The Betsileo

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Above Fianarantsoa the water comes down a hillside in steps. A single slope is cut and walled into a staircase of a hundred paddies, terrace below terrace, each retaining-bank packed and dressed by hand, the flow led from the crest to the lowest field so that no drop is wasted and no bank gives way. Higher on the same slope, set into ground that will never be planted, stands a chamber of stone built to outlast every dwelling in sight. The hands that raised those banks lie in that chamber now. The terrace feeds the living and the tomb keeps the dead, and a people has written its continuity twice into the one hill — once in worked earth and once in worked stone, the rice below and the ancestors above.

Irrigated rice terraces stepped into the hills around Fianarantsoa, the country of the Betsileo, reputed the finest rice-farmers of Madagascar. Torbenbrinker, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The unconquered many

The Betsileo are the Malagasy people of the southern highlands — the plateau-and-terrace country centered on Fianarantsoa, where the interior falls away southward from the Merina heartland into a rougher, wetter, more broken relief of hills and narrow valleys. They are the third-largest of the island’s ethnic groupings, after the Merina of the central plateau and the Betsimisaraka of the long east coast, roughly an eighth of all the Malagasy; recent counts put them near 4.36 million (Betsileo people), where the anthropologist Conrad Kottak, who did the deepest modern fieldwork among them in 1966 and 1967, reckoned them then at something under a million. Like every people of the island they carry the doubled Austronesian-and-Bantu descent that the record reads across all of Madagascar; that braided origin is the common inheritance, and it is not re-derived here.

The name is heard within the tradition as Betsileo, and the tellers gloss it — be, many, and a root of invincibility — as the many who cannot be beaten, the unconquered multitude, sometimes tied to a founder-figure remembered as having thrown back a raid from the Sakalava country to the west in the seventeenth century. The gloss is folk-etymology, and those who tell it hold it lightly; it is a claim about standing more than a claim about history. What the deeper memory holds firmly is that the southern plateau was not always the ancestors’ to farm. It is remembered as having been the country of the vazimba before the founding lineages came to it — the first people of the land, honored still at the springs and the oldest stones. Whether the vazimba were a real earlier population or a founding people of tradition is a question argued in its own place and not reopened here; on the southern plateau as across the island, they are remembered as the ones who were there first.

By the seventeenth century the record shows the highlands south of Imerina divided among independent kingdoms rather than gathered under one. The standard account names three principal southern-highland polities: Isandra to the west, Lalangina in the center and east, and Arindrano — also written Iarindrano — to the south, with Manandriana counted to the north and lesser realms such as Fandriana and Fisakana beyond. Isandra and Lalangina are named the largest of them. These were the frame within which Betsileo society took the shape the ethnographers would later read: a country of competing chiefdoms, each anchored on its own ancestral ground, none of them able for long to subdue the rest, so that the “unconquered many” of the name were as often unconquered by one another as by any outside power.

What is written of the Betsileo begins as what the Betsileo themselves recite — the oral traditions of founding and rank — and passes through the twentieth-century ethnography that gathered those traditions and read the social order on the ground. The deepest modern account is Kottak’s The Past in the Present: History, Ecology, and Cultural Variation in Highland Madagascar (University of Michigan Press, 1980), built on that 1966–67 fieldwork, in which he mapped some nine hundred and ninety-eight named descent groups spread across thirteen hundred settlements of the Betsileo homeland. Alongside it stand the archaeology of Susan Kus and Victor Raharijaona, who have made the southern highlands a laboratory for the study of stone and building, and the highland ethnography of Maurice Bloch, whose long work among the forest-dwelling Zafimaniry — reckoned a Betsileo subgroup — sits at the edge of this world. The founding kingdoms are held in oral memory; the social and mortuary order is read in the terraces and the tombs.

