Bezanozano Erotic

The Bezanozano are named for their hair. The word means roughly many little braids, and for a long time that was how travelers picked them out: a head worked into dozens of tight plaits. They live in the Ankay basin of east central Madagascar, the broad plain drained by the Mangoro river, with the town of Moramanga at its center. This is transitional ground. Above them are the bare, worked hills of the Merina highlands. Below and to the east, the land drops through steep rainforest toward Betsimisaraka country and the Indian Ocean. That position made them intermediaries, and through the nineteenth century most of what moved between the port at Toamasina and the capital at Antananarivo moved through their territory or their hands. The road still runs that way, and so does the railway.

Their language is Malagasy, Austronesian, with its nearest relatives in southern Borneo, and the Bezanozano dialect sits about where they do, between the highland and the coastal forms. Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, has been established here for well over a century, but the ancestors carry the older authority. Family tombs fix a lineage to particular ground, and famadihana, the rite in which the dead are lifted out, rewrapped in fresh cloth and carried through the village before being laid back, is kept here as it is elsewhere in the highlands. Fady, the prohibitions inherited from the dead, still shape ordinary decisions: what to eat, when not to work, which ground to leave alone. The forest at Andasibe lies in their country, and the indri, the largest lemur still alive, is protected there by taboo, which is a good part of why it is still alive. Merina armies under Radama I took Ankay early in the nineteenth century, and it did not stay taken quietly. The area's hardest modern memory is 1947, when the anticolonial revolt broke out nearby and French forces answered with mass killings, including prisoners shot in railcars at the Moramanga station. Today the valley grows rice, zebu graze the plain, the Ambatovy nickel and cobalt operation works just outside town, and the forest keeps shrinking. The Bezanozano are among the smaller of Madagascar's recognized peoples and get less notice than the large neighbors on either side of them. That is arithmetic, not significance.