Vazimba

Also Known As: also given as vazimba andrano, “Vazimba of the water”, vazimba antety, “of the soil”, and vazimba antsingy, “of the limestone”; often called tompontany, “masters of the land”
Region/Culture: Southern Africa
Mythos: Malagasy Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: They hold hasina, the unseen force that produces visible results, and they dispense it as sickness or as fortune depending on how they are treated.
Role in Mythos: They are the island’s first occupants and its oldest dead, the prior claim on every acre of Madagascar that later arrivals had to reckon with.
Relation to Humans: People bring them offerings at bogs, boulders and river bends, observe strict prohibitions around their graves, and ask them for the things that ancestors give. Anyone willing to bargain can turn a Vazimba into a private source of power, which is exactly why the practice carries a bad name.

Somewhere under the reeds of a highland marsh there is said to be a coffin of beaten silver, shaped like an outrigger canoe, with a queen inside it. Rangita died around 1530 and was not put in a tomb. She was lowered into water chosen for the purpose and left there, which is what the Vazimba did with their dead, and the marsh has been sacred ever since. People still come to the edge of such places with rum and honey. They do not go in.

The Vazimba are the first inhabitants of Madagascar, and they are also the reason that half the water on the island cannot be safely disturbed. Both things are true at once, and the friction between them is the whole subject.

Malagasy oral history opens with a period called the faha vazimba, before the Merina kingdoms, when the central highlands were held by small polities that were frequently ruled by women. The Tantara ny Andriana, the great compilation of Merina tradition, names Andriandravindravina as the first Vazimba sovereign of the highlands. Oral history sorts the rest of them by ground. The vazimba andrano lived along the rivers and lakes. The vazimba antety, reckoned the most numerous, clustered in the Betsiriry valley. The vazimba antsingy took the caves in the limestone pinnacles of Bemaraha in the west and lived off what the forest gave.

What that living looked like comes through in fragments that feel domestic rather than legendary. They cut and burned forest to plant bananas, tubers and ginger. They took honey out of trees, gathered fruit and seed, hunted small game. When zebu came to the island they kept the cattle and did not eat them, which later herders found incomprehensible. They had no iron and no rice, and their weapons, the stories insist, were made of clay. Their rulers reddened their hair with a forest mushroom, and red has meant royalty in Madagascar ever since.

Then came the second wave, and after it the Merina sovereigns. Andriamanelo, who reigned from about 1540 to 1575 and was himself half Vazimba through Rangita and Rafohy, is credited with pushing the Vazimba out of the highlands and westward, a campaign his successors Ralambo and Andrianjaka finished. Tradition says the fighting was about rice land. Archaeology puts the beginning of that expansion in the fourteenth century, which is early enough to suggest the appetite came before the justification. By the reign of Andrianjaka, in the early seventeenth century, the last of them were supposed to have been wiped out.

Supposed to have been. Jean-Pierre Domenichini looked at the physical descriptions, found them too inconsistent to hang an ethnicity on, and argued that Vazimba was always a statement about culture rather than blood, and that most of the people so labelled did not die at all but simply became Merina. Solofo Randrianja puts it more bluntly still and calls the Vazimba a way of life. Merina and Betsileo families across the highlands trace their own descent through Vazimba ancestors, which is an awkward thing to do about a people you exterminated.

The word did other work too. By the eighth century, according to the account in the General History of Africa, the Vazimba had themselves absorbed or driven off whoever came before them and had begun calling themselves tompontany, masters of the land. Every group on Madagascar seems to arrive to find someone already there, and to inherit the title by taking it.

Which brings the story to what a Vazimba actually is now, in practice, in the villages of Imerina where people make offerings to them. A Vazimba is a razana that nobody remembered. It is an ancestor who has lost the tomb and lost the descendants who would have kept the tomb, and who has gone down into watery ground and turned amoral there: not evil, exactly, but no longer bound by obligation to anybody. That is the definition Malagasy practice uses, and it is far stranger than the one about a vanished race. It means Vazimba are not found. They are produced, continuously, by ordinary forgetting.

They are still powerful, and that is the point of them. The rituals directed at Vazimba are called manasina, from the same root as masina, sacred: the business of making something holy by feeding it hasina. Ask well and a Vazimba can give what any ancestor gives, which is health, children, rain and luck. Someone prepared to be unscrupulous can go further and bind one into a private engine of power, and everyone knows who in the district is suspected of having done it.

The limits are as specific as the offerings. A Vazimba cannot bear the touch of anything that has been in contact with salt, so a pinch of it in the wrong place ruins the whole transaction. Garlic and pork must not be carried onto ground that holds a Vazimba grave. The graves themselves are not to be entered, and the people who live near them will tell you the penalty for entering is death, delivered without negotiation and usually without delay. And a Vazimba is fixed to its water and its stone. It can make life impossible for a village that shares a valley with it and can do nothing whatever to a man who walks out of that valley for good.

The oldest sovereigns of the island are down in the mud in silver boats, and the newest Vazimba was somebody’s grandmother whose grandchildren moved away.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Vazimba?

The Vazimba are remembered in Malagasy oral tradition as the first inhabitants of Madagascar, holding the central highlands before the Merina kingdoms rose. Their period, the faha vazimba, opens Malagasy history and was marked by small kingdoms often ruled by queens. They are said to have farmed by burning forest, gathered honey and wild food, and herded zebu without eating them.

Were the Vazimba a real people or a myth?

Both readings are current, and scholarship has moved toward the second. Popular belief holds that they were a distinct earlier population, possibly small in stature, but the pygmy theory has never been proven. Jean-Pierre Domenichini argued that Vazimba marked cultural rather than ethnic difference, and Solofo Randrianja describes it as a way of life rather than an ethnic group.

What is a Vazimba spirit?

In living Malagasy practice a Vazimba is an ancestor who has lost both a tomb and descendants to tend it, and who has sunk into watery ground and become amoral, dangerous and powerful. Such spirits attach to rivers, bogs, boulders and gorges rather than to families. They can be fed and asked for favours, and someone willing to bargain can turn one into a personal source of power.

How do people protect themselves from the Vazimba?

The precautions are precise. A Vazimba cannot stand contact with anything that has touched salt, and garlic and pork must never be brought onto ground containing a Vazimba grave. The graves are not to be entered at all, and the spirits are bound to their own place, so distance from the site is itself a protection.

What happened to the Vazimba?

Tradition credits Andriamanelo, who reigned from about 1540 to 1575, with driving the Vazimba westward out of the highlands, and says the last of them were destroyed under Andrianjaka in the early seventeenth century. Domenichini’s reading is that most were assimilated into Merina society rather than killed. Many Merina and Betsileo families trace ancestors back to Vazimba forebears.