Catastrophe

By now it should be easier to understand how there could have been so much tension in Betafo; so much mistrust between the andriana, most of whom were increasingly impoverished farmers, and Betafo’s mainty population, who seemed to be doing relatively well. In this chapter, I can finally answer some of the questions posed in the introduction: what exactly had happened in 1987, when a communal ordeal meant to reassert the solidarity of the community ended up being remembered as the final proof that solidarity was ultimately impossible, and thus marking a definitive split between the two.

If one has to define a starting point for the series of events that directly lead up to the disaster of 1987, the logical place would be Ratsizafy’s second marriage, twenty years before, to an andriana woman from Belanitra. It was this marriage, more than anything else, which made Ratsizafy’s claims to status an issue, something local andriana could not simply ignore, because it meant there was now at least a handful of fellow andriana who were committed to defending them. In the end, the community of Belanitra itself (entirely composed of andriana) split into factions; this, in turn, sharpened the opposition to Ratsizafy on the part of the vast majority of andriana not directly involved in the conflict, at the same time as it only heightened Ratsizafy’s own desire to win them over. The fact that his wealth, and his fame outside Betafo, continued to grow greater and greater during all this time did nothing to make matters any simpler. It was the tensions generated by this situation that finally burst (partly) into the open in 1987.

Background

Betafo’s andriana were probably already talking about the decline of their community even before the fire in 1931. The great families were already disappearing; fewer people remained, and those that remained were doing worse. But at the time, no one could have been talking yet about the rising fortunes of their former slaves. Out of the 250 residents of the eastern fokontany in 1921, black people made up only a fifth—and most of them were landless laborers.

Thirty years later, in 1959, on the eve of Malagasy independence, matters had not much changed. True, the andriana population had dipped sharply—to around 115—but the number of mainty had risen only slightly, to 71, and most were still extremely poor. It was in the 1960s that things really began to change.

Not that Madagascar’s independence, in 1960, made much of a difference for rural society. The new government kept almost all of the old, colonial institutions in place: the same administrative system, tax collection, and gendarmes. In Betafo, the man responsible for representing the community before the state authorities continued to be the same: an andriana of relatively modest origins named Razafindrazaka, whose official title was notable—a position roughly equivalent to the modern President Fokontany. Razafindrazaka was one of three brothers who made up the core of the andriana presence in Andrianony; the other most prominent of Betafo’s andriana were Raoelizaka, who had recently moved back to tampon-tanana, and the old eccentric Rakotonarivo Auguste, who was still living in his great mansion in Atsimonkady— the last vestige of the former great families. Rakotonarivo and the notable were good friends, and joint sponsors of the greatest projects of the times: the rebuilding of Andrianambololona’s tomb on tampon-tanana in 1967.

The center of Betafo had, it will be remembered, laid largely abandoned after the fire of ’31, and even the tomb had fallen into disrepair. Old people still spoke glowingly of how the village filled with ox carts and workmen as far as the eye could see, dragging vast stones and laying down concrete; of the crowds assembled from all over Madagascar for the famadihana, the great speech Rakotonarivo delivered in dedicating the new tomb (with its exactly dated inscriptions), of the music, feasting and dancing afterward. It was a glorious moment, but almost as soon as it was over, the order that created it started a precipitous decline. The three brothers had a great falling out and then died one by one over the course of the next five or six years; by the end all were so alienated from one another that they were buried in three different tombs. Their children scattered. Within a decade Andrianony had become an almost entirely mainty settlement. Rakotonarivo Auguste’s mansion collapsed only a few years after the dedication; he spent the last few years of his life in his wife’s old house in her natal village of Belanitra, increasingly sickly, until he finally died in 1974. By the time of the political upheavals of 1972–1975, which led to the collapse of the machinery of repression and eventually, withdrawal of the state, the local representatives of that order were already dying out.

It is against this backdrop that Ratsizafy’s rising fortunes can best be understood. When Ratsizafy came into his own, in 1961, he had already been Betafo’s most prominent astrologer for at least a decade. His work gave him access to money, and he appears to have been very skillful in investing it. Ratsizafy was among the first to take advantage of Rakotonarivo Auguste’s financial woes during the 1960s, and he ended up with the largest single share of his former holdings. Not only that, he developed a reputation as a man always willing to produce money for a loan, whenever an andriana was in trouble—loans which were in many cases really just euphemisms for land sales, or which anyway ended up that way. Particularly in a time when the power of the state was in retreat, his reputation for having enormous resources of hidden power must have strengthened his hand enormously heading off any resulting disputes.

