Betafo, 1990

I was first drawn to Betafo because people there didn’t get along. Many of its inhabitants were practically not on speaking terms with one another. Now, it is a notorious thing in Madagascar that when a community is divided in this way, no one wants to talk about it. Certainly, not to outsiders. Rather than trying to win them over to their own side’s perspective, people are much more likely to see the whole situation as shameful for all involved. When dealing with outsiders, the impulse is always to emphasize the solidarity of one’s community, so as to gain a kind of moral authority that comes from embodying it; when that solidarity clearly does not exist—as in Betafo—people retreat into silence.

In Betafo they didn’t do that. Or at least, among the first handful of people I met from Betafo, there were several more than willing to talk about its conflicts. Mainly because, for one reason or another, they wished to rise above them. And while they always remained the people I knew best, once a wall of silence cracks it tends to collapse entirely; once word gets around that someone has been talking, then everyone starts to think perhaps it would be better to make sure their own perspective gets a hearing, too. Anyway, so it was in Betafo.

The first person I met from Betafo was named Armand Rabearivelo. At the time I was living in Arivonimamo, a town of about ten thousand people, where Armand was known as the man who trucked in bananas from the coast. He supplied most of the vendors in and around town. Two or three of his employees were usually to be seen in the marketplace, in front of a vast pile of bananas, young men unusual for their red berets and military-style clothing. I should explain here that roughly a third of the population in this part of Madagascar were called olona mainty, “black people”—supposedly more African than the “white” majority, and mostly made up of the descendants of nineteenth century slaves. Unlike most other black people in rural Imerina, Armand and his workers affected a style that recalled something of the African Nationalist posture popular in the capital in the late ’70s and early ’80s, mixed with the more generic idiom of the Third World Revolutionary. They listened to reggae and funk music; Armand, tall, slightly bearded, with a swagger (at least, by Malagasy standards it was a swagger) that was tempered by his obvious good nature, was a prime mover in local left-wing politics.

Armand saw himself as rising above the divisions in Betafo partly because he saw himself as an actor in a much larger world. He was a man of humble origins who had worked his way through college; for all the Africanist posturing, he ultimately saw those divisions—largely, divisions between black and white—as simple racism, the result of rural ignorance and narrow-mindedness: the very thing which reasonable people should unite to overcome. This, anyway was what I was eventually to discover, because Armand and his wife, Nety, eventually became good friends of mine. At first, though, I only knew him because of my friend Ramose Parson.

Parson was a biology teacher at the Catholic High School, and his wife had a hotely, a booth where she sold food in the marketplace. During my first two months in Arivonimamo I used to hang around there all the time. Armand was an old drinking buddy of Parson, and would often drop by in the afternoons when he was finished with business and had nothing else to do.

At that time I was gathering oral histories in the region surrounding Arivonimamo, Parson often accompanying me. On hearing of my project, Armand immediately volunteered to take us to Betafo, where, he said, there was a notable andriana—a royal ancestor—named Andrianamboninolona, whose descendants still occupied the place today.

Everyone assumed that andriana were intrinsically interesting. The hills were dotted with royal tombs, sites of curing and pilgrimage. But “andriana” also had a broader meaning. It referred not only to kings or royal ancestors, but it was also used to refer to their present-day descendants. Of the “white” population, about a third were themselves andriana (the rest were referred to as hova, or commoners.) The factions in Betafo were not just “white” and “black,” they were seen much more as a matter of nobles and their former slaves.

As a result, Armand ended up taking us to talk to two different people.

We went first to a hamlet called Morafeno to talk to a black person, one of Armand’s own relatives, a very old and rather eccentric astrologer named Ratsizafy; only afterwards did he take us to speak with a representative of the andriana, the President Fokontany, in the nearby village of Belanitra. Now, even at the time, it did strike me that the president seemed nervous about something. Not that I thought much about it: perhaps he was just a shy person, or found my presence intimidating. Anyway he seemed to loosen up considerably as time went on. After a while, all of us—Armand, Parson, the president, and myself—ended up walking together to the ancient village of Betafo, its center now largely abandoned and overgrown. We gazed admiringly into the vast moat-like ditches that surrounded the village, admired the stonework of some fallen pillars in the remains of a ruined mansion just outside it (I made sketches), inspected the ancestor’s large white tomb inside. It was a pleasant visit, informative enough as such visits went, but I had no idea of the undercurrents running beneath it all.

Which was, no doubt, what everyone would really have preferred.

Or—not quite everyone. I should make a confession here. Actually, the president had every reason to be nervous, seeing me walk in with Armand, fresh from a visit with Ratsizafy. No doubt he spent the first hour or so of our meeting hoping I wouldn’t ask him who Ratsizafy was, or about anything he had told me; and when he became more relaxed, it was only because I never did. This was not surprising, considering I hadn’t really understood much of what Ratsizafy said. When I had met him, he was coming back from the fields, with a spade over his shoulder and a wool cap on his head, drinking rum from a hip-flask; I turned on my tape recorder by a tree and he began to tell us stories in an old, cracked voice, talking mainly to Armand and not to me, softly at first, more and more forceful as he consumed the additional rum we’d offered him but also a lot more slurred. (At the very end, caught in a sweeping gesture, he tripped and fell over. “Oh, he’s all right,” said Armand, as I moved to help him up, “it happens all the time. He’s used to it.”) To be honest I had no idea what the story was even supposed to be about. It was only when Parson and I began trying to decode the recording later that I began to realize how interesting it really was.

