The Descendants of Rainitamaina

At this point we can finally return to the problem posed in chapter 1: how it is that Betafo has come to be divided between two ancestors, one andriana and one mainty, so inimical to one another that mixing them together could only lead to catastrophe.

The mainty ancestor in question was named Rainitamaina. He was said to have been a wandering astrologer who, sometime in the early part of the nineteenth century, chanced to be passing through Betafo, and ended up locked in a magical battle with the andriana and their leader, Andriamaharo. In the end, he prevailed, and as a result his descendants stayed on and have had control of the weather around Betafo ever since. Yet at the same time, he has always had a difficult time sharing the territory with the people he once fought. To this day, Rainitamaina’s body was not to be removed from his tomb to be exposed to the village of Betafo, or terrible things would result; even during funerals for his descendants, when the dead had to be carried there, it was forbidden to pass through Betafo on the way.

This much, everybody knew—though other elements of the story were certainly contested. People were also aware that his descendants now are by far the most numerous and important mainty lineage of Betafo: when I was there, they included fourteen households (grouped in three large families) between Andrianony and the village of Morafeno, and another in Arivonimamo, and ranked among their most prominent members Ratsizafy, the astrologer, Augustin, and Armand.

Ratsizafy was in every sense the head of the lineage. He was a man of extraordinary stature. Not only was he the richest man in Betafo, and one of the oldest, he was an astrologer and curer famous as far away as the capital. What’s more, he was the direct successor to Rainitamaina: it was he who kept Rainitamaina’s hail medicine, who continued his avocation as astrologer and curer, who had built his current tomb and officiated over its ceremonial. So close was the identification that a number of people actually had trouble telling the two apart. The identification also took on political significance because many people spoke of Rainitamaina as if he was, in some diffuse sense, the ancestor of all the black people of Betafo; as a result, Ratsizafy himself became a sort of grand ancestral figure, their leader, a token of the unity of all those descended from Betafo’s former slaves.

It was rare for anyone to know much about other people’s ancestors. Rainitamaina’s story, and Rainitaba’s, were probably the only two everybody knew at least a little of. This was because both gave shape to something that would otherwise be diffuse and inarticulate: Rainitaba’s story, to the experience of loss and dispersal which is the legacy of slavery, Rainitamaina’s, to the profound ruptures it had created within the historical fabric of the community. But Rainitamaina’s, at least, also had an ongoing political importance, and this poses certain problems of presentation.

When describing the history of a lineage, the obvious thing is to begin at the beginning, with the story of its founder. But this would be very difficult to do. Different members of the lineage told this story in very different ways, and to understand why they did so, one has to first understand their place within it, their interests and perspectives. In other words, one has to know a lot about the end in order to get at the beginning.

What I am going to do then, is this: first try to reconstruct the history of the lineage, then, tell the story of its razambe.

The Descendants of Rainitamaina

Rainitamaina almost certainly did exist. He appears to have lived in the early part of the nineteenth century. Descendants still remember the names of his children and grandchildren.

The genealogy below is highly schematic: I have only included those born in Betafo, and even left out several people whose descendants have all left. Still, it provides a framework for understanding the connections between those who still remained in Betafo and Arivonimamo when I was living there, and some idea of what the group has looked like over time.

Early documents suggest that Rainitamaina was indeed a contemporary of Andriamaharo, and in fact, the earliest mention I could find of anyone included in the genealogy above were from AKTA notebooks from the 1880s, which record how each one of Rainitamaina’s sons (along with his granddaughter Rangoritsiserahana) were sold—in every case, by a member of the Andriamaharo family to some other andriana.

9.1. The Rainitamaina lineage

Oral traditions insist that Rainitamaina himself had lived in a hamlet called Anosy, located on a kind of island of raised ground in the middle of the rice fields at the head of the long valley that runs through most of the southern part of Betafo’s territory. There too he was buried, in a primitive chamber by the side of the fields.

