8. Lost People

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 . . . (Raombana’s “Annals,” A2, no5: p74 [693–696])

So wrote Raombana, secretary to Queen Ranavalona I, around 1855, in a history which he wrote in English so that no one else at court could read it.

For its victims, brought as captives to be sold in markets in Imerina, the very first thing slavery meant was a complete rupture of the ties of love, kinship, and shared experience that had bound them to a home, to parents, friends, lovers, everything and everyone they had most cared for in their lives. Even when it was not brought about by wholesale mass murder—which it usually was—enslavement meant being ripped away from all of the objects that made life meaningful. It was first and foremost a loss of human relationships, but people at the time tended to speak of it as a loss of place. Slaves were “lost people” (olona very), wrenched from their ancestral lands, in an alien place among people who did not know them.

Even those born as slaves in Imerina found it extremely difficult to create enduring ties to people or to places. Slaves were always the most mobile part of the population. Few lived with their masters. Most did not even live in the same settlements: free men and women lived in towns or villages on high ground; slaves, in makeshift hamlets in the valley bottoms, near the paddy fields. One astrologer told me the reason people tend to shun low places nowadays was for fear of lolo. At night, ghosts travel through low places; they tend to follow the current of moving water, to flow along the damp bottoms of the valleys or sweep through the depths of moats. If so, slaves were exiled to confused tumultuous places full of chaotic memories and intentions, dislocated powers. But even in such places, few established themselves long.

Most hamlets were 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, lovers, and friends. They made up most of a murky, commercial, semi-criminal underworld whose inhabitants were considered intrinsically suspicious because of their very mobility. Slaves dominated petty commerce. They also made up the vast majority of burglars and highwaymen. This mobility made it easier to slip away from their owners’ claims on them, but it also ensured their uprooted condition remained permanent. I never found anyone, for instance, able to tell me how slaves were buried. The little I could glean suggested most had to make do with makeshift tombs— sometimes little more than covered pits—near their settlements. Almost always men and women of very different ancestries were buried together. It was only in the decades after liberation that some families were able to begin pooling their resources to create solid and substantial tombs.

Most of the slaves emancipated in 1896 abandoned these hamlets: either returning to their ancestral homes (if those places existed and they still remembered them), founding new villages, or moving off to town. Those who stayed on were almost always encouraged to do so by gifts of land. Remember that most rural communities like Betafo were dominated by a relatively small elite of wealthy families. After the French conquest, the children of these families largely abandoned the countryside, becoming doctors, engineers, or minor officials in the capital. Most, however, continued to be buried on their former ancestral lands, and to do so, they had to maintain land there. Most chose a few responsible, middle-aged men from among their former chattels and offered them gifts of land, on the understanding that they would also work for them as sharecroppers.

For others, winning access to productive land was an insuperable problem. White people would not sell it to them (their ancestors forbade it), or if they did, only for vastly inflated prices. In Betafo most mainty families traced their presence back to some financial windfall: if not a gift of land, then a military pension, an ancestor who married a local heiress . . . When one managed to win a foothold, kin were soon to follow, looking for similar opportunities. Occasionally, this could 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. To the northeast of Betafo were several villages whose white inhabitants had ultimately abandoned them entirely. But such cases were unusual.

The desire for land was not simply economic. Farming was not all that lucrative. Nor did former slaves seek land in order to escape a life of wage labor— most, in fact, continued to engage in wage labor even after they acquired land. The desire for land was first and foremost a desire to create a place for one’s descendants. Once there was land to pass on to one’s children, one could begin to think about a tomb. In Betafo, the first substantial mainty tombs—ones built on hilltops, rather than in the valleys—were constructed in the first two decades of this century. Building tombs was extremely expensive; in most cases several families had to pool their resources in order to be able to afford to build one. It is hard to imagine how many schemes, struggles, and how much monotonous, grinding labor must lie behind these simple structures of earth and stone— structures which represented the possibility of a permanent place for their descendants, that their names might be remembered after they had died.

As one might well imagine, all this ensured that tombs and the practices surrounding them took on a rather different meaning for black people than they did for white. Ancestors were not felt to be nearly such a constraint for those who were struggling to find a solid place; history was not such a burden for those who’d had theirs stolen.

According to any conventional anthropological definition, black and white people shared a common culture. The language they spoke was identical. There was no substantial difference in marriage customs, clothing, use of deferential speech forms, the kind of music each enjoyed. Certainly I never heard anyone refer to mainty customs. What made the two groups different was a difference in historical experience.

