Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 236
Only a hundred years later, Ibn Furtu mentioned the Wandala of Kirawa at the northern foot,
and the Margi-Magay of Kopci to the west of the Gwoza hills, as both having been vassal
kingdoms of Borno (Lange 1987). We know about possible iron trade, and early production
of sorghum in the Gwoza hills at the time is not impossible. We are aware that the Gwoza
hills were sandwiched between the DGB complex and the Wandala of Kirawa for about 200
years before the Tur tradition led to the formation of the Dghweɗe, but we do not know how
long the Tur tradition had already been there as a highway of mutual exchange before that
period. We however presume that the traditions of farming and perhaps even crop rotation
were already common at that time, and our hypothesis is that many elements of material and
immaterial culture were exchanged along the same route too. It is not only the heights of Tur,
but the wider northwestern Mandara Mountains as a subregion, including its northwestern
plains, which we embrace here as a sphere of mutual cultural-historical influences.
Locality aspects of the Dghweɗe ritual cycle
Bulama Ngatha (1995) explained to us that most of the rituals were performed before
threshing the guinea corn, while the corn was still in the storage facility. He uses the word
tsufa as a general term for those rituals, but unfortunately we did not ask for its literal
meaning. We can nevertheless begin to see how the ritual calendar is embedded into the biannual cycle of crop rotation dictated by the role of guinea corn as the ritually more
significant crop. We are not entirely sure why bulama Ngatha thought that most rituals were
done before threshing, and infer that he meant as such only in relation to guinea corn, and
remember that he thought that the rituals for the paternal ancestors of the house could be done
in both years.
We contested that view, and have learned how the smaller scale rituals came before the
larger-scale rituals, such as sacrifices of he-goats to the ancestor stones of the house being
followed by sacrifice of a bull for the festival comprising Dghweɗe as a whole. In the context
of this, we ascertained that the rituals before threshing were most likely at one time all part of
the guinea corn year, leading to an extensive slaughtering period during the dry season. It
started with the guts of a he-goat being ritually thrown into the ripe guinea corn as part of
tikwa kupe before it was harvested, and ended with the bull festival.
We already pointed to the application of ritual activities as a behavioural aspect of local group
formation. If we look at the social organisation underlying the ritual application, we can see
that there was a spatial dimension which connected the house with the farmland. The terrace
fields near the house were particularly important, since they were used every year in the
context of the bi-annual cycle of crop rotation. It was the guinea corn year which not only
accommodated most ritual slaughtering, but possibly also needed most of the manure, due to
the longer ripening period of guinea corn. During the active season the animals were tied up,
and then after the harvest released again into the fields, which made husbandry an integrated
part of farming.
All this was not only very labour-intensive and therefore required a high population density,
but it made hamlets into very fertile and prosperous hillside areas, being neighbourhoods of
houses clustered on stone platforms integral to the surrounding terrace fields. The Dghweɗe
referred to such hamlets as khuɗi luwa, which means something like 'stomach of the land', a
subject we explore in detail in the chapter about the architecture of a house. The other areas of
a mountain site were hillsides of terrace fields without settlements, which received a lesser
amount of the annually produced animal manure. We learn in the chapter about working the
land, how important the leasing out of cows was in that context.
What we want to emphasis in this section is that the infields and the house were seen as the
'stomach' of a hillside, and as such received in spatial terms the highest ritual attention. This
ritual attention was very personal in terms of material culture, in the form of shrines, types of
ritual pots and their storage places, plus ritual pathways in and around the house as a place of
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