Antemoro Erotic

The Antemoro are the Malagasy people who kept books. For centuries, along the lower Matitanana River on Madagascar's southeast coast, families of scribes wrote the Malagasy language in Arabic letters. Nobody else on the island did this, and it still shapes how other Malagasy think of them. The name means "people of the shore," and their homeland is still the coastal strip around Vohipeno and Manakara: humid, rainy country of rice paddies, coffee and river mouths.

Their founding story points across the sea. Antemoro family histories trace the leading clans to Muslim newcomers who arrived around the fifteenth century from the Arab and Swahili trading world and married into the local population. What those newcomers brought did not last as orthodox Islam. It lasted as a set of trades. There were the sorabe, or "great writings," manuscripts of family history, astrology, medicine and protective charms. There were the katibo, scribes trained to read them. And there were the ombiasy, diviners and healers known far beyond the coast. Antemoro experts served the Merina kings in the highlands, and the Merina court used sorabe until the Latin alphabet replaced it in the 1820s.

Antemoro society is ranked, and the ranks still matter in memory and ritual. Noble clans such as the Anteony held political power. The Anakara kept the manuscripts and much of the religious authority. Commoner families stood below both. Religion is Malagasy at its core: the ancestors have a say in family decisions, tombs are serious business, and fady, or taboos, decide what a household eats and does. Islamic traces survive inside that frame, in the respect given to the written word and in taboos that keep pork off many tables. Many Antemoro are also Christian and see no conflict between church and their duties to the ancestors.

They speak a southeastern dialect of Malagasy, an Austronesian language whose closest relatives are spoken in southern Borneo. Today the Antemoro name is best known from paper. Handmade bark sheets pressed with dried flowers are sold across Madagascar as "Antemoro paper" and made mostly in the highland town of Ambalavao. They descend from the paper once made for sorabe. It is a decorative afterlife for a tradition that gave a coastal farming people something rare on the island: power that rested on being able to read.