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Small Enterprise Development Volunteer - Peace Corps Madagascar

Monday, March 3, 2014

The Atandroy Ghost Serpent of Arivonimamo



Thus far in my writings I’ve been conspicuously silent on the subject of my beloved town, Arivonimamo.  In the beginning I listed a few of the essential statistics and peppered my writing with anecdotes from around town, but I’ve tended to focus on topics other than the daily deeds in the town of a thousand drunks (literal translation of Arivonimamo). Yet, in the past few weeks there has been an intruder amongst us in Arivonimamo causing quite the kerfuffle. Arivonimamo is now besieged by a menace so insidious, ghoulish, so outlandish, that the story must be told.

I first caught wind of our new interloper when the group of children who normally bumble around outside my house came knocking franticly at my door, ostensibly with some very urgent news. I ushered them inside, they hustled up my stairs and, once the door was securely locked behind them, launched exasperatedly into the tale of Arivonimamo’s Antandroy ghost serpent.

To paraphrase: A few days before someone had discovered a giant snake here in Arivonimamo. Now, this was no ordinary snake according to the girls, oh no. This snake, they told me, was six meters long (roughly 18 feet) and had a head the size of an ox cart.  What’s more, this snake was currently living down on the soccer field, located a couple hundred yards from my house, and the word on the street was that the night before he had eaten a drunkard and left only his head down on the field. 

Now I was incredulous at first, of course. I’m very much a ‘see it to believe it’ type of guy and mythic serpentine monsters have yet to cross my field of vision.  I played along with the children though and decided to ply what information I could from them. 

Allegedly the local police force (Gendarme) had bravely ventured down to the soccer pitch the day before only to come face-to-face with the slithery terror. The intrepid foot soldiers engaged the creature, guns a-blazin’ yet tragically, and bafflingly, came up empty handed.

I then pushed the children on where on earth this serpent may have come from, and what in the name of all that is holy, Arivonimamo could have done to bring this fresh hell down upon ourselves. To that they gave me two seemingly incongruent stories, which only thickened the plot. 

The first explanation was that an old vazah (white person), who lived up on a hill outside of town, was raising this snake as a pet.  The vazah supposedly skipped town a few years back but must have forgotten to fortify his serpent pens because one of the little buggers escaped and ate what I can only assume was a dozen cows to grow himself into the monstrosity terrorizing my soccer field.

Here’s where it gets weirder. The other story begins with an Atandroy man (one of the 18 ethnic groups of Madagascar), who had been living and working for a number of years in Arivonimamo. When this man suddenly died, he was laid to rest in one of the tombs on the high ridge to the Southeast of town. Sometime during the night, this Atandroy fellow broke free of his Merina burial shrouds (ethnic group in my area) and turned into a giant snake. The snake busted out of the tomb, but not before devouring a few of the other bodies around him. Sometime that night he must have slithered his way down to the soccer field where he was residing at the time the children told me the story.

My favorite part is that when the kids told me about the man turning into a snake they must have noticed a hint of doubt in my expression, because they gave me the, ‘Eric you’re so dumb,’ look that I’ve come to know so well. Apparently it’s common knowledge here that whenever an Atandroy person dies, they turn into an animal. I’m always the last to know I guess.

So it could be either story. We’ll never know.       

Anyway, I assumed that an active imagination had gotten the best of the children and I decided to investigate. Astonishingly, as I roamed the streets of town that morning, asking people to tell me what they’d heard about the newest resident of Arivonimamo, every single person I talked to knew about it. Every. Single. Person. 

The Gendarme shoot-out: most people had heard about that. The vazah with the pet snake: very plausible most people thought. The Atandroy thing: Oh duh Eric, of course, it’s definitely an Atandroy guy turned serpent, that makes sense. 

I did get a lot of variation on the story from different sources. Some people disputed the size, saying it was only a meter or so long. I later checked with the Gendarme who told me that they didn’t know anything about the shoot-out but that they had heard of the snake and heard it had moved down the hill where someone saw it drinking water. I even met a few people, notably younger individuals from the capital, who told me they had a hard time believing the story.

Nonetheless, I was advised not, nay forbidden, to head down to the soccer field by my neighbors and all the little kids that I basically run a day-care for here in Arivonimamo.

I did anyway though and low and behold, no 20 foot snake. After coming back from a run down at the field I stopped over at my neighbors to tell them I’d been down looking for the serpent but couldn’t find him.

‘That’s because he’s part ghost. When he sees you he can choose to hide and then strike when you’re not expecting it.’ They explained to me.

I was then informed that there is a very good possibility that this ghoulish creature can also take human form and may now be walking amongst us in the streets. At this point one of the ladies who was sitting and having coffee with us rolled her eyes and exclaimed how the whole thing had been blown out of proportion and how this kind of gossip is so typical of Arivonimamo:

‘If we had grasshoppers come into town by the time they got here, they’d be dogs, and by the time they made it to the bottom of the hill, they’d be people.’

My friend James stopped into Arivonimamo around the time this was all going on and over lunch, while we were contemplating taking my Tsimahety sword (another ethnic group) down the field to hunt snake, we came across an article in one of the national newspapers that we had bought to read:

‘Arivonimamo: Bibilava hafahafa hoe? Toy ny olona ny lohany,’ meaning, ‘Arivonimamo: A strange snake? His head is like a human.’

 So thanks to the hard hitting journalism of ‘Gazetiko’ I found another piece of the puzzle. Supposedly the snake has a human head.  The article did mention that there were a number of rumors flying around town and nobody seemed to know the true story.

Unfortunately, there isn’t some dramatic climax to this story. Somehow the snake never re-surfaced, Arivonimamo wasn’t stormed by hordes of zoologists looking to document a new species of man-snake, and the buzz around town seemed to fizzle out. A week or so ago a little shop owner across the street told me that a Gendarme officer had stopped by his store and mentioned that the Gendarme had seen a few-foot long, harmless snake somewhere in the rice fields outside of town and decided not to bother with it. So at this point it’s beginning to feel as if Arivonimamo is finally safe from the Atandroy ghost serpent.

But then again, who knows, maybe he’s still walking among us.

Until next time,
Veloma.