But what really made up my mind to concentrate on Betafo was when I met a woman named Miadana.

I first met her completely by accident. Together with another friend from town, Chantal, I had wandered into Betafo on the first day of the lunar new year. This is a day marked all over Imerina (indeed, all over Madagascar) by rituals called fanasinana, and Armand had assured us that Ratsizafy always celebrated it by sacrificing a sheep (or at least a chicken), and that while Armand himself couldn’t make it, Ratsizafy would in no way mind if we sat in. Unfortunately, the message reached me somewhat secondhand—or, maybe it was just another example of my still uncertain command of the language—because when I set off that morning all that I was completely sure of was that I was going to Betafo to see some fanasinana.

So, around 10 am I was standing once again in the overgrown and largely abandoned center of Betafo, with Chantal, near the tomb of the andriana ancestor, wondering why the place looked as deserted as ever, cursing myself for being so stupid as to follow advice that I had obviously not even understood instead of simply going to the top of one of the famous mountains near Arivonimamo—where there were sure to be lots of people sacrificing—staring at the stump of my cigarette and wondering whether it would be all right to just throw it in the grass. Or were we just in the wrong part of Betafo? (In fact we were. Ratsizafy was off sacrificing in Morafeno. I never found that out till much later, however.) There were three houses near us. Two, traditional two-story red clay houses with high-pitched thatch roofs, looked empty. In one, more modern looking, there were signs of life. We came to the door, called hody-o!, and a woman emerged: thin-faced, about forty-five, with a guarded intelligent manner and one crooked tooth that jutted extravagantly from the corner of her mouth. She listened silently as we tried to explain that I was doing research on Malagasy history and customs, that we had actually been here before, once, but that we had heard there was supposed to be this ritual going on today, though it didn’t seem there actually was one, and if she knew anything about this we would certainly be obliged, or if not, as seemed likely, we were sorry to bother her and would just be on our way.

“Well, I don’t know anything about fanasinana,” she said, “but I could tell you something about history. Come inside.”

Inside was a large room with a double bed and several rattan chairs. The woman, Miadana, shooed away a couple of chickens that had wandered in from the yard, introduced us to her husband, son, and daughter, sent the daughter off to the kitchen to make us coffee, and began to narrate the history of Betafo. For the next two hours or so, she talked almost continually. She told us about the origins of the local andriana (her family was andriana, these being the nobles whose ancestors first founded the community), described traditional customs and taboos. It was a very traditional community. There was no end to customs and taboos. Her family systematically violated them. We break all the ancestral customs, she said. We’ve only been living here five years now, we’re still used to the life of the capital—to living like normal people—and all of a sudden we’re supposed to completely give up eating onions and garlic? But of course, one has to be secretive about these things. If you grow garlic, you have to grow flowers around them to disguise the smell. People are always scolding us, threatening to tell Ratsizafy, but no one’s ever caught us red-handed. And she also intimated something else. These aren’t really ancestral customs, she said. Not ours, anyway. Really, all this fuss about taboos was part of a game played by Ratsizafy and his cohorts, a way of intimidating the andriana and making their lives more difficult.

Before I go any further let me remark that Miadana was a stupendous verbal performer. Also, a very enthusiastic one. During this first meeting—during which she incidentally never even stopped to ask me who I was and why I was interested in Betafo—her husband, a handsome man of maybe fifty, remained almost completely silent. Occasionally, he would try to throw in some gruff comment or to answer one of our questions, but only to be immediately overwhelmed by Miadana’s flow of words. It didn’t seem to bother him particularly. But for me, the effect was almost surreal, because one thing I had consistently noticed in rural Imerina was that women always deferred to men when it comes to the telling of history. I had even seen mothers insist I interview their sons—and then proceed to coach them when they made mistakes. Miadana seemed entirely unaware of this convention. Even more odd, when now and then she got stuck for a name or a date, she would always turn to her twelve-year-old son (actually he was fifteen, but I thought he was twelve at the time—he had a baby face) who would then, in a slightly bored tone of voice, supply it: “It was 1931, mom.”

I suppose I could have written this family off as eccentrics, anomalies, misplaced members of an educated elite entirely unrepresentative of the community around them. Instead, my main thought was that I really liked them. Perhaps it was Miadana’s way of immediately making me feel complicit in transgression, perhaps it was her sense of humor, or the fact that she so obviously wanted to talk to me, to talk about things others preferred not to. But when she urged me to come back soon, I decided that she meant it, so I did. Before long I was a regular visitor.