In 1967—the same year as the great famadihana—when Ratsizafy was sixty-one years old, he married Razanajohary, an andriana from the village of Belanitra. Razanajohary was already forty-five years old but she was of proven fertility—having already had six children by her former husband, the youngest born only a year or two before. And indeed she quickly bore Ratsizafy two sons: Pano, in 1968, and then Noely, on Christmas day 1970. Not only did he finally have children, then, to inherit his position, he also had a number of important allies in Belanitra who now had every reason to defend his assertions that he too was, in some way, an andriana. It is quite likely that he would never have felt in a position to build his magnificent new tomb at Ambohitrimaninana in 1978, with its ostentatious trano manara, without having won acceptance for his claims by at least some of Andrianamboninolona’s descendants.

Belanitra

Now, to understand how this marriage could take place, one has to understand something about the village of Belanitra. For most of this century, it has been the largest single settlement in the eastern fokontany of Betafo, and has always been entirely andriana. It was also notoriously difficult for a stranger to break into. After my first interview with Rajaona, the President Fokontany, for example, I never got to speak to the man again, despite sporadic overtures. He always had something else to do. His attitude was, I was told, typical of Belanitra: inwards looking, suspicious, not comfortable dealing with outsiders. They were notorious for only marrying each other. But at least in the present, they are also famous for being extraordinarily poor.

Almost all the land in the thin valley between Ratsizafy’s settlement in Morafeno and the village of Belanitra belongs to members of two of Belanitra’s families: the southern half, to the descendants of Rakotovazaha (Razanajohary’s husband before she married Ratsizafy); the northern, to the descendants of a couple called Rakoto and Raketaka, who died in the 1920s. The fields are mostly tiny, mediocre in quality, and difficult to work. In neither case do they provide anywhere near enough rice to feed their present-day descendants. At least when I was in Betafo, when one of them descended into the valley, it was much more likely to be in order to seek work in Morafeno as to work their own fields. In the winter, most picked up a good deal of their cash income doing odd jobs for Ratsizafy: cutting wood, painting, building fences, or tending sheep. In purely economic terms this is not, perhaps, surprising. These are some of the poorest people in Betafo, and Ratsizafy was rich. He had far more land than he could work himself, and plenty of money to pay for laborers. They were in desperate need of cash. On the other hand, white people tend to avoid getting involved in ongoing relations of wage labor of any kind, let alone with those they do not consider kin. For an andriana, however poor, finding oneself in the regular employ of a descendant of one’s own former slaves would have been the ultimate humiliation. But these andriana did not see Ratsizafy as a descendant of slaves; or anyway, they insisted he too was a kind of andriana.

By marrying Razanajohary after the death of her husband Rakotovazaha, Ratsizafy managed to largely win over both of these two families. Rakotovazaha’s (d. 1966) six children were of course Razanajohary’s too; and all looked on Ratsizafy as a sort of father. They were the ones who appeared most regularly to work for him in Morafeno, but Ratsizafy helped them in all sorts of other ways: he provided meals, advice, small gifts of money, bailed them out of financial scrapes, helped with the education of their children. Nor did he expect very much in return, except for loyalty. It was altogether in his interest to have a devoted following amongst the andriana. It must also have been particularly personally satisfying, for a man who had spent so much of his early childhood living in exactly this sort of relation with his andriana patron from Anosy. From Razanajohary’s perspective, the advantages were self-evident: she was perhaps the only woman in Belanitra whose grown children were all still there.

11.1.  Ratsizafy’s marriage

Figure 11.1 represents a very simplified genealogy of the two families. Rakoto died in 1920; his two sons had both died shortly before I arrived, but when I asked who were Belanitra’s real Ray amandreny, their names were always the first that would come to people’s minds. During the last years of their lives, both were said to have become regular visitors at Ratsizafy’s: clients, even political allies.

The people represented in diagram 11.1, then, were for the most part willing to accept Ratsizafy from the start. Most other families that made up Belanitra were, apparently, much more guarded on this issue.

When people described social groups, they generally talked about their tombs. By this logic, Belanitra was made up of three major ancestries (figure 11.2). Ratsizafy’s allies (#1–5) all ultimately traced back to the tomb of Rakototsintsina, a large stone-faced tomb located just outside the walled precinct of Antsahasoa, built in 1878. No one was quite sure how this tomb fit into the overall hierarchy of the deme, but most described its descendants as “simple people,” not having much to do with the great ruling families of tampontanana. The second (#6–8), trace to a tomb at Ambohimasina, along the abandoned ridge that lies at the northern fringe of the deme. It was not entirely clear how they fit into the overall hierarchy either, but (like Irina’s family in Antanety, whose tombs were also on this ridge) they saw themselves as somewhat higher in status.

