Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 241
places to be shrines, but people accused of sorcery were made to proclaim their innocence in
the form of an ordeal, and we discuss these places in the chapter about the concept of
personhood. Concerning the distinction of shrines for worshipping, it is the lineage shrine
(khalale) in which we are most interested, and here I am aiming to consolidate our oral data to
understand them better. For me there is also the question of whether there was ever a regular
sacrifice to khalale, as there was with the har ghwe sacrifice for a deceased father of a house.
Har khahale (slaughtering for a local lineage ancestor) was in a way the opposite of har
ghwe. Because lineage ancestors were too far removed, as bulama Ngatha explained to us in
1995, ancestor pots were no longer kept, but ordinary pots were used to prepare and serve a
meal for them.
The meaning of khalale (lineage shrine)
Bulama Mbaldawa and elders of Tatsa (1995), explained to me that khalale meant that:
If you built your house somewhere where nobody already lived, whatever rock you put your
weapons nearby, would become your khalale.
This explanation was quite telling, since it indirectly said that only if there were no one else
already living in a place where a man wanted to build his house, would he be able to have a
lineage shrine. This in turn implies that he would start a new local group or lineage section
(kambarte) as illustrated in Figure 14 of Chapter 3.6. Also, the reference to weapons in that
context is important to notice, as it implies the possibility of taking a piece of land from
someone else by force. It meant at least that the person in question was able to settle as a
result of using his weapons, or would be able to defend his new home should he actually be
the first settler.
If we consult our knowledge about traditions of war alliances illustrated in Figure 8a (Chapter
3.2), it is difficult to imagine that anyone could have built a new house anywhere in Dghweɗe
as a first settler, other than by assuming it to be an ideal or even romantic view held by our
protagonists from Tatsa. We remember that Tatsa even had a history of being neutral, being
sandwiched between the expanding Vaghagaya as the largest local lineage group and the
smaller groups of Ghwa'a and their potential allies. Still, the image bulama Mbaldawa relayed
to us implied that a man as founder of a household had claimed his local independence,
represented by putting his weapons down at the rock nearby his house, which then had the
potential to become his lineage shrine khalala. This possibly implied that he was hoping to
have a seventh son born to him by his first wife, as a symbol of good luck in the context of
expanding further, and hence the rock where he put his weapons down would become the
starting point of a successful new lineage section (kambarte).
Other than the Mafa of the Gouzda area, the Dghweɗe did not serve their lineage shrines as
part of a regular calendar as they did for their extended family ancestors, but apparently only
sacrificed when there was a need. We think that this might have been to do with the fact that
they did not have a chiefly clan system such as the Mafa had, where a complicated system of
sequential ritual order was maintained to monitor first-comers and late-comers. If we take
Gharaza in southern Dghweɗe as a hypothetical case, the Gudule lived there before the
descendants of Vaghagaya defeated them and took over their land. The fact that some of the
Gudule remained raises the possibility that such an underlying ritual context existed, in which
the Gudule as first settlers needed to be ritually acknowledged. We failed to explore any such
possibilities in Dghweɗe, but perhaps the hidden context reveals itself in the fact that they had
the role of starting the bull festival. We will discuss this particular aspect in a hypothetical
alternative scenario in Chapter 3.14, and only want to point out here how little we know about
the oral history of lineage shrines in Dghweɗe.
So, what does that have to do with the meaning of khalale as the Dghweɗe word for lineage
shrine? Well it shows first of all that it is not as straightforward as explained by bulama
Mbaldawa and the elders of Tatsa. What perhaps helps us to further understand a khalale,
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