Mythical Creatures of Madagascar
bizarre wildlife and strange gods

Like the ocean-bound laboratory of some mad scientist, Madagascar is inhabited by many weird and wonderful species that would be considered impossible anywhere else.
Giant cockroaches hiss like snakes, and lizards scream like banshees. There is a moth with a fourteen-inch tongue, and a weevil with a giraffe’s neck. Lemurs occupy the niches that were usurped by more advanced primates elsewhere 40 million years ago and, as late as 1986, a species was discovered (the golden bamboo lemur) that lives on a cyanide-rich diet that would kill an animal twelve times its size in a day.
Myths and (to us) superstitions are so alive among the Malagasy that many fantastic and otherworldly creatures are considered as much a part of daily life as the sacred crocodiles or the ubiquitous chameleons that are often considered harbingers of bad luck. Firsthand accounts of Madagascar’s (super-)natural riches are not uncommon and my guide Eloi Razafimandimby, the well-educated son of a city doctor, was keen to introduce me to some of his island’s strangest creatures.

Songaomby: In 1876 a German zoologist mounted an expedition to hunt a man-eating antelope that is still terrorising rural people all over the island. A young man from Eloi’s village tried to escape a songaomby by climbing a tree. “This was very silly,” my guide explained, “because everybody knows that it plays a wicked trick to get you down. It stood underneath the tree and – how you say?…it peed. The pee burns like acid. He fell out of the tree when he got splashed and the songaomby ate him.”
The songaomby is like a fat bull with no horns and un-cloven hooves. Some scientists believe that spraying-urination technique and the man-eating (or at least killing with the teeth) attributes could be derived from a pygmy hippopotamus that became extinct after the arrival of man, about 2,000 years ago.

Man-Eating Tree: In 1881 Carl Liche reported a virgin-sacrifice to a Malagasy man-eating tree which ‘as if instinct with demoniac intelligence fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her neck and arms…there trickled down the stalk of the tree great streams of the viscid honey-like fluid mingled horribly with the blood and oozing viscera of the victim…May I never see such a sight again.’
In fact nobody but Liche ever saw ‘the devil tree.’
            The agy tree meanwhile unarguably exists and I can personally vouch for the fact that its stinging hairs (which detach even in the mildest breeze) are at least ten times as painful as the sting of a common nettle. As one missionary traveller wrote of an agy tree ‘attack’ in 1879: ‘agony was writ plain over every line of my face.’

Bibyolona: In common with other Malagasy Franco-phones Eloi also knows bibyolona as Sagittaire and he saw him once when he was twelve: “I was so scared I froze. He had a horse’s bottom half and a man’s top and he was with someone…Bibyolona only comes when it is a half-moon and he is always accompanied by a man – usually a witchdoctor…or a politician. If he’d seen me he would’ve killed me!”

Fandrefiala: Many Malagasy snakes have spiritual (often ancestral) attributes but the spear-headed fandrefiala is certainly the most feared. “It’s very clever,” Eloi explained, “if you stop under his tree it will drop three leaves, one at a time, onto your head. It does this to check the trajectory. Then it drops out of the tree and springs its body straight like a spear to kill you.”
            But inexplicably the ‘clever’ fandrefiala also kills itself in the collision. Another guide told me about a fandrefiala that missed its target and broke a metal rice pot. It also died.
This snake is in fact known to modern science as Ithycyphus perineti and it does have V-shaped head-markings that suggest a spear. Experts believe that, on an island where all its kind are harmless to humans, this reptile has been accredited such wilfully violent (and suicidal) behaviour to satisfy the ancient human impulse to fear snakes.

Just as the diabolical fandrefiala has a real-life counterpart even the great Roc of Sinbad’s legends was based on Madagascar’s Aepyornis (once the world’s largest bird). The scientific world is still far from completing an inventory of this ‘evolutionary madhouse’ and who can be certain that in the remote wildernesses of the world’s fourth largest island there are not other creatures that could push back the boundaries of western belief.
On an island where the bat-eared, rat-toothed, fox-tailed, long-fingered aye-aye turns out to be, not the fantastic taxidermic hoax that it was first declared, but a product of natural selection anything is possible.

The End