Andriambavirano

On the summit of Angavo, the Merina say, there is a lake, and one day a leaf fell into it out of the sky. It looked like any leaf. It smelled like nothing else, and it would not let itself be picked up. The fullest account of what happened next sits in a footnote to the *Tantara ny Andriana eto Madagasikara*, the vast collection of Merina royal tradition gathered from oral informants by the missionary priest François Callet and printed at Antananarivo in 1908. There the leaf has a name, Andriambavirano, the Princess of the Water, and the note begins without ceremony: she came down from heaven.

The story belongs to a strand of the genealogy that the collection introduces simply as “another account”, set in a time before rice, cassava or sweet potatoes, when the highlands were thick forest and the only inhabitants were scattered Vazimba. A ruler named Andriandravindravina held Ambohitsitakatra in the north, and his sons divided the country. Andriamanjavona took Angavo in the east, having won his land from his elder brother in a quarrel over a single roasted tenrec, which is not the most dignified start to a royal line but is at least a memorable one.

It was Koto, a young slave of Andriamanjavona, who first saw the leaf on the water. He reached for it and could not hold it. He went and fetched his master, and as the two men came near the lake the perfume met them on the air, sweet and heavy. Andriamanjavona tried and failed as well. Then he spoke a sentence that did the work his hands could not: if he was truly noble by his father and noble by his mother, he would take it easily. He took it easily. He carried the leaf home and shut it in a chest.

In the dark the leaf grew feet and hands and became a woman, and after that the chest would not open for anyone. Each day, once the two men had gone out to the fields, she climbed out alone, seized the cooked food and the rice and scattered them across the house, grains skittering over the floor mats, and slipped back inside before anyone returned. She did it to astonish them, and it worked. Koto asked leave to keep watch and hid himself in the stack of firewood.

The next time she came out he waited until the mess was made, then caught her as she turned back toward the chest. She begged him to let her go and to say nothing to his master. Koto refused and promised instead to make her Andriamanjavona’s wife. In a moment clothes, silver and every kind of ornament stood ready, because, as the note puts it, she was a goddess.

Marrying a goddess did not make her the only wife. Andriamanjavona already had a *vadibe*, a senior wife, and one day the vadibe killed her. Andriamanitra, the high god, raised Andriambavirano from death by sending three messengers with the long names Andriampanointointaolana, Andriampanafosafoninofo and Andriantomponiaina, and she walked back into her husband’s house alive. The senior wife’s reaction is recorded, and it is the most honest line in the story: she truly is a daughter of Andriamanitra, she was dead and she lives.

That did not stop her. When Andriambavirano gave birth to three children at once, two boys and a girl, the vadibe announced that the mother had borne misfortune and calamity: a worn-out broom, an ox jawbone of the kind used to polish woven mats, and a round, smooth pebble. The babies went into a chest and the chest went into the river. On the bank lived Konantitra, whom the French translator of 1913 glosses as an ogre of Malagasy legend. He saw something floating, went out to it on a raft, dragged the chest ashore and opened it on three living infants. He raised them. The elder boy was named Rabingoanony, the younger Andrianjatovorovola, the girl Ratandratandravola. Grown, they went to the famous diviner Ranakombe, and the girl married the lord of the west, and there the footnote breaks off with a flat “etc.” Readers of other cultures’ tales will recognise the second half. Lee Haring, writing on verbal charms in Malagasy folktales in 2009, tied it to the international plot folklorists catalogue as the Three Golden Children.

The genealogy adds one more child, Razanahary, who settled on the hill of Ambohijanahary south of Mahamasina. She was buried on its summit and became a vazimba there, one of the dangerous ancestral presences that live in old graves and high places. Generations later, under King Radama, a man named Rafanoharana wanted to build a family tomb on that summit, and the king refused him with a single short reason: Razanahary is there.

Callet’s is not the only telling. The 1913 translation of his work in the *Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache* adds a note that the legend was well known among the Bara-Tanala northeast of Ivohibe, above all in a clan called the Zaza rano, the Children of the Waters, whose members were spread through the Ivohibe district and the provinces of Mananjary and Farafangana. They held that their common ancestor was the eldest of her three children. In their version she is called Fatima. Fishermen working for a lord named Andriambahoaka drew her out of a river in a net, and he swore never to speak of where she had come from. One day, in the middle of a quarrel, he called her Zaza rano, daughter of the waters. She walked down to the river and went back into it for good, taking two of the children with her. The third would not leave his father. The same note points to further variants in the missionary Lars Dahle’s collection of Malagasy tales.

Her powers all run in one direction, downward and outward: she descends, she changes shape, she fills a house with clothing and silver in an instant, and she cannot even be touched except by the rightly born. Death itself does not keep her, though it takes Andriamanitra’s own messengers to undo it. What she cannot do is defend herself inside a household. The Merina version lets a jealous co-wife kill her and steal her children without a single power raised in their defence, and the southern one makes her whole marriage hang on one unspoken fact about her origin. Once that fact is said aloud she goes back to the water, and the people who claim her blood are left telling the story on the riverbank.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Andriambavirano?

Andriambavirano is a Malagasy goddess whose name means Princess of the Water. In a Merina tradition recorded by François Callet, she comes down from heaven as a fragrant leaf on the lake at the top of Angavo and becomes the wife of the local lord Andriamanjavona.

How did Andriamanjavona catch Andriambavirano?

Neither his slave Koto nor Andriamanjavona could pick up the leaf at first. Andriamanjavona then declared that if he was truly noble through both his father and his mother he would take it easily, and he did. He kept the leaf in a chest, where it turned into a woman.

What happened to Andriambavirano’s children?

Andriambavirano gave birth to three children, two boys and a girl, and her husband’s senior wife claimed she had borne a broom, an ox jawbone and a pebble. The children were shut in a chest and set adrift, but the ogre Konantitra pulled them from the water and raised them. They were named Rabingoanony, Andrianjatovorovola and Ratandratandravola.

Is Andriambavirano the ancestor of any Malagasy group?

Yes. A 1913 note to the French translation of Callet reports that the Zaza rano clan, the Children of the Waters, among the Bara-Tanala of the Ivohibe district, regarded the eldest of her three children as their common ancestor. In their version she is called Fatima and returns to the river after her husband insults her origin.

Related Entries

Vazimba, Andriamanitra, Zanahary, Andrianerinerina, Andriamahilala, Andriambahomanana, Ratovantany, Ibonia, Kalanoro, Tromba, Swan maiden, Melusine, Selkie, Mami Wata