Constructing Inequalities on the Malagasy Frontier: Slaves, Ancestors and Tombs in the Extreme Southern Highlands

Dr. Sandra Evers, Anthropologist, Free University, Amsterdam.

From 1989-1999, the author conducted research and field work among the Betsileo people of the extreme Southern Highlands of Madagascar. Until recently, this region was virtually unknown and considered to be a no-man’s-land. Historical archives described the area as a frontier, settled in the early twentieth century by ex-slaves. 
These first migrants, as it turned out, had succeeded in implanting a myth of themselves as tompon-tany, or “masters of the land”, by building tombs and creating a land monopoly.

The tompon-tany relied upon a trilogy of tombs, kinship and ancestors, coupled with a skilful deployment of “Malagasy customs” to reinforce their legitimacy and to exclude later settlers. Some of these migrants were labelled andevo (“slave” or “slave descent”). The tompon-tany prohibited the andevo from owning land, and thereby from having tombs. As a tombless people, the andevo were socially ostracised and economically marginalised. They were olona maloto, an “impure people”.

This seminar and accompanied paper focuses on the plight of the tombless andevo, and how their ascribed impurity and association with infertility, illness, death and misfortune made them an essential part of the tompon-tany world-view.