Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 244
how important it was to have a regular ritual regime to avoid the risk of bad luck taking root
as a result of ritual neglect, and that the whole process of managing successful communal
fecundity was very much linked to the family household as the starting point for the ritual
prevention of misfortune.
The sequence goes from the house to the group site
Ndruwe Dzguma (1995), a rainmaker from Gharaza, explained the sequential order of har
khalale as it was performed in the past, by listing four key rituals. Among these four we
already know of three, but have not yet heard of man skwe:
First har ghwe (sacrifice inside the house), followed by har daghile (bull sacrifice), then man skwe
(general name for sorghum flour in water poured over ancestor stones) was done, and finally har
khalale (group site sacrifice). He added that with the arrival of the new religion everything was
changing.
Unfortunately we do not know a great deal about a ritual man skwe, but know that sorghum
flour mixed with water was used by rainmakers for pouring over the rainstones to make rain
(see Plate 14). Zakariya Kwire of Ghwa'a introduced us to the term tikwa thagla,
demonstrating that the term tikwa not only appeared in tikwa kupe, but also as part of the
harvest festival (thagla), which we discuss in Chapter 3.13. Zakariya Kwire pointed out that
tikwa was a general reference to any ritual liquid being poured over the ancestor stones. With
regard to tikwa kupe, we know the senior rainmaker had to do his tikwa kupe before anyone
else was allowed to do it. After all, he was also the one to start the ritual planting of guinea
corn long before anyone else planted theirs.
This means we have to leave the question open of whether man skwe was the name of the
sacrifice the rainmaker made over his rainstones, or whether it was an additional ritual that
was also performed by everyone else. We know about ɗuf ɗala, which consisted of ritual
sorghum beer being used only in the case of someone not having a goat to slaughter. We
introduce the concept of man skwe (man = handling; skwe = ritual treatment) in Chapter 3.23,
as a general term for preventing bad luck by carrying out all the necessary key rituals, and we
wonder whether it was this to which rainmaker Ndruwe Dzguma was referring, or whether he
meant his particular skwe (ritual treatment) of making rain, which consisted of sorghum flour
mixed with water and poured over the rainstones. However, our fieldnote in round brackets in
Ndruwe Dzguma's quote implies that it was poured over the ancestor stones. We can only
assume that he was referring to his family ancestors as a member of the Gaske rainmaker
lineage, which gave him the entitlement to ownership of this specific skwe (ritual treatment).
Regardless of whatever he meant by man skwe, what is important here is the sequencing from
the house as a place of worship to the group site, and in that context it was har khalale which
our rainmaker friend listed at the end of the sequential order, while the house was where it
started.
Most of our few sources on the subject claim that har khalale was not carried out as a regular
part of the calendrical order, unlike for example har ghwe or har daghile, but only performed
if there was a demand for it. We can only speculate as to what such demands might have
been, but they would have most likely been linked to issues related to the local group. We
were told that a sacrifice to the lineage shrine was required before some of the other
community or group sites could be ritually served. Another circumstantial context was the
involvement of a Ɗagha diviner, who might have been consulted by a group of lineage elders
to perform divination in order to advise on the type of sacrifice and the ritual way forward.
We will learn later in Chapter 3.13 that the harvest festival (thagla), as the only other
communal festival apart from the bull festival (har daghile), possibly also included a sacrifice
to the lineage shrine (har khalale), but want to point out here that we do not know for sure.
Unfortunately, both the harvest festival and the bull festival stopped being performed decades
before my time.
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