Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 201
it was up to four generations in the past and had become two generations during my time.
Aside from sknukwe, the word gwagha specifically describes the 'brotherhood' of belonging
to the same exogamous lineage, as opposed to the word mbthawa which describes the fact
that one was not exogamous to the other. Gwagha describes ancestor-centred patrilineal
exogamy, and zbe describes ego-centred matrilateral exogamy for a limited number of
generations.
This was illustrated to me by saying that if a daughter from the Btha lineage were to marry a
son of the Ngaladewe lineage, and they were to have a daughter together, this daughter could
no longer marry a man from Btha, and the same rule would apply the other way around.
Figure 13 shows that because Btha and Ngaladewe are co-descendants of Thakara as their
shared founding ancestor they can be classified as belonging to the same clan group in terms
of lineal descent. In terms of their ability to intermarry they are mbthawa, but the two families
of Btha and Ngaladewe who intermarried are now exogamous. From now on their
descendants are zbe, meaning their children cannot continue to marry one another.
In the past they would have to be exogamous for four generations but during my time this had
changed to only two generations. This means that the exogamy rule via a potential zbe
connection had considerably loosened over the decades, and it had become easier to marry
across lineages of Ghwa'a which were mbthawa to each other. If we stay with the example of
Thakara as local founding ancestor, we can see that the various major lineages forming
Ghwa'a are Ngaladewe, Washile, Btha and Nighine. Despite their shared lineal descent they
formed exogamous lineage groups which included the Washile branches of Taghadigile and
Kunde who could not intermarry with the Washile of Ghwa'a. This form of lineage exogamy
seems somewhat narrow but reducing the matrilateral zbe connection rule from four to two
generations presumably made it much easier to find a suitable marriage partner within
Ghwa'a.
Considering that a large majority of the inhabitants of Ghwa'a were originally descendants of
Thakara, presumably there would have not been enough marriage partners to be found in
Ghwa'a anyway. We will learn in Chapter 3.20 that the most desirable marriage arrangement
was a marriage by promise. This meant that a girl and a boy were promised to each other as a
consequence of friendship between families that were permitted to form marriage alliances.
We can only imagine how difficult it might have been during late pre-colonial times to find
suitable partners for a marriage by promise, because the descendants of such an arranged
marriage would not be able to intermarry again for four generations. This had been reduced to
two generations in the mid-1990s, and I seem to remember from casual conversations at the
time that some families even ignored the two generations, which made zbe irrelevant. This
was perhaps criticised, but zbe is possibly irrelevant now anyway, considering the local
communities I encountered no longer exist, and how could such rules operate among the
displaced survivors of Boko Haram?
Unfortunately we do not have comparative data for Korana Basa, apart from an interview
with bulama Mbasuwe and elders (1995) in which we were told that all the descendants of
Vaghagaya would intermarry with Ghwa'a, Takweshe, Hembe, Gathaghure, Guduf, Gvoko
and Kwalika. Bulama Mbasuwe further added that the units with whom they could not
intermarry they would call 'brothers' (sknukwe), and those who were 'not brothers' but with
whom they were still not able to intermarry were called zbe. We have already explained zbe
(exogamous matrilateral kin) and sknukwe (exogamous patrilineal brothers).
Bulama Mbasuwe also said that extended family members with whom one was able to
intermarry were often referred to as:
dadude (father-in-law),
mamude (mother-in-law),
dughzgune (son-in-law), or
kwaghwa (daughter-in-law).
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