Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 135
PART THREE
DGHWEƊE ORAL HISTORY RETOLD
Introduction
Part Three is the longest part of this book and our main aim is to present the fieldnotes in such
a way that the reader can witness the contextualisation of the fragmentary oral history of the
Dghweɗe as it unfolds with the greatest possible ethnographic authenticity. There are 23
chapters altogether and each chapter presents one fragment of the notes as I ordered them,
beginning with the bigger picture of Dghweɗe settlement history and ending with the role of
Cissus quadrangularis as a representation of the high ritual density which we see as a key
element of their high population density. We see the latter as a socio-economic consequence
of their system of labour-intensive terrace farming, conditioned by a cosmological worldview
developed as a result of historical and ongoing exposure to a semi-arid mountain environment
not far from the southern fringes of the Sahel zone.
Because our Dghweɗe notes are embedded in the subregion between the DGB sites to the
south, and Kirawa as the first capital of the Wandala state to the immediate north, in Part Two
we constructed a Table of Contemporaneity which attempted to link Dghweɗe oral history
with other key sources available to us. In the context of this we hypothesised that there were
two phases in which the development of Dghweɗe oral history might be connected with early
archaeological and palaeoclimatic sources in written form. We linked the first phase to the
late 16th century, with 'Johode' (Ghwa'a) in northern Dghweɗe as the early arrival zone when
the climate started to become humid following a period of dryness. The second phase started
with the 17th century, a very wet phase lasting 100 years which led to the formation of a
united southern and northern Dghweɗe as we came to know it during my time.
In this context we distinguished between early and late pre-colonial times, implying that the
end of the DGB period might well have coincided with the formation of the Mafa in the DGB
area, and also with the way southern and northern Dghweɗe merged into a new ethnic unity as
a result of a shared south-to-north migratory tradition from Tur. We will pick up on this
hypothesis in Part Three, and illustrate in a wider subregional context how the Tur tradition
most likely overlapped with other south-to-north migratory traditions across the northwestern
Mandara Mountains. These also included the DGB area on the northern slopes of the ZiverOupay massif. The exact historical periods to which my Dghweɗe protagonists were referring
when they related their versions of a shared local past to me between 1994 and 2010 remain
uncertain however, and therefore historically circumstantial in their connectedness to
subregional palaeoclimatic conditions. Nevertheless we think that most of the oral traditions
relayed to us belong to what we term the late pre-colonial period, and want to emphasise here
that in this respect we are only referring to the northwestern Mandara Mountains as our
defined wider subregion.
When we speak of oral traditions, we mean not only traditions of origin but any shared oral
memory accounts concerning material and immaterial objects. Artefacts such as architecture
and pottery are in the former category, and myths, beliefs, and traditions of origin are in the
latter. In terms of material objects we are informed by social ones, such as the spatial aspect
of shared ritual performances which can be contextualised with geographical markers in the
landscape, and by the architectural design of the house as a place of religious worship. The
people and their social relationships as they unfolded during such performances allow us to
see the operation of localised social networks, including how they were linked to the biannual
agricultural calendar of crop rotation in which the ritual handling of guinea corn played an
important role.
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