This intense scene is very difficult to date in time: listening to the sound, it might have happened last week or a hundred years ago. However, the coordinates indicated from the ship do reveal the place. We are in the vicinity of the city of Mahajanga, in the northwest of Madagascar, and this location makes it clear what is going on there.

It is a ceremony linked to the tromba cult.

The music that fills this transmission falls squarely into the traditions of trance accompaniment. The reactions also correspond to the framework of possession rites, and it is not difficult to imagine that the escalations of the clapping and the fuss punctuate the moments in which the attendees interpret that a spiritual entity is temporarily taking over the physical body of one of them. In this scenario, the “guardians” watch over the proper functioning of the ceremony armed with bladed weapons and a symbolic attire that characterises them as authority figures halfway between the two spheres, the mundane and the supernatural.