Ratsimisilaka is said to have been a mpampakatra rano velona, an expert in manipulating streams and watercourses to transform the landscape (it was he, Ratsizafy told me, who had created most of the moats still visible around the local countryside, including the three around Betafo). His work kept him traveling. Oral traditions have less to say about the other two brothers, except that they were both at least occasional astrologers and mpomasy. When his father died, it was Rainisalama who got the hail medicine; when he died, it passed on to Rainibaka, who also received the family’s modest estate of rice fields around Anosy.

The children of the first two brothers did not, for the most part, stay on in the territory of Betafo. Rainisalama had only one child that anyone still remembers—his daughter Rangoritsiserahana; her daughter Ravelo Raosera spent much of her life as a wandering peddler. Ratsimisilaka is said to have had quite a number of children, all of whom, except for the one daughter whose descendants are still alive today, have been entirely forgotten. Ratsizafy claimed their line had been effectively destroyed as a result of Rainitamaina’s ozona: almost all of those children had been thieves and ne’er-do-wells of one sort or another; because of their ancestor’s cursing, most died young or ended up in jail. Even those who didn’t died childless.

Rainibaka himself had five sons and three daughters, who apparently moved from Anosy to another hamlet called Morafeno, somewhat to the north. According to Ratsizafy (the only person old enough to remember this period in any detail) the eldest son inherited the medicine, but eventually grew tired of Betafo, and after a few years set out west to find his fortune. The hail medicine passed to his younger brother, Rainikotomamonjy, also an astrologer, who died soon afterward, perhaps in 1910, passing it to his sister Raivo.

Raivo lived in Morafeno until she died in 1937 and brought up five children there. For a long time she was the only representative of the Rainitamaina lineage who was a full-time resident in Betafo. Most remember her as a rather colorful local personality; apart from protecting the crops, she was a midwife and specialist in women’s medicine, and, according to some, a skilled amateur astrologer. Even so, her family was poor, among the poorest in Betafo.

Ratsizafy had few fond memories of his mother:

David: And who was her husband in those days?

Ratsizafy: She didn’t have one. Don’t remember . . . husbands in the grass. She was a real harlot.

Chantal: So there were different fathers?

Ratsizafy: Different fathers; I have no idea. None of them had fathers. Oh, she was a badly behaved woman, she was.

David: Raivo?

Ratsizafy: Really badly behaved. There weren’t any men dared push her around! If she got mad they’d run away or she’d turn them upside down absolutely. She was big, you know, our mother . . . big and tall, and really violent.

David: But she brought up a lot of children . . . I guess she did it well.

Ratsizafy: Nah, she was hard on her kids, too. Beat on them.

David: Oh, that’s rough.

Ratsizafy: Mmmm . . . the woman was badly behaved.

In Arivonimamo there used to be a fair—this was in French times. And there was one of those boxers from over in Antanibe: a big guy, really skillful with his fists. She happened by, and decided to enter the competition.

“Don’t enter in that if you’re a woman, you’ll get yourself killed! Don’t enter in there!”

They tried to stop her, but “No,” she said, “let me go and try my skill!”

She wrapped the cloth around her loins. “You’re going to get yourself killed, you lunatic! Enough!”

“Fine, then, if I die then my daughters will bury me. Let’s fight it out!” The guy went at her, they say, but he couldn’t hit her. Then the one time she landed one on him, he fell tumbling on the ground there to the south of the big amontana tree, and that’s where he went a-rolling . . .

That’s when they said “One, two, three . . . gone!” And the Frenchman gave her the prize for her victory.

And it was from then that people said “Watch out for that Big Raivo from Anosy. Watch out, because she’s a disaster!”

Actually, Ratsizafy appears to have spent much of his childhood outside his mother’s house. While the old hamlet of Anosy was abandoned in Malagasy times, around the turn of the century a number of andriana—almost all descendants of Andriamaharo who owned land in that valley—had left Betafo to found a new Anosy further up the hill. By the 1910s and ’20s, when Ratsizafy was growing up, this village consisted of five or six households, among whom perhaps the most prominent was that of a man named Ramarozaka. Ratsizafy spent much of his childhood minding Ramarozaka’s cattle, doing his chores and running his errands in exchange for shelter, food, and clothing. Ramarozaka died childless, but Ratsizafy still remembers the man fondly as someone who “fostered” him (nitaiza azy); he always contributes cloth if there’s a famadhina at his tomb.

