Tromba

Also Known As: Sakalava Malagasy; the word covers the royal ancestral spirits, the experience of possession, the institution itself and, in ordinary speech, the medium
Region/Culture: Southern Africa
Mythos: Malagasy Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: The tromba are the spirits of dead Sakalava royalty, ranked into generations that follow the dynastic lines and able to speak, judge, heal and remember through the body of a living medium.
Role in Mythos: They are the working core of Sakalava religion, guarding sacred ground, holding the royal genealogies and telling the living who they are.
Relation to Humans: A tromba comes to a medium, usually a woman, and through her advises clients on sickness, money, love and land, which makes mediums among the most sought-after healers on the northwest coast. Because a migrant who takes a Sakalava spirit is drawn into Sakalava kinship, tromba is also the one institution in the region that can turn an outsider into an insider.

The moon has to be climbing. On a shrinking moon nothing will happen, and no amount of drumming will change that, so the work waits. Then a Friday comes with the right moon behind it, the mats go down on swept earth somewhere on the northwest coast of Madagascar, the hazolahy drums are carried out by the men who are the only ones permitted to play them, and the clapping starts. It is a dry, fast, close-packed sound. Somewhere in it a woman’s shoulders begin to move in a way that is not quite her own.

What arrives is a tromba, and the word is doing an unusual amount of work. It names the spirit. It names the experience of being entered by one. It names the whole institution, and in everyday speech it will name the medium too. Strictly it belongs to the Sakalava of the west coast, though it has travelled so far that Malagasy across the island now use it for almost any kind of possession at all.

The tromba are dead royalty. Not gods, not nature spirits, not the anonymous ancestral dead that most Malagasy peoples honour. They are known individuals with names, reigns and quarrels, sorted into generations that match the dynastic branches of the northern and southern Sakalava and split again between the Zafin’i’mena and the Zafin’i’fotsy, the Gold and the Silver. The Sakalava built a chain of kingdoms along the western coast and were the dominant power there from the seventeenth century until the French arrived. Their monarchy did not survive that in any political sense. Their monarchs did.

Describing a tromba means describing somebody else. The spirit brings no face and no shape, only a preference, and it is expressed in cloth: when a medium is taken she puts on clothing that signals the rank, the lineage and the era of the ancestor speaking through her, so that a room can tell an eighteenth-century king from a nineteenth-century one by the wrap and the ornament alone. The voice shifts. The idiom shifts, into an older register with royal vocabulary in it. A spirit may have any number of mediums scattered across the country, but it can only be in one of them at a time, which means that on any given night most of its mediums are simply themselves.

In a small house in a plantation town, a client sits on the floor with a bottle of rum, a folded length of cloth and a few coins set out on a mat, because this particular spirit expects those things and would take offence at their absence. There is singing, and clapping, and then the medium is no longer answering to her own name. The consultation that follows is practical. A child who will not get well. A husband who has stopped sending money. A dispute over a plot of land.

Where the practice came from is a question the sources answer only in outline. It probably rose on the East African coast before it reached Madagascar, and what the Sakalava monarchy did with it was to institutionalise it magnificently, binding the dead into the machinery of rule. From the second half of the nineteenth century it spread outward, into other Malagasy regions and across the water to the Comoros and Zanzibar. It reached the arid south late, arriving in Androy in the early 1970s in the luggage of returning migrant workers, where it had to make room alongside kokolampo, the spirit that had structured possession there before. The two now coexist, and people argue amiably about which outranks which.

At the top of the hierarchy the arrangement is formal and closed. The oldest and greatest spirits take a small number of dedicated mediums called saha, commoners, usually unmarried women, who live permanently in the villages beside the royal tombs. For the Bemazava the tombs stand on the small island of Nosy Faly, and the two founding ancestors buried into that ground remain the most powerful spirits the region has. Their mediums advise the living ruler on anything that touches the kingdom as a whole. Those women are not consulted about faithless husbands.

Once a year at Mahajanga the royal relics are carried out for the Fanompoa Be, bathed at the doany after a night of vigil, and the festival closes with the rebiky, the slow battle dance, when the great kings come into their mediums and dance in front of everybody. Further south the Fitampoha does something similar every five years, washing the relics of old kings in the Tsiribihina River across a week of ceremony. A crowd stands in river shallows watching bone that was a monarch go under the water.

The spirits themselves give a plain reason for coming back. They say the tombs are cold and lonely. That is the explanation Sakalava offer for why the dead turn up so persistently in the bodies of the living: not vengeance, not unfinished business, simply a preference for company and for having a say. The dead would rather be here.

What they can do follows from what they were. They diagnose and heal, and many people on the coast will go to a medium before a clinic on the reasonable grounds that the medium shares their understanding of what illness is. They arbitrate. They remember, which matters more than it sounds, because a possession is also an archive, and the genealogies of the west coast are stored in the mouths of women rather than in any book. And they naturalise strangers. Possession draws a migrant into a web of fictive kinship with the spirit and its other mediums, and a woman who came to the plantations from the highlands or the far south can end up, through her spirit, counted as Sakalava. In the town of Ambanja the effect has been extraordinary, and modern preoccupations have gone into the symbolism with it, coffee and cashews and wage labour surfacing in the imagery of possession alongside the kings.

Their limits are just as specific. They come only on a rising moon, and only on the right days, and the calendar of forbidden days, months and lunar phases around royal ritual is dense enough that Sakalava describe the whole business as difficult. Each spirit carries its own taboos, so a household may go without coffee or guinea fowl for as long as it keeps that spirit, and a medium’s head is not to be touched without permission while she is in trance. A tromba cannot arrive uninvited into a room that will not sing for it, and it cannot stay without its rum, its cloth and its money. It can be crowded out, too. Protestant churches on the coast do not negotiate with tromba, they exorcise them, and a woman who converts is understood to be putting her spirit out of doors. Plenty of others decline the choice altogether and are mediums through the week and communicants on Sunday.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tromba in Madagascar?

A tromba is the spirit of a dead Sakalava king or queen who returns to speak through a living medium. The same Malagasy word also covers the experience of possession, the institution as a whole, and often the medium herself. Although it is strictly a Sakalava term from the northwest of the island, it is now used across Madagascar for many kinds of spirit possession.

Who becomes a tromba medium?

Most tromba mediums are women, though men can be possessed as well. The greatest spirits take a small group of dedicated mediums called saha, usually unmarried commoner women who live permanently in the villages beside the royal tombs and advise the ruling family. Ordinary mediums live everywhere on the coast and work as healers and advisers for paying clients.

What happens at a tromba ceremony?

Drumming, singing and hand clapping call the spirit, and offerings of rum, cloth and money are laid out according to what that particular spirit expects. When the spirit arrives, the medium puts on clothing that marks its rank, lineage and era, and speaks in an older royal register. Ceremonies can only be held while the moon is waxing toward full, and Friday is the most auspicious day.

Why do tromba spirits possess the living?

Sakalava accounts say the spirits find the tombs cold and lonely and want to go on taking part in the affairs of the living. Unlike many Malagasy peoples, Sakalava commoners do not centre their religious life on their own family ancestors, so the royal dead carry the weight of collective memory and identity instead.

Can an outsider take part in tromba?

Yes, and that is one of the reasons the practice has grown so fast. A migrant who becomes a medium for a Sakalava spirit is drawn into a system of fictive kinship with that spirit and its other mediums, and can come to be counted as Sakalava. Because mediumship is overwhelmingly female, this route into local belonging is open mainly to women.