Tromba

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At the doany in the Tsararano quarter of Mahajanga, a visitor does not simply walk in. He waits outside the fenced enclosure until a guardian comes for him, is told what he may wear and what he may not carry, and is led in to where a woman sits. When she speaks it is not in her own voice, nor from her own century. A king who reigned and died generations before has come into her — dressed in the manner of his reign, addressed by his own name, keeping the taboos on food and color and word that were his in life — and it is the king, not the woman, who hears the visitor’s trouble, puts questions to him, blesses or warns him, and sends him out with a piece of white limestone in his hand as the token of an ancestor’s favor. The monarchy that France dissolved a century ago is, inside this enclosure, still receiving petitioners. It has only changed the bodies through which it speaks.

A Sakalava sovereign during the Fanompoa be, the annual royal service held at Mahajanga. Mainty kely, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

The word that names four things

Tromba is a Malagasy word, and strictly a Sakalava one, and it is worn thin from carrying more than one meaning at a time. As the anthropologist Lesley Sharp sets it out in The Possessed and the Dispossessed, the term names four things at once: the royal ancestral spirits of the Sakalava; the institution of possession by which those spirits return; the mediums into whom they come; and the experience of possession itself. To speak of tromba is thus to speak, in one breath, of the dead, of the practice that recalls them, of the living who hold them, and of the moment when the two exchange bodies. The looseness is not confusion. It is a single thing seen from its several sides.

The spirits at the center of it are the dead of the Sakalava monarchy — kings and nobles who ruled the northwest of Madagascar and did not, in the Sakalava understanding, stop ruling when they died. They are ordered into generations that follow the dynastic lines, so that the whole royal past stands ranked behind the present, reign after reign, each spirit fixed in the era he governed. That order divides into two great branches. The Zafinimena, the “descendants of gold,” are the senior and ruling line; the Zafinifotsy, the “descendants of silver,” are a junior branch, defeated by the gold and driven north, where in the middle of the eighteenth century their survivors founded a kingdom of their own. In the far north a number of the silver nobles are remembered to have drowned themselves in the sea rather than submit to the gold, and in the country the gold now rule their spirits are honored in possession — the beaten rivals given voice again in the mouths of the living. The francophone anthropologist Maurizio Esposito La Rossa has traced this gold-and-silver order as a scheme of dynastic identity and rank, the hierarchy of the kingdom reproduced among its ghosts.

Around the royal tromba the record names a wider company of spirits, not all of them kings and not all of them kind. There are the jiny; the kokolampo; the tromba hely, the “little tromba”; and the njarinintsy, which the recent ethnography sets down as a comparatively new arrival among them. These lesser and sometimes afflicting spirits shade off from the crowned dead into a broader field of possession, but the tromba proper keeps its royal center: the spirit that matters most is a named king, and the institution that matters most is the one that brings him back.

How the tromba reaches the documentary record runs through the Sakalava kingdoms and their cult of the royal dead. The ruling house was the Maroserana dynasty, whose own origins are debated among historians; from it descended the two great realms of the northwest. The Kingdom of Menabe was founded before 1600 in the country between the Morondava and Tsiribihina rivers; the Kingdom of Boina, or Iboina, was established in 1685 by Andriamandisoarivo, whose successors made the port of Majunga — Mahajanga — the greatest of their gateways to the Indian Ocean trade. The monarchy rested on two supports at once. One was material: the dady, the ancient relics of dead kings, their bones and hair and nails and ornaments, kept as the proof of royalty and a reservoir of power. The other was vocal: the tromba, in which the same kings returned to speak. Between them the two divided the labor of continuity. The relics gave the dynasty a body that could be washed, wrapped, guarded, and processed — a thing to be possessed and defended, and, as the twentieth-century disputes over the custody of the Sakalava relics would show, fought over. The tromba gave it a voice that could still answer a question. A king reduced to his bones is honored; a king who speaks through a saha can be consulted. The Sakalava kept both, and kept them together, so that the dead ruler was at once an object of service at the doany and an audience one might actually attend. Because the institution is alive and not archival, its deepest documentation is ethnographic and present-tense — Michael Lambek’s fieldwork at Mahajanga and Sharp’s in the north — with the colonial and mission notices read critically against what the living tradition still shows.

The king in the living body

Within the Sakalava sacred world the tromba is the monarchy continued by other means. Death does not retire a king; it changes the body from which he speaks. A tromba spirit is never a vague ancestral presence but a particular dead royal, and he is known with the precision one would use for a living person: by his name, by the reign he held, by the dress his medium puts on when he arrives, by his bearing and his temper, and by his own fady — the taboos that must be kept in his presence, on certain foods, colors, days, and words. To receive him is to receive a specific man of a specific century, and to observe the prohibitions he brought with him from it.

The vessel is the medium, the saha. A single spirit may claim many mediums over time, though it can be present in only one at any one moment. The oldest and most powerful of the royal tromba attach themselves to saha who are often single women, living permanently in the villages beside the mahabo, the royal tombs, where they hold themselves ready to the dead. Through the contact between the crowned dead and the living runs hasina, the sacred efficacy that legitimates authority and quickens life across the world of the Malagasy; when a king speaks through his saha, hasina passes with his words, and the relations of gold and silver are enacted again each time a spirit takes a body.

