Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 239
Chapter 3.9
Distribution and custodianship of local shrines
Introduction
This chapter is about rituals associated with important local shrines, for example the already
mentioned lineage shrine for all descendants of Vaghagaya. We have so far established that
the Dghweɗe might not in the past have followed a regular calendar of rituals, but carried
them out as and when it appeared necessary. Unfortunately my data on the past use of such
shrines are almost non-existent, and considering the changes already pointed out in the
previous chapter, regular sacrifices might well have been made at one time.
We will therefore try to ascertain whether those local shrines played a role in asserting a sense
of belonging, by looking specifically into their social embeddedness. We will see that we can
for example distinguish between lineage and other communal shrines. Both had a strong
locality aspect, and while agnatic descent seemed to be the main reason for the lineage
shrines, the other communal shrines seemed to have had more socially inclusive definitions.
This is why we refer to them as community shrines, and it was Durghwe, with its regional
significance, which was the most important of that type.
I have studied the social inclusiveness of ritual performances of the Mafa of the Gouzda area
on the Cameroonian side of the border, where I systematically mapped all local shrines in five
villages and linked them to the oral history of an underlying ritual and geographical context.
Unlike in Dghweɗe, the Mafa lineage shrines were served as an integral part of a regulatory
ritual calendar represented by the sequential order of passing on sorghum beer. I soon
discovered that the Dghweɗe did not have such a Way of the Beer 1 (Muller-Kosack 2003),
and as a result decided not to systematically map their local shrines, but instead relied on
individual examples that would geographically underpin their oral history of local group
formation. However, similar to the Mafa area under study, Dghweɗe shrines were also often
found in small groves situated on hillsides or marked by a rock formation overlooking a
hamlet or a wider area of lineage-based settlement units.
Although we cannot compare the geographical distribution of the Dghweɗe and Mafa local
shrines, it is interesting that the general term khalale for lineage shrine is identical to the Mafa
word halalay. 2 In Mafa, halalay was not only a reference to ancient or distant agnatic
ancestry linked to the ritual ownership of such major lineage shrines, but also to their twin
ceremony (ibid:361). We will illustrate the equivalent ritual importance of water as an aspect
of managing communal fecundity in the chapter about Dghweɗe beliefs concerning the birth
of twins. In Dghweɗe the word khalale was not only used to refer to the agnatic ownership of
lineage shrines, but is also the word for water spirit. In Mafa (ibid:108ff) as well as in
Dghweɗe culture, water spirits were seen as very powerful agents and can be interpreted as
potentially dangerous representations of fecundity in the light of communal reproduction.
1
The Mafa have a system of egalitarian chiefly clans, called kr biy (son of the chief), who were always
the largest and most recent clan group expansion of a village. In terms of the importance of number,
and being the most recent lineage expansion, they have a structural similarity to the rise of the
Vaghagaya in southern Dghweɗe. In the context of the distribution of custodianship for their lineage
shrines, the recently expanded kr biy clans always had to wait until the more ancient but smaller clan
groups of a village had made their sacrifice before they could make theirs on behalf of the village
community as a whole. The Dghweɗe had no such a system of chiefly clans, although the British tried
to invent one through the system of gidegal (chiefly majority) to promote self-governance (see Chapter
3.21).
2
The spelling of an 'h' instead of 'kh' is simply a different way of writing the same phonetic sound as it
is applied in Cameroon when transcribing indigenous languages.
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