Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 219
Chapter 3.8
Interacting with the seasons
Introduction
This chapter is an attempt to reconstruct an ideal version of the Dghweɗe calendar. For this I
will rely on the oral data collected from my various Dghweɗe friends, of which the main
protagonist was bulama Ngatha of Hudimche whom I met for the first time during the rainy
season of 1995 while staying three weeks in Korana Basa. It was also the first field session I
spent with my friend and research assistant John Zakariya, who translated for me and helped
to structure the traditional Dghweɗe year. We present our fieldnote quotes in the ethnographic
present as before, and then discuss it by mostly using the historical tense.
The Dghweɗe calendar is a reflection of their labour-intensive mixed farming system. The
terrace fields needed regular manuring, which required animals to be kept in stalls and sheds
during the growing season. This in turn not only implied that they needed stall feeding, but
also that the dung had to be brought out then mainly applied to the terrace fields near the
houses. Settlements in Dghweɗe were spread across the mountain sites but clustered more in
one corner of a hillside, while the outer fields were further away. The labour intensity of hill
farming produced a high population density, a socio-economic circumstance which brought
about a density of the Dghweɗe ritual calendar. This was reflected in high regulatory
complexity. The seasonal management of human, animal and land resources required an
interactive calendar that could embrace ritual transformations as a result of socio-economic
changes.
In the past, the subsistence economy of the Dghweɗe had to suffice for everyone’s needs, but
that had already changed in many ways when I started visiting, and now we can strongly
assume that none of it is left as a result of Boko Haram. As mentioned above, we are here
constructing an ideal version of a Dghweɗe calendar, reflecting a time before so many men
left for seasonal work, and things including the social division of labour changed. We will
point out some of those changes in Chapter 3.10: 'Working the land', such as how women
took on certain responsibilities which before had been performed only by men. Presumably
the most important change is the increased use of chemical fertiliser, which replaced dung
production and had major ritual consequences.
We start our chapter with the bi-annual cycle of crop rotation, divided between a millet and a
sorghum year, and present a list of the various timed activities within the bi-annual calendar
of crop rotation. We already know that the sorghum year was in ritual terms the more
important year of the two, but present our list with contradictions regarding the sequential
order to which some of the rituals once belonged. This relates to the ritual changes that had
already taken place during my time, and we will contextualise them with our fieldnotes by
pointing out contradictions with the Dghweɗe collective memory. By so doing we aim to
demonstrate our main objective of presenting a Dghweɗe oral history retold from the
grassroots. Eventually we will need to decide on which is the most likely version of a shared
late pre-colonial past.
To reach the best understanding we will go through the labour-intensive phases of the
agricultural year in great detail, and present the seven moon phases and the days of the week.
Next, we present two field accounts, one by bulama Ngatha, giving his view of the labourrelated and ritually important events of the sorghum and millet years, and another by
rainmaker Ndruwe Dzuguma, giving his take on the once seasonal activities of the Gaske
rainmaker lineage. We will then discuss both accounts along with annotated comments for
further comparison, and will confirm that ritual handling of sorghum was particularly
complex and had a high ritual significance.
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