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THE DESCENDANTS OF RAINITAMAINA 244 At this point we can finally return to the problem posed in chapter 1: how it is that Betafo has come to be divided between two ancestors, one andriana and one mainty, so inimical to one another that mixing them together could only lead to catastrophe. The mainty ancestor in question was named Rainitamaina. He was said to have been a wandering astrologer who, sometime in the early part of the nineteenth century, chanced to be passing through Betafo, and ended up locked in a magical battle with the andriana and their leader, Andriamaharo. In the end, he prevailed, and as a result his descendants stayed on and have had control of the weather around Betafo ever since. Yet at the same time, he has always had a difficult time sharing the territory with the people he once fought.To this day, Rainitamaina’s body was not to be removed from his tomb to be exposed to the village of Betafo, or terrible things would result; even during funerals for his descendants, when the dead had to be carried there, it was forbidden to pass through Betafo on the way. This much, everybody knew—though other elements of the story were certainly contested. People were also aware that his descendants now are by far the most numerous and important mainty lineage of Betafo: when I was there, they included fourteen households (grouped in three large families) between Andrianony and the village of Morafeno, and another in Arivonimamo , and ranked among their most prominent members Ratsizafy, the astrologer, Augustin, and Armand. Ratsizafy was in every sense the head of the lineage. He was a man of extraordinary stature. Not only was he the richest man in Betafo, and one of the oldest, he was an astrologer and curer famous as far away as the capital. What’s more, he was the direct successor to Rainitamaina: it was he who kept 9 Rainitamaina’s hail medicine, who continued his avocation as astrologer and curer, who had built his current tomb and officiated over its ceremonial. So close was the identification that a number of people actually had trouble telling the two apart. The identification also took on political significance because many people spoke of Rainitamaina as if he was, in some diffuse sense, the ancestor of all the black people of Betafo; as a result, Ratsizafy himself became a sort of grand ancestral figure, their leader, a token of the unity of all those descended from Betafo’s former slaves. It was rare for anyone to know much about other people’s ancestors. Rainitamaina’s story, and Rainitaba’s, were probably the only two everybody knew at least a little of.1 This was because both gave shape to something that would otherwise be diffuse and inarticulate: Rainitaba’s story, to the experience of loss and dispersal which is the legacy of slavery, Rainitamaina’s, to the profound ruptures it had created within the historical fabric of the community .2 But Rainitamaina’s, at least, also had an ongoing political importance, and this poses certain problems of presentation. When describing the history of a lineage, the obvious thing is to begin at the beginning, with the story of its founder. But this would be very difficult to do. Different members of the lineage told this story in very different ways, and to understand why they did so, one has to first understand their place within it, their interests and perspectives. In other words, one has to know a lot about the end in order to get at the beginning. What I am going to do then, is this: first try to reconstruct the history of the lineage, then, tell the story of its razambe. The Descendants of Rainitamaina Rainitamaina almost certainly did exist. He appears to have lived in the early part of the nineteenth century. Descendants still remember the names of his children and grandchildren. The genealogy below is highly schematic: I have only included those born in Betafo, and even left out several people whose descendants have all left. Still, it provides a framework for understanding the connections between those who still remained in Betafo and Arivonimamo when I was living there, and some idea of what the group has looked like over time. Early documents suggest that Rainitamaina was indeed a contemporary of Andriamaharo,3 and in fact, the earliest mention I could find of anyone included The...

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