11.2.   Belanitra families

The third (#9–11) group, referred to as “People from Antsahasoa,” are all, in one way or another, descendants of Andriamaharo.

The reader will by now be familiar with the figure of Andriamaharo: wealthiest and most important man of Betafo in the 1840s, founder of its church. Antsahasoa was abandoned around 1900, and most of his descendants eventually moved out to newly opened lands out west. However, the three families that did remain in Betafo’s territory that did regularly make use of the ancient tombs located within the walls of Antsahasoa were all in Belanitra: most notable among them Rajaona, the President Fokontany (#9), and Solofo, the impoverished smith and reputed witch-catcher (#10). Rajaona was considered the local “owner” of the old earthen tomb of Andriamaharo, Solofo, of the huge stone tomb of his son Andriamihagarivo, located directly to its south.

These ties had an enormous effect on what sort of people Rajaona and Solofo—both men of decidedly modest means—took themselves to be. Antsahasoa itself is an empty compound, its ruined houses overgrown with grass and eucalyptus trees. Normally, its proprietors didn’t even set foot there—perhaps they occasionally trimmed some wood for charcoal-making but certainly they never grew anything there. But every few years, people who normally lived in other parts of Madagascar would converge on it, open its tombs, recount the memories of its most distant ancestors while touching the remnants of their bodies. Rajaona and Solofo were the local guardians over those memories— which, however ambivalent, however much they even partook of a certain terrifying violence, were also guarantors of status, placing them at the very center of a history still valued by men and women in Antananarivo and Mahasolo— many of them far wealthier and more influential than they.

Did the Antasahasoa people actually preserve a memory that their ancestor had once owned Ratsizafy’s? I would love to know, but even if they did, it was hardly the sort of thing they would have told outsiders. Certainly, everyone had heard the story of how Andriamaharo had thrown Rainitamaina in the pigsty, and how his rice was cursed for seven years, how Andriamaharo’s descendants had themselves been cursed. Hardly surprising then that Andriamaharo’s descendants were from the beginning utterly unwilling to accept Ratsizafy’s marriage, and his newfound, grandiose pretentions. Before long, they had managed to bring the Ambohimasina people—who at first had wavered—over to their camp.

The conflict, then, did come down largely to a difference over history. At first, though, it had to remain somewhat covert.

When I talked to Razanajohary’s children by her first husband, for instance, they would always dutifully affirm Rainitamaina’s noble status. What was the reason, I once asked Rasata, for his quarrel with the Andrianamboninolona? He paused, then smiled: “He wasn’t willing to be made a slave.” He said it accompanied by an eager, smiling glance at a descendant of Rainitamaina who happened to be sitting on the street next to him at the time, a little like a student pleased to have remembered the correct answer during a surprise quiz. But still, he seemed to me not entirely insincere. At the same time, others, like the descendants of Andriamaharo, kept their own council. They might not have said anything against him, in front of others, but neither were they willing to say much else. There were no open arguments, but exchanges between neighbors became more and more likely to contain uncomfortable silences. Many of Ratsizafy’s clients began to frequent other astrologers; many even stopped taking their children to him when they were sick. The andriana of Anosy, a village of five or six households to the south of Belanitra, had always shunned Ratsizafy and relied on Dada Leva. Many from Belanitra began to follow suit. Dada Leva—who was either unintimidated by Ratsizafy’s powers or had to pretend, for reasons of professional image, that he was—was willing to openly declare that Ratsizafy’s claims were entirely spurious, that his ancestor was nothing but a thieving slave.

Within the territory of Betafo, covert stories circulated. While few seemed willing to challenge Ratsizafy’s stories about the distant past, there was a constant struggle over who could impose a narrative structure on events, which also meant, who could determine their moral significance. Irina’s family from Antanety—who had their own hail charm, and came closest to being declared rivals of Ratsizafy—seemed most conspicuous in wanting to take this role. They might not have given me an argument when I told them Ratsizafy’s version of his ancestor’s quarrel with the andriana, but they did insist that his marriage to Razanajohary had been the result of witchcraft. Rakotovazaha, the woman’s former husband, had been ill. When he and his wife went to Ratsizafy, Ratsizafy gave him poison, and slipped his wife love medicine. How else would such a thing have happened except through medicine?