In 1929, Morafeno consisted only of Raivo’s house and one andriana household farther down the hill. Around 1935 Ratsizafy’s older sister Razanapanahy built a house there, and his younger brother later built one as well. For a long time, then, Morafeno was made up almost entirely of Raivo’s descendants. It is not clear, though, how often Ratsizafy himself was around. According to his own account, he had been a very a sickly child. In his third year he was so desperately ill that everyone considered his death inevitable, and his mother was forced to tote him on her back from curer to curer. Finally, at the recommendation of an andriana astrologer from Anosy named Rainikotozafy, she trekked up Mount Antongana, a famous mountain to the east, where there lived a famous mpomasy named Ingahy Volo. Ingahy Volo no sooner saw him than he pronounced a fira-vava, a prophecy, that the child would someday be a famous astrologer:

Ratsizafy: “Within the year this child will be cured,” he said, and it was truly masina indeed. And the people were afraid then, for they saw Ingahy Volo was truly pronouncing words of prophecy. This is what he said: “He shall be a great astrologer” he said, “he shall work medicine,” he said, “he will not do evil,” he said, “so take him home once he’s cured.”

So we went up to the west, me carried on my mother’s back, and “Sit still!” my mother started saying, “are you shitting on my hip, or what? Sit still! Sit still!” she said. [Ratsizafy drawing back miming a savage gesture, open hand poised to slap]

Chantal: And you were cured?

Ratsizafy: And I was cured. But it was that Ingahy Volo, from Mount Antongona, who ultimately became my teacher. He and Rainibotokelimaso used to go at each other, back and forth—the two men both lived on Antongana. One on the north side, the other on the south side.

Chantal: I take it the two of them were rivals?

Ratsizafy: They were both mpomasy, the two of them. Rainibotokelimaso was building a tomb. As soon as he’d have the ground all dug out, Ingahy Volo up on the north side would have it all undone: break all the rocks into fragments. Hoooo! He’d send down the lightning and smash ’em all to bits.

So then Ingahy Volo up on north side would try to make his own tomb, and all the rocks, all of them would be stripped away, stripped away, stripped away . . . Come morning, all the stones would be dancing around in four pieces each; he’d come back from work and there they’d be. That’s how the two men used to entertain each other.

Chantal: You were already grown up by then?

Ratsizafy: Oh no, I never saw any of that. Ingahy Volo told the story.

That Rainibotokelimaso, too: he used to dream without sleeping. If there was someone was coming to steal something from his house, it was: “Get out the baskets, if you will!” So the thief would be able to carry his manure for him. “Take out the shovels, please! Because there’ll be men working here tonight!”

Chantal: They’d end up having to work on his rice fields . . .

Ratsizafy: Hooooo! It’s a disaster, when it’s medicine. “Put the shovels out to the west of the house!” he’d say, and the thieves would be out working his lands for him.

It is significant, I think, that Ratsizafy never once mentioned the fact that his mother knew astrology. The positive figures in his reminiscences were always knowledgeable men: Ramarozaka who fostered him, Rainibetsarazaka and Rainikotozafy, another aged andriana from the village of Anosy, who introduced him to the first principles of astrology; Ingahy Volo himself who prophesied and later became his teacher. While it was Rainitamaina, he said, who had given him his abilities, Ingahy Volo was the one who taught him the substance of his art. Apparently, after finishing primary school (he did know how to read) Ratsizafy returned to Mount Antongana and spent years as Ingahy Volo’s apprentice. It was there he learned his techniques of curing and divination, of astrological calculation, the art of placing houses and tombs in such a way as to avoid harmful destinies, which colors, plants, and properties corresponded to each of the twelve lunar months.