The existence of slavery was, certainly, central to how white people saw themselves in history. For them, the scene with which I began this chapter— in which rifle-bearing Merina soldiers rip families apart—could almost be considered a moment of original sin. Such scenes, endlessly repeated, ended up creating a population of hundreds of thousands of lost people who have remained among them ever since, a kind of permanent accusation. After the defeat of the Merina army at the hands of the French, however, images of soldiers and victims began to merge together in the popular imagination, until the word “soldier” became an emblem for the moral perils involved in any relation of command. Now, in a way, one could say this is a very insightful conclusion. If what one is trying to do is to understand how such endlessly repeated acts of treachery, mass murder, and destruction had been possible, the existence of structures of command in which individuals completely abandon their autonomy of judgment and subordinate themselves to another is just the place to look. Obviously, we are not talking about an explicit theory; it was more of a deeply felt, but only vaguely formulated suspicion of certain types of possible social relation. Still, it resonated throughout almost every reflection on history, and contributed to a much larger sense that the past was somehow laced with violence, that it was a terrible constraint on living human beings.

For the descendants of the victims, history looked very different. Like wage labor, relations of command were considered the inevitable result of poverty—so much so that many black people would hire and be hired by their own close relatives. Attitudes toward ancestors were also rather different. Ironically enough, many olona mainty—especially male heads of household— appeared to genuinely accept the very ideal of benevolent ancestral authority that for most white people often seemed more an uneasily maintained facade. All this comes much more clearly into focus when one looks at the history of particular families. The most dramatic contrast in the family histories that follow is between those families that actually did manage to secure a toehold, and ultimately, to turn Betafo into their ancestral land, and those who were permanently set adrift, and whose histories turned into stories of endless dissolution and displacement; a kaleidoscope of images that always centered on the murky figure of the Vazimba.

Antanarok’omby

Two of Betafo’s three most prominent mainty lineages hark back to a tiny settlement called Antandrok’omby, now long since abandoned, on a spur of land near the rice fields to the north of Antanety. Early colonial records suggest that together, three noble families probably owned about half the rice fields immediately surrounding Betafo—including all the land surrounding Antandrok’omby, and the vast majority of that hamlet’s slaves. After emancipation, the leaders of these families appear to have chosen two of its prominent men and granted them the entire stretch of valley. These, then, were the “good and faithful servants” Ramanana referred to in chapter 6, the trustworthy slaves who had not strayed too far from their masters, and were granted land and a place in the community as a reward for their years of mending walls, fetching firewood, and carrying manure—and as assurance they would continue to do so in the future.

Their names—Rainizanabohitra (b. c. 1870) and Rainimananandro (b. 1872)—were still remembered by just about everyone in Betafo, because each is now Great Ancestor of a prominent lineage.

The first appears to have converted to Catholicism—anyway, most of his descendants are Catholic today. In 1916, shortly after his death, his widow joined together with several friends and relatives to build a tomb on the ridge above their hamlet, called Ambohimasina. Two years later the other man, a Protestant, contracted to have a tomb of his own built at a place called Ambohitrimaninana, further east along that same high ridge.

1918 was also the year that Antandrok’omby was abandoned (for fear of bandits, I was told). Most of its population took refuge in Andrianony, the quarter of Betafo where most of its mainty population already lived. Rainizanabohitra’s descendants, the Catholics, all moved out again in 1935, to the newly founded village of Antanety, on the high ridge above where their ancient hamlet used to be, and there they remained when I knew them, a population of roughly sixty people in eleven houses. Rainimananandro’s descendants were, at that time, still living in Andrianony. In fact, Rainimananandro’s son Ingahirainy was still alive.

While Rainizanabohitra’s wealth was quickly divided up among four daughters, Ingahirainy was his father’s only son, and as a result he quickly became one of the wealthier men in Betafo—certainly the wealthiest of its mainty inhabitants. He has managed to collect a very large family around him. In his own house—placed as is appropriate to the north and east of those of his descendants—live his wife and her childless brother, nearby are two large houses owned by his eldest son, Norbert, and while I was there, work had just begun on building a new, huge, brick house for his younger son, Martin, recently posted as a math teacher in the public high school in Arivonimamo. Three more houses clustered around them were occupied by daughters or grandchildren. All in all it was the largest single family in Betafo: seven households, all descended from one man. Not surprising that he was also the one man who everyone in Betafo, black or white, was willing to consider a genuine, bona fide Ray amandReny.

