Speech, silence, and slave descent in highland Madagascar

Abstract

This article is an examination of the uses and effects of words and silence. It analyses the rhetorical strategies used in connection with a fundamental cleavage in highland Malagasy society: the distinction between people of free and slave descent. A pervasive silence hangs over this topic since it is almost never mentioned between the two groups. This silence, along with the careful words used to play down status differentiation, forms the rhetorical micro-politics of village life. The article takes the view that this wholesale avoidance constitutes a generalized speech act: that is to say, it is constituted of diverse motivations and strategies, and has multiple and contradictory effects. One of these is that while allowing a liveable fiction of equality to be evoked, these rhetorical strategies also entrench the division even more deeply. Ny vava tsy ambina no ahitan-doza.An unguarded mouth spells danger.Malagasy proverbIt takes less than two minutes to walk from the main village of Antanety, westwards across groundnut and manioc fields, to the shabby little group of mud and thatch houses called Tananomby. The distance is meaningful, for the residents of Tananomby are descendants of slaves while the residents of Antanety are not. The placement of slave-descent hamlets to the west of the main village is common throughout the Malagasy highlands, and the western location of settlements such as Tananomby is a topographical fact with symbolic resonance. This resonance comes from the cosmological significance invested in the cardinal points: in brief, the north and east are associated with the ancestors, and are considered auspicious and sacred, while the west and the south are profane and dangerous (Hébert 1965;Vig 1977).In my early days of fieldwork in Antanety, armed with a cursory knowledge of such arrangements from my preparatory ethnographic readings, I was able immediately to bs_bs_banner

The risk of sliding down

“…The topic of slavery and its legacies is still an embarrassing one in the highlands of Madagascar. This is so for both slave descendants who have tried to hide their origins and thus avoid discrimination, and for people of free origin who, in public, generally avoid using the word andevo and explicitly referring to anyone's slave origin (Evers 2002; Freeman 2013; Rakoto 1997a; Razafindralambo 2014; Regnier 2015). Before the French colonial authorities abolished slavery in Madagascar in 1896, enslaved people were generally regarded as alienable properties and, for the great part, employed in agriculture and domestic work (Domenichini‐Ramiaramanana and Domenichini 1982; Rakoto 1997b).…”

“…Ketaka came from a rural family of free origin and found it particularly distressing to be treated like an andevo ,testifying to how slave status has remained important in Madagascar, even though the French abolished slavery there in 1896, albeit after centuries of making profits in the slave trade. In the highlands of Madagascar, slave origin is highly stigmatized, and to be suspected as a slave descendant is often enough to be considered impure ( maloto ) and inferior, and to be excluded from marrying people of free or noble origin (Evers 2002; Freeman 2013; Razafindralambo 2014; Regnier 2015). 4 What Ketaka feared most was that being treated like a “slave” would cause her to “slide down” the ranked system of essentialized, endogamous status groups that still permeate local societies.…”

“…Status is often based on naturalized notions of purity and ascriptive principles, often safeguarded by endogamy and strict kinship rules, and it does not necessarily overlap with the changing economic conditions that generate class distinctions and shape the renegotiations of political power. In the highlands of Madagascar as well, class and status distinctions do not overlap perfectly: while it is true that in some areas of the highlands slave descendants still work as sharecroppers for former masters and have struggled to be recognized as landowners (Evers 2002; Freeman 2013), in other cases, slave descendants enjoy the same economic conditions as people of common or noble origin, but they are still stigmatized (Regnier 2015).…”

Clean people, unclean people: the essentialisation of ‘slaves’ among the southern Betsileo of Madagascar

“…I found the situation of the Berosaiña striking since my readings of the ethnographic literature had given me the idea that Betsileo slave descendants lived a rather miserable life, either in poor satellite hamlets where they sharecropped the land of their former mastersas in the cases described by Kottak (1980) and Freeman (2013) or in migrant villages where they were harshly treated and exploited because they were not able to prove a clean ancestryas reported by Evers (2002). In comparison, the Berosaiña were well integrated in the local peasant community and, to a certain extent, treated as equals.…”

“…Unfortunately, due to a lack of space I cannot do justice to the ethnographic richness of these conversations, which were remarkably open in comparison with more ordinary contexts where a 'silence' on slavery is usually observed(Somda 2009;Freeman 2013). Retrospectively, running the three tasks proved a very effective way to circumvent the southern Betsileo reticence to talk about slavery and slave descent.…”