Zafisoro Erotic

The Zafisoro are a people defined by descent and by one stretch of shoreline. Their name begins with zafy, the Malagasy word for grandchildren and, more broadly, descendants. Many lineage-based groups across Madagascar build their names the same way. To be Zafisoro is to belong to a line of kin that counts itself back through the generations, and that line still decides a lot in daily life: whose ceremonies a person attends, which taboos they keep and where they will be buried. Their home is the southeast coast, around the town of Farafangana in the Atsimo-Atsinanana region. Here rivers come down off the eastern escarpment into lagoons, and the shore takes a pounding from Indian Ocean surf. Several peoples live close together here. The Antefasy are also centered on Farafangana, the Antaisaka live mostly to the south and the Antemoro live farther north. They share markets, roads and many customs, yet each keeps its own name and its own ancestors. The Zafisoro speak Malagasy, an Austronesian language whose closest relatives are spoken in southern Borneo. Their local form of it is close enough to their neighbors' speech that people from different groups talk easily with one another.

Religious life runs on two tracks. Christianity is well established on this coast: Farafangana is the seat of a Catholic diocese, and many Zafisoro go to church. Alongside that is an older duty to the razana, the ancestors, who are treated as present and watchful rather than simply gone. People keep their goodwill by honoring fady, bans on certain foods, days, places or acts that differ from one lineage to the next. They also hold ceremonies where zebu cattle are slaughtered and the meat is shared out. Few families see any conflict in keeping both. Most Zafisoro make their living from the land and the sea. They grow rice in the wet valley bottoms and coffee and pepper for sale on the humid coastal plain, and villages near the shore fish. Their history follows that of the wider southeast. Merina armies from the highlands pushed down this coast in the nineteenth century, and French colonial rule came next. The 1947 uprising against the French brought fighting and harsh reprisals to the eastern districts. Through all of it, lineage, tomb and taboo have stayed the fixed points by which the Zafisoro know who they are.