Madagascar: Zafimaniry Craftsmen of Ambositra

Ambositra, Central Madagascar: Marquetry, Zebu and the Road South

We left Antsirabe that morning heading south on the R7, bound for a town called Ambositra, which sits roughly a hundred kilometres further down the road, and which I had, until about a week before, never heard of in my life. I mention that not out of any pride in my ignorance, but because it turned out to be one of those places that rather puts you in your place, geographically speaking. You think you have a reasonable working knowledge of the world, and then Madagascar quietly reminds you that it has been getting along perfectly well without troubling your awareness for the last two thousand years or so.

It was going to be lunchtime before we arrived, so there was nothing for it but to sit back and let the country do its work on us, which it did, in the way Madagascar seems to specialise in: glorious scenery paired with a road surface that appeared to have personally offended the Malagasy public works department at some point and never been forgiven. The potholes did not so much appear as ambush you, and they got, if anything, worse the further south we went, which I had not thought possible when we set off. I have driven on some fairly agricultural roads in my time, including a memorable stretch of the A15 in Lincolnshire that I still think about with a shudder, but this was a different order of thing altogether.

What I had not quite grasped, sitting there being thrown gently from side to side in the back seat, was that we were also crossing a rather significant cultural boundary. We were leaving the highland territory of the Merina people, whose kingdom had once run most of Madagascar from their capital at Antananarivo, and moving into the lands of the Betsileo, the island’s third-largest ethnic group by population. I had never heard of the Betsileo before that morning either, which by this point was becoming something of a running theme for the trip.

The name itself has a proper story behind it, the kind I am rather fond of. It means, more or less, “the many invincible ones”, and the Betsileo apparently gave themselves this name after seeing off an invasion by King Ramitraho of the Menabe kingdom, somewhere in the early part of the nineteenth century. There is a lesson in there, I think, about never underestimating a people who have taken the trouble to name themselves after their own victory. The Betsileo occupy the southern portion of the great central plateau of Madagascar, their traditional lands running from the Mania River in the north down to the Andringitra Massif in the south, bordered on the west by the Bongolava range and on the east by the dense rainforest belt occupied by yet another group, the Tanala. Most of what is properly Betsileo country falls within the modern province of Fianarantsoa, where their historic capital, confusingly also called Fianarantsoa, still stands.

Religiously, most Betsileo today are Catholic or Protestant, the legacy of some very determined nineteenth-century missionary work, but as with the Merina further north, an awful lot of the older beliefs have simply carried on underneath the newer ones rather than being replaced by them. There is a whole supernatural cast list still very much in circulation out here: ancestral spirits, deities, the ghosts of people who behaved badly in life, and various spirits of nature and water, all coexisting quite comfortably with Sunday Mass, which strikes me as a rather sensible arrangement, hedging one’s bets being something the English have always understood instinctively, even if we tend to call it something else.

One custom the Betsileo share with the Merina is exhumation, the practice of periodically opening the family tomb, bringing out the bones of the ancestors, rewrapping them in fresh cloth, and having something of a party about it, a custom known further north as the famadihana. The tombs themselves are substantial, permanent, communal structures, built to last considerably longer than the houses of the living, which tells you rather a lot about where the priorities lie. Alongside these tombs, the wealthier Betsileo families build enormous multi-storey houses, a very visible declaration of status that gets passed down from father to son across generations, and when a family outgrows the house, the answer is simply to extend it, rather than building anew. We saw a good many of these houses as we drove through the villages on the way to Ambositra, looming up rather grandly at the roadside among far more modest dwellings, like minor stately homes that had wandered in from somewhere else entirely.

🤠 Boys, Bulls and the Sport of Savika

It was somewhere along this stretch of road that we saw something I am still not entirely sure I believed at the time: young boys, wrestling with zebu bulls, quite casually, at the side of the road.

The zebu, for anyone as previously unenlightened as I was, is the traditional cattle breed of Madagascar, a large beast with a pronounced fatty hump on its shoulders and long, floppy ears, and originally hailing from the Indian subcontinent rather than being native to the island at all. They are strong, useful animals, put to work hauling carts and ploughs, and kept for meat, and to a lesser extent for milk, though nobody seemed to think much of a zebu as a dairy prospect. What these boys were doing, however, had nothing to do with agriculture and everything to do with tradition. It is a sport called savika, and it is a rite of passage.