Even after he left Antongana, Ratsizafy did not return permanently to Morafeno. He practiced his trade all over Imerina, and even took voyages outside it (this is the time, remember, when according to the more scandalous rumors he used to go from town to town curing people his traveling companion had ensorcelled). In part, it was because he was never allowed to take the place he felt he deserved in Betafo. His mother died in 1937, when Ratsizafy was 31, but when she did she passed the medicine to his older sister Razanapanahy, who she had also taught everything she knew about astrology and midwifery. Razanapanahy, in turn, lived on until 1961. Ratsizafy only got control of the family medicine at the age of fifty-five—by which time he had already, by all accounts, been the preeminent astrologer of Betafo for as long as anyone could remember. He lived most of his life, then, in the shadow of powerful and independent women, and clearly resented it: the one thing he always insisted on when speaking of the hail medicine was that it was always handed from eldest male son to eldest male son, something which was clearly not the case. When I once started asking him about Razanapanahy (this was in fact before I knew that she had ever kept the medicine) his son warned me I would do well to avoid mentioning her name: “You’ll end up upsetting daddy.”

Not only was Ratsizafy shunted aside as head of the family, for a long time, he was also childless—which must have reinforced his sense of infantilization. In the ’30s, he married a local mainty named Rasoavahiny. The marriage never produced offspring, and they eventually drifted apart. It was only later, after he had finally come into his own and married an andriana woman from Belanitra, that he had his two sons: Pano (b. 1968) and Noely (b. 1970). By this time his fortunes had begun to turn in more ways than one; he was becoming wealthy from his curing, and buying up rice fields in the valleys surrounding Morafeno. This story, though, must wait for a little later.

Noble Wives and Military Pensions

Most of the lineage’s members quickly scattered, at best spending some years of their lives working as sharecroppers or wage-laborers in Betafo itself, eventually finding better opportunities elsewhere. Those whose descendants still remain always turned out, on investigation, to be people who had some unusual stroke of good fortune. Rainisalama’s great-grandson Ranaivo (1904–1982), for example, was lucky enough to marry an heiress from tampon-tanana. The marriage was infertile and she died a few years later, but through her, he came into land. Ranaivo—he was called “Ranaivo the Nail” because he was always putterring around fixing things—was much remembered around Betafo as a good-natured old man, always full of minor projects, whose decency and good sense made him the first person anyone would turn to if there were quarrels—whether mainty or andriana. He married five times before producing any children, but they were all still around in 1990—by which time the family was headed by his widow (Razafindravao b. 1949) and eldest son, Armand (b. 1961).

Similarly, the descendants of Ratsimisilaka have been forgotten, except for the descendants of Rafarabako. Rafarabako herself was a peddler, her main occupation, I was told, was traveling from market to market trading in hot peppers and spicy condiments. But her daughter, Razafindranosy (1887–1987), married a Malagasy soldier just before he embarked to fight in the First World War; when he died in France, she ended up receiving a widow’s pension for the rest of her very long life. While she never lived in Betafo, Razafindranosy kept up an active interest in the place from her home in nearby Arivonimamo (where she worked as an occasional grade-school teacher), never missing an opportunity to buy up rice fields, and two of her children—one son and one daughter—still live there and work the fields their mother bought.

Finally, there is the curious case of Ravelo François, Raivo’s nephew, born in 1894. Ravelo joined the French army in 1914, and is said to have spent many years overseas. He returned in the early ’20s, lived for a while with Razanamino in Andrianony—just long enough apparently to produce a son—then disappeared again. Later Ravelo reappeared, armed with a substantial military pension, and took his son off to his current home, in a town somewhere in northern Imerina. The son, Rakotozafy Albert, thus grew up in a relatively prosperous milieu; he got something of an education; during his periodic visits to Betafo as a teenager, he must have been an alluring figure, sophisticated, worldly, well-dressed. When I was in Betafo everyone remembered him only as he was in the last years of his life, wealthy, a little proud, given to self-destructive romantic passions, but he must have once been an unusually charming and attractive young man. Anyway there must be some explanation of how a black man who was not really all that wealthy managed to convince two different andriana women in a row to marry him. His first wife—originally from a village several kilometers to the northeast—was of a grade of andriana two levels above even those of Betafo. About the only thing most people really remembered about her is that she bore him one son and died almost immediately afterward (probably because of her ancestors’ wrath for having married him). A year or two later he married Razafisoa, an Andrianamboninolona from Betafo. This was an incredibly advantageous match, because not only was she an andriana, but a fabulously wealthy one, the orphaned granddaughter of a former village notable and brother of the governor, Andriantonga. She was, in fact, the last of the descendants of the great tampon-tanana andriana. The marriage was infertile but Razafisoa adopted Augustin, the son of his first marriage, and Augustin in turn grew up to marry an andriana woman from outside Betafo as well. By the time I knew him he had a number of children, all of whom he had managed to keep around him because of the resources his adopted mother put in his hands.