It’s interesting to note that members of these two relatively successful lineages had little to say about their history. Their ancestors were people who grew rice, married, built tombs, had descendants, moved a bit from place to place. It is also interesting that, while Ingahirainy’s descendants owed their position to having been considered the most faithful and trusty of the andriana’s ancient servants, they were now considered among the most bitter and suspicious of Betafo’s black population—we have already heard about Norbert’s relations with Miadana. The paradox is nicely revealed by the two little snippets of history I did manage to tease out of them. One I was told by Norbert himself. The reason his family found refuge in Andrianony, he said, was because of the love between his grandfather and a simple andriana farmer named Rajaonera. Worried about the danger of bandits, Rajaonera had convinced his friend to abandon the old hamlet in Antandrok’omby, and helped build a new house for him in Andrianony, directly adjoining his own. Later, the two men sealed their friendship with a ritual of blood brotherhood. This is a story members of the family always cited, publicly, to describe their past relations with andriana. On the other hand, this history had a hidden underside: because this was also the family who, after Norbert’s quarrel with Miadana, constantly reminded her of their ancestor (Rainimananandro himelf? His father?) who had been tied up and thrown among the pigs. It was a token of the success of the family, one might say, that the history was itself so uninteresting: it took something very much like the form of the official andriana histories, a placid façade with all the elements of conflict and violence carefully hidden away.

The Story of Rakotovoalavo (Rakoto the Rat)

The story of Rakotovoalavo and his brother Rainilaimiza—two slaves who also remained behind in Betafo after liberation in 1895, and who stand at the head of another major mainty lineage—is much less uneventful. Here, the violence is foundational. As remembered now, the story centers on one shocking event: a brutal murder, committed, in Betafo, in 1901. Rakoto the Rat’s story is particularly dramatic because it has come to embody the limits of possibility for former slaves; he was a man who came very near to transcending the agrarian world altogether, by the same path as the sons and daughters of the wealthiest slaveholders took—by establishing himself among the educated colonial elite. In the end, he was brutally stymied.

The story begins with a woman named Black Rangory, a slave apparently, but one of an unusually high status. She might have been a local woman who been sold into bondage because of her parents’ debts or crimes. She appears to have been owned by a resident of Avarakady, a relatively modest andriana farmer named Rakotondrainibe, but unlike most slaves, she and her two sons actually lived with their master. They apparently had some money, too, since according to AKTA records, Rangory bought a paddy field in the adjoining valley in 1893: the price was twenty dollars, an enormous sum of money for a plot of land, larger than most ordinary sales by a factor of ten. Even more unusual was the fact that her eldest son Rakoto the Rat (b. 1872) was by 1880 already a registered student in the Protestant mission school. It was extremely rare for the children of slaves to be allowed to attend primary school, particularly in rural parishes. In Betafo, Rakoto may well have been the only one. Perhaps he had an unusually indulgent master, or his mother had greater influence than most, but by all accounts, he was a brilliant student.

Rakoto the Rat never had any children, and he is not buried in Betafo. The only reason anyone still remembers him is because in 1901 he murdered his former teacher, Ralaitsivery. I have already alluded to this story in chapter

5. For some, particularly amongst the andriana, this murder is seen as the defining moment of the history of Betafo. Ranaivo Karetsaka (Ranaivo the Bolt), who though seldom in Betafo is the head of the one andriana family that still remains in Avarakady, seems to feel it is his particular duty to remind his fellow andriana that the murder took place, to tell the story as a kind of admonition, a way of inveighing against the evils of internecine hatreds that have, in his opinion, wracked and shattered Betafo ever since. Others claimed never to have heard the story—Armand, for example, seemed honestly surprised when I told it to him. Others, descended from Rainilaimiza, Rakoto the Rat’s elder brother, undoubtedly knew a lot but guarded their council on the matter; to be honest, I didn’t think it would be very nice to press them.