Savika is, as far as I can tell, a rodeo-like sport that has been practised by Betsileo men for a very long time indeed, and it works roughly like this: a bullfighter, known locally as a mpisavika, must climb onto the hump of a deliberately provoked and thoroughly unimpressed zebu, and stay there, clinging on, for as long as possible, without being thrown, trampled, or caught on one of the animal’s long and evidently very hard horns. The winner is simply whoever manages to hang on longest. There is no sword involved, no killing, nothing of the Spanish tradition about it at all, just a young man and an extremely large, extremely cross animal, with the young man generally coming off worse. In the bigger towns across Betsileo country there are proper stadiums built specifically for savika tournaments, which tells you this is not some minor local curiosity but a genuinely significant part of the culture, and watching a couple of teenage boys having a practice run at the roadside, with considerably less padding and considerably more enthusiasm than the exercise seemed to warrant, was one of those moments where I felt very glad to be a passenger and not a participant.

🪚 Into Zafimaniry Country

Ambositra announced itself as we came down into a broad, picturesque valley, rice paddies lining the valley floor and green hills standing guard around the edges, and it turned out this town, however unassuming it looked at first, is something of a capital in its own right, the centre of Zafimaniry territory.

The Zafimaniry are themselves a sub-group of the Betsileo, living in the forested mountains to the southeast of Ambositra, and they are a small community by any measure, spread across something like a hundred villages, with a total population reckoned at only around twenty-five thousand people. What they are known for, and known for well beyond the borders of Madagascar, is woodcarving. Their particular style of intricate, geometric wood carving and marquetry was recognised by UNESCO in 2003, added to the list of the world’s Intangible Cultural Heritage, which is not a small thing to have achieved for a community of that size, tucked away in a corner of a country most people in Clapham could not point to on a map.

This style of woodworking was, apparently, once common across much of Madagascar, but has faded elsewhere largely due to deforestation, the raw material having simply become harder to come by. Historians who study these things regard the surviving Zafimaniry craftsmanship as a genuine window into how the applied arts of Madagascar’s past must have looked more widely, before the forests began to shrink. It was specifically to see this, the carving and the marquetry, that we had come to Ambositra at all, the rest of the journey having been, in a sense, simply the road that got us there.

We arrived right in the thick of the lunchtime rush, and the town was properly buzzing, full of people going about their business and swarms of schoolchildren heading home for their midday break. The roads were absolutely jammed with pousse-pousse rickshaws stuffed with children, and I do mean stuffed, we counted what looked very much like ten children wedged into a single rickshaw at one point, an achievement in packing efficiency that would put most budget airlines to shame. Somehow our guide Zo found a gap at the side of the road, and we all piled out into the middle of it.

We followed him down a narrow alley into a small, dark workshop, crammed with hand tools, offcuts of wood, and half-finished carvings and marquetry panels, and through into a second, even smaller room, where the man we had actually come to see was at work, talking to another group of visitors. The workshop was tiny, genuinely tiny, the sort of space where three or four people made it feel properly crowded, and we had to wait our turn until the previous visitors had gone before we could go in.

The craftsman himself was middle-aged, though his exact age was frankly impossible to guess, and if pressed I would have said he was roughly my own vintage, though he had clearly worn the years rather more usefully than I have. He was working on a piece of marquetry when we arrived, and there were finished and half-finished pieces scattered all around the workshop. His main tool was a manually operated fretsaw, the downward cutting stroke driven by a foot pedal, the return stroke handled by a spring that he told us, with what I took to be a certain quiet pride, had been salvaged from an old bed frame. We asked him about the blade itself, and he explained that he made those too, from the wire taken out of an old car tyre, filing the serrated teeth into it by hand. Watching him work with tools that basic, and producing marquetry of that quality, was genuinely humbling, and it rather put into perspective any complaints I have ever made about my own tools being not quite up to the job.