Land and Tombs

For most of the century, then, there weren’t more than three or four families of Rainitamaina actually living in Betafo at any given time, and most of its most prominent members were women (or, in two cases, men who had married andriana heiresses). It is only quite recently that their numbers had expanded.

All this has only been possible because of the gradual accumulation of land. Much of it was made possible by Rakotonarivo Auguste, who, as noted in chapter 5, toward the end of his life gradually sold off almost all of his vast possessions—mostly, to descendants of Rainitamaina. It is hard to reconstruct what happened, but by the 1990s, almost all the land to the north and east of Morafeno was in the hands of members of the lineage—most of it in fact was owned by Ratsizafy himself—as well large chunks of the best land to the north, east, and west of Betafo itself—perhaps half of it. Ratsizafy and Augustin, who usually had access to cash, were both notorious for approaching impoverished andriana and offering to loan them money, hoping to seize their fields as collateral should they default; Armand’s family was less unscrupulous, but were always looking for opportunities to buy.

By 1990, the recognized leaders of the lineage were all men: starting with Ratsizafy himself, in Morafeno, Augustin in Andrianony, and Armand. Only they, Armand once explained to me, could really be considered close to their great ancestor Rainitamaina, the founder of the lineage, because they were the only ones who dared to take that ancestor’s body into their own hands during famadihana. All others were afraid.

This way of presenting things is significant—after all, if the group did manage to cohere, during the early years, it was because of the existence of a common tomb—which Raivo and some others apparently founded sometime around 1910, on a hill overlooking Betafo to the northeast, called Ambohitrimaninana. As the lineage gained in prosperity in the ’60s, the first reaction was a burst of new construction there; the original earthen tomb has transformed into a complex of four in shiny white concrete, at their center, a vast new tomb dedicated to the razambe himself.

The history of the original tomb—called the tsy idiram-binanto—was known to everyone. It had been created jointly by descendants of Rainitamaina, Rangorimainty, and Rainitaba. Most of the people who pooled their resources to found it were middle-aged black women, interested in preserving the memory of fathers or grandfathers recently deceased. The hill they chose is a shelf-like foothill of the mountain chain that looms behind Betafo’s territory; an excellent location since it is not only to the northeast of the village of Betafo (the ritually favored direction) but clearly visible from most of its territory.

It seems to have stood alone there for over half a century, squared adobe reinforced with stone, with granite door and chamber hidden underneath. In 1968, however, Razandranosy—the woman with the military pension—had it rebuilt in stone, and rededicated with a particularly ostentatious famadihana many still remembered vividly. This was, however, just the beginning of a wave of expansion. A few years later Augustin’s father Rakotozafy Albert—by then one of the wealthier men in Betafo—got together with Armand’s father to build a shiny new stone tomb a few meters to the northwest, removing his own ancestors to be its razambe. In 1974, Ratsizafy built an even larger stone tomb of his own, directly to the north of the original, and transferred the body of Rainitamaina itself. Finally, in 1978, Ingahirainy relocated his own family tomb (which had been on the other side of the same hill) just to the north of Ratsizafy’s, so that there were, now, four different white stone tombs all clustered together on the same hill overlooking the village of Betafo.

