The Vezo are soft people. Their customs are easy and their taboos are few. They dislike ties and bonds, which they avoid through complex strategies of manipulation. When the binding power of kings becomes too strong to be manipulated or contextualized, they choose to flee in order not to be told who they are. The Vezo are people who keep themselves alive by searching for food in the sea. But they are unwise, and so they fail to learn from past experience and to plan a head for the future; this makes them unusually prone to surprise. They are people who live on the coast, who know how to swim, how to make canoes, how to sail, fish, eat and sell fish, and how to walk on soft sand without losing their breath. They are people who bear on their body ‘the signs that one is Vezo’.

The Vezo are people who ‘are’ what they do. Their identity (Vezo-ness) is an activity, not a state of being; it must be performed for a person to ‘be’ Vezo. When people learn Vezo-ness, they learn to ‘be’ Vezo; when they perform it skilfully, they ‘are’ very Vezo; if they perform it only intermittently, they ‘are’ Vezo at one moment and Masikoro at the next; if they stop performing it, they stop ‘being’ Vezo. Whether people ‘are’ Vezo or not depends on their actions in the present, for it is only in the present that they can act Vezo.