Terrace, rank, and tomb

The Betsileo write their standing with the ancestors into two kinds of built ground, and the sacred order runs through both. On the tanety, the hills, water is led down the walled staircase of irrigated paddies, and the Betsileo are held across the island to be its finest rice-farmers — the people who took the terrace furthest, cutting and banking whole slopes into flooded steps in a manner that recalls the wet-rice country of Island Southeast Asia from which one line of their ancestry came. The terraced land is tanin-drazana, ancestral land: held from the forebears who first cleared and walled it, owed back to them, worked under their eye. To farm it rightly is to stand in the flow of hasina, the sacred efficacy that quickens the rice and the descent line at once and legitimates those who hold authority; the working system of that potency is set out in its own account, and here it is simply the current the whole order runs on. The labor the terrace demands is heavy and exact: the banks must be maintained against every rain, the water led and held at the right depth through the flooding and the transplanting, the whole staircase kept in a single working order that no one household can sustain alone. Kottak read the making of Betsileo rank partly off that demand — the way the best valley-bottom land, once cleared and walled, became the scarce and coveted ground that a ranked society formed around, the terrace and the hierarchy rising together. The rice is not only food. It is the visible proof that a family stands in right relation to the dead who own the ground.

That order is stratified by descent, and the Betsileo terms do not map onto those of the Merina to the north. The record’s own Betsileo usage, set down by Kottak, names three historically endogamous ranks. The nobility — the rulers and their descendants — are the hova, the hova Betsileo; the free commoners are the olompotsy; and the descendants of the enslaved are the andevo, also called hovavao. The inversion is exact and worth marking: in the Merina highlands hova names the free commoners, the rank below the nobility, while in the south the same word names the nobility itself (Betsileo). Within the commoners the record draws a further line, between junior and senior olompotsy: a senior line of free commoners served as counsellors to the chiefs and rulers and as checks upon their power, a standing body of advisers whose consent a chief needed and whose weight balanced his own. The endogamy pressed hardest at the bottom of the order, upon the descendants of slaves; andevo remains a stigmatized word in Betsileo society today, and the social order it belongs to is described here as the ethnography records it, not weighed. Over the whole ritual life stand the ray aman-dreny, the “fathers-and-mothers” — the elders who hold custom, speak for the ancestors, and preside at the gatherings where the order is renewed.

The completing of a life turns, as across the highlands, on the tomb. The Betsileo lay their dead in collective chambers of stone, the tranon’ny maty, the house of the dead, to be gathered there among the razana, the ancestors into whose senior order a completed life is raised. And they keep the famadihana, the turning of the bones, the highland rite of secondary burial in which a family opens the tomb, carries out its wrapped forebears, renews their shrouds, and lays them back — a rite the Betsileo share with the Merina and whose full course is given in its own place. What is distinctively Betsileo in it is the weight thrown onto the tomb itself. The grandest turnings fall when a new tomb is inaugurated, and the building of that tomb — the quarrying of stone, the pulling of great blocks across country by the massed labor of a kindred, the raising of a chamber meant to stand when every house of the living has fallen — is itself the central mortuary labor, the durable monument on which a family stakes its continuity. To move a great stone is to move a whole descent group; the tomb is the family made permanent, and its making is the work around which the rest of the mortuary life is arranged.

Susan Kus and Victor Raharijaona have read this stone-work as the key to the whole. In “Matters of Life and Death,” their study of Betsileo mortuary ritual in the Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association (2001), they set the tomb and its rites inside the larger fabric of Betsileo life rather than treating death as a sealed domain — the labor of building, the feeding of those who build, the reckoning of rank all bound into a single order. In “Between Earth and Sky There Are Only a Few Large Boulders,” in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (1998), they traced how great stones carry sovereignty in central Madagascar — how the raising and mounting of boulders was bound to the standing of those who ruled. Behind both stands Maurice Bloch’s Placing the Dead (Seminar Press, 1971), which argued for the highlands generally that it is the collective stone tomb, and not the house of the living, that defines the enduring family. Among the Betsileo the argument reads almost literally off the ground: the dwelling is of wood and earth and passes with a generation; the tomb is of stone and holds all the generations at once, and it is built to a standard the living never claim for themselves. The prohibitions that fence conduct — the fady whose whole logic is given in its own account — are woven through both terrace and tomb, an ancestor’s word binding a line long after the forebear who set it.

