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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesTrimobe is a powerful, man-eating figure in Malagasy tales, an owner of gardens and riches whose captives turn his appetite against him.
Also recorded as Trimobé, Itrimobe
Trimobe carries his prisoner home in a basket. Each falling stone reassures him that Takinga is still inside. Then the prisoner himself drops to the ground. [1]
Read the manuscriptTrimobe, Trimobé and Itrimobe name formidable adversaries in Malagasy tales. The English word ogre suggests their dangerous appetite: a person caught stealing their fruit may become the next meal. Yet these figures also have spouses, children, gardens and possessions. Their threats arise within households and encounters with strangers, where strength can be defeated by someone who understands what the stronger opponent wants to hear. [1][2]
Takinga is already a troublesome trickster before he meets Trimobe. In Gabriel Ferrand’s collected tale, he repeatedly eats his younger brothers’ portions while they tend the family’s cattle. His parents sell him to a stranger. He delays the buyer by making every brother answer to his name, then hanging cassava around every brother’s neck to duplicate his own identifying mark. Eventually recognized by a mark on his lips, he asks permission to say farewell at home. Instead, he steals the forty piastres paid for him and buys his freedom. He wanders away. [1]
Hungry, he eats bananas in Trimobe’s garden and escapes onto a polished, slippery stone when its owner appears. The next day he is caught stealing pineapples. Trimobe intends to eat him, but Takinga claims that his flesh will smell bad if he is killed immediately. He proposes waiting a few days inside a basket. The ogre agrees and goes hunting. Takinga tears his way out, returns to the bananas and again escapes pursuit by climbing onto the stone. [1]
Promises about the next meeting place prolong the contest. Takinga says he will be among the pineapples, then stays among the bananas. Trimobe eventually anticipates the deception and catches him. This time Takinga proposes travelling home in a basket of stones carried on the ogre’s head. Whenever called, he will drop a stone as proof that he is still there. Repeated sounds reassure the carrier. At the doorway Takinga jumps out, and Trimobe mistakes the noise for another stone. Only inside does he discover that the basket contains no prisoner. [1]
Caught again, Takinga offers an even more tempting story: cooking will turn him into two people. Trimobe leaves his two children to prepare the doubled meal. Takinga tells them to test the water; when they lean over the vessel, he seizes their feet and plunges them into it. Afterward he bathes in a pond. Their father returns and mistakes the distant bather for one of his children. Four hands and four feet in the cooked meal appear to confirm Takinga’s promise. He eats, then recognizes the trickster, who asks whether he has finished eating his own children.
Ferrand labels Takinga an Antambahoaka tale and says it was dictated by someone from Mananjary, although he leaves the narrator unnamed. Renel places his two Betsimisaraka tales, Faramalemy and Kotobekibo and Trimobé and Faramalemy, in the province of Andevoranto. His separate Trimobé and Sohitika carries a Marofotsy heading and names Andriamena in the Maevatanana district as its collection place. These headings preserve distinct routes into print. [1][2]
Takinga appeared as tale XXIII in Ferrand’s 1893 Contes populaires malgaches. Renel’s 1910 Contes de Madagascar places the three selected stories together as XLV–XLVII. Both collections present French versions of narrated material. Their spelling, explanatory notes and regional labels accompany the stories through translation; the books’ dates do not date the origins of those stories. [1][2]
Renel’s introduction explains ody as amulets and describes their different uses in his collected tales, including changes of appearance or voice. His broad account gives the charms used against Ralesoka a setting beyond that single pursuit. The effect is obtained from another being and comes with a condition; Trimobe does not possess it merely by being an ogre. [2]
Ferrand’s note supplies the animal body and human face of Takinga’s opponent, together with its inability to move across a flat surface. It specifies no single familiar animal whose anatomy would explain that limitation. In the tale, the repeated halt at the polished stone makes the limit unmistakable. The human face belongs to a body that cannot follow its smaller adversary everywhere. [1]