If a traveler approaches Betafo from Arivonimamo, the grassy expanse of Ambohitrimaninana with its sparkling white tombs is the first corner of Betafo’s territory likely to catch her eye. As one draws closer, though, the central tomb is by far the most imposing. Most people from town immediately knew what I was talking about when I described it—many remembered it as having an odd, exotic, vaguely Moorish look. From very close it is equally impressive: a massive structure of unpainted granite blocks, fastened together by white concrete. What really made it stand out however was the fact that it had, effectively, two stories: above the tomb itself was a smaller granite structure with a peaked granite roof, resembling a house, which is where only Rainitamaina’s body rests. Such a structure is referred to as a trano manara (a “cold house”) and is a mark of royalty—in fact, it is forbidden for any but the most exalted andriana to put one atop their tomb. Ratsizafy of course justified it by claiming that his ancestor was the son (or maybe grandson) of King Andriamanalina of Betsileo. From an andriana perspective, then, for a black person to build such a thing would be an act of almost unimaginable pretension. I never heard anyone spontaneously bring up the matter; certainly, andriana did not go around muttering their indignation. But on the two or three occasions when I mentioned it to an andriana, the response was always a look of hopeless dismay, a depressed shrug—what could one even say?

One reason these tombs are so bright and well kept-up is that they were the object of almost constant famadihana. Since the late ’70s at least, there has been at least one there every year—often, two or three. The beauty of the tombs is thus the visible evidence of incessant ritual activity, which has transformed the hill into a shining display of the newfound power and prosperity of Betafo’s mainty. Certainly the andriana themselves have nothing like it. Besides them, even the tombs in the very center of Betafo, the most prestigious noble tombs, looked shabby and unkempt. But this display had another effect as well. The hill could at least be imagined as a place of origins similar to Betafo itself; and while no one actually claimed their ancestors had ever lived there, people did sometimes talk about “those people from Ambohitrimaninana” just as they might “those people from the Telo Milahatra.” And this, in turn, made it possible to imagine Rainitamaina—its central and most ancient razambe—as the razambe of all Betafo’s mainty.

This was also a center very much defined against the village of Betafo. The tomb ritual surrounding Rainitamaina seemed especially designed to maintain this opposition. When one of Rainitamaina’s descendants died their bodies could never be carried through Betafo on the way to the tomb; when the razambe himself was to be wrapped, it was forbidden to take his body outside the tomb; in fact, a cloth had to be hung across the doorway because if he was ever exposed to sunlight or caught sight of the village Betafo, either all rain would stop, or whirlwinds would strike the town. Andriana could attend tomb ritual, but they could not take part in the actual wrapping of the bodies. One key thing the stories about Rainitamaina did was to explain the origins of this opposition: why Rainitamaina and the andriana still did not get along.

Let me go on then to the story.

Rainitamaina: Who Gets to Tell the History

While just about everyone knew that Rainitamaina had fought with the andriana, and most, if asked, were quick to tell me this, usually throwing in some details about his tomb, few would go beyond that. Only a handful felt they had the right to tell the story.

Now, as the reader will no doubt have noticed, in rural Imerina, long continuous historical narratives are rare. For the most part, history took the form of little stories or bits of information attached to specific places: the family that owns this tomb, the ody that was once buried beneath this tree, the event this stone commemorates . . .—knowledge which almost anyone could claim. Since such places were constantly being discovered, reinterpreted, forgotten, history became a broken, scattered thing. There were few overarching frameworks connecting things together; even where there was, as in the half-effaced history of tombs, most people did not feel entitled to lay claim to it. All the more so with actual narrative accounts of the origin of demes or ancient kings, which only the most authoritative figures felt entitled to set forth.

As the reader will no doubt also remember, such “official histories” tend to be almost completely purged of conflict: deme founders move about over an unpopulated landscape; situations of conflict are shunted aside, made ridiculous, or covered up. One of the things that makes the story of Rainitamaina so interesting is that it completely violated these principles. It was a story about a heroic contest in which the protagonists were not dismissed as childish, which had had repercussions lasting to the present day that are not dismissed as foolish out of hand. But this made it a very difficult story to tell. It made everyone uncomfortable. As a result, it took me a very long time to figure out exactly what the story was supposed to be about.

What follows then is in part a history of how I learned the story, taking each of my first five informants in turn. In the process, I also try to suggest why each narrator chose to tell me the story as they did.

