Ambohimanga means the blue hill. Blue like what is sacred, like what one does not touch, like what one observes from afar with the certainty that some things, at least, will remain intact. Kings reigned there. The razana rest there. Pilgrims still climb there, barefoot, to ask their ancestors what the living no longer know how to give. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage site in 2001, with these words: "the most significant symbol of the cultural identity of the Malagasy people." The hill does not belong only to those who live there. It belongs to what we are. Or to what we still claim to be. It was in a ravine on this hill that two bodies were found this weekend. Two young women. One was not yet eighteen years old. They wanted to go to the cinema, on a Friday afternoon. A gesture that any young girl in any country should be able to afford without dying from it. They never came home. They were reportedly found thanks to a phone signal. A phone can break, be thrown away, disappear with a gesture. Any killer with half a brain would have thought of that. Unless a slightly more clever killer wanted us to search, to find, to see, and to see precisely there. None of these hypotheses speaks of chance. What was done to them, others have already described. I will add nothing to it, except that no one should die like that, and even less at seventeen years old.
A month ago, a Masonic temple in the capital was raided. Cameras were shown a coffin, a skeleton, documents representing funeral rites. The word "sacrifice" was spoken. That was all it took for Facebook specialists, yesterday experts in economics, the day before in Russian geopolitics and Mpox, to discover a new vocation in occultism and transform funeral objects into evidence of ritual murders. We had a lead, a raid, arrests, images on loop. The abductions continued.
And now, Ambohimanga.
No one yet knows what happened at the foot of the sacred mountain. The investigation is still ongoing, and it would be indecent to attribute conclusions to it that it has not yet rendered. There remains a question that decency itself obliges us to ask: why there? This country has thousands of ravines where a body can disappear for months, years, forever. The absence of blood at the scene confirmed what logic already suggested: they were killed elsewhere, then brought there. And bringing two bodies into a sacred ravine does not happen by accident. Something in the choice of that ravine, at the foot of that hill, refuses coincidence.
After the lodge, the place of ancestors. After imported occultism, indigenous sacred. The pattern draws itself, and history, ours as well as others', knows its grammar by heart. Every era needs its outside, its darkness, its suspect. Freemasonry held that role in July. Traditional religions, the cult of the razana, ancestral practices that two centuries of Christian missions never completely managed to extinguish—are they next to occupy it?
I do not have the answer. But in a country where silence always ends up giving reason to those who speak loudest, asking the question in time remains the only luxury that prudence allows us. Because once the word "ritual" is stuck to what happened at Ambohimanga, and some are waiting for exactly that, it will be very difficult to remove it. And that word, in a country where famadihana is already viewed with suspicion by part of the evangelized population, will carry consequences far beyond this case.
These two young women, like all the others, deserve an investigation, not a symbol. Answers, not a convenient narrative that would designate the next culprit in advance. And Ambohimanga deserves better than to become, in the mouths of those seeking devils, proof that Malagasy sacred is dangerous.
The hill is blue. It always has been. It is not the hill that needs to be raided.
Mbolatiana Raveloarimisa