Lamba Hoany: proverb cloths from Madagascar

African Arts, Summer, 2003 by Rebecca L. Green

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The term vita gasy is complex. It is applied with great pride to items, traditions, and performances that are made, practiced, or enacted in Madagascar and nowhere else. Yet it is also used derisively to describe local products or traditions that are in competition with those of other countries. Malagasy peoples are acutely aware that they live in a severely economically disadvantaged nation. Madagascar was ranked the tenth poorest country in the world in 1991, with at least seventy percent of the population living below the poverty line according to an estimate in 1994 (World Factbook 2002). With raw materials and resources often unavailable, Madagascar cannot easily compete on the world market. Its products and services are frequently considered inferior to foreign imports.

Many Malagasy, therefore, use lamba hoany to express themselves, define their Malagasy identity (vita gasy) or a more worldly one (vita ambony), and to send messages--implied and specific--to others. If, as Mary Ellen Roach and Joanne Eicher note, "all aesthetic acts are acts of speaking" (1979:7), cloth and clothing in particular, by providing manipulable and versatile surfaces upon which aesthetic messages may be emblazoned, have the ability to supply information about a person's identity. Communicating through cloth, whether implicitly or explicitly, has a long history in highland Madagascar. For example, when the powerful eighteenth-century Merina king Andrianampoinimerina was expanding his empire, the Betsileo king Andriamanalina refused to submit to his authority. The former then sent his southern neighbor a cloth with a hole cut in its center. When Andriamanalina saw the cloth, he understood the depth of his isolation. The hole was his small kingdom; the surrounding cloth was the other Betsileo kingdoms whose rulers had already surrendered and sworn their allegiance to Andrianampoinimerina (see Brown 1978:127).

Lamba hoany act as a means of communication in a much more obvious way. Information is conveyed not only by the simple act of wearing this cloth (seen as a Malagasy practice) and in the choice of manufacturer (domestic or foreign), but also through the printed imagery, the text embedded into the design, and the contexts in which the cloth is worn.

The imagery of lamba hoany is wide ranging, and may or may not have an obvious connection to the proverbs depicted with them. Designs tend to be carefully symmetrical. They can be relatively abstract, as seen in the ubiquitous paisley swirls and grid or checkerboard designs. They can also portray plants, trees, vines, flowers, and other natural phenomena. Flowers are particularly prevalent, perhaps a harking back to an earlier source, the distinctive lambamena burial shroud. Lambamena are essential components of highland Malagasy reburial practices, which themselves are significant elements in highland performances of identity (see Green 1996, 1998, 2003). Moreover, the floral imagery that is commonly incorporated into the shroud plays a significant role in this expression of identity. The flowers are usually identified as poinsettia, which in the Malagasy language is Madagasikara, the local name for Madagascar.