Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 234
meteorological knowledge and his ritual role as a rainmaker, and at the same time that God
was ultimately responsible for the right amount of rain. We could perhaps conclude from this
that he would be considered more as a rainmaker priest than a technical rainmaker. We
acknowledge his claim of a religious entitlement to act, being a representative of God because
he belonged to the Gaske rainmaker lineage. His interventions were at the same time
practically determined by meteorological observations in which he monitored rainfall and
other potential environmental threats, mainly during the growing and ripening period of
crops.
This happened in the context of the agricultural seasons along the lines of the labour-intensive
hoeing phases of the active part of the year. His meteorological knowledge was observational
and perfectly in tune with our modern view of cloud-building as a result of the sun heating the
surface of the earth. The ritual aspects of his role as Dghweɗe rainmaker were however the
result of ritual entitlement which came from his descent. In that sense, we think he was
convinced he was making rain, but only because he had that entitlement which allowed him to
interact with the seasons as a cosmological agent with an expert link to the celestial world
above.
Rainy and dry season in cultural-historical perspective
The Dghweɗe do not divide their agricultural year into months, but distinguish between a
very labour-intensive agricultural season and a less active ritual season. We learned that the
most active season is connected with the growing season during the wet period, plus about
three months of the early dry period for harvesting and threshing. The latter is part of the
ritual period, which leads into the intensive slaughtering period, firstly of he-goats for close
family ancestors, followed by the bull festival, far into the dry season.
We know that the seasonal pattern of the Dghweɗe calendar is very much guided by climatic
conditions and the observation and monitoring of the weather conditions, a job for which the
Gaske rainmaker lineage held a key responsibility. In the context of this, their understanding
of the seasons was not only meteorological but cultural, with ritual activities interacting
socio-economically and religiously with the typical semi-arid environment of the Gwoza hills
as the most northerly extension of the whole of the Mandara Mountains.
We learn through later chapters that the cultural dimensions of rainmaking and cornblessing
were embedded in a cosmological view of the world, which did not see the earth as a globe
but more as a flat primordial mass with the firmament above, rather in the shape of an
umbrella. In the context of this, we will increasingly contextualise throughout Part Three,
what we mean when we refer to a Dghweɗe celestial world above the sky of this world, and
the world of the ancestors not only as a world beyond, but below, deep inside the earth. The
title of this chapter: 'Interacting with the seasons' includes a sense of becoming aware of the
exclusive cultural-historical perspective from which we think the pre-colonial Dghweɗe saw
and interpreted the world.
We can only imagine how the environment of a significantly more humid Gwoza hills might
have felt during the 17th century. Presumably the rains would have started earlier and lasted
longer, maybe similar to today's climate in the Fali region to the south of the Tur heights. This
was perhaps also the last period when population pressure might have occurred as a result of
increased south-to-north migration across the heights of Tur, and which might have led to the
settlement structure we refer to now. We remember the earlier chapter on the expansion of the
Vaghagaya in southern Dghweɗe. Unfortunately, we do not know how densely Dghweɗe was
populated during the end of that wet period, which would have been about 300 years ago.
The palaeoclimatic scale of dry and wet phases illustrated in Figure 16 below will underpin
the climatic change that the Gwoza hills, as a most northerly mountainous subregion of the
semi-arid savannah region south of Lake Chad, might have encountered. Our illustration is
based on Maley's (1981) palaeoclimatic change of the Lake Chad water levels, which we
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