Kalanoro

← Encyclopedia

In the soft ground along a forest stream the tracks are small, no bigger than a child’s, and they read the wrong way. The heel-marks point ahead, in the direction the walker was going; the toe-marks point back, toward the water it came from. A hunter who kneels to them and follows their lead walks steadily, patiently, in exactly the wrong direction — away from the thing that made them, deeper into the country it wanted him to leave. The feet are reversed. This is the first fact set down about the kalanoro, before any account of what they are or want: they leave a trail that cannot be followed home.

The one name and the many tellings

The kalanoro are small beings of Malagasy belief — child-sized, or under a meter, dwarf-small — and across a great island of many peoples they carry a single name. What that name gathers is not one figure but a family of them, told differently from region to region, so that the record itself is plural where the word is single. The most constant marks hold steady through the variation. The kalanoro is very short. Its hair is long, worn over the head and, in the eastern telling, over the whole body. Its fingernails are long and hooked. And its feet are turned about, heels to the front and toes to the back — in some accounts three toes, all facing the way it came (Kalanoro).

In the northeastern telling gathered by Golden and Comaroff the kalanoro are envisioned as women — beneficent spirits of the rivers and the caves, with very long hair and fingernails, who eat crabs, whose feet are reversed, heels in front and toes behind, and who are very short, like dwarves (Ecology and Society 20:2, art. 41, 2015). The details shift from district to district — the fangs and glowing eyes of one telling, the hair-covered body of another — but the small stature, the long hair, the hooked nails, and the turned-about feet are the marks that travel with the name wherever it goes.

What the written page holds of the name is split between two very different kinds of book. The first is the colonial-era folklore corpus, in which the kalanoro was set down as a stock figure of the Malagasy tale. Lars Dahle’s Specimens of Malagasy Folk-lore (1877), Gabriel Ferrand’s Contes populaires malgaches (Paris: E. Leroux, 1893), and Charles Renel’s Contes de Madagascar (Paris: E. Leroux, 1910) were gathered by missionaries and colonial officials, men who came to the island with other business and took the stories down along the way. They are indispensable and they are made things: collected by outsiders, printed abroad, and framed for a European reader, and they carry that making into everything they preserve. The second track is the modern ethnographic and conservation record, which finds the kalanoro not as a story told but as a power reckoned with — Joseph J. Hobbs’s fieldwork in the caves of the north, Christopher Golden and Jean Comaroff’s survey of taboo in the northeast, Genese Sodikoff’s forest ethnography, and the possession scholarship of the northwest. Across both tracks the name is one and the tellings are several.

Where a people lives shapes which kalanoro it keeps. Among the Betsimisaraka of the eastern rainforest they are the small hairy beings of the sacred forest — the ground where the dead are buried and the supernatural creatures, the kalanoro among them, are held to dwell, a place of danger presided over in its rites by the tangalamena officiant (Betsimisaraka people). Among the Sakalava and Antankarana of the north they inhabit the limestone caves of the Ankarana, the great karst massif whose passages honeycomb the rock; there the cave-shrines are approached with care, and guides will not enter certain galleries. At Lake Alaotra, the island’s largest lake, the same name means something nearer the water: women with hair to the waist who live in palaces beneath the surface. Forest-dweller, cave-dweller, water-dweller — the one word holds all three, sorted less by kind than by the landscape each community meets at the edge of its own clearing.

One thread of the record is held apart and not settled here. Some tellings draw a line between the kalanoro and the vazimba, the first people of the land — in one version the vazimba are said to be the ghosts of the kalanoro. Whether the vazimba name an actual earlier population or a category a settled people built to think with is a question argued at length elsewhere and not reopened here; the folk link between the two is noted as one telling among many, and left standing as that.

And one framing belongs emphatically to the outsiders. In the cryptozoological literature and on adventure television the kalanoro becomes the “Madagascar wildman,” a hidden animal to be tracked, thermal-imaged, and cast in plaster — a reframing that mistakes a sacred neighbor for a specimen. It is named here only so that it can be set where it belongs: not with the belief, but with the visitors who came to hunt it.

Keepers of what the clearing left

Within the Malagasy sacred world the kalanoro are the keepers of the places people do not fully own — the deep forest, the reed-margin, the river-pool, the cave — and the reversed feet are the sign of exactly that office. A being whose heels point the way it came and whose toes point back cannot be tracked to its home. The prints promise a direction and deliver its opposite. To meet a kalanoro, then, is to meet the wild’s refusal to be mastered on the wild’s own ground: the forest keeps a creature that the forester cannot follow, that answers the tools of the hunt with a trail built to defeat them. In the frame-internal telling the kalanoro remember the time before the trees were cut for the rice-field, and they hold what is left of that time at the edges where the clearing stopped.

They are keepers, and they are captors. At the river and the cave they are beneficent — leaving healing, answering a petition, advising on the plants that cure. But they also take children. In the Sakalava tale a kalanoro carries off a child, though only where the child has been wronged or has wandered where it should not; and the taking is not final. Hobbs, working near the Ankarana, recorded villagers of Ambalakedi who held the nearby Andoboara cave sacred because on several occasions — most recently, when he wrote, about two years before — parents whose children had vanished into the forest recovered them alive at the cave mouth after leaving food for the kalanoro in exchange for their return (Hobbs, People and caves in Madagascar, Focus on Geography 46:3, 2001). The exchange is exact: an offering left, a child restored. The wild takes, and on the right terms the wild gives back.