The vocation is a calling and not a career one chooses. It announces itself, in the common account, as an affliction — a sickness or disorder that resists ordinary remedy — and it is refused before it is accepted; only when the sufferer submits, and is trained and disciplined under mediums already possessed, does the affliction resolve into the settled capacity to carry a spirit. The public record describes this passage at a respectful distance, and there it must stay: it is not a procedure to be set down. What can be said is what the finished medium does. When the spirit comes, the woman is set aside and the king is present. He hears grievances and settles them; he blesses and he warns; he heals; he adjudicates disputes brought to him as they might have been brought to his court in life, clothed and spoken in the register of his own reign. The living come to a dead king because he is a king, and because being dead has not unseated him.

Two readings of what this accomplishes stand at the center of the scholarship, and they complete rather than contradict each other. Lambek’s, from Mahajanga, is that the mediums bear history. In The Weight of the Past he describes the saha as the living archive of the Sakalava royal past — custodians who carry it not as a written record but as an obligation and a performance, the royal ancestors emerging in their mediums to comment on the present in many voices from many reigns. To bear history, in his account, is at once a weight, a discipline, and an act of creation: the past is not merely remembered but staged, embodied, and answered to. Sharp’s reading, from the migrant town, is that the tromba is also a source of real and usable power. In a plantation society the mediums — most of them women, a group easily counted as powerless — are in fact far from powerless; through possession they become healers and authorities, people to whom others come for relief from personal and social ills.

The distinction between the tromba and the family dead is exact and worth keeping. The razana, the ancestors of an ordinary household, are honored at the stone tomb and reached in dream and first-fruits; they bless and warn a line, but they do not, as a rule, take a living body and hold audience. The tromba are royal, named individually, and present through mediums — the crowned dead speaking, not the family dead resting. The healing and divining the tromba perform likewise runs alongside, but does not merge with, the work of the ombiasy, the diviner-healers whose knowledge is read from the sikidy rather than spoken by a possessing king. Different orders of the sacred, differently reached.

One framing the tradition does not accept, and which belongs to the observers rather than the observed, is the older outside reading of possession as “hysteria” or as a species of “mass psychology.” Named here only to be set aside, that vocabulary describes the discomfort of the visitor and not the institution he was watching; the scholarship that has taken the tromba seriously — Lambek on the mediums as historians, Sharp on possession, gender, and power — has left it behind. What the saha does is a coherent office in a living religious order, transacted with the concreteness of court business.

From the doany to the migrant town

In the kingdom era the tromba was inseparable from rule, and its institutional seat was the doany — the royal shrine-capital, at once palace, reliquary, and place of service. Chief among them is the doany of Andriamisara at Tsararano in Mahajanga, which houses the dady of the four great kings of Boina — Andriamisara, Andriamandisoarivo, Andrianamboniarivo, and Andriamihaninarivo, whose names appear in variant spellings across the northwest — and is known for them as the Doany Efadahy, the shrine of the four men. There the dady custodians keep the relics and conduct the royal service. Its yearly summit is the Fanompoa be, the “Great Service,” the bath of the royal relics, which draws the Sakalava world and its client-mediums to Mahajanga and shrouds the dead kings anew in a rite the Sakalava keep as the renewal of the year. The relics are washed and reclothed, the hasina in them reactivated, and the commitment of the living to the crowned dead renewed in the open.

The state that housed all this was taken apart in the nineteenth century, and then again by conquest. The expansion of the Merina kingdom from the highlands pressed hard on the Sakalava: Menabe submitted to Radama I in 1822, Majunga fell to him in 1824, and Iboina was attacked in 1835, its leaders scattering to the surrounding islands. French conquest finished the work of dismantling Sakalava sovereignty as a political fact, Menabe’s last resistance broken by 1902 after the killings at Ambiky in 1897. What ended, though, was the kingdom as a state — not the tromba. From the second half of the nineteenth century the royal spirits and their mediumship spread outward: across Madagascar, beyond the old heartland, and overseas to the Comoros and to Zanzibar, carried along the routes of trade and migration, so that a Sakalava king exiled from his own port might be honored in possession on another island entirely.

That spread was not a simple export of a fixed rite. As the mobility of laborers, traders, and pilgrims carried the tromba across the island and its seas, the ancestral service was reconfigured in the moving — the reworking of the rites under conditions of migration a subject in its own right for the ethnographers who have followed the spirits out of the heartland. A king who in the kingdom era was tied to a particular tomb and a particular doany could, among people on the move, be met far from either; the mediumship traveled lighter than the relics, and where it went it took the royal dead with it.

Today the institution is emphatically present-tense, and it reaches far past the people whose kings founded it. Mediums come from every walk of life, every clan, and every religion; the spirits claim whom they claim. In Sharp’s migrant town of Ambanja, in the Sambirano valley of the north — a booming plantation economy that draws laborers from across the island and beyond — some sixty percent of women had been possessed at one time or another, and incoming migrants, arriving as outsiders with little standing, found themselves assimilated and raised in status as local spirits came to possess them. To be claimed by a Sakalava king was to be given a place in a country not one’s own. The living communities of saha, of dady custodians, and of doany pilgrims carry the work forward, and the Christian present of the island runs alongside the tromba rather than closing it out; pilgrims come to the doany, leave money, and receive in return the tanifoty, the small piece of white limestone that carries the royal ancestors’ blessing away in the hand.

The plantation towns where the Sakalava kings never held territory are now among the places their dead most reliably appear, arriving in the bodies of women who came for work and were claimed instead by a monarch two centuries gone. A sovereignty abolished on paper keeps its court by other means. Its kings are lodged not in any palace but in the living, who dress them, answer for them, and give them back their voices — and who, in doing so, keep an entire royal past on its feet, generation ranked behind generation, none of it yet willing to fall silent.

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