Conquest, capital, and the living highlands

The Betsileo kingdoms did not hold their independence into the nineteenth century. Radama I of the Merina, who reigned from 1810 to 1828, turned south early, and the fragmented southern-highland polities — never united among themselves — were incorporated one after another into the expanding Merina kingdom by the early 1820s. The incorporation is given here from the Betsileo side and without a verdict; the royal history that drove it belongs to the north. What followed on the ground was a new administrative order laid over the old chiefdoms. In June 1830 the Merina governor Rafaralahindrinaly, acting on the order of Queen Ranavalona I, founded Fianarantsoa on the site of the Betsileo village of Ivoenava, as a southern seat of government modeled deliberately on Antananarivo — a twin of the highland capital set down to hold the newly taken south. The name is glossed “where one learns the good,” and the city grew into what it remains: the Betsileo capital, a center of schooling and of the churches, the pivot of the whole southern plateau (Fianarantsoa). Set high on its ridges above the terraced valleys, it kept the old Betsileo country as its hinterland even as it governed it for the north, and the older kingdoms did not vanish so much as fold into the districts and lineages that the new administration recorded. French conquest and colonial rule followed the island’s wider history from 1896, and the Betsileo country passed with the rest of Madagascar through colony and into the independent republic, Fianarantsoa remaining the seat of its own province and the head-town of the south.

The ethnographic reception of the Betsileo is unusually rich for the south of the island. Kottak’s The Past in the Present read the rise of stratification and of state power among them through their ecology and their oral history together — how the demands of terraced wet-rice cultivation, the pressure of population on cleared valley-bottom land, and the memory of the founding kingdoms bore on the making of a ranked society. Kus and Raharijaona have kept the southern highlands as a working ground for the archaeology of monumentality and mortuary practice, reading the tomb, the boulder, and the built house as carriers of sovereignty in central Madagascar. And at the margin of this world lie the Zafimaniry, a forest-dwelling people reckoned a Betsileo subgroup — some twenty-five thousand of them in about a hundred villages of the wooded highlands southeast of Ambositra, who settled that country in the eighteenth century as the plateau forests were cleared. The Zafimaniry keep a woodcraft that was once widespread across the island and now survives chiefly with them: houses and tombs assembled entirely in mortise-and-tenon joinery, without a nail or a hinge or any metal, their boards and posts carved in a codified geometry of patterns. That knowledge was proclaimed by UNESCO in 2003 and inscribed in 2008 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (UNESCO). Bloch’s decades of fieldwork among the Zafimaniry — on their houses, their marriages, their sense of what endures — sit at the edge of the Betsileo world and illuminate its center, the same instinct that raises a stone tomb on the plateau expressed in the forest in carved and jointed wood.

A Zafimaniry house of the southern-highland forest, built board-on-board in nailless mortise-and-tenon joinery — the woodcraft UNESCO inscribed in 2008. Aquintero82, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

In the living present the Betsileo of the Fianarantsoa country keep the ancestors and the church together, as much of Madagascar does. The city is a stronghold of the Malagasy churches — Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed — and its people are as often as not parishioners; they are also the ones who tend the tanin-drazana, raise and repair the stone tomb, and gather when the day-reckoner names the hour for the turning of the bones. The two allegiances are held together more often than they are traded, the Sunday and the tomb kept by the same hands. The terrace is still cut and banked and flooded; the great stones are still quarried and pulled; the elders still speak for the dead who own the ground. What was written into the hillside above Ivoenava before the Merina governor came to found a city there is written into it yet — the rice that feeds the line and the stone that holds it, the one people’s answer, in earth and in rock, to the question of how the living stay bound to the dead who gave them the land.

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