Ratsizafy

I have already described my first meeting with Ratsizafy; how Armand first lead me to meet him in Morafeno, how he came up the hill with a woolen cap and a spade over his shoulder, an ancient man with a graying mustache, drinking freely from a hip flask. It is difficult to provide a broader summary of the man and his importance. In Betafo, Ratsizafy was a figure of almost mythic proportions. Not only was he the oldest man in Betafo, he was also the richest one, and an astrologer and curer whose fame attracted clients from the capital and beyond. He was also someone who no one claimed to completely understand; whose power was in fact to some degree derived from that fact; the sort of person whose neighbors spent a good deal of their time discussing, exchanging gossip about, speculating as to what he might be up to next.

Perhaps the best way to describe Ratsizafy is not to start with the man but with the place where he lived. Ratsizafy lived in the northernmost of three houses that made up the village of Morafeno. From inside, Morafeno is a maze of walls, sheds, outhouses, sheep and cattle pens; almost any time you come there, there are likely to be workmen hammering or digging or climbing up and down on the steep paths that lead to the surrounding fields. Ratsizafy’s own house was palatial by rural standards, painted white, with a pale green trim on its numerous doors and windows; inside, an elegant central stairway leads to spacious rooms tastefully appointed with what looked like antique French furniture. It was the sort of house where there always seemed to be something vaguely furtive going on. Half the time, while I was visiting, I would catch sight of people who were obviously from the city, in designer jeans and leather jackets, usually looking slightly embarrassed, and carrying little presents for the Ingahibe (as he was always called). People would periodically disappear upstairs to a private room for consultations. Often one heard muffled laughter in the distance, or sometimes, arguments. Young women would occasionally appear in doorways to peek at the foreigner, giggling, only to be shepherded away by one of Ratsizafy’s two teenage sons. Bottles of rum, full or empty, were everywhere, and at any given time most of the people in the house were drunk. Ratsizafy himself was always in a greater or lesser state of intoxication. This is what everyone always said about his household—those people don’t even keep water in their house, where other people would drink water, they drink rum. The moment he wakes up in the morning the first thing he does is drink.

Conducting interviews in such a house was challenging to say the least. During the conversation with Chantal cited a few pages back, for example, when he told us about how he first became an astrologer, our conversation was interrupted on three separate occasions by a man who claimed to be a distant relative of Armand, who would stumble in and, in a longwinded imitation of formal oratory, announce that he was leaving. He kept asking us for our blessing so he could go. We’d comply; he’d disappear; twenty minutes later, there he’d be. The third time, Ratsizafy, interrupted in his anecdote, responded by softly intoning a little poem, a hain-teny, which sounded like an elaborate blessing but actually was a series of very elaborate insults to the effect that he was a babbling fool.

Often Ratsizafy would slip in and out of consciousness. Half of the interviews I had with him were mainly with his sons; Ratsizafy would be passed out on his bed, until something would catch his attention and he would flicker to attention, toss out some amazing fact or anecdote, then drift away into a self-satisfied haze, or else, seized by some unknown impulse, abruptly rise and leave the room. Occasionally too his wife would pass through, looking very demure and upright, giving orders to the workmen, but always too busy to talk.

I really cannot say how much of the apparent randomness was spontaneous, how much of it performance, an intentional effect. I do think Ratsizafy rather enjoyed having the appearance of chaos all around him. It suited a man who lived in the knowledge that his political significance manifested itself largely in being the constant topic of other people’s conversations. Everything around him exuded the possibility of stories, and anyone who paid a visit to his household was sure to leave with something new to talk about. But clearly, this was not all calculated effect. Ratsizafy gave every sign of being a man who combined an unparalleled mastery of performance with a sense of not being entirely in control of himself or his surroundings.

During the last four months of my research, I never got to talk to Ratsizafy because he was laid up sick in bed. He had broken his hip while drunkenly trying to kick the cat. Now, the very fact that Ratsizafy had a cat was something I found peculiar. Ratsizafy hated cats. I first picked up on this while his son Pano was explaining the “Malagasy” attitude toward God: that God is not purely good, he had created both the good and the evil. After all, it was God who made rats and vermin.

Ratsizafy raised his head from the pillow, calling out, “He made cats!” “God,” said Pano, “who created fleas, the plague, malaria . . .”