First, background:

Recall Ralaitsivery’s history, which I sketched out in chapter 5. He was the eldest son of a captain in the Merina army, who had been made a kind of local constable when he retired. Ralaitsivery himself had gone in two or three years from being the most promising student in Betafo’s school to one of its three teachers. When Rakoto the Rat was a precocious mainty student in the school, Ralaitsivery was one of the men who taught him how to read. For almost twenty years, between 1878 and 1895, he was also the man who kept the local government accounts. When Madagascar became a French colony, Ralaitsivery did not receive an official post, instead he followed his younger brother Andriantonga, who was made Goverena Madinka, in charge of the commune that included Betafo, Kianja, and Andranovelona. He seems to have assumed he could continue to keep the books much as he always had, even without an official post. He also appears to have reinforced his authority by presiding over a revival of the tangena, the ancient poison ordeal that had been officially illegal since the time of Radama II (1861–1863). By this time, his former pupil was twenty-three, and apparently so renowned for his learning and so popular with the community that he was elected mpiadidy—in the colonial system, the rank immediately below Governera Madinika, a sort of local assistant responsible for Betafo itself. While Ralaitsivery was capable of generosity to former slaves—at least, he was one of those who gave the Antandrok’omby men their land—he seems to have drawn the line at the idea of a slave being granted public office or any role in government. The fact that Rakoto the Rat could have an official title, and he could not, infuriated him.

For the rest of the story, I will simply reproduce Ranaivo the Bolt’s account. Aside from a few dramatic details, there seems nothing in the story that is intrinsically implausible—in fact, I found many of the specifics confirmed by some very tattered French legal documents from 1902 that Miadana managed to find for me in a chest in her neighbor’s attic.

Ranaivo the Bolt, as I mentioned, seems to think of it as his role as elder in Betafo to remind the other andriana of what occurred. He rarely passed through town in 1990, and when on one occasion he was in, my friends on tampon-tanana quickly rushed me over to Avarakady, taking me up the winding stairs of the one tall house that now dominates the quarter, to a vast bedroom in the top floor. There he greeted me, a large wry man with something of the appearance of a Hollywood Roman senator, and almost immediately launched into his story. It never occurred to him that there would be anything else I would be interested in knowing from him:

Ranaivo the Bolt: According to the elders that lived here, we were stubborn people and badly behaved. The sort of people who would push the weak out of the warm spot by the fire, who spoke without thinking. And there was a functionary who once lived here, someone who did government business— from that part of town [pointing to tampon-tanana], who lived in that empty house there.

And there was another person of learning—a black person. When the French came in 1895, and all of Madagascar fell under the colonial regime, he was among those who had received education, who had learning, who the government enlisted to become officials and to carry out its affairs. Because in this town in which you live, many were the educated people enlisted to do government business.

And here too there was another educated person . . .

Miadana: Their names?

Ranaivo: Yes. There was one person in town who was murdered because he was savage, of a savage destiny, and he said things without thinking. His name was Ralaitsivery. And the one who murdered him: Rakoto the Rat. There was a certain Rasoavelo who lived here, the father of Ralaitsivery, and his wife was Rasoarivao. And his younger brother was named Ranaivo—Ranaivo Zandry. It was he who owned that abandoned compound to the south.

So later, another son of Rasoavelo, named Andriantonga, became the Governera Madinika. He was the younger brother of the person who was killed.

Miadana: Of Ralaitsivery?

Ranaivo: Ralaitsivery was the older one.

And there was a very educated man who became mpiadidy—because back then there used to be an office of mpiadidy. He was even more adept than the governor. And so the governor’s elder brother was envious of him. He insulted the mpiadidy. Bad words, insults on his sister, insults on his mother, the kind of insults that put people to shame, the kind of insults you just don’t use. So the one—the murderer, this is—would say “you shouldn’t act like that, sir. It isn’t right. We are people of the same ancestral lands, the same community, the same work for your brother. So don’t act like that, it’s not right.” So “get out of here! get out of here I have nothing to say to you! get out of here because it’s you who should shut up . . . What is this, this sister-fu . . . , this sis . . .” He used the worst possible kind of insults.

So starting in 1901, the office that used to be here in Betafo during 1896, 1897, and 1898 moved to Andranovelona. It was in Andranovelona until the 31st December 1930. So the victim’s elder brother went to Andranovelona, and the murderer also worked there, as he was the mpiadidy.

Miadana: This is to say he followed him there?

Ranaivo: He followed him there because it was government service, and one was Governera Madinika and the other mpiadidy. And the house of the one murdered was where Raoelizaka’s house is now . . . There were four houses here [in Avarakady] and six houses to the west [on tampon-tanana]. The people were all trodding on each other’s corns, with no space in between them. So everyone was just incredulous . . .

Miadana: Because everyone saw everything?

