Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 136
Some rituals were shared by the community as a whole while others were only relevant within
the nuclear or extended family. Certain aspects of the material culture show similarities to key
archaeological finds of the DGB complex, which underpins our quest for subregional
embeddedness in this Dghweɗe oral history retold. However, we will not draw definite
historical conclusions but will continue to be open-minded when looking for connections, and
this also applies to Kirawa which in the late 16th century was the thriving capital of trade in
our study area. Such connections are part of the immaterial cultural history that is of
subregional interest to us, but we will mainly focus on presenting the Dghweɗe oral sources
and the local ethnography it is possible to comprehensively derive from them. However, we
continue the thread of our conclusion from Part Two by mainly differentiating between two
pre-colonial sub-phases along the lines of cyclical climate change. As stated several times
before, we consider Ghwa'a to have already existed during the 16th century, and presume that
Korana, a place formerly known as Gharguze in pre-Korana southern Dghweɗe, developed
and took shape during the much wetter 17th century.
In Part Two we tried to contextualise oral accounts of the local history of slavery, and placed
them into the later period of the Wandala sultanate, long after it had moved from Kirawa to
Doulo and subsequently to Mora from where Ghwa'a first came under German rule. We
illustrated the early parts of colonial history and showed that tributary and taxation
arrangements are in fact separate concepts, despite the Dghweɗe having used the same word
for both. Tributary payments were more a form of pre-colonial dependency linked to the
history of the Wandala state, while colonial tax collection was based on the concept of being
part of the development of nationhood. We also looked at mythological accounts, to explore
whether these might represent elements of earlier pre-colonial times in our subregion,
meaning linked to the early phase of the DGB period, and suggested that the possible prehistorical significance of not only rainmaking but perhaps also manure production should be
included in the ethnoarchaeological narrative.
As already indicated, our oral history retold begins with the chapter 'Names and places',
which finds links between place names, thereby allowing us to connect archival sources from
early colonial times with late pre-colonial oral sources related to the settlement history of
Dghweɗe. This means that Chapter 3.1 is a transitional chapter connecting written and oral
sources to a route leading back in time. As indicated, we will use Moisel's cartographic record
from 1913 and Lewis's investigations from 1925, these being the earliest colonial sources to
list local place names, and connect them with the oral accounts of how they came about. We
will then move straight on to the question of whether the presumption is correct that Korana
in southern Dghweɗe came into existence after Ghwa'a in northern Dghweɗe had long
fulfilled its role as the early south-to-north arrival zone into the Gwoza hills from Tur. This
hypothesis is not only tested by examining oral sources about war alliances and local group
connections in the border area separating modern Korana Basa and Ghwa'a, but also by
looking into the most vivid collective memory which was the war between Gudule and
Vaghagaya leading to the formation of the Mughuze-Ruwa, the largest clan group of late precolonial Dghweɗe.
Before moving back to earlier collective memories of pre-colonial times, we begin by
consulting Mathews (1934) as our main archival source, in order to compare our orally
collected traditions of origin with his reports from about sixty years earlier. We will see that
quite a lot of the memory traditions we collected in the 1990s coincide in essence with those
of Mathews, while others do not, and we will pinpoint and critically discuss those differences.
Mathews will accompany us and re-emerge as a comparative source in later chapters, such as
the chapters about Mughuze-Ruwa and Gudule, the latter in the context of the bull festival,
the most important communal bi-annual event of Dghweɗe. We will also use Wolff's accounts
of the Lamang of Hiɗkala which he documented and published in 1994, since there are many
references to the oral historical relationship between the Lamang of administrative
Hambagda, and Korana Basa as part of the Mughuze-Ruwa tradition.
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