Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 220
After discussing the versions of the ritual calendar, we discuss the cyclicality of the rainy and
dry seasons from a historical cultural perspective, by going back to the pre-colonial
background scenario of our subregion. Figure 16 will present the paleoclimatic context of
essential archaeological, written and oral source locations as they hypothetically appear from
a regionalised chronological perspective. We close the chapter with a section on the locality
aspect of the ritual cycle, and show the apparent link between Dghweɗe oral history and the
process of local group formation. This will lead on to our next chapter about the distribution
and custodianship of local shrines and other places of communal ritual interest.
The bi-annual calendrical cycle
The Dghweɗe practice crop rotation, which means one year they plant guinea corn and finger
millet, and the other year millet and beans. I was informed that they never changed this cycle,
regardless of whether or not it had been a good harvest the previous year. We will learn more
about the technique of terrace farming in the chapter ‘Working the land’, but here mention the
fact that crop rotation involved two different planting times, and certain ritual performances
and other tasks which at one time only happened during a guinea corn year. We often use the
term sorghum as an alternative reference for guinea corn.
Table 5a below shows a list of the various calendrical activities during the bi-annual crop
cycle. The table is organised into three sections, and more or less represents how things were
still done in 1995, although certain rituals such as the bull festival and the adult initiation
ritual (dzum zugune) had already ceased decades ago. Also, the ritual slaughtering period of
he-goats for the deceased father (dada) and grandfather (jije) was presumably in the past only
performed in a guinea corn year. Apart from the rainy and dry seasons, it was the moon that
was relied on for timing, which meant a shorter year, but the regularity of the periodical
changes between dry and wet seasons always allowed for readjustment. This is visible in
Table 5b, showing how the Dghweɗe calendar contextualises with the Gregorian calendar.
In Table 5a we instantly recognise that the guinea corn year had more ritual activities, starting
with tikwa kupe linked to the consumption of the first newly-harvested guinea corn. It was
largely performed by older males. Then there was har gwazgafte (slaughtering for God)
which was an important ritual connected with the threshing of the newly-harvested guinea
corn after it had been stored in the front yard of a house. We also see that roofing the houses
and the bull festival were part of the guinea corn year, as was ritual planting by the senior
rainmaker during the dry season, before the planting of it by anyone else.
We see that the ritual slaughtering of he-goats for the deceased father or grandfather is listed
for both years, but the explanation will follow that this was a very recent development. Such
sacrifices occurred during late pre-colonial times and the first half of the colonial period, and
were most likely only performed in a sorghum year. We later learn that thagla, the harvest
festival, was presumably the only larger communal event to be celebrated during both years,
but thagla too had already gone by my time. Another smaller ritual which was most likely
performed during both years was tswila. It consisted of throwing the intestines of a he-goat
into the crops before harvest. This was done by individual households, but we do not know
how long it survived as it was concerned with celebrating dung as fertiliser. It seems that it
was the immediate ancestors (dada and jije) of a man who continued to receive ritual
attention the longest, and this could have been why it eventually became an annual
celebration, perhaps with some sequential modifications which we will get back to again later.
The traditional year started when there was enough first rain for planting. The Dghweɗe did
not have names for months, but only counted the number of moons. Because they only
counted the lunar months during the labour-intensive phase and not throughout a solar year,
they did not have the problem of adjusting for the almost one month shorter lunar calendar at
the end of the solar year. We discuss their counting methods and how they further divided the
agricultural year, in a separate section of this chapter. At this point we only need to know that
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