Fady

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A man on a highland footpath who must step in front of someone seated, or reach across a neighbor to take up a dish, or break into a conversation to ask the road, will set a single word before the act: azafady. It is the ordinary Malagasy word for please, and for excuse me, spoken a hundred times in an ordinary day and worn as smooth by use as please is worn in English. Taken apart, it is not a pleasantry at all. Aza is the negative, the do-not; fady is the forbidden thing. Azafady means, at the root, may it not be fady of me — may what I am about to do not fall under a prohibition, and if it should, let the offense be pardoned in advance (Fady). The commonest courtesy of the language is built out of the fear of giving offense against a taboo, so that to be polite in Malagasy is, at the root of the word, to ask that one not be caught in a breach.

A word already in the mouth

Fady names the whole Malagasy order of the forbidden. It is the prohibited act, place, food, day, word, or creature, held to be enforced by powers beyond the human and bound up above all with the honoring of the ancestors (Fady). The range of it is very wide and the grain of it very fine: a fady may be observed across the whole island or kept by a single family, and it varies by region, by village, and by household, so that a food no one near one hill will touch is eaten without a thought two valleys over. What holds this scatter together is not a code that could be written out once and posted. It is a relation. A fady binds because someone with standing set it, and the one who set it, in the tradition’s own telling, is most often an ancestor.

That is where the concept has its spine. Fady descends from the razana, the ancestral dead of the family, whose word stands after the one who spoke it has passed into the tomb, respected during his lifetime and respected the more once he is among the seniors of the line. A food a forebear refused becomes a food forbidden to all who come down from him; a day or a direction marked by a forebear’s fortune or his ruin becomes a day kept or a direction shunned for the generations after. The prohibition is the ancestor’s instruction made durable, carried forward as the very shape of proper conduct — and the theology of the dead who issue it is the ancestors’ own, named here only as the source from which the forbidden flows. So the system has no need of courts or police. Its enforcement is the nearness of the razana and the certainty that a breach is seen.

How all of this reaches the written page runs through a record that must be read with its makers in view. The fullest descriptive inventory of the highland prohibitions is the work of the Norwegian missionary-scholar Jørgen Ruud, whose Taboo: A Study of Malagasy Customs and Beliefs — Oslo University Press, with London distribution by George Allen and Unwin, 1960, running to 326 pages (Africa review, Cambridge Core) — gathered a vast body of highland fady from a lifetime spent among the people he described. It is indispensable and it is framed: a catalog compiled by a man who came to the highlands as a missionary, whose gathering carries the purpose he came with, and whose pages are used here for the description they preserve while the frame around them is kept in sight. The deeper court-record of highland custom, François Callet’s Tantara ny Andriana, likewise carries the fady of the kingdom and its royal ancestors — assembled across the 1860s and 1870s at a Christianizing court and set in type on a mission press, a witness of the first value and one that speaks from a place. The tradition itself needs no such record. It lives in the mouths of the people who say azafady. But the account that can be laid out on a page comes through these witnesses, and each of them was written from somewhere.

The reach of a fady

The tradition sorts its prohibitions by how far they reach. At the narrowest is the personal fady, carried from birth and read from a person’s vintana — the destiny fixed by the courses of the sun and the moon on the day one was born, from which a day one may not undertake a thing, or a direction one keeps, or a direction one shuns, may be reckoned to a single life. The reading of vintana is the office of the diviner the highlands call the ombiasy, and it belongs to that account; here it is enough that a fady can be as particular as one birth-day, binding no one but the person born under it.

Wider than the person is the family or descent-group fady, the food or the act a forebear refused, forbidden now to all who trace their line to him. Wider still is the place-fady that guards the sacred ground — the doany where the ancestral powers are met, the tombs, the springs and the forests held holy — where salt, garlic, or pork may be withheld near the sacred water, and where to point at a tomb is itself a breach. The oldest of these place-taboos guard the sites of the first people of the land, the vazimba; one of the most frequented survives at Andranoro on the Antananarivo plain, where the fady kept among the Antehiroka for the water-ancestress Ranoro turns on a single forbidden word, and the covenant and the word belong to that site’s own telling. And there are the fady of craft and of time: the work one may not do, and the day or the season on which one may not labor at all, so that a stretch of the calendar can be closed to the plow or the loom as firmly as a food can be closed to the mouth. A single household may stand at the meeting of several of these reaches at once — an island-wide prohibition, a village one, a lineage one carried from a named forebear, and a personal one read from a child’s birth-day — so that the forbidden is never one code but a weave of prohibitions of different origin and different span, each binding a different circle of people, and each known to the ones it binds. To live rightly is to know which of them fall on oneself.

Fady and hasina are paired logics, and the pairing is the heart of the system. Hasina is the sacred efficacy that runs through the Malagasy world — the potency and rightness that quickens the field and the child and ratifies authority, which the historian Jan Vansina called “the whole ideology of kingship” (Hasina); its own theology is treated in full under hasina, and named here only as the thing a fady is set to protect. For the prohibition is the fence around the potency. Where hasina gathers — in a tomb, a spring, a sovereign, a rite — a fady stands guard, the boundary that keeps the sacred efficacy intact and unspilled. To keep the fady is to keep the hasina whole. The two are not a list of powers and a list of rules laid side by side; they are one thing seen from two sides, the force and the guard set around it.

