Darafify

A man walks down the east coast of Madagascar with his wife and a red cow, and none of the three can be pleased. They have come from the far north. At each settlement they stop, look the place over and find fault with it: the grazing, the water, the ground. The man complains. The cow complains too. They walk on, the surf loud on their left and the forest wall on their right, until the island runs out at its southern tip and they see open country full of grass. This, they agree, is cattle land. They stay.

The man is Darafify, and by most accounts he is a great deal bigger than that scene suggests. A Malagasy manuscript in Arabic script, written out by Mosa ibn Soza in 1911 and edited by the Norwegian scholar Ludwig Munthe in 1982, gives his length as more than a hundred arm-spans. His name has been read as a description of his face. Alfred Grandidier, in 1908, took it to mean the man with cheeks of a clear red, like the ripe fruit of the dara palm. Bakoly Domenichini-Ramiaramanana heard something else in it: a Persian word for tree joined to the Malagasy name of a scented wood. Either way, he is a stranger from over the water. The noble families of the south-east who call him their ancestor say he was an Arab and that he came from Mecca.

The manuscript sends him inland up the Sakaleona river, on the east-central coast, and shows him at work. He plants banana trees along the banks. He cuts a mortar out of rock, the kind used for pounding fish poison, crushes the plant in it and tips the bitter white sap into the stream. Stunned fish roll belly-up and drift. Then the water heaves, and something much larger comes up after them: a giant eel, driven out of the deep pools by the poison.

It thrashes into a tree and sticks fast. Darafify cuts it in two. That ought to be the end of an eel. It is not. The creature pulls free and makes off to the south, and at a place the manuscript calls Imananora it is given a new name, Tapakena, and passes out of the story still alive. The giant who can carve stone and plant a riverbank cannot finish one fish.

He left his mark further north as well. Among the Tankarana at the top of the island, his name is attached to worked stones, blocks that look cut by a hand and are too large for an ordinary one. The Antambahoaka of the east coast explain him by pointing to Rapeto, the giant of the central highlands, as if every region had one such man and these two were the same kind.

The best-known story about him is told on the Pangalanes, the chain of lagoons behind the eastern beaches, at two neighbouring lakes named Rasoabe and Rasoamasay. They were his wives, and the manuscript calls them sisters. In the tale told on the shore, the ground where the lakes now lie was once his rice land, and he gave it to the two women to farm. He went away. When he came back he learned that both had been unfaithful, and he threw them into the flooded fields, one in each. The water closed over them and stayed. People there say the wives did not simply drown. Each built a village on the bottom and lives in it with her cattle and her servants, and on a windless day, when the surface lies flat and brown as glass, the roofs of the houses can be seen below. This is a nasty story, and the lakes are very pretty.

There is history folded into him. When the Antemoro reached the south-east, around the year 1500 by Raymond Kent’s reckoning, they found another Muslim-descended group, the Zafiraminia, already settled there, and the two fell out. Tradition does not remember this as a war between peoples. It remembers a duel between two giants, Darafify and Fatrapaitanana. Kent set this down in the UNESCO General History of Africa in 1992. Some writers go further and take the whole figure of Darafify as a memory of settlers from the Persian Gulf reaching the island centuries earlier, which would suit the Persian reading of his name. That is a theory, and the tellers themselves do not need it.

His strength is the strength of his size. He shapes the country as he crosses it, turning rice fields into lakes and bare rock into tools, and the families that descend from him draw their rank from his long walk. He can talk with his cow and be answered. Yet he is no god. He can be cheated by his wives and escaped by an eel, he needs a mortar and poison to catch his supper like any fisherman, and he dies. The manuscript gives him a grave, at a spot between two named villages, and lists the children who came after him. The lakes keep the wives. The south kept the cattle.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Darafify in Malagasy mythology?

Darafify is a giant and founding ancestor in the traditions of eastern and south-eastern Madagascar. He is said to have come from Mecca, walked the length of the east coast and left lakes, worked stones and noble families behind him. One manuscript says he was more than a hundred arm-lengths tall.

What is the legend of Lake Rasoabe and Lake Rasoamasay?

Rasoabe and Rasoamasay were the two wives of the giant Darafify. In the story told at the lakes, he gave them his rice fields, found they had been unfaithful while he was away, and threw them into the flooded fields, which became the two lakes. Each wife is said to live in a village on the lake bottom with her cattle and servants.

What does the name Darafify mean?

Alfred Grandidier read Darafify in 1908 as the man with cheeks of a clear red, like the ripe fruit of the dara palm. Bakoly Domenichini-Ramiaramanana linked it to a Persian word for tree and a Malagasy word for a scented wood. The two readings do not agree.

Who did Darafify fight?

Darafify fought another giant named Fatrapaitanana. Historian Raymond Kent explains that this battle of giants is how tradition remembers the conflict between the Antemoro and the Zafiraminia, two Muslim-descended groups in south-eastern Madagascar, around the year 1500.

What happened between Darafify and the giant eel?

Darafify poisoned the fish of the Sakaleona river, and a giant eel rose out of the water. The eel was caught in a tree and Darafify cut it in two, but it escaped to the south, where it was renamed Tapakena. The story comes from a Malagasy manuscript written by Mosa ibn Soza in 1911.

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