Ramanga

The ramanga were not creatures: they were men. They formed a class of servants among the Betsileo, on the central highlands of Madagascar, and their name means «blue blood», the very term used for the nobility they served. There is no transformation in them, no pact, no night. There is an office, and one that nineteenth-century ethnography recorded in detail precisely because European observers found it repellent.

It is worth saying where they were not, because the error repeats in almost everything written about them. They were not Betsimisaraka of the eastern coast, and they had absolutely nothing to do with Maasai kings, who live over three thousand kilometres away, on the African continent and in another cultural world. The ramanga belong to the interior of Madagascar and to the court of the andriana, the Betsileo nobility.

The office consisted of two things, and neither of them is supernatural. When a nobleman cut his nails, the ramanga ate the parings. When the nobleman bled, from a wound or from a bleeding, the ramanga licked the blood from the ground as quickly as he could. If none happened to be near at that moment, the nails and the blood were carefully gathered and kept for him to consume on arrival.

That is all the sources describe. They had no long tongue, no healing saliva, no advance sense of their master's weakness, no caves beside the palaces, and no immortality for as long as they served. None of those traits appears in any ethnographic account: they have been added in modern vampire compendia, where the ramanga was filed as a «living vampire» for the one thing he shares with them, which is putting human blood in his mouth.

The reason was not nourishment, nor sacrifice: it was defensive. In the Betsileo system of belief, as in so many others, what leaves the body remains joined to it. A cut nail or a drop of blood fallen on the earth is the whole person put within anyone's reach. A sorcerer who got hold of them could harm the nobleman through those remains, and so the remains could not be left on the ground.

Within that scheme the ramanga was the device that sealed the leak. What he did was not drinking: it was making evidence disappear. James George Frazer recorded the case in The Golden Bough, in the chapter on tabooed things, precisely as an instance of contagious magic, and from there it passed into the European literature on vampires. That literature read it backwards: where there was a precaution against witchcraft, it chose to see a thirst.