Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 230
pulled and gathered together in small heaps. Later in the rainy season,
they put sand on it to get it rotten for manure. They also place these
little mounds so that erosion is stopped. These heaps/mounds are called
dalaha.
processed in sand into
manure
Mounded fields = dalaha
Normally the roofs don’t get covered in a millet year.
There is no sacrifice before the threshing of millet. They only remove
it from the drying roof to the threshing floor (balke). They cut the
shorter end of the remaining stocks and gather them together and then
take the chaff and burn it together with the stocks. The name of the
remaining millet stock is tsatsaya and chaff is ɗire. The ash they keep
together and they produce salt out of it by processing it with water.
The name of that kind of salt is zze.
In the millet year, there is no bull festival but sometimes there is
thagla, but sometimes thagla is with the bull festival. That means
thagla is not every year. For the beer of thagla they use sorghum from
the granary of the wife. In the guinea corn year, the ones who have no
bull do only thagla. That is to invite others to come and drink sorghum
beer with them. If somebody has a bull in the village the whole village
will celebrate har daghile and will therefore not call it thagla. That’s
only in the guinea corn year because no har‐daghile in the millet year,
but only thagla sometimes.
In the millet year, we have the same arrangement with har ghwe, har
jije and har‐khagwa. [We left in Table 5a har khagwa as a closing
ritual for har ghwe and har jije still connected to the guinea corn year.]
Only people of Ghwa’a use the newborn weak dying goats at
har‐khagwa.
No sacrifice is needed
for threshing of millet
Threshing floor = balke
Millet stock = tsatsaya
Chaff = ɗire
Salt made from ash = zze
No bull festival during
millet year but thagla and
for the 'beer of thagla' the
sorghum from the wife's
granary is used
Bulama Ngatha's account
about thagla is not very
satisfying and it is later
better explained by other
oral sources
Bulama Ngatha might
have done his har ghwe
during a millet year
Having gone through bulama Ngatha's account again, we realise we have not yet presented
the ɗuf ɗala ritual. We will discuss the ɗuf ɗala ritual again in the chapter about the house as
a place of worship, where we point out that not everyone was in a position to be able to
sacrifice a he-goat on so many ritual occasions, which began with tikwa kupe and ended with
the closing ritual har khagwa. Between these there were at least har gwazgafte, har ghwe and
har jije. This would have meant the slaughtering of at least four billy goats. Tikwa kupe was
to throw guts into the guinea corn before harvest, and har gwazgafte to thresh it and bring it in
from outside before it could be safely stored in the husband's granary. There was a
particularly strong ritual component to the transformational process of yielding attached to the
harvesting, threshing and storage of sorghum. We learned earlier that cornblessing was linked
to that process, while rainmaking was more connected to the growing period represented by
ritual planting, and we will learn all the other activities of the rainmakers from our next field
account.
The ritual ɗuf ɗala was for those who could not afford to carry out so much slaughtering of
he-goats. For them it had to suffice to use sorghum beer as its ritual essence and pour it over
the three ancestor stones of the house. Neither would they have been able to put a combined
remainder of rib and chest dedicated to the deceased father and grandfather on a potsherd
under the granary, or some of the guts on the chest and bellies of the grandsons of the house.
Being able to sacrifice was a sign of being affluent, and despite the Dghweɗe having been an
egalitarian society without chiefs, they did have a competitive ritual culture which could be
organised along both paternal and maternal descent lines.
We will understand the last point much better at a later stage, in particular in the chapter
about the adult initiations rituals known as dzum zugune. Bulama Ngatha did not mention
dzum zugune to me, only the bull festival. We know that the bull festival and the adult
initiation cycle had long ceased being performed, but the former was certainly still active
during early colonial and late pre-colonial times. We already have a hint of the local historical
228
