Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 248
stage of dzum zugune, a downhill race, was started (see Figure 22). Fkagh is a reference to a
flat place, and while Fkagh ga Maruwa was perhaps the most important public gathering place
in Ghwa'a where communal ritual celebrations often ended, Fkagh Gwatadhe had another
ritual function which included a sacrifice to avoid a low birth rate.
According to Zakriya Kwire and dada Ɗga, the sacrifice at Gwatadhe to promote human
fertility was where a stone (presumably a distinctive rock) was found in a grove nearby. They
explained that the purpose of the stone was only to make children grow fat, but inside the
grove was a stone circle