Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 137
As we go through all the different aspects of the material and immaterial culture of our
Dghweɗe oral history retold we will sometimes use Mafa oral sources for subregional
comparison. The reason for this is that I was inspired by my Mafa fieldwork to explore the
origin of the ritual importance of sorghum and dung production, among other mythological
and cosmological themes. We will therefore use Mafa sources to some extent, but will try to
keep these to a minimum. For example we will compare the legendary connections of the
Dghweɗe bull festival to those of Gudur, and by doing so will take a wider regional view in
order to establish the uniqueness of the Dghweɗe bull festival. In that context we will use
written ethnography from David & Sterner which relates to the legendary image of Gudur
(known as Gudulyewe in Dghweɗe) at the western fringes of the northern Mandara
Mountains. An important chapter will be our reconstruction of the Dghweɗe adult initiation
rituals known as dzum zugune. Like the bull festival these were no longer performed, and we
had to reconstruct them from the collective memory of some of our Dghweɗe friends. With
dzum zugune this involved reconstructing the cycle of rituals extending over several years, by
presenting each stage in its performance elements including images of the relevant material
culture. Chapter 3.14 on dzum zugune will close a series of themes related to the socioeconomic and ritual behaviour of the Dghweɗe society of the past. In this context we will also
review changes in the ritual calendar. We will show how a major change of the Dghweɗe
ritual cycle came about in colonial times, but we are not able to establish the exact reasons
behind this element of the arrival of modernity in the subregion.
One of the more concrete reasons must surely have been the shift from animal manure to
chemical fertiliser, and we will address this in Chapter 3.10 about working the terraced land,
where we also show that the bi-annual calendar of crop rotation increasingly favoured millet
when it came to producing a cash crop on leased land in the adjacent plains. However,
rotating sorghum, millet and beans remained the main method of planting in the mountains,
but the attached ritual complexities became much reduced. Certain rituals of the house which
were previously only linked to the sorghum year were already carried out annually during my
time. Also, the house as a place of worship no longer reflected religious requirements in terms
of architecture, and we will address this in the two chapters about the house. In this context
we will see how it was necessary to reconstruct a traditional house from the remains of a
house whose architecture was still visible despite it being heavily neglected.
When introducing the reader to Dghweɗe architecture and the house as a place of religious
sacrifices we will return to the discussion of the role of ancestral beer pots and the small
apertures which are typical of these. We will compare them with the pottery from the DGB
sites and revisit questions of a shared subregional past. We will also show how smooth
stonewalling and the ritual importance of dung production can be linked in cosmological
terms to the image of the stomach. The ritual importance of manure and sorghum is not only
about sustainability in socio-economic terms but is also a religious expression of a preCopernican cosmographic view of the world. In Chapter 3.16 we will address the belief in the
interaction of a celestial world above with a primordial world below, by describing how the
specialist cornblesser and rainmaker lineages are expressions of ancestral pairing comparable
to the process of human reproduction.
Durghwe, the subregional mountain shrine in Ghwa'a, has been mentioned several times, and
in a dedicated chapter we will locate what is most likely the first mention of Durghwe as a
regional landmark visible from as far as Isge in the western plain, by the 19th-century
explorer Barth (1857), and we will discuss the cosmogony of Durghwe as it was remembered
by my Dghweɗe friends. After that we will address the Dghweɗe belief in the importance of
the seventh-born son thaghaya, whose ritual importance as custodian of the earth we will
highlight throughout Part Three. We will show how the casting out or even infanticide of the
eighth-born child needs to be seen as a way of controlling good luck and bad luck in an
unpredictable semi-arid environment. We will then present the importance of the birth of
twins in Dghweɗe society of the past, and describe how they were seen as reincarnations of
previous twins. We will connect all these aspects of Dghweɗe culture as oral historical
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