Louis Molet’s 1974 comparison places several descriptions alongside one another: the animal-bodied, human-faced figure of a dictionary definition, a cannibal among the Bara and an identification with a seven-headed dragon in Mahafaly country. These are separately attributed forms, not features of one composite portrait. [3]
Trimobe can learn enough to make an escape harder. He waits among his own banana trees instead of going where Takinga has promised to be and obtains outside help when his daughter recognizes his voice. These are practical adjustments within the tales. His opponents have to respond to a pursuer who remembers failure, even though his appetite repeatedly makes him accept another dangerous bargain. [1][2]
In Renel’s Faramalemy and Kotobekibo, a house full of food stands at the top of a hill. The siblings who discover it have already lost the security of their own home: their parents leave a pot filled with stones and topped with a little food and never return. Brother and sister go searching along the river. Kotobekibo insists on dividing their room so each can eat only what each has found. When his sister brings home a dead lamb, its smell persuades him to remove the partition and ask to share. [2]
Faramalemy next finds Trimobe’s house while its owner is absent. She eats and brings provisions home. When she says she has found nothing, her brother puts the partition back up. He peers through it, demands a share and decides to accompany her. She warns that his greed will leave him too full to pass through the door. He insists on going, eats excessively and becomes trapped exactly as she feared. [2]
His sister still devises his escape. She tells him to take a poker and hide beneath a stool. Trimobe returns, smells a human being and asks who has eaten his meat. Kotobekibo answers from his hiding place. As the owner bends to look beneath the stool, the boy strikes him with the poker and kills him. He calls his sister back, and the two enjoy the riches together. The food once guarded by a partition or a dangerous owner can finally be shared. [2]
Sohitika’s escape in Renel’s Marofotsy tale resembles Takinga’s basket trick, but begins with stolen oranges. Captured after repeated visits, the small, swift thief is sewn into a basket with vegetables destined for the same cooking pot. He opens the stitching and drops the vegetables one by one. Trimobe looks back at the first sound, then stops checking. Near the village Sohitika drops out with several more vegetables. The carrier announces his catch at home and opens a basket from which the captive has vanished. [2]
The next capture is more secure: Sohitika’s hands and feet are tied, and Trimobe’s wife looks into the sack to confirm that he is there. The parents leave to fetch water and wood. Sohitika loosens his bonds and imitates a cock’s crow. The two children open the sack, hoping to take a fighting bird; instead he binds them inside it and escapes. They cry, then fall asleep. Their parents cook the sack and discover their own children only when they open it. They bury them and mourn. [2]
Sohitika returns carrying ox entrails and an iron hook. Roasting the meat draws Trimobe from hiding. The thief pretends that he has taken the food from his own body, then offers the ogre a taste and suggests that a larger body would yield better meat. Trimobe agrees to the proposed operation. Sohitika heats the hook and thrusts it into him, killing him on the spot. He takes every possession, leaving nothing for the widow. Here the children’s deaths end in a burial rather than a meal, and the surviving spouse bears the final loss. [2]
Human hunger is dangerous before an ogre arrives. Takinga deprives his brothers of food; Kotobekibo changes the rules of sharing whenever they cease to benefit him. Their cleverness does not establish their generosity. Faramalemy’s care is different: she shares provisions with the brother who excludes her, then saves him after he rejects her warning. The same talent for reading an opponent can serve selfish survival or a relationship that its beneficiary has done little to deserve. [1][2]