Ranaivo: Everyone saw everything. “Why does Ralaitsivery treat him like a dog? Why does Ralaitsivery insult him when there’s nothing wrong he’s done?” In the end, Rakoto the Rat decided he would murder him. For three years, he had been constantly humiliated. And the murderer, he didn’t answer back. He didn’t say anything. He was mild-mannered. Well-behaved. Popular with the fokon’olona. Always good with his neighbors. The murderer.

This was a major scandal at the time, and something I can’t help but know about because my parents really saw it—because the murderer lived right next to them, and the victim, right across that moat. The murderer said “I am hereby informing the elders and the fokon’olona that I have to go off on a journey.” Really he was going off to hire some bandits to help him kill the man who had humiliated him. On Tuesday the 19th of December, 1903, the people were all replanting the rice—it was that time of year. The people were all off in the fields replanting; it was early evening, dusk. Rakoto the Rat arrives with four bandits. He happens to catch at home the man who humiliated him. And his father. But they didn’t kill his father, they didn’t do anything to him but just lifted him up gently. “Ingahibe, out of the house with you, Ingahibe.” They carried him off to the east of the house.

Then, ti-pa! ti-pa! with rice pestles—it was rice pestles they used to kill him. From the bottom of his throat on up, there was nothing left to bury. Because they finished off his jaws with the pestles and smashed his brains. There was nothing left to bury because the things that had come out of his mouth were just too evil. Ti-pa! ti-pa! Smashed—they didn’t stop, not one. His shoulder bones, his chest bones, his eight-bones as we say, were broken in a hundred places before they were through with him. His ribs, broken in a hundred places. The bones of his fingers, broken in a hundred places. His arm bones, broken in a hundred places. There was nothing to identify him by because it was all mashed into his back before they were through with him.

That is the evil history where you live; this is the kind of place in which you live.

Then, come the end of the month of December, 1903, the killer was caught, arrested and taken before the government. They held the trial in Faravohitra. The whole fokon’olona was called up. They interrogated them: “What was the reason?” So the fokon’olona said: “This was the reason: Ralaitsivery, the victim, had humiliated Rakoto the Rat. He had insulted him in the worst way, shameful insults, words, words . . . And Rakoto the Rat didn’t answer back, he just went right off and killed him with a rice pestle.”

“You all go home now,” said the government.

Rakoto the Rat had been arrested, and then the decision came forth: life imprisonment. And Rakoto the Rat having been sentenced to life in prison, the fokon’olona went home.

That was . . . in 1904. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915,

1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920 . . . eighteen years. On the 28th of October 1920 a letter came for his brother—down there, that’s the house of the killer’s older brother—and this was the writing on the address on the envelope because I looked at it like this [squints up close]—because the killer was sharp as a tack you know, whether in French or Malagasy or transcription— “Ingahy Rainilaimiza, resident of Andrianony, Betafo, canton Andranovelona, district of Arivonimamo, province of Antananarivo, Madagascar.” And there was a big stamp on the envelope, which said “Guyane Française, South America.”

“Such was the story then,” said Ranaivo, at the end. “And now? Poo-a!” He turned and pretended to spit—poo-a! poo-a!, three times in an over-blown, comic-opera gesture which seemed only half self-mockery. Then, smiling:

Ranaivo: Even now there’s still some nasty shit down here. Theft, it’s been done. Destroying other people’s property out of spite, it’s done. Bewitching, sorcery—it’s done. There are sisika, needles placed under people’s skins. [he laughs] But that was the first history from here.

One of the most striking things about this story is its extremely factual style. The account is full of numbers. Facts and figures become the medium through which the characters live their lives. But this in itself is quite accurate. It was. They were both men who lived their lives surrounded by printed textbooks, slates and rulers, ink bottles, leather-bound ledgers, blotting paper, loose-leaf binders filled with rafts of printed forms. Such were the reasons for their prominence. If it were not for these technologies of accuracy, they would not have been characters worth telling about. Of course, all this was not simply a way of evoking a milieu: the narrator, after all, went through the same educational system geared to producing petty bureaucrats as the characters in his story. After finishing it, Ranaivo the Bolt immediately began asking me where I went to school. When I told him I attended the University of Chicago, he leaned back and began to recite the names of each of the five Great Lakes. An itinerant trader, Ranaivo, I discovered, carried a paperback pocket atlas of the world with him wherever he went, and seemed to have memorized at least half its contents.

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