Angatra

Also Known As: Malagasy, “ghost”; the verb manangatra, “to haunt, to come back as a ghost”; regional words for the same thing listed beside it in the Malagasy dictionaries include lolo and avelo on the Betsimisaraka coast, matoatoa among the Tanala, and ambiroa in Imerina
Region/Culture: Southern Africa
Mythos: Malagasy Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: The angatra is the spirit of a dead person, or even of a dead animal, that lingers around the living and can be seen by them, most often in the form of fire.
Role in Mythos: It is the dangerous face of the dead in Malagasy belief, the ancestor who has to be fed, honoured and spoken of carefully so that it will help the living instead of harming them.
Relation to Humans: On the east coast in 1818 a Betsimisaraka priestess set out rice spirit in a leaf cup so that the Angatra would let the rice grow, and people spilled a little of every drink on the ground so that it would not injure them. A later reference work records the belief that neglected or abused ancestors become angatra, haunt their own graves, and send disease and misfortune on whoever offended them.

In November 1818, at the edge of a rice field near Tamatave on the east coast of Madagascar, a priestess named Senegala poured a little arrack into a cup folded from a leaf. She had already prayed to Zanahary and sprinkled a bullock with water from a horn before its throat was cut. This second offering was for someone else. She asked the Angatra to let the rice grow, set the cup down somewhere safe in the open field, and left it there in the sun. Over the following days the spirit in the cup went down. Everyone could see it going down. The Angatra, the planters concluded, was drinking, and a spirit that drinks what it is given is a spirit that has been satisfied.

The scene comes from David Jones, a missionary who watched it and whose account William Ellis printed in his History of Madagascar in 1838. It is the oldest clear record of the angatra in European print, and it catches something the dictionaries miss. Angatra is the ordinary Malagasy word for a ghost, but at Tamatave in 1818 it was also someone you could address by name, bargain with, and pour a drink for. Ellis added that the Betsimisaraka, before drinking spirits, would spill a little on the ground to propitiate the Angatra “that he may not injure them.” The gesture is small: a tilt of the cup, a dark splash in the dust, and then the drink. It was also constant, which says more about the angatra than any story could. It was not something met once in a haunted place. It was at the table every time the bottle came out.

What exactly it is depends on who is asked. The monolingual Rakibolana Malagasy defines it as the appearance of the spirit of a dead person, or even of a dead animal, that hovers around the living and may actually be seen by them, most of all in the form of fire. The great nineteenth-century missionary dictionaries translate it more bluntly. James Richardson’s New Malagasy-English Dictionary of 1885 gives “spirit, ghost, demon,” and the Malagasy-French dictionary of Abinal and Malzac gives “fantôme.” They also list regional words that cover the same ground: lolo and avelo among the Betsimisaraka, matoatoa or lolo among the Tanala, ambiroa in Imerina. The word has two unrelated meanings besides. Angatra can also mean partiality or unfair judgement, and, in the same dictionaries, gonorrhea. Malagasy speakers rarely confuse them, which is a good thing for everyone.

Where the angatra comes from is not a mystery the tradition bothers to hide. It is one of the dead. Ancestors in Madagascar are generally honoured, and generally thought of as a benevolent force in the lives of their descendants. The angatra is what the dead become when that care fails. C. Scott Littleton’s 2005 reference work Gods, Goddesses, and Mythology records the belief that ancestral spirits may turn into angatra if they are ignored or abused, that angatra haunt their own graves, and that they bring disease and misfortune on the living people who wronged them. It is an unforgiving arrangement. A family that forgets its dead is not left alone by them.

Other nineteenth-century writers heard about the restless dead under different names. In Imerina, the central highlands, Jones and Ellis were told that the ghost of a dead person was the matoatoa, which hovered about the tomb after burial, that the matoatoa of men and beasts alike lived in a great mountain in the south called Ambondrombe, and that they came out to walk among the tombs at night. The ambiroa, in that account, was the apparition of someone still living, and its visit announced a coming death. After the death of King Radama, his ghost was reported riding one of his best horses through the garden of his country house at Mahazoarivo, dressed in a uniform from his own coffin. The palace keepers ran. The queen sent a minister and priests to sacrifice a bullock and ask the dead king why he had come back, and whether he had not been buried with property enough. He did not come back again.

The missionary James Sibree recorded two more pieces of the pattern in Madagascar Before the Conquest in 1896. The Sakalava of the west, he wrote, did not go to the burial place to pray to the lolo of their relatives, because they held it in great dread; they went instead to the dead person’s abandoned house, left to fall into ruin. And in the highlands a whirlwind was thought to be made of ghosts. Sibree does not use the word angatra in that book at all, which is worth knowing: the name that Ellis heard on the east coast is the one that has since become the general word, but the belief sits under a different name in almost every region of the island.

The worst of the angatra, according to Littleton, is the kinoly. Sibree printed a Malagasy account of the creature without calling it an angatra: someone who is going to become a kinoly is buried, and the relatives wait until the intestines and the skin of the stomach have rotted away before opening the tomb to let it out. It walks out with red eyes and long nails, otherwise shaped like a living person but no longer like one, and it steals cooked rice left standing. Littleton adds that kinoly disembowel the living, and that some people believe famadihana, the ceremony in which the dead are brought out of the tomb every few years and rewrapped in fresh lamba cloth, keeps kinoly from forming, because the cloth carries hasina, sacred life-force.

The angatra’s power is the power of a grievance. It can sicken a household, ruin a harvest, and follow the offender home, and it can be felt without being seen. Its weakness is that it can be satisfied. It drinks what is poured for it. It answers to a sacrifice, to a tomb kept in order, to a body rewrapped in clean cloth. Even speech is a defence: the Rakibolana records the formula aza manody, aza manangatra, said when a dead person happens to come up in conversation, asking that the dead do the living no harm. In Madagascar the dead are never really gone. The whole art is keeping them content where they are.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an angatra in Malagasy belief?

An angatra is a ghost, the spirit of a dead person that stays near the living in Madagascar. The Malagasy dictionary Rakibolana Malagasy says it can also be the spirit of a dead animal and that it is most often seen in the form of fire. Nineteenth-century dictionaries translate angatra as “spirit, ghost, demon.”

Why does a Malagasy ancestor become an angatra?

According to C. Scott Littleton’s 2005 reference work, some Malagasy believe that ancestral spirits become angatra when they are ignored or abused by their descendants. An angatra then haunts its own grave. It brings disease and misfortune on the living people who offended it.

How do people protect themselves from an angatra?

The oldest record, from Tamatave in 1818, shows Betsimisaraka people offering the Angatra rice spirit and spilling a little of every drink on the ground so that it would not injure them. Sacrifices, well-kept tombs and famadihana, the rewrapping of the dead in fresh cloth, are all part of keeping the dead content. The Rakibolana Malagasy also records the spoken formula aza manody, aza manangatra, asking the dead not to harm the living.

What is the kinoly and is it an angatra?

The kinoly is a dead person who leaves the tomb with red eyes and long nails and steals food from the living, according to a Malagasy account printed by James Sibree in 1896. Littleton’s 2005 reference work treats the kinoly as a particular type of angatra and adds that it disembowels living people. Sibree’s own account describes the kinoly without using the word angatra.

Is the angatra the same as the lolo or the matoatoa?

The Malagasy dictionaries list lolo, avelo, matoatoa and ambiroa as regional words for a ghost alongside angatra. In the 1838 account by William Ellis, the Merina of the highlands called the ghost of a dead person the matoatoa and the apparition of a living person the ambiroa. James Sibree recorded that the Sakalava prayed to the lolo of their dead relatives.