Their deepest office in the living world is as the familiar of the healer. The diviner-healer whom much of the island calls the ombiasy reads a person’s trouble in cast seeds and treats it with charm and medicine; but there is a knowledge the ombiasy does not read off the mat, and it comes from a spirit only the healer can see. The kalanoro is that spirit — the one who knows the healing plants, who names a diagnosis, who is consulted, in the public record, through a medium. What the kalanoro wants is asked of a man or woman hidden behind a cloth, and answered in a high, childlike voice that the listeners take for the kalanoro speaking through the human throat. This is ethnographic description at the distance of the record, not a rite to be worked from a page; the point that matters is the relation it names. The healer and the forest-spirit are in traffic with one another, and much of what the healer knows about the standing forest he knows because a keeper of it told him.

From that same traffic comes a portion of the fady — the ancestral prohibitions that bind a person, a family, or a place across the Malagasy world, whose fuller working is set out under that name. Many taboos are traced to the ancestors and to the ombiasy who speak the ancestors’ will; but the northeastern record holds that many originate with the kalanoro themselves, imparted to a person in dream and vision (Golden and Comaroff, Ecology and Society 20:2, art. 41, 2015). A being of the deep woods hands down, through sleep, the rule a waking person must keep — and often the rule protects the very ground the kalanoro holds. Through the fady the keeper of the forest reaches into the ordered life of the village, and binds it.

All of this places the kalanoro at a precise seam of the sacred order, and the seam is best seen by what they are not. They are not the razana, the honored family dead who are gathered into the stone tomb and blessed with the first of the rice; the razana are one’s own placed seniors, reachable at a particular door, and the kalanoro are no one’s kin and have no door. They are not the first-owner vazimba of the springs, older than any lineage’s coming. And they are not the tromba, the royal dead of the northwest who return to speak as sovereigns through their mediums — though the record of that country names the kalanoro among the spirits of the land that a possession may carry, so that a Sakalava healer may be a medium for tromba, for tsiny, and for kalanoro in turn, the crowned dead and the forest-keeper reached by kindred means (Sakalava — Religion and Expressive Culture). The kalanoro sit apart from all three. They are neighbors of a different order — small, older than the field, present at the edge of every forest and every cave, and never quite evicted from it. What runs through the whole exchange with them is hasina, the sacred efficacy that settles in wild places as surely as in tombs and sovereigns; a place a kalanoro keeps holds a potency the clearing did not make and cannot take, and to deal rightly with the keeper is to keep on the right side of that force.

From the folklore volume to the standing forest

The mission and colonial centuries met the kalanoro as they met the rest of the Malagasy sacred world — as material for the folklore volume, and, in the missionary reading, as the superstition of the unconverted. That vocabulary is history to be reported, not a verdict to be kept. The men who filled Dahle’s and Ferrand’s and Renel’s collections did real work of preservation, and they did it inside a frame that took the belief for error; the tales survive because outsiders wrote them down, and they survive bent to the outsiders’ sense of what a tale was for. What the record shows against that reading is persistence. The kalanoro are not a closed chapter of a vanished island. They are a present-tense belief of living communities.

In the Ankarana of the north the cave-shrines are still approached with care and the kalanoro still consulted; the Antankarana who took refuge among that limestone in the nineteenth century, and whose sovereign’s tombs lie in its caves, keep the country sacred still. Among the Betsimisaraka of the east the forest remains the ground where the dead lie and the kalanoro dwell, its observances led by the tangalamena. At Lake Alaotra the women of the underwater palaces are still reckoned with by the people of the largest lake. None of this is recollected; it is done.

The modern scholarship has taken the belief seriously on its own terms, and each strand of it has read the kalanoro in a different light. The possession ethnography of the northwest — the work of Lesley Sharp and Michael Lambek on the tromba country — sets the kalanoro among the wider company of spirits that the mediums carry, a keeper of the land ranked beside the royal dead in the crowded field of the possessed. Genese Sodikoff’s Forest and Labor in Madagascar (Indiana University Press, 2012) reads the forest-spirits within the political economy of conservation, where the woods are at once a sacred ground and a contested resource. And Golden and Comaroff’s taboo research documents, present-tense, how the kalanoro knit local spiritual value to the condition of the standing forest: they are, in the study’s phrase, “restricted to forest areas,” so that the health of a belief and the health of the woods move together. Clear the forest and, in the telling the researchers recorded, the kalanoro leave it. The spirit is only as safe as the trees.

That last turn is the striking one, and it has reached the conservation literature directly. George Holmes, Thomas Aneurin Smith, and Caroline Ward, in “Fantastic beasts and why to conserve them” (Oryx 52:2, 2018, pp. 231–239), treat belief in beings like the kalanoro as a real force in biodiversity protection — noting that the kalanoro are held to vanish if their forest is destroyed or degraded, so that a taboo which shelters the spirit shelters, under the same rule, the endemic species that share its ground. In that reckoning a being of the deep woods becomes a stakeholder in the woods’ survival, the sacred value and the biological one sheltering beneath a single fady. The keeper of the forest edge turns out to be, in the plainest institutional sense, one of the forest’s defenders.

Against all of this stands the one framing the tradition does not own. On the adventure-television circuit the kalanoro is the “Madagascar wildman,” pursued through the night jungle with thermal cameras and hunted for the plaster cast that never sets in the wet ground — a hidden animal awaiting capture. It is the crusader’s error in a new costume: a living neighbor mistaken for a specimen, a belief mistaken for a beast. The kalanoro of the record are not a cryptid to be run down. They are the small keepers of the forest and the cave and the reed-margin, told in one name across a whole island, consulted by the healer, honored at the cave mouth with an offering, and holding, at the ragged edge of every clearing, the country the field never took. They have outlasted the folklore volume, the mission, and the colony, and they are keeping it yet.

The tsingy of the Ankarana massif in northern Madagascar. The limestone’s caves are approached as dwellings of the kalanoro by the Antankarana and Sakalava of the north. Lemurbaby, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

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