Shamans & Bones
Two Stories from Madagascar
Travel, they say, is a broadening experience.
A few years ago I hitched a ride on a container ship from Seattle to Shanghai and spent two weeks on the stormy Pacific, smoking cigars on the deck and pretending to be a mysterious adventurer.
I do a lot of daydreaming when I travel. Sometimes, when I’m walking through a foreign airport terminal, I’ll plug in my AirPods and cue up some atmospheric music — often, I must confess, the James Bond theme — and pretend to be a spy on the run. I’ll size up my fellow travelers and try to spot the secret assassin in the Men’s Fragrances section of the Duty Free store, that kind of thing. On long layovers, I can construct an entire secret agent identity which really helps pass the time.
That’s the best part about traveling. If you’re a daydreamer like me, you can really let it rip.
Recently, for instance, I was in Madagascar, touring around the African nation with a few friends. We went to see the giant, ancient baobab trees and the hilariously antic lemurs, and to get a look at this famously remote, deeply weird country.
I promise to keep the geography homework to a minimum, but here’s the nutshell: Madagascar is a gigantic island floating in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Mozambique, and it’s been sparely populated since Indonesian explorers landed there sometime around 1000 AD. It often seems more Asian than African, despite being merely 250 miles from the African coast. Its key export is vanilla, its system of government is Chaotic Democracy, and its chief historical figures were a series of psychotic rulers in the 19th century.
Most of the roads in Madagascar are unpaved, and the paved ones are pocked with car-sized, axle-snapping potholes. If you want to come to Madagascar, better do it before the rainy season begins in late January or you’ll be slogging through the mud.
What you’ll see, if you come to Madagascar, is lush forestation and arid plains, blue-water beaches and a capital city, Antananarivo, that turns out to be among the most easily pronounceable names in Madagascar. As I said: weird place.
One morning we scrambled up a rocky hillside to see the traditional burial place of the Bara tribe. The people in Madagascar have an elaborate way of handling the dead bodies of their relatives. First, the departed are carried to a temporary tomb — usually a niche in the rocks nearby. They wait a few months for nature to do its work on the corpse, then return to the niche, collect the bones and whatever is still attached, take the gruesome package back to the village to scrape the bones clean, rub them with animal fat and honey, wrap them in silk and then carry them higher on the mountain for permanent burial in the family rock crevice.
It seems creepy to us, but then I think the Malagasy people would find it equally weird that some people in the United States keep the ashes of their deceased loved ones in urns next to a flat screen television. The world is a complicated place. We tend to work with what we have,.
As we neared the tomb, my daydreaming went into overdrive. I was no longer a middle-aged American puffing exhaustedly in the Madagascar heat. I was a famous archaeologist — Indiana Jones! — climbing over the rocks to find the Lost Tomb of the Madagascar King, a fantasy that lasted until we actually arrived at the tomb and discovered that someone else was there, a young woman, standing in front of a pile of bones and dessicated fabric and some other indistinct material, pooching her lips out seductively and taking a selfie.
The spell was broken. I was convinced this was the worst example of disrespectful tourist behavior ever until our guide told us that the young woman was from the local tribe and that the bones belonged to her grandmother.
Fine, I said, but why is she doing the duck lips thing and pushing out her butt?
He shrugged with a Kids, whaddya gonna do? expression on his face.
Look, it’s their country and their culture and they can do anything they want with the bones of their dead. If a young Malagasy girl wants to pretend to be Kim Kardashian in front of a pile of what used to be her Nana, fine with me. But I had come a long way up a steep hill, and it would have been nice had she stopped pretending to be a famous influencer long enough for me to pretend to be Indiana Jones.
Travel can be mind-expanding, it’s true, but it’s a lot more fun when you’re the only star in the daydream.
And then, of course, we ended up seeing lots and lots of lemurs. Lots and lots of them.
“Is there any way,” I asked my guide, “that we could visit a local shaman? Instead of seeing more lemurs?”
He shifted uncomfortably. What he wanted to do was show us more lemurs, the gentle monkey-like creatures that populate the island. That’s what tourists come to see, after all.
I don’t really care about lemurs, to be honest. Cute, furry things swinging through the trees? Fun the first time you catch a glimpse of them moving through the forest canopy like a dozen Tarzans. Sort of fun the second and third times, too. But when the fourth set of the fuzzy little charmers swoops through, I’m ready for the next thing. What else you got? is what I want to know.
And what Madagascar has got, aside from a lot of lemurs, is shamans. So my highly educated and city-sophisticated guide eventually relented and took me to meet a genuine Malagasy shaman.
Just to be clear, what we call a shaman is basically what we used to call a witch doctor, but we don't say that anymore for the same reasons we don’t use a lot of old school labels — they’re outdated and potentially offensive and it’s easier to just give in and use the approved term than argue about it. In Madagascar, a more appropriate way to describe a shaman would be traditional healer or spiritual guide, though those New Age-y words don’t really capture the spooky experience of crawling into a dark and smoky hut in the middle of a remote Malagasy village and coming face to face with a young man in a bright red nightshirt. He took me by the hand and held my gaze and peered deep into my eyes and all I could think was Damn, this guy is good.
In Malagasy society, shamans are respected and consulted by people from all walks of life, including the educated and the powerful. People come to them when they’re in trouble or want protection, and after a consultation the shaman will often make an amulet which may be worn around the neck or carried in a bag.
My guide shifted uncomfortably again, and it was then that I noticed the small leather pouch hanging from a cord around his neck. He had an amulet of his own, which may have explained his reluctance to bring me there. For the previous few days, he had been all business — explaining the economic issues facing Madagascar, its complicated history, the habitats of the (many, many) lemurs — and a highly westernized, man of science and reason.
The amulet gave him away. He was embarrassed by it, but explained that it was for the protection of his family. That made perfect sense. I asked the shaman if he would make one for me.
Which he was happy to do. It’s a business, after all. A shaman gets paid for his magic services — and on a sliding scale too, it seems, because I was charged the New York City price. So as he was collecting seeds and feathers and small bones, he reminded me that he was only offering protection for a certain category of things. This amulet, he told me, and any amulet, isn’t a magic force field that repels all misfortune. Bad stuff can still happen to me, he wanted me to know.
“But not as much bad stuff?” I asked.
“Not as much bad stuff,” was the response, translated by my guide.
As he wrapped up my little pouch he told me that some shamans promise the world. Some tell their clients that this or that amulet or spell will solve all of their problems. He shook his head. That’s bad business, he said. Only promise what you can deliver.
The amulet sits next to my bed and every now and then I put it around my neck to feel protected against not as much bad stuff.
Yesterday, while I was scrolling through the news on my phone, I read about a politician promising to “create jobs” and another one promising to “save America,” and a magic pill that makes you “feel more confident” and a powder you can mix into your morning coffee that will “activate your brain.” It’s a good thing I’m not superstitious, I thought, or I’d believe all of that nonsense, and I touched my amulet for good luck.