in the mats, in order of seniority, calling their names as they emerge. The crowd shouts for joy, and the band cranks up the beat as the men dance the corpses around the tomb. Placed on the laps of the women, the corpses are sprinkled with rum and honey, then rewrapped in new white silk lamba, and held by family members who pray silently. The music picks up again and mixed groups of men and women dance the corpses around the tomb one more time. The mood, writes Graeber, is one of “delirious abandon,” with the corpses “twisted and crunched about a great deal before finally being returned to their places inside.” As the crowd begins to drift away, the tomb is sealed with earth. Later, the astrologer and a few assistants return to perform a fanidy, symbolically locking the tomb by burying magical objects around the doorway. If done correctly, writes Graeber, a fanidy should ensure that “the ghosts of those within would remain there, unable to emerge again and trouble the living.”4
The famidhana is a joyous occasion, but an expensive one. A huge feast is prepared, one of the few occasions when a zebu is killed for meat. There are the costs of the silk lambas, the band, the bottles of homemade rum. Family members are expected to contribute what they can, handing over an envelope of cash to the host. The event can cost from $1,500 to $2,000, more than many families earn in a year. “It is usually held in winter after the harvest when families have the means,” said Richard. Winter is also the dry season; for public health reasons, the government has banned the exhumation of bodies during the monsoon months.
There is no set interval between the famadihana, although some say that once in seven years is common. “It depends on a family decision, and financial means,” said Richard. Lala was suggesting it was time, and maybe they could do it in September. “We need to consult everyone in the family,” Richard replied. By then, he hoped, the house would be finished so everyone could stay overnight.
The practice of famadihana has been criticized. A Washington Post article attempted to link it to the spread of bubonic plague in Madagascar, although the connection seemed weak;5 in a country where over 75 percent of the population live on less than $2 a day, many people live in unsanitary conditions that provide fertile breeding grounds for rats and fleas. Attempting to ban a strongly established cultural practice because it may result in a few cases of plague diverts attention from the structural problems of poverty, sanitation, and lack of infrastructure. The government could achieve more by picking up the trash and enforcing sanitary regulations than by banning famadihana.
Richard did not forget Lala’s request. The family agreed to hold the two-day famadihana in mid-September. I was sorry I could not attend, but Richard posted photos to my Facebook page.
Paris with Rice Paddies
Most travelers arrive in Madagascar at Tana’s Ivato international airport, about eight miles from the city center. There are daily flights from Paris, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Maputo (Mozambique); connections to Indian Ocean destinations—Mauritius, Réunion, the Comoros, and Seychelles; and weekly flights to more offbeat destinations such as Bangkok and Istanbul. The Bangkok passengers include gem dealers with illegal shipments of rough sapphires sewn into their underwear or in bottles labeled as vitamin tablets. Others travel to buy electronics and upscale consumer goods for resale to middle-class customers. Until the domestic market grows enough to make it viable to use air freight, business owners will continue to make shopping trips, stuffing cheap luggage with designer-label clothes, iPhones, and cosmetics.
Domestic flights are on Air Madagascar. Or “Air Maybe,” as one passenger described it. “Sometimes they fly, sometimes they don’t,” she said. “You can never be sure.” The airline seems to suffer from the same disease as the government that owns it, staggering from one financial or management crisis to the next. Sometimes it’s bankrupt. Sometimes the pilots are on strike. Sometimes there is no fuel. You should never book too far ahead on Air Maybe.
The road to the city from the airport passes through a densely populated area. After a few hotels and the Chinese casino, it’s the typical African or Asian street scene—honking cars, slow-moving trucks, hole-in-the-wall shops, children playing on the narrow sidewalk, porters lounging on hand carts. Change the language on the signs and it could be almost any city in India, Bangladesh, or Indonesia. A mesmerizing array of small retail establishments are crammed into narrow storefronts—a tire repair shop next to a beauty salon, then a halal butcher, a one-room health clinic, a furniture workshop, a SIM card recharge outlet, a shop selling friperie (secondhand clothes), a small hotel, a lumberyard, a used car parts store, another beauty salon. Then a wall plastered with posters for music concerts and religious revivals, almost obscuring the Défense d’Afficher (forbidden to post) sign. A jumble of colorful hand-painted signs, mostly in French or Malagasy with a sprinkling of English—Good Auto, Rehoboth Shack, Smile Pizza, Quick Fix Oil Change, Flash Video. For the last four miles, the road runs along the levee of the River Ikopa. The low-lying areas around the city are crisscrossed by canals supplying water to the rice paddies. Among the paddies are islands of shacks, with chickens, geese, and ducks (some destined to be pâté) running free, and zebu grazing on patches of grassland. Then past the fifteen-thousand-seat national rugby stadium—home of the Makis (the lemurs)—to a retail district centered, without any sense of ideological irony, on a square dedicated to a communist hero, the Place de Ho Chi Minh.
Situated just over four thousand feet above sea level, Tana, with its hills and narrow, winding streets, feels like a tropical, slightly rundown version of Paris with rice paddies. From the original rova (fortress) built by the Merina king Andrianjaka in the early seventeenth century, the royal real estate expanded, with new palaces and royal tombs built on the highest points of the ridge. The residential topography of Tana (as in other Merina towns and villages) reflected class distinctions. Down the hill from the palaces were the houses of the andriana, the noble class; the commoners, the hova, lived further down the slope, and the slave caste (andevo) and rural migrants on the plains to the west. Members of castes were required to live in designated districts and return to them after working in other places. Nonnobles were not allowed to build wooden houses or keep pigs within the city limits. As the population grew, the Merina kings used forced labor to construct a massive system of dikes and paddy fields around the city to provide an adequate supply of rice.
Tana temporarily lost its status as the Merina capital in the early eighteenth century with the death of the king Andriamasinavalona. The kingdom split into four territories and for the next seventy-odd years, Merina kinglets fought, intrigued, allied, married, and died as they competed for supremacy. The eventual winner was Andrianampoinimerina from the eastern district, who conquered Antananarivo in 1794, ending the civil war. His former capital, Ambohimanga, was designated the spiritual capital of the Merina, and Antananarivo the political and commercial capital. Andrianampoinimerina created a large marketplace at Analakely, the lowland area between the two ridges, and it remains the city’s economic center.
By 1810, when Andrianampoinimerina’s son Radama I ascended the throne and began expanding the Merina empire, Antananarivo, with a population of more than eighty thousand, was the largest and most important commercial city on the island. Radama’s successor, Ranavalona I, helped launch Madagascar’s modest industrial revolution. British missionaries introduced brickmaking, and a shipwrecked French craftsman, Jean Laborde, established factories to produce construction materials, agricultural tools, and weapons for the army; in Antananarivo, two massive staircases were built to connect the market at Analakely to the growing residential areas on the two ridges.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, all houses in Madagascar were built from wood, grasses, reeds, and other plant-based materials deemed appropriate for structures used by the living; stone, as an inert material, was reserved for the dead and used only for family tombs. In 1867, after a series of fires destroyed wooden homes in Antananarivo, Queen Ranavalona II lifted the royal edict on the use of stone and brick for construction. The royal palace was encased in stone. The first brick house built by the London Missionary Society in 1869 blended English, Creole, and Malagasy designs
