Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 223
remember that the tswila ritual involved the throwing of intestines of a he-goat into the millet
or guinea corn before it was harvested.
There are a few other rituals listed in our calendar. One was har gwazgafte (slaughtering for
God) but we do not know whether this was still done during my time. It involved the
slaughter of a he-goat, of which the stomach was placed on top of the guinea corn stored in
someone's front yard, after it had been harvested but before threshing. We will learn more
about this in the chapter about the house as a place of worship. We will see how delicate and
ritually complex the agricultural processing of sorghum was in comparison to millet. Har
gwazgafte also included sacrificing to the doorposts of the entrance area of a house, and then
bringing the freshly-threshed guinea corn into the foyer area of a house (see Figure 18) and
storing it in the granaries.
It was only after har gwazgafte was performed and the guinea corn was successfully stored in
the granaries that the slaughtering period of he-goats to the family ancestors could be
performed. We learn later that not everyone could afford to slaughter he-goats for the
ancestors, but that there were ritual alternatives. We therefore think that performing all three
sacrifices in relation to the immediate family ancestors was more the ideal, and that perhaps
har ghwe, the sacrifice to the deceased father of the house (dada), might eventually have
survived the longest. The sacrifice to the deceased grandfather (jije) was however conditional
on being able to afford a bull for sacrifice. The latter ceased being performed even earlier.
Because we do not have enough oral data on this question, we leave har ghwe and har jije for
both years, but with a big invisible question mark.
There are some open questions as to whether thagla (harvest festival) was done in both years,
and what that meant. Examining my fieldnotes on thagla, I realise there was a large consensus
that those involved in the bull festival did not have to do thagla during a guinea corn year.
This indirectly suggests that thagla was only done during a guinea corn year by those who
had not been successful enough to afford to fatten a bull and ritually share its sacrifice.
Because the bull festival had disappeared at least a couple of decades before my time, thagla
appears in my calendar listing under both years.
I also listed dzum zugune (adult initiation), which had also not been done for decades and had
already ceased some time before the bull festival. I have mentioned dzum zugune a couple of
times. It could go across kinship links over more or less seven cycles, representing a kind of
extended family tradition for storing surplus food. Someone whose father had not performed a
certain stage could not progress beyond that stage until his father died. We will learn more
about this in Chapter 3.14. A similar type of adult initiation cycle was performed across the
Gwoza hills, which emphasises the competitive nature of terrace farming in this part of the
northwestern Mandara Mountains. We realise that the Gwoza hills, due to their northerly
position, were exposed to regular food shortages caused by cyclical climate change consisting
of severe droughts.
We established in Gudule (1995) that the bull festival could be started after har khagwa, the
closing ritual for har ghwe and har jije, but we are not entirely sure how the opening stage for
the new performers of dzum zugune fitted into that. We will discuss this in greater detail in
the two relevant chapters later in Part Three, and here have provisionally adopted the view of
bulama Ngatha, who claimed that the new candidates for dzum zugune began their first stage
at the end of a millet year. Bulama Ngatha was the first to point out to me that dzum zugune
was the overarching ideal image of a successful man, one who could provide for emergencies
and keep three granaries constantly filled for seven years.
Before we present bulama Ngatha's account, we need to explain some main seasonal phases
of our agricultural calendar reconstruction in the next two chapter sections. Some of the terms
might be recognised from our calendar design above. Next, we show the phases of the moon
as the Dghweɗe see them. We will also explain the terms the Dghweɗe used for the days of
the week. I thank John Zakariya for passing these data to me.
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