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HERE LIES ONE WHO IN HIS LIFE WAS HONOURED
OF THE BETSILEO PEOPLE
Funerals are expensive affairs for Malagasy mourners. The ceremonies
include a banquet for which bullocks are slaughtered in numbers
proportioned to the rank of the deceased or the ambitious ostentation of
the relatives. As many as three hundred bullocks have been slaughtered
for a single such occasion. Afterwards the skulls and horns are placed
on or near the tomb as a memorial. The Betsileo tribe erect large stone
monuments, about twenty-five feet square and five feet high, the actual
tomb being a deep subterranean chamber approached by a passage opening
out about a hundred feet away
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