Paul Ottino’s comparative study includes a French translation of Ifara and Itrimobe from Dahle’s collection. Caught fishing in Itrimobe’s pond, Ifara proposes marriage rather than being eaten. Their son, Injamanolo, wears a red loincloth. When Itrimobe looks for him among children in the fields, they all deny being his child. A week later he takes mother and son away. At night, while he sleeps, Ifara pierces him with an iron trident and kills him. The short translation leaves some connections unstated; Ottino explains it against the ogre’s appetite for his own children. [4]
Molet questions whether the ferocious, man-eating figure’s name can be securely identified with Malay harimau, tiger. A resemblance between names is a different proposition from a resemblance between adventures. His doubt leaves the proposed derivation unsettled; it gives no reason to put a tiger’s body into Takinga’s garden. [3]
The surviving French versions preserve actions more precisely than they preserve the circumstances of performance. Ferrand identifies Takinga’s narrator by community and place, but not by name. Renel’s collection headings distinguish regional tellings, yet the shared name Faramalemy belongs to a sister in one and a mother in another. Nothing in those headings makes the two women a continuous character. [1][2]
The children leave the sharpest difference between the endings. Ralesoka’s mother remains someone to return to. Takinga kills other children to obtain his own freedom. Sohitika’s victims are buried by their parents before he takes the widow’s remaining possessions. Calling all three victories over an ogre would miss who still has a home afterward, and who has lost everyone in it. [1][2]
Ferrand supplies Takinga and its narrator note. Renel supplies three complete regional tales and the explanation of ody. Molet’s page 125 compares names and descriptions; Ottino presents the short Ifara translation through Dahle’s collection. [1][2][3][4]
Gabriel Ferrand, collector and translator · Ernest Leroux / Internet Archive · 1893 · French
XXIII, pp. 69–76
The account follows Ferrand’s French version of an unnamed narrator’s telling.
Checked 2026-10-11
Charles Renel, collector · Ernest Leroux / Internet Archive · 1910 · French
XLV–XLVII, pp. 243–253; introduction p. xxix (ody)
Checked 2026-10-11
Louis Molet · Journal de la Société des Africanistes / Persée · 1974 · French
44(2), pp. 123–138; consulted p. 125
Dictionary definitions and regional comparisons are cited through Molet’s discussion.
Checked 2026-10-11
Paul Ottino · Études océan Indien / INALCO · 2013 · French
Indexed PDF p. 3, paragraphs 9–11 and embedded Ifara/Itrimobe translation; paragraph 12 commentary; DOI 10.4000/oceanindien.1832
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑Grieving, Trimobe pursues Takinga to the smooth stone. He asks for help climbing it and promises not to kill him. Takinga lowers a rope, but releases it when the ogre threatens him halfway up. For another attempt, he tells Trimobe to plant pointed stakes below. The ogre obeys, still expecting to reach and eat his tormentor. Takinga lets go again. Trimobe falls onto the stakes and dies; his adversary inherits his possessions. Successful deception has made Takinga rich, without making him innocent. [1]
Charles Renel’s Trimobé and Faramalemy begins with a woman gathering vegetables. On her way home Faramalemy takes some of Trimobe’s beads. He catches her and offers a choice: become his wife or his daughter. She chooses marriage and later bears Ralesoka. When the girl grows older, her father buys her a water vessel. Other girls persuade her to break it by claiming they have broken theirs. The next day they admit that they only hid their vessels. Ralesoka goes crying to her mother. [2]
Faramalemy fears that Trimobe will kill their daughter. She hides Ralesoka in a cave, brings her food and tells her to answer only her small voice, never a heavy one. The father’s attempts to imitate her fail. He seeks ody—magical charms—from Tononkakazo, then Rahonkoka, to change his voice. Each gift requires him to refrain from spitting. Twice he forgets, and Ralesoka keeps the entrance closed. [2]
On a third attempt with magical help he remembers. The small voice convinces Ralesoka to open, but she recognizes her father’s head as it enters. She thrusts back the stone that closes the doorway. It crushes his head and kills him. Ralesoka returns to her mother: the sound that promised safety has deceived her, but she acts on what she sees in time to escape. [2]
Dahle’s tale is presented through Ottino’s French translation.
Checked 2026-10-11