Ratsizafy: “He created cats!”

Yet unlike almost everyone else in Betafo, Ratsizafy had a cat. Supposedly it was just there to catch mice (though everyone had those), a scraggly, undernourished creature that would sometimes tentatively try to slide into the room while I was there, always to be greeted, if Ratsizafy was conscious, with sudden bursts of hostility, the old man sitting up and growling, open hand drawn back savagely as if to strike—a gesture I only otherwise saw in him when recounting his mother’s beatings. Often, I was told, when very drunk, he’d run after it trying to kick it; often he’d miss, it was thus he broke his hip. Soon after, he developed a violent fever. The progress of his illness was, of course, closely followed by everyone in Betafo. He was always about to recover, then he would revert. He knew the medicine required; he would send his sons off to fetch this herb or that, the body would recover, but as soon as he was capable, he’d immediately start drinking heavily and within a day or two the fever would return and he’d be on his back again.

Even in the stories that he told, he would represent himself as small and vulnerable. When he spoke, his voice would start out quiet and subdued—as was typical of elders—but once he began to warm to a topic, it would usually alternate between impertinent and awed. Almost everything he said had an element of wonder in it, every anecdote something not entirely easy to believe. He might have been willing to boast of his ancestor’s powers, to speak openly of conflicts—delivering bold assertions, outrageous stories with a kind of impish smile, eye half-cocked to monitor audience reaction—but even then, he would quickly switch to his typical pose: dazzlement, tinged with fear. His signature expression, one I never heard from anybody else, was a kind of soft, astounded “hooooo” sound, which he would throw in to his stories constantly, as an expression of speechless awe before some astounding force beside which he felt small. “Hooooo! It’s a disaster, if it’s medicine”—a comment which seems to sum the man up, coming as it does from a man who has based his entire career on being an expert in the stuff.

Even before I discovered that he had only become a full social adult at the age of fifty-five—that he had spent most of his life as the brilliant prodigy who nonetheless always had to defer to powerful and authoritative women— it occurred to me that Ratsizafy acted a little like a naughty child. It came out especially in his interaction with Chantal. Chantal, the reader will remember, was my frequent companion on trips to Betafo, especially early on. Though twenty-five years old, she conformed perfectly to the Malagasy stereotype of the strong-willed woman, accustomed to taking charge of things. Normally, she would also become meekly respectful in the presence of rural elders, but somehow, Ratsizafy had almost exactly the opposite effect. When he ignored her questions she would scold him like a disobedient child; he would respond by acting like one, telling her what she wanted to know with an almost fearful expression and then trying to sneak off the moment she looked the other way. One time I could have sworn she almost hit him. When afterward I asked her what in hell she thought she was doing, she seemed genuinely confused by her own behavior: “I know, I know. I’m sorry,” she said, ‘I just don’t know what came over me.”

If nothing else, this fits in with his notorious fondness for practical jokes, his alternation between cowering and self-assertion, his odd fascination with bodily fluids, even his drinking, which was rather in the manner of a ten-yearold suddenly allowed to have all the candy he can eat. In many ways, he seemed unable to believe his luck, that after all those years he was suddenly the greatest and most powerful man in Betafo, unable to completely believe that he was finally free of all constraints.

But let me return to my first visit to Betafo, when I first met Ratsizafy in the company of Armand and Ramose Parson. At the time, he told us the history of his ancestor Rainitamaina. It was very much an authoritative version—the sort of account which, as I pointed out in chapter 6, is normally defined almost as much by what’s left out than by what it says. But in this case, so much was left out that I found it difficult to understand what the story was even about. So did Parson. Even after we’d transcribed the cassette and gone over it several times, we couldn’t make sense of it. Part of the problem was that we had talked to him outside, and a strong wind had made sections of cassette inaudible. So we went back to Morafeno and had him repeat it all. But even that did not clear things up entirely. The odd thing was that it was not as though Ratsizafy was trying to suppress elements of conflict—the history was full of conflict—what was missing was motivation, any larger framework that explained what the characters had to with each other and why they were behaving as they did.

[...]