To keep a fady, then, is to keep faith. To break one is ota fady, the transgression of a taboo, and its consequence is exact. The one who breaks a fady becomes maloto — unclean — and is shunned, held to have endangered the community’s spiritual balance whether or not the breach was meant (Fady). Intention does not enter into it. The pollution is a state, not a verdict on the will, and a man who eats a forbidden food in ignorance is as unclean as one who eats it in defiance. That the uncleanness can be lifted — the specialist consulted, the offering made, the balance restored — is a matter of public record; the rite by which it is done belongs to those who do it and is not set out here. What matters to the shape of the system is that breach, pollution, and restoration each carry their full weight, and that the whole runs without an office to administer it.

Nor is the order closed. New fady are made constantly. When a household sets its hand to something of weight — a marriage, a house, a journey, a venture — a ritual offering called joro may be made to establish that the ground is clear, that the undertaking is not fady (Fady). The system grows the way a language grows, by use, taking on a new prohibition where a new circumstance calls for one, so that the body of the forbidden is never a fixed inheritance from a closed past but a living reckoning kept current by the people who keep it. The commonly cited fady are homely and precise: one does not point at a tomb; a pregnant woman does not eat eels; a stranger does not call a newborn baby ugly. Each is small, and each is a place where the sacred and the daily touch — the tomb that holds the razana, the child not yet safely arrived, the fortune of a house that a careless word could turn.

This is not a relic system awaiting extinction. It is the grammar of proper living in the present, kept at the table, on the road, and at the tomb — the everyday order of a people who arrange their conduct by the will of those who came before, and who fold that whole order into the word they use to say please.

Superstition, and after

The mission-era and colonial writers had a single word for all of this, and the word was superstition. The fady was set down as the fearful survival of a benighted people, a thing to be argued out of them along with the diviner’s cast seeds and the turning of the bones — a reading that belongs to the history of the encounter and not to the thing it described. The correction is plain. The fady is a coherent moral and legal order, not a failure of reason, and the record that preserves it is read against the purposes of the men who made it. Ruud himself, the fullest keeper of the highland inventory, wrote as a missionary, and his Taboo is used for the description it is while its frame is held in view; to take the word superstition from such a source and repeat it would be to mistake a verdict for a finding.

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship has restored the system its intelligence. Maurice Bloch’s analyses of hasina and highland ritual set the fady within an economy of sacred force rather than a cabinet of curiosities, reading the prohibition as one term in the flow of potency and blessing that binds the living to their dead. In that frame a taboo is not an isolated dread attached at random to an eel or a day, but the guard drawn around a point where the sacred gathers, and it becomes legible only once the potency it fences is understood — which is why the older habit of collecting fady as a list of quaint don’ts, apart from the hasina they protect, missed the sense of them entirely. And conservation researchers, studying Madagascar’s sacred forests and its protected species, have documented the fady as a working instrument of restraint. The prohibitions sort, in this reading, into kinds with different reach: temporal fady that close parts of the year to the harvesting of a resource; place or habitat fady that bind every inhabitant and visitor of a lake, a mountain, or a forest; and food fady that may bind only a single group or a single person. Where a habitat is held fady, the restraint holds. A sacred forest is left standing, a lake left unfished, a species left unhunted, in country where the surrounding land is cleared — kept with a compliance that no ranger commands and no fence enforces. At Lake Tsimanampetsotse in the southwest the fady forbids diving in the water and hunting its birds, and out of the force of it the flamingos nest in safety and the blind cave fish endemic to the region are let alone (Mongabay, 2021). The same researchers note that the instrument cuts both ways, that a fady can shield a stand of forest and elsewhere expose a creature held unclean; the point is not that the fady is conservation by design, but that a prohibition kept for the ancestors does work in the world that a law on paper cannot.

Lake Tsimanampetsotse, in the southwest, kept from diving and its birds from hunting by a fady of the surrounding people. Frank Vassen, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The system is contested at its edges, and the contest is itself a living fact. Near Mananjary on the southeast coast live the Antambahoaka, the least numerous of the Malagasy groupings — an offshoot of the Antemoro who split from them in the fifteenth century and trace their descent to the ancestor Raminia (Antambahoaka). Among them a fady holds against the raising of twins. Twins born to the line may not be brought up within it: historically they were abandoned in the wilderness or killed at birth, and they are excluded from the family tomb and barred from ever becoming ancestors — cut off, that is, from the very order of the razana in which the whole system of fady is grounded. It is described by those who keep it as an ancestral oath, binding on some still and increasingly refused by families who will not do it, and who accept the ostracism that refusal brings rather than keep the prohibition. Human-rights organizations and the Malagasy government work against the practice, citing the international convention on the rights of the child. It stands without a side taken: an ancestral fady still binding on some, refused by others at real cost, argued over in the present by the people it falls on.

The fady is not a closed thing or a settled one. It is the durable will of the ancestors, kept and argued over and lived — held most often by Malagasy who are also Christians, and who carry the two allegiances together as easily as they carry the word for please. A stranger who learns that azafady means may it not be fady of me might take it for a fossil, a dead metaphor buried in a courtesy. It is the opposite. The courtesy is alive because the thing it fears is alive: at every table where a forbidden food is passed over, on every road where a tomb goes unpointed-at, at every shrine where the salt is left unnamed, the order that began in an ancestor’s word is being kept by someone who would rather ask pardon than give offense.

→ Related: Ranoro · Kalanoro · Ndramisara · Andranoro · Doany Ndramisara · Antsahadinta · Ambohidrabiby · The Sakalava · The Betsileo · The Antemoro · Hasina