Nety, Armand’s wife, had only good things to say about Miadana and her family. They were decent people who wanted to get along with everyone; it wasn’t their fault that so many of their neighbors wouldn’t have anything to do with them. It was typical of the tensions in Betafo, Nety said: their neighbors were black people, Miadana was white. Nety herself seemed genuinely depressed by the whole business. I remember once a man named Desi, an andriana from the village of Belanitra (where I had met the President Fokontany), came to visit Armand on some minor business. Armand was out, Nety invited him in but Desi preferred to hover outside the door for twenty minutes or so until her husband showed up. “That’s what those people from Belanitra are like,” she told me afterward. “Perfectly polite: they’ll always say hello, exchange pleasantries. But then that’s it. You never feel you could really get to know them.”

Armand’s opinion was that the tensions in Betafo had not been going on for very long. When he was growing up, Betafo was a really strong, solidary community. It was only since he had come back from college, really, that it had gotten to the point where people in the northern and southern halves of the fokontany wouldn’t even invite each other to weddings and funerals. The definitive break had only happened about three years before.

This was an opinion I would hear repeated quite frequently over the next year or so, during which time I became more and more immersed in the affairs of Betafo. Most people, in fact, were willing to be even more precise. The definitive break occurred in 1987, during a communal ordeal that ended in disaster. Over and over, I heard the story of the disastrous ordeal of 1987. In its own way, it served as a charter for the rupture of the community: though the fault lines had been evident long before, it marked the point where no one could any longer deny them.

It was Miadana herself who told me the story the first time, during our first meeting, though I had little idea of its import at the time. The basics of the story were this: there had been a spate of robberies in the community of Betafo. The fokon’olona—the communal assembly—decided to hold a collective ordeal, which was a way of invoking the power of the ancestors to punish whoever was responsible. The usual practice was to have everyone drink some water which had been mixed with earth taken from the ancestral tomb. But there was a problem. The inhabitants of Betafo were of two different ancestries. So they took dust from the tombs of both major ancestors and mixed them together. Mixing them, however, turned out to be a terrible mistake.

Here is her own first account of the affair:

Miadana: There was a time here when there was lots of petty thievery: if there was manioc growing in the fields, if there was corn growing in the fields, then there would be someone stealing it. So “we’ll hold an ordeal,” they said. They were going to hold an ordeal. So over in Belanitra—you know where that is? There’s a fokontany office in town there, and everyone, the entire community all gathered together there. And they took a bowl and put water in it. They got some dust from here, and someone else went to get dust from over there [pointing northeast]—because there’s a tomb up there, too.

That is, one of the people organizing the ceremony collected dust from around the andriana tomb in the center of the Betafo [a few yards from the house where Miadana was telling me this] while another went across the rice fields to a hill to the northeast, where the ancestor of Ratsizafy, the astrologer, was buried, and got some there. Generously, Miadana allows Ratsizafy’s claim that his ancestor was some kind of andriana as well:

Miadana: Now, that one: that too is the tomb of an andriana; it belongs to the people from Morafeno. But you know, the two of them were rivals. That is to say: the andriana who lived here, and the one who lived over there. They were opponents. Rivals.

So they took the bowl of water and dropped some gold into it. Gold. Then they took the dust from here and the dust from there, and when they’d added that the people all lined up. One by one, each was taken up and given a spoonful of the water to drink.

And each drank it, saying as they did, “We drink this water, so that if it was ever I who stole, if it was ever I who did this, if it was ever I who did that, then let those two ancestors kill me on the spot,” as it would be both the two ancestors who would—how do you say?—who’d smite them.

So, “What,” you say, “happened next?”

It was summertime. It was the middle of summer. And according to the belief around here, both of these ancestors were of andriana status—but the two of them had been chasing each other around constantly in the past. They both used to live here, you know, but then there was a fight, and one was defeated and left. And later his children made those tombs.

David: What was his name?

Miadana: Rainitamaina. From Morafeno. Nowadays they have their tomb way over there; they don’t come around here any more.

David: And he and Andrianamboninolona, were they related?

Miadana: There was some slight relationship. But . . . they didn’t get along, and the one was defeated and driven away. He left.

But despite that, during that ordeal, they combined the two. After all that happened, they were combined. During the ordeal.

“So what happened then?”

Now, I don’t know if this was really true, or just a coincidence—I have no idea. But this is what happened:

It was summertime, like it is now, and the rain was due. The rice: the rice had all been harvested. It started raining, hard. And the rice belonging the people who had called the ordeal was . . . it was . . .

The rice belonging to the person from Morafeno was all swept away. Carried away by the rainwater. It went all the way down to Ambodivona—and only his! [laughs] It was really funny. Really really funny. All the rice he’d harvested wound up down there—more than a kilometer away! And what? So they started asking: “So how come all of our rice got carried down into the fields by the water, but your rice didn’t get carried off, none of your rice was carried off at all?” And some people said: “Yeah, well, didn’t you put people who didn’t get along together in the same bowl?” The rain came. “And wouldn’t it be carried away by the rain?”

So it was obvious what had happened. And from then on there haven’t been any more ordeals. Not any more.

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