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Malagasy in an Arabic hand
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Claim (verbatim)
In southeastern Madagascar the Antemoro and neighbouring groups wrote Malagasy in Arabic script — the sorabe ('great writings') — for genealogy, history, divination (sikidy), medicine, and magic, a manuscript tradition held by hereditary scribal families (katibo) and studied since Gabriel Ferrand (Un texte arabico-malgache du XVIe siècle) and Ludvig Munthe (La tradition arabico-malgache, 1982). It is African text culture on an Indian Ocean island, and it is doubly hidden: the manuscripts are guarded family property rarely surrendered to public collections, and where they do surface they meet cataloguers primed for Arabic who cannot read the Malagasy the script encodes. The mechanism is custody plus script-language mismatch — the forces that bury Ajami on the mainland, intensified by the sacred-secret status of family sorabe — so the corpus is quantitatively real and historically deep but institutionally almost uncounted, its described fraction sitting mostly in a few colonial-era European acquisitions. Prediction: the number of sorabe manuscripts held and catalogued in public institutions worldwide will be a small fraction — under a fifth — of the number credibly inferred to remain in Antemoro family custody, and the catalogued fraction will be dominated by early-twentieth-century European acquisitions rather than recent in-situ documentation (primary clause: under one-fifth of the inferred sorabe corpus is publicly catalogued; the verdict follows it). Kill: not yet built as a census — assemble it from the sorabe holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Norwegian mission and Oslo collections and from Munthe's inventories (La tradition arabico-malgache, 1982) for the described side, against ethnographic estimates of family-held manuscripts in the Antemoro region.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: the number of sorabe manuscripts held and catalogued in public institutions worldwide will be a small fraction — under a fifth — of the number credibly inferred to remain in Antemoro family custody, and the catalogued fraction will be dominated by early-twentieth-century European acquisitions rather than recent in-situ documentation (primary clause: under one-fifth of the inferred sorabe corpus is publicly catalogued; the verdict follows it).
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: not yet built as a census — assemble it from the sorabe holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Norwegian mission and Oslo collections and from Munthe's inventories (La tradition arabico-malgache, 1982) for the described side, against ethnographic estimates of family-held manuscripts in the Antemoro region.
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, Sub-Saharan Africa wave 2, weighted by inferred textual production rather than survival, cataloguing, or digitization; every item grounded in real works, authors, chronicles, catalogues, and testimonia and in the real evidence of loss (colonial capture, single-copy transmission, translation-only corpora, Ajami catalogue-invisibility, substrate attrition, and manuscript populations inferred rather than counted), with no fabricated citations, and deliberately disjoint from the 2026-07-10 w16 Africa wave and the 2026-07-16 Africa/Americas wave. Nine candidates were dropped for duplication or a weak kill: the Kilwa Chronicle double-transmission (coin-audit already posed in breadth-africa-americas), the Ahmad Gragn fire age-profile and the Tarikh al-Fattash forged-layer (both already posed there), the Bamum/Njoya script life-cycle (already posed there), the generic Qasr Ibrim genre-proportion and a second Nubia item (w16 Nubia cluster), the Kano Chronicle stratigraphy (folded to avoid a third late-single-witness chronicle), a Futa Jallon Fula Ajami item (dropped to avoid Ajami over-weighting), and a Cape Arabic-Afrikaans item (dropped as too late for the premodern brief).
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The sorabe tradition — Malagasy in Arabic script held by hereditary Antemoro katibo families — is documented from Ferrand through Munthe, as is its double burial by family custody and Arabist cataloguing. But the primary clause is an inferred-population proportion: publicly catalogued sorabe under one-fifth of the number credibly inferred to remain in family custody. The conjecture states this 'is not yet built as a census,' and it requires an ethnographic estimate of family holdings that no published figure supplies. The tradition is described; the one-fifth ratio is un-run.
- Ludvig Munthe, La tradition arabico-malgache (Antananarivo, 1982)
- Gabriel Ferrand, Les musulmans à Madagascar et aux îles Comores (Paris, 1891-1902)
- Sorabe holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Norwegian mission / Oslo collections
Predictions
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