Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 164
We view the Godaliy tradition as the main outgoing migratory tradition from the DGB area,
and we previously referred to them as the alleged former ritual owners of the largest and most
recent DGB site. Because Godaliy is an ethnic synonym for Dghweɗe among the Mafa of the
DGB area and the Mafa of the Moskota hills, we consider it important to discuss it in a
separate chapter section below.
We also find Podoko in the DGB area, but have not shown them on our map. Instead we only
marked the Podoko who moved from the Gwoza hills across the plain of Koza into the Mora
hills. This makes the Podoko quite widespread, and we see on our orientational map (Figure
4) that they live as an ethnic group north of the Muktele. We can see in our tree of Tur
traditions (Figure 9), that the Podoko still shared a common ancestor by the name of Wasa,
although they are no longer present in the Gwoza hills.
The Lamang are highlighted as the former inhabitants of the Zelidva spur, and we will explain
in the chapter about outsiders as founders how Ghweshe appears as the ancestor of the
Zelidva via his son 'Zadva' in our tree of Tur traditions (Figure 9) under Dghweɗe descent.
However, the Lamang are not part of the Tur tradition, which is of interest to us, especially
considering that the language of the Hide of Tur is much closer to Lamang than to Dghweɗe.
This is why we have marked, at the southern end of our Lamang connection, a second arrow
pointing down to where the Lamang live today.
We have not marked the Hide of Tur separately as we have discussed them in the context of
the meaning of Mbra or Ngra as the mythical ancestry link with our tree of Tur traditions. We
want to add at this point, that according to my unpublished research in Hide (Muller-Kosack,
fieldnotes 1987), the Hide of Tur refer to themselves as 'Gra'. They claim to have originally
come from the Margi area in the western plain of Gwoza, from where they allegedly moved to
mount Gulak at the southwest of the Sukur massif. 4 We have already indirectly referred to
this earlier when stating that the Wula-Sakon connection overlaps in Figure 10 with the
southern part of the Tur tradition, and if we take another look we can see that both arrows are
left open at the bottom, indicating that ethnicity is presumably secondary in this region.
One very interesting point we want to make here is that a medium-sized DGB site (DGB15),
is found in Nduval, on top of mount Oupay, marking at 1230m the highest DGB site (David
2008:17). During my research on traditions of origin in the DGB area, I was able to establish
that there was indeed an overlap between the DGB area and the Tur tradition linked to
Nduval, which was occupied by two local groups known as Sakon (Sukur) who claimed to
have arrived there via Tur. They explained that they belonged to the same migratory tradition
as the Dghweɗe-Mbra of the Gwoza hills. In referring to this, our friends from Nduval used
the ethnonym Godaliy for Dghweɗe (Muller-Kosack fieldnotes 2002).
There are two more entries to discuss in Figure 10. The first is the open arrow we have named
Higi-Kapsiki, which indicates another migratory tradition from the west onto the central
plateau, which might have inspired the Tur tradition. Perhaps we should rather refer to them
as 'Kamwe', since this is their shared ethnic autonym (Muller-Kosack 2003). We mention
them here as the most southerly migratory tradition that can potentially be linked to the Tur
heights as a migratory highway into the Gwoza hills. Some of my Dghweɗe friends claim to
have originally come from there too. Their view was perhaps inspired by the fact that the
volcanic remains of Rumsiki were visible from certain points in Dghweɗe.
My Tur notes speak of 'Matsak' as their apical ancestor of Margi orgin. Vaughan (1970:68) refers to
the Margi of the plain to the west of Gwoza, and those near the hills, as ‘Marghi proper’, and Strumpell
(1912:57) tells us that the Margi of Gulak and Duhu experienced strong Fulbe raids as early as 1800,
which might explain the reference ‘Gra’. However, Ibn Furtu (Lange 1987:76,144) speaks of Idris
Alauma's military campaign against the rebellious ruler Adwa of Kopci (west of Disa), at the time of
the capital of the Margi-Magay, between 1564 and 1576, being a similar situation to the 'usurper' of
Kirawa.
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