Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 107
What we have established though, is that the first ward head of Ghwa'a quoted by Lewis as
Baima (see Table 3), was the same as the Ɗagha peacemaker Vaima in the oral narrative, who
became the leader of the Dghweɗe delegation. Perhaps the fact that there was no
communication between him and the district head explains why he now acted as a traditional
peacemaker for a delegation that represented montagnard communities affected by Hamman
Yaji's raids as far south as Tur.
The potential for conflict in the Gwoza hills was presumably not just about under which part,
Gwoza or Ashigashiya, one would fall, but had other internal reasons. For example, the
Zelidva had a history of not wanting to be under Wandala control, and there was altogether a
desire to be independent in the hills. After all, the hills had long served as quite a safe place
against slave raiding in pre-colonial times. Under the Germans not much had changed in the
Gwoza hills, and now the British were trying to establish a tax system. It seems that the
British colonial officers became aware quite early on of the potential problems involved,
which is why the Gwoza hills was declared an Unsettled District.
Lewis does not make any reference to the Dghweɗe as an ethnolinguistic group, but when we
examine the names of the settlement units listed in Table 3 in the part of our chapter: 'Names
and places', we can identify them all as Dghweɗe villages. The table also shows the names of
the village officials he identified as 'chima' and 'bulama', and the number of houses in each of
the villages they represent. This is the beginning of British colonial administration in the
Gwoza hills. It was the first time the people of the Gwoza hills were so intensely exposed to
any colonial system. It is perhaps no wonder that the British found it difficult to manage the
Gwoza district solely through the new local elite they were about to create in Gwoza town.
As far as the new international boundary was concerned, French technical interim rule
officially ended for the Gwoza hills in 1922. The boundary was henceforth the Kirawa river
south of Kirawa town, encircling the southern Dghweɗe massif and then following westwards
up the Kughum river and reaching the Gvoko massif, turning south again along the top of the
Tur heights. Dghweɗe was now entirely under Gwoza town, which was controlled through
Dikwa, while Madagali stayed under Yola. The earlier Wandala connection with Dghweɗe
via Mora was finally cut, since Mora was now officially in French Cameroon. During the
referenda, on the eve of Nigerian and Cameroonian independence in 1960/1961, the question
of national identity would again come to the historical foreground. We know that the Gwoza
LGA eventually voted to stay with Nigeria.
In the following section we will present the Dghweɗe version of Hamman Yaji's arrest. The
narrative belongs to the 1920s, and as part of the creation of Dghweɗe oral history it has
legendary features such as the use of a clan medicine owned by the Ɗagha peacemaker
lineage. This was about a decade after Hamman Yaji had become district head of Madagali,
then under German rule. The British as mandatory power had not acted fast enough against
his regime of terror over the populations of large parts of the western hills, in the context of
which the Dghweɗe of Ghwa'a became the northernmost victims of his brutal raids. We tell
the story according to how John and I recorded it during my time between 1994 and 2009,
only a decade before Boko Haram would unfold its terror regime in the region. This again,
ironically, had a particularly nasty presence in Ghwa'a, which used to be, with its subregional
mountain shrine Durghwe, ritually one of the most ancient and precious places not only of the
Gwoza hills, but of all the northwestern Mandara Mountains.
The Dghweɗe version of Hamman Yaji's arrest and death
Hamman Yaji kept a diary in rudimentary Arabic, which was confiscated by the British on his
arrest in 1927 and published in English by Vaughan and Kirk-Greene in 1995, and included
an introduction about the circumstances of his arrest. The diary makes no mention of any
raids in the Gwoza hills, but the following Dghweɗe oral account tells a different story.
Throughout his rule as district head of Madagali, from the short German period interrupted by
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