The problem with this interpretation was that it did not explain how the Ingahibe could have gotten away with it. The woman who first told it to me herself went on, not ten minutes later, to insist that anyone, male or female, who uses love medicine to seduce an andriana will always be die because of it, and most likely in some terrible way, and almost certainly, leave no descendants to remember them. But there was Ratsizafy, living to a ripe old age, with two perfectly healthy male offspring. As a genre, stories of transgression were always also stories of punishment; the proof, one might say, was in the comeuppance. Until the culprit had experienced some unexpected disaster, or at least could be said to have done so, the suggestion of wrongdoing was a mere potential, an accusation awaiting evidence. The Malagasy language is rich in terms for people who make false accusations; it was, as in most places, considered a distinctly ugly thing to do. Most people, whatever they thought of Ratsizafy, would be reluctant to suggest—in any company—that anyone they knew would be capable of such extreme depravity without some kind of evidence.

Of course, Ratsizafy was himself, as a curer, in the best position to establish narratives about others’ hidden misdeeds or malicious intentions—for those who came to him. Over the years since his marriage, I was told, he had been able to largely reshape allegiances within the community of Belanitra by manipulating where its households got their water: sowing such suspicions between households that his supporters ultimately abandoned their old spring and began getting their drinking water each morning from the spring at the head of the valley between Belanitra and Morafeno, periodically creating new suspicions and intrigue by encouraging individuals to yet more distant springs . . .

At the same time, other curers—first and foremost Dada Leva—played the same game with his opponents. All such curer’s stories had a certain hypothetical air to them—in part because people would often have to go to several curers in a row for the same condition, and thus have often heard a whole series of different possible explanations for its origins. Almost all of this speculation was covert, and unavailable to me. But there was one that I did happen to hear about, rather by coincidence. One day I was chatting with a Zanadrano in Arivonimamo who, when I mentioned I was doing research in Betafo, remarked that he had once treated a boy from Belanitra who had been afflicted with ambalavelona; someone had caused him to develop dangerous fevers by afflicting him with a malicious ghost. A delegation of six or seven people had brought him in. The medium invoked his spirits, and soon determined that it was Ratsizafy who had done it. As soon as he revealed the culprit’s name, he said, they immediately started asking him if there wasn’t some way to cast the illness back on him, or even, take revenge by afflicting him with something worse. “Of course I told them that I couldn’t. The spirits do not allow their powers to be used to do others harm. But they were offered me all sorts of money if I would.”

Do You Want to Be Rich?

During the 1970s, as the tombs were built and renewed at Ambohitrimaninana, the demographic tide also swung increasingly in the favor of the mainty. Fewer and fewer andriana managed to keep their children from leaving the ancestral territory, more and more mainty families did. By the late ’80s, andriana made up only a slender majority of the population in the eastern fokontany of Betafo.

Much of it had to do with the economic crisis that began in the mid-70s, and the continual decline of standards of living. Imports and manufactured goods became infinitely more expensive; everyone needed more and more ways of getting money to be able to maintain even the most minimal standards: to keep themselves in candles, cooking oil, occasional new clothes, notebooks for their children. Black people, all too familiar with the world of wage labor, were in a far better position to adapt. Most were also more familiar with practical techniques of commerce. In Betafo, for instance, many andriana farmers reacted to the crunch by taking up blacksmithing. Ironwork was a traditional andriana occupation, every village had at least one two men who already knew how to do it, and knives, spades, and other implements were marketable commodities. The results were almost always disastrous. It was the merchants who supplied the metal, and then disposed of the products, who really made money on the deal; the smiths just barely made a profit, and the labor was so timeconsuming that usually they ended up neglecting their own fields, which left them even more dependent on the market, since they had to buy more food. At the same time, while there were a few black people in Betafo who dabbled in metalworking, a much larger number went into the business end, becoming part-time ironmongers, which proved a far more effective way of supplementing income.

It was probably in 1970s and ’80s, as white people became fewer and black ones wealthier, that most andriana developed the theory that they were being visited by divine punishment for their misdeeds. As always, there was more than one way to talk about it. On the one hand, a disaster was always the proof of wrongdoing. On the other, vast success was usually evidence for the manipulation of medicine, or other immoral practices. Ratsizafy’s wealth, and his increasing fame outside of Betafo, was an obvious case in point. The more his fame increased, the more he could be seen as drawing on covert networks of money and influence that were almost by definition tainted and corrupt.

