, who were assumed to be equally African. But

clearly, this had nothing to do with Malagasy attitudes. I certainly

never heard anyone refer to Vazimba as ‘black.’

[21] This indeed is the gist of most previous analyses. Gerald Berg

(1977) for instance notes that in Merina king-lists, the earliest rulers

are referred to as ‘Vazimba’ because unlike later kings they were not

buried on solid ground; their bodies were thrown into lakes. Likewise

Bloch (1982, 1985, 1986) draws an opposition between ancestors

identified with ancestral land and Vazimba identified with water.

[22] Her fame—or at least her documentation—is in part due to the fact

that her grotto is located less than an hour’s drive from the center of

the capital.

[23] An interesting parallel with Rainitaba.

[24] Pier Larson (personal communication) has pointed out to me that in

the 18^(th) century, most Merina slaves were, in fact, Betsileo. Later

this was not the case, but since no single group ever gained the same

numerical dominance Bestileo once had, the identity might well have

lingered.

[25] Betsileo in fact are the only other people in Madagascar who

regularly perform famadihana.

[26] That is to say, just before the narrator’s living memory.

[27] An olon-javatra was the term he used, which means someone

constantly accompanied by an invisible spirit.

[28] NR: Fa ny zavatra hita raha tahaka ny army dia mpiandry ombin’ny

anadahin-drminay kosa atao hoe: Betsileo. Olon-javatra hono izy io. Iray

soa vahiny [Ohatry ny hoe, petrahan-java-tra izany]. Izy no niandry ny

ombin’ny anadahin-dreninay, tery an-tananay ambony andrefana tery,

tamin’ny and.ro taloha. Dia. .. nefa efa ho faty izy, efa antitra be

izy, dia tsy mba navelany ho fonosana lambamena na nofatorana. Fa dia

ambody sobika no nentina. Dia totorana. Dia rehefa auy eo izany a, dia

nojerena afaka telo andro, dia tsy too inisony tokoa. Ny lavaka dia

nisokatra be izao. Fa izy tsy Vazimba mihitsy fa hoe: olon-javatra

fotsiny. Izy efa antitra be Hay izy.

[29] V: Efa taloha ela be, efa naharoaka omby tamm’izany nandrangaranga.

Dia nisy mpikarama tamin-dry Rakotomanga no nipetraka tery Antanety

teny—Betsileo io. Ary izy nikarama nijinga vary. Ary rehefa nikarama

nijinja vary by, dia marary, dia maty teny ampanoaoan-draharaha teny Hay

Rangahy. Dia nileuina teo ambon’ny tanimbarin’ny teo ilqy Betsileo. Dia

rehefa nipetraka teo herintaona izy dia navoaka fanany. Navoaka biby

izy. Ary rehefa navoaka biby, mala too izy, dia niakatra too an-tranony.

Dia hoe: ahoana? Dia hoe: Ianona teo aloha avela? Dia nanantoka ny

hhan’ilay biby. Dia omena vary. Dia nihinana vary eo ny biby—ngeza be

hono izy (izaho tsy nahita maso) dia rehefa cay eo dia manao hoe: ary

rehefa izao ianao a, dia ianao marina no too, dia mendehana mandeha

mody. Mivoaka amin’ny tanindrazanao. Dia rehefa voiky teo iky biby, dia

lasa nandeha. Ary efa tonga tany izy, dia nanofy ilay Rangahy hoe Honga

aty amin’ny tanindrazako. Ary ry zareo izany, rehefa lasa izy lasa

nandeha teo iky fatiny. Ilqy olona tsy misy hita intsony.

[30] In fact, the word for ‘history,’ tantara, could be used to mean

‘privilege’ as well.

[31] Though almost all these ancient hamlets had long since been

abandoned, the slaves on liberation having moved further up the hills.

The almost ritualized invocation of Betsileo origins might also be

interpreted as serving as a kind of authorization to speak. In many

rural communities I found that even old Merina men would push the

descendants of Betsileo migrants forward to tell me local histories,

despite the fact they had been bom elsewhere, just on the basis of their

greater ability to talk.