Andrianerinerina

North of Angavokely the ground lifts into a run of grey granite shoulders, and on one of them, at a place called Anerinerina, nobody lives. Further north is Kilonjy, and there is nothing there either except a tomb belonging to people whose village has gone. The Merina chronicles are exact about this geography in a way they are not exact about much else, and the reason is that a child of God is supposed to have come down onto that hill to play.

The arrangement had one condition. God sent the child down to amuse himself among the Vazimba, the small, half-remembered people who held the highlands before anyone else, and God told them plainly: this child of mine wants to play with you, so keep away from the sheep, because my child does not eat mutton. It is the sort of instruction that only exists in a story in order to be broken. For a while nothing was broken. The Vazimba had the strangest guest in the world sitting in the grass among them, and the days went by, and the cold highland wind came up the slope in the afternoons the way it still does.

Then one of them, a man the old telling calls white of soul, which in Malagasy means guileless rather than good, had an idea he thought was harmless. Cook the child’s food in the pot the mutton is cooked in, he said, and let us see what happens. So they did. The clay had held fat and it still held fat, and whatever went into it came out tasting of the one thing he was forbidden. He ate it. When evening came and the light went off the hills, he found he could not go up.

His father noticed at once. There is a line in which God leans down over the highlands and asks the Vazimba what exactly they have done to his child, down there, below. They ran. That detail is the most human thing in the story, a whole people scattering off a hillside because they have understood, all together and slightly too late, what they have done.

God did not chase them. He called them back instead, every Vazimba in the country, and when they were standing together he offered a choice with only one answer in it. Take my child as your lord, or I loose your lives. They said they would rather serve. And God, the matter settled, gave the child the name he has carried since, taken from the hill he had fallen onto: Andrianerinerina, the lord of Anerinerina.

A wife came down after him. The record does not name her, only that she was a daughter of God, lowered out of the sky to the man who could no longer climb back into it, and that she bore a son at the eastern shoulder of the Angavo range. From that son the genealogy runs on without a break, generation after generation of names built from the same royal syllables, down through the Vazimba queens Rangita and Rafohy to Andriamanelo, to Ralambo, and to Andrianjaka, who took the hill of Analamanga and called the town beneath it Antananarivo. Every Merina sovereign who ever sat there was, on paper, the descendant of a child who got fed the wrong dinner.

That is the version the court preferred, and it was doing a job. Read against the dynastic lists, the sky-marriage covers a much more ordinary transaction: Andrianerinerina married a woman whose name announces that she holds land, his grandson married another of the same kind, and their children inherited the ground along with the heavens. The Vazimba in this account are not so much conquered as married and outranked. The whole descent works as the claim of a newer princely line to stand over an older landholding one, with heaven brought in as the authority qualified to punish the faults of earth.

He is also, in the same traditions, a man who walked out. Before the genealogies settle into their long procession he takes Kilonjy and then Anerinerina for himself as an apanage, which was the formal way of announcing that he no longer owed anybody anything.

Nothing anywhere says what he looked like. There is no face, no height, no colour, not even the usual note about radiance that sky-born figures tend to attract. What survives instead is a rule about meat, a sooty pot, a hill and a grave, which is a strange and rather good exchange: a being fixed in memory entirely by what he could not eat and where he ended up.

The tellings do not agree with one another either. One manuscript of the Merina chronicle opens the royal line with him; another opens it somewhere else and never mentions him at all. Some accounts make Andriananjavonana his son, while others make the prince of mists his nephew, married to a daughter of his called the princess of the waters. His father is Andriamanitra in the oldest written version and Zanahary in most of the retellings, two Malagasy names for the same silence overhead. The pot, in later versions, becomes a whole sheep butchered and stewed. Stories that get used for political purposes tend to acquire this kind of wobble.

What he could do, he did once and permanently. He turned a scattered set of highland communities into subjects with a single lord, and he made every king who came after him a relative of God, which is a considerable body of work for a figure whose only recorded action was eating. His limits run the other way and are just as absolute. He could be undone by curiosity rather than malice. He could be bound by a rule about food, and the binding worked in one direction only, because the door he came through did not open again from below. He ate, and the sky shut. He fathered a dynasty and then lay down in the earth north of Ambohimalaza, in a country whose people would go on feeding and fearing the Vazimba he had displaced, at their tombs, for centuries after his own was forgotten.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Andrianerinerina?

Andrianerinerina is the child of God in Merina tradition, sent down from the sky onto the hill of Anerinerina in the central highlands of Madagascar and stranded there. He became the first lord over the Vazimba, the island’s remembered first inhabitants, and the ancestor from whom the Merina royal line traced its descent.

Why could Andrianerinerina not return to heaven?

He was forbidden mutton, and the Vazimba fed him food cooked in the pot they used for mutton. When evening came he found he could no longer go up to his father. In later retellings the offence is blunter, with a sheep butchered and served to him in a stew.

What choice did God give the Vazimba?

God gathered every Vazimba in the country and told them to either take his child as their lord or lose their lives. They answered that they would rather serve than die, and God then named the child Andrianerinerina, the lord of Anerinerina.

Is Andrianerinerina the son of Zanahary or of Andriamanitra?

Both names appear. The oldest written Merina version calls his father Andriamanitra, while most later retellings call him Zanahary. They are two Malagasy names for the creator rather than two different gods.

Why does Andrianerinerina matter to the Merina kings?

He is the join between the dynasty and the sky. Because the royal genealogy ran back to a son of God, Merina sovereigns could claim the throne by divine descent rather than by conquest, and the marriages recorded alongside the myth quietly secured their rights over the land as well.

Related Entries

Vazimba, Andriamanitra, Zanahary, Ratovantany, Andriambahomanana, Andriamahilala, Ibonia, Kalanoro, Tromba, Ninigi-no-Mikoto, Hwanung, Dangun, Unkulunkulu, Persephone