By the time I knew him, Ratsizafy was known as a curer as far away as the capital. His son Pano proudly informed me he would often get referrals from doctors in urban hospitals, whenever they concluded their patients were suffering from Malagasy ailments, beyond the range of Western medicine. If one dropped by his house, one was likely to meet men in military uniforms, women in stylish French apparel with leather jackets and silver cigarette cases, the sort of people one would never otherwise see descend into the countryside; they always brought the traditional offering of rum, but also, substantial sums of money. All sorts of cars began to be spotted making their way up the pockmarked road that lead north from Arivonimamo, a road so rarely traveled by automobiles that one’s passage was almost automatically a subject for widespread speculation and gossip. But the most celebrated visitor—and he rapidly became one of Ratsizafy’s most frequent visitors—was a man from Arivonimamo named Manambe.

Manambe, everybody knew. He was the richest man in Arivonimamo. By the mid-80s, he was also a regular client of the Ingahibe. He had first come to Morafeno because of the illness of one of his children; before long, he was a devoted follower, never entering into a major new venture without consulting Ratsizafy first, buying all sorts of medicine from him. Each time Manambe bought another car or van, he would have it driven up to Morafeno, into the yard of Ratsizafy’s great white house, where the old man and his sons would sprinkle it with water that had been mixed with the scrapings from various bits of medicinal wood to ward against accidents. Manambe was among those who held extensions of Ratsizafy’s hail charm, Dry Rock; each year, on the new moon of the month Alakaosy, he would appear at the rituals to manasina it held at Ambohitrimaninana, and contribute his share of money to buy the sacrificial sheep.

Now, I actually saw Manambe quite a lot when I was living in Arivonimamo. About fifty years old, he always dressed in a simple Malabary, a gruff, square-shaped person with the abrupt, perfunctory air of someone used to making instant judgments. He affected an air of rustic simplicity, shunning the exterior trappings of wealth. But men like that didn’t need to show off. His wealth was legendary. Everyone knew about his endless herds of cattle at pasture in the meadowlands out west, his vast fleet of cars, his innumerable houses. And there was a broad consensus, too, as to how he had come by his money. He had stolen it. How else could anyone possibly become so rich? Or, to be more precise, there was something that had stolen it for him. As almost everyone in Arivonimamo could could tell you: he had a Kalanoro.

Kalanoro are creatures similar to humans; usually, they were represented as tiny women with long flowing hair. Some said they are a kind of Vazimba, others, that they were living creatures that become Vazimba when they die. Still others treated them as yet another variety of lolo. Like Vazimba, they could form relationships with humans. They were however always said to be demanding and difficult to keep; most of all, they imposed all sorts of dietary restrictions.

I first heard Manambe’s story from Rakoto, the astrologer, Ratsizafy’s nephew from Morafeno.

Rakoto: Now, Kalanoro are similar to . . . they’re like what you’d call Vazimba They’re a kind of Vazimba. Vazimba exist; they are living people just like us, except that they can’t be seen by the eye. And they won’t eat cooked things. Raw fish, raw chicken, that’s what it’s the nature of Kalanoro to eat.

They won’t reveal themselves in the open; when they walk abroad, even if they do it at high noon and walk up to the marketplace, they will be surrounded by a darkness.

Parson: Is that so?

Rakoto: Kalanoro are like a second God. They resemble other creatures that God fashioned except that God gave them a special gift; he gave them a power [ fahaizana] like unto his own. They are genuinely close to God. Because they can just enter a house in the night, and there won’t be any sign of a break-in: no door opened, no wall broken in. That’s how they enter, then they leave in the same way.

Take the example of Manambe, he explained. In the beginning, he was a poor man, making his living driving an ox cart back and forth between Arivonimamo and Amboanana. Then one day, the spirits just happened to take a fancy to him. They pressed down on him, spoke to him on the road, and they offered him a deal: if he were to agree to abstain from the foods they hated— not to eat chicken, not to eat cooked fish, not to eat pork—for ten years, and to keep the arrangement an absolute secret from everyone else, even his wife, then during that time they would give him three bushels full of money. If at any time he broke the agreement, they would kill him.

Manambe kept to his agreement, and as a result, they showered money on him. They provided him with a box of money that never seemed to run out.

. . . they brought money, brought cows, brought money, brought cows: Manambe no longer had any idea what to think. The only work he had to do was buying cars, buying cattle fattening at pasture—by now he has more than four thousand cows at pasture, and sixty-seven automobiles.

Then, when about ten years had passed . . . “Your appointed time on earth,” they said, “has come. Now you will die, and join us.” That was when Manambe came to his senses and built that tomb of his. Once again he inspected his money: it still had not run out. So not only did he build that tomb, he also did this: he approached mpomasy (and, you know, he employs very large numbers of mpomasy). “I’m about to be taken away by those Kalanoro,” he said, “so . . . work things out so I’m not with them any more. Because if I am with them,” he said, “they’ll take me off to die. But my possessions are very numerous.”

[...]