The dancers step into a dusty arena and the crowd starts to hush. They are led by a man with braided hair down to his shoulders wearing amulets made from cow-horn and a pouch stuffed with leaves. Carrying a long iron-tipped spear, he kneels beside three female dancers wearing brown cloth shawls.

It is Saturday night in southern Madagascar, when the Antandroy people sing, drink rum and forget the week’s hardships. The dance begins. The leader chants and blows a whistle as he swings his head from side to side, casting leaves from his pouch onto the ground. “The leaves are significant because they’re from the same plants we use for sacrifice,” said Joyce Tahiendraza, 24. “They symbolise a long and healthy life.”

Supported by a cow-skin drum, an old fiddle and a guitar missing two strings, his female dancers shake their hips frantically and sing in eerie harmony while the leader and another male dancer lunge spears at each other in a theatrical duel. “The dance is for celebrations,” said Remanintsy Tompotany, former mayor of Ifotaka, one of the Antandroy’s bigger villages of 1,700 people. “Weddings, funerals, circumcisions, national holidays. They usually draw the crowds.”

Madagascar, a huge Indian Ocean island, houses a unique mix of cultures that has long fascinated anthropologists. Successive waves of immigrants since antiquity, starting with sea-faring peoples from present-day Indonesia to more recent arrivals from eastern Africa and Arabia, have each left their mark. The Antandroy say they originally came from Africa across the Mozambique channel, eventually inhabiting the vast ‘spiny forests’ of south Madagascar. Cut off from the world by poor roads and a dry, inhospitable climate, the Antandroy have held fast to their traditional culture.

Influence the living

“We have more respect for our traditions than perhaps any other people in Madagascar,” said Tompotany. Respect for ancestors and beliefs that they influence the living are paramount, governing every aspect of life. The Antandroy consult their ancestors through special ombiasi (witch-doctors).

If a close relative is sick, a child is about to be born or plans for building a house are underway, a witch-doctor will be consulted to ask the ancestors’ advice. Using astrology, the ombiasi also soothsay. “We sometimes use astrology to see the future,” said Manahiras Mahateraka, a 73-year-old witch-doctor. “We can forewarn people of bad things.”

Reverence for ancestors, as with all Madagascan people, has left the Antandroy with many taboos. To break any of these upsets the ancestral spirits and could be dangerous. “Taboos are very important to us,” said Tompotany. It is taboo to refer to body parts of one’s elders, to eat turtle or pork, cut tamarind trees from the forest, mix milk with salt, milk a cow when pregnant or eat beef when a family member has recently died.

Each taboo has a folk tale explaining why the ancestors don’t want it broken. The Antandroy tell a story about the turtle. A woman wanting to please her husband hid a turtle under her dress so he’d think she was pregnant. But one day the turtle bit her and she dropped it right out in front of him. In anger, he decreed that no Antandroy should ever again eat turtle.

Basic services

Aid workers say the south is Madagascar’s most deprived region, with higher chilmortality, lower school enrolment and fewer basic services than anywhere else on the impoverished island. With aid from the World Bank, development projects are underway in the south to build roads and repair crumbling infrastructure to end the region’s economic isolation. The government is keen to bring development to Madagascar’s 17 million people, three quarters of whom live on less than a dollar a day.

The Antandroy hope for these things, too, though they are determined not to lose touch with their roots. They say they want to bring their traditions to the world. “We dream of making an album of our traditional music to play on world radio,” said the dance leader, Bruno, 33. “We just need a break.”