Unreported World

The Cursed Twins (2014x5)

Air date: May 09, 2014

Unreported World visits a remote area of Madagascar where the dead make the rules. A set of taboos, handed down from long-dead ancestors, controls what you eat, when you work and every aspect of how you behave. Reporter Kiki King and director David Fuller visit the town of Mananjary, on the isolated east coast, to reveal how one taboo against twins leads to children being abandoned and mothers becoming outcasts. No one is sure how the taboo against twins, and the belief that they bring bad luck, arose, but most stories talk about an ancient battle that caused a tribe to flee their village. One mother forgot one of her twins and when the villagers returned to save it, they were all massacred. The tribe's elders then declared it taboo to raise twins. Ursula, the mother of twins Giovanni and Venua, says that when they were born her husband told her to abandon them and refused to recognise them legally. Ursula refused to give them up and moved in with her sister and mother. Then her mother got sick and died. She tells King that her family and neighbours blamed the death on the twins: 'Everyone said that her death was her punishment because she didn't respect her culture: the ancestors.' King and Fuller also meet Carolin, who is considered especially unlucky as she has given birth to three sets of twins. She says she has had to move house around 30 times, because her neighbours feared the twins. Now she lives in a tiny tent and is struggling to feed her family. Living alongside her, in what amounts to a small refugee camp for twins, are six other families who have all had to flee their villages. The nearby CATJA orphanage is home to a dozen sets of twins, but none of them are orphans; their parents are alive and living nearby. Over the years, hundreds of twins have passed through the centre, which is funded by a French charity. While the team are there, an abandoned newborn twin is brought in. Nobody knows who she belongs to; only the villag