Landibe (Malagasy)
The lamba mena ("red cloth" — red here symbolizing the ancestors rather than a literal colour) serves as a burial shroud in the famadihana, the Malagasy tradition of exhuming, cleaning, and rewrapping ancestral remains before reburial, repeated rough…
Wild silk cloth has been woven in Madagascar for centuries, historically worn by the island's most powerful men or used as funerary shrouds. The lamba arindrano is a regional variant tied to the Betsileo people of the Fianarantsoa region, produced today primarily around the towns of Ambalavao and Ambohimahamasina. It is distinct from the lamba akotofahana, a silk tradition using mulberry silk and imported aniline dyes that developed among the Merina aristocracy in the highlands starting in the 1830s.
The lamba mena ("red cloth" — red here symbolizing the ancestors rather than a literal colour) serves as a burial shroud in the famadihana, the Malagasy tradition of exhuming, cleaning, and rewrapping ancestral remains before reburial, repeated roughly every five to ten years. The lamba has also served as an engagement gift, a diplomatic gift, and a marker of social status — particularly the akotofahana variant reserved for Merina nobility.
The market for hand-woven silk lamba has narrowed sharply in recent decades: most remaining weavers produce only a handful of shawls a year, if any, and most ceremonies today rely on industrially imported cotton or rayon cloth rather than genuine wild silk. Authentic silk lamba has become a luxury item, accessible mainly to wealthier Malagasy families and foreign visitors.
The silk comes from landibe, wild silk produced by the caterpillar of an endemic moth of the genus Borocera. Cocoons are boiled to release the fibre, which is then extracted by hand in a slow, labour-intensive process. The silk is dyed using natural materials — bark, earth, leaves, and flowers — before being woven by hand on a traditional loom. A two-metre lamba takes a weaver roughly three to six weeks to complete, working several hours a day, depending on the complexity of the pattern and the fineness of the thread.
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