Zanahary

Rice was called Andriamanitra. So was silk, and the reigning sovereign, and anything else strange enough or excellent enough to seem to come from outside ordinary life. The word means fragrant. When the first Protestant missionaries reached the Malagasy highlands early in the nineteenth century they expected the long, frustrating hunt for a local word for God that their colleagues had endured in southern Africa, and instead they found the name already worn smooth by daily use, dropping from the mouths of children. Several names were in circulation. Only one of them said plainly what it meant, and that one was Zanahary.

The word is built on hary, to create. Strip off the personal prefix and what remains is the past tense of the verb: the one who made. In Imerina, the central highland kingdom, the usual pair was Andriamanitra, the Fragrant Lord, and Andriananahary, the Prince Who Created; elsewhere on the island, and sometimes in Imerina too, Zanahary carried the second sense on its own. Both names sat inside an invocation that Malagasy speakers in the 1870s insisted was far older than any mission station. O Andriamanitra, fragrant throughout the universe. O Andriananahary, who created the heaven and the earth. There was a habit of adding a strange, homely tag to the second line: who created us with hands and feet.

Hands and feet stand in for everything a body can do, and that is the shape of what he was credited with. The proverbs of the ancestors, the ohabolan’ny ntaolo, are full of him and they are not sentimental. God looks down from a height and sees what is hidden. Nothing is unknown to God, but he deliberately bows his head so as not to see. Do not say that God is fully understood by you. There is a fine one about a chick drinking, tipping its beak up to swallow, and so looking heavenward with every mouthful. When a man prospered he was called bezanahary, having much of the Creator in him. When women whose husbands had gone to war chanted together, the line they returned to was blunt: they have many guns, they have many spears, protect them.

The making itself is told in pieces and the pieces do not agree. In the version that has travelled furthest, Zanahary made the world and left it bare, and out of that bare ground a second being pushed up like a shoot, self-made, who took the red clay and modelled figures of people and animals and set them in the sun to harden. They dried beautifully. They would not move. When Zanahary came down to look at the earth he found this earnest sculptor surrounded by his motionless crowd, and he offered the one thing the clay lacked, which was breath. In a rival telling the quarrel is between a Zanahary of the sky and a Zanahary of the earth, two creators of the same name, arguing over the same figures. The tellings that reach print came late and through outside collectors, and they wobble.

What does not wobble is the bargain. Breath belongs to the sky, clay belongs to the ground, and when a person dies the loan is called in from both directions at once. That is the theological floor under everything Malagasy families do with their dead: the massive stone tombs of the highlands, the care taken that a body reach its own tomb and its own kin, the famadihana in which the ancestors are lifted out every few years and rewrapped in fresh silk. Cold stone below, and above it the part that cannot be wrapped. A body left unburied and unplaced is the worst outcome anyone can name, because half the bargain has failed.

Death itself arrived, in the story most often told about him, as an offer rather than a punishment. Zanahary looked at the first man and the first woman, saw their children and their children’s children multiplying across the land, and asked what kind of death they wanted. Two were available. There was the death of the banana, which withers and falls but throws up shoots from its own root, and there was the death of the moon, which goes out entirely and comes back whole every month. They chose the banana. They chose descendants over their own return, and Malagasy custom has been organised around that choice ever since.

Zanahary has no body in any source. There are no idols of him, no temples, no priesthood that belongs to him alone, and this absence is not an accident or a gap in the record. Among the Sakalava of the west coast the very word is often plural: the Zanahary made the world and human society and then stepped back from it, remote, uninvolved in anything as small as a harvest or an illness, though no ceremony can open without honouring them first. The daily business of the invisible world is transacted with the royal ancestors who possess the mediums, with the spirits in the sacred trees, with the family dead. He is the landlord, not the neighbour.

His powers follow from that position and so do his limits. He makes, he animates, he sees what is concealed, he takes back the breath, he is the source of life and of the blessing that Malagasy speakers still wish on each other a dozen times a day. He rewards a kindness that the recipient cannot repay. He is the last court, and it is better to be found guilty by men than by him. Against all that: he is far away, he has no image, he does not intervene, and the road to him runs through the dead rather than straight up. Almost nobody takes a lost cow to Zanahary. The nineteenth century took the other name from him as well, since Andriamanitra was picked up by Protestant missionaries, then by Catholics and by Malagasy Muslims, until it now simply means God in the Christian and Islamic senses. Zanahary was left holding the older job. It is the narrower word and the harder one, and it has kept its edge precisely because nobody borrowed it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Zanahary?

Zanahary is the creator god of Malagasy tradition in Madagascar, the maker of heaven, earth and living creatures. He gave breath to the first human beings and receives that breath back when a person dies. Across most Malagasy communities he is a remote figure who withdrew to the sky after creating the world.

What does the name Zanahary mean?

It means “the Creator”. The name is built on the Malagasy root hary, “to create”, with a personal prefix attached, and it is equivalent to the highland Merina name Andriananahary, “the Prince Who Created”. Unlike the other Malagasy name for God, it was never used loosely for excellent or unusual things.

Is Zanahary the same as Andriamanitra?

They are the two traditional Malagasy names for the supreme being, and they were often spoken together in one invocation, but they do not behave the same way. Andriamanitra means “the Fragrant Lord” and was applied broadly to rice, silk, the sovereign and the revered dead, while Zanahary means specifically the Creator. Christian missionaries and Malagasy Muslims later adopted Andriamanitra as the ordinary word for God, which left Zanahary carrying the older creator sense.

What happens to a person after death in this tradition?

Zanahary takes back the soul or breath, which returns to the sky, while the body returns to the earth from which it was modelled. This division is the reason Malagasy funerary practice puts so much weight on getting a corpse into its proper family tomb, and it underlies the famadihana ceremony in which highland families exhume their ancestors and rewrap them in fresh cloth.

Why did human beings become mortal?

Zanahary offered the first man and woman a choice between two kinds of death after their descendants had multiplied across the land. One was the death of the banana plant, which dies but leaves shoots behind it, and the other was the death of the moon, which vanishes and returns whole each month. They chose the banana, accepting their own end in exchange for children who would outlive them.

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