Ambondrombe

Also Known As: also written Ambòndrombé; called Iratsy, “the Bad One”, by the Betsileo who live beneath it
Region/Culture: Southern Africa
Mythos: Malagasy Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: A forested, cloud-wrapped mountain believed to receive the spirits of the dead, from which the sounds of an unseen town are heard at night.
Role in Mythos: It is the best-known abode of the dead in Madagascar, a cursed ancestral landmark for the southern Betsileo and, from the nineteenth century, a city of ghosts ruled by the Merina crown.
Relation to Humans: The living did not go there, and nineteenth-century travellers found that no one in the surrounding country would guide them up it. People at its foot listened to it instead, hearing cannon, cattle and rice-pounding where nobody lived.

The wind on Ambondrombe does something strange. In the 1870s the missionary George Shaw camped in a sheltered hollow near its summit, where the air barely moved, and listened to what sounded like a furious gale tearing past overhead. He had spent three hours cutting a path through undergrowth and creepers to get there, followed by a few of his bearers. None of the Betsileo farmers who lived below would come with him or lend him an axe. They knew what the mountain was. It was where the dead went.

Ambondrombe stands on the eastern lip of the Betsileo highlands in south-central Madagascar, about fifty kilometres east of the town of Ambalavao, where the cleared uplands of rice terraces and cattle pasture give way to forest and drop toward the lower country of the Tanala. The missionary James Sibree saw it from the road in 1876 and described a long, regular ridge stretching like the outline of a bow from north to south, its top buried in cloud. It is not especially high, a little under 2,000 metres and lower than the neighbouring Andringitra peaks, but the east wind drives moisture against it almost without pause. Mist sits on it. Rivers that run east start on its flanks. The lower slopes carry some of the densest forest Shaw said he had seen anywhere on the island, and above the trees there is scrub and wet grey granite.

The Betsileo who farm beneath its western side call it Iratsy, the Bad One. Their own account of it is local and specific. The rivers that begin on Ambondrombe were the routes by which migrants climbed from the east coast into the highlands, so the mountain stood at a crossroads where many groups halted and split. One tradition says that Andriandahifotsy, the shared ancestor of the royal houses of the southern Betsileo, stopped at its foot. A prince’s child died there, lost in the forest or drowned in a pool, depending on who tells it, and after that the mountain was cursed and became the home of spirits that meant people harm. The villagers of Ankarinomby, at the forest edge below it, still claimed descent from the old princes of the mountain when the geographer Sophie Moreau studied their village.

Then soldiers arrived. Around 1815 the armies of the Merina king Radama I took the southern Betsileo country, and in the 1830s Queen Ranavalona I sent expeditions down through the valleys at the mountain’s foot to make war on the Tanala. The troops camped there more than once, heard the local stories, and heard what the local people heard. From the empty forest above came the boom of cannon and the call of bugles, then cattle lowing, a cock crowing, the steady knock of pestles pounding rice, the sounds of a busy town drifting down from a slope where nobody lived.

Out of those sounds grew a larger story, which Moreau, in a study published by IRD Éditions in 2005, dates to Ranavalona’s reign and follows through the accounts of nineteenth-century writers. On the summit, it held, stood a city of the dead laid out like Antananarivo, the Merina capital, where the spirits kept their ranks and lived as subjects of the Merina sovereigns. Moreau reads it as a myth that helped hold an expanding kingdom together. The older Betsileo mountain of a dead child and hostile spirits did not disappear. It simply had a royal capital built on top of it.

By the time Sibree wrote it down in The Great African Island (1880), the belief had spread well beyond the Betsileo. The spirits of the dead, he reported, were believed to go to Ambondrombe, and no one living near it would dare approach. People told him that whenever a royal ghost arrived to take up residence, the mountain fired a salute. A royal ghost climbs out of the valley into the cloud, and somewhere above the trees the guns go off to welcome him home. In a later book Sibree called the place the Malagasy Hades, the abode of the souls of the ancestors, and repeated a report that great caves opened somewhere inside it.

It sat awkwardly among other ideas about death. Sibree found the dead spoken of as having gone into the air, or as having gone home to rest, or as having become God, while ghosts went by many names, ambiroa among them. A modern summary of Betsileo belief keeps the same double arrangement: one part of a person goes to Ambondrombe, or nowadays to heaven or hell, and has no more to do with the living, while the ambiroa lingers in the hills, slips into houses and dreams, and is called back to receive offerings at the tomb.

Shaw went up to settle the matter. What he found was a closed block of hills whose gullies ran north to south and opened only at the south-west corner, so that the east wind, striking the highest hill, poured round and over it into the valleys and had nowhere to go but out through one narrow mouth. He called it a natural trumpet. He found no caves. His conclusion was blunt: the wind, he wrote, was the great ghost raiser at Ambondrombe.

That explanation did not empty the mountain, and the tradition never asked it to answer to a surveyor. What Ambondrombe does, in every version, is take the dead in and keep them away from the living, and its sounds are the proof that someone is at home. Its danger lies in the curse the Betsileo put on it and in the spirits of Iratsy, which have no love for trespassers, and in plain terms in the forest itself, dense, wet and pathless. Its limits are equally clear. No telling in these accounts sends a living hero down into the city and back, names a gatekeeper, or describes the streets. The ghosts could be heard. Shaw climbed the mountain, camped on it, and came down again, and nothing followed him.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Ambondrombe?

Ambondrombe is a forested mountain in the Betsileo highlands of south-central Madagascar that was widely believed to be the home of the spirits of the dead. Nineteenth-century travellers such as James Sibree reported that local people would not go near it, and Sibree later called it the Malagasy Hades.

Where is Ambondrombe located?

Ambondrombe stands on the eastern edge of the Betsileo highlands, about fifty kilometres east of the town of Ambalavao, where the highlands drop toward the forest country of the Tanala. It rises to a little under 2,000 metres and is almost always wrapped in mist carried by the east wind.

What sounds are heard on Ambondrombe?

People living near Ambondrombe reported hearing cannon fire, bugles, cattle lowing, cocks crowing and rice being pounded, as if a town stood on the empty mountain. The missionary George Shaw, who climbed it in the 1870s, concluded that the shape of its valleys turned the east wind into a natural trumpet.

Why do the Betsileo call Ambondrombe Iratsy?

The Betsileo who live beneath Ambondrombe call it Iratsy, meaning the Bad One. Their tradition says a prince’s child died there, lost in the forest or drowned in a pool, and that the mountain was cursed afterward and became the home of hostile spirits.

Is the city of the dead on Ambondrombe an old legend?

The city of the dead on Ambondrombe is a nineteenth-century development. The geographer Sophie Moreau traces it to the reign of the Merina queen Ranavalona I, when soldiers camped below the mountain heard its sounds and a story grew of a ghost capital modelled on Antananarivo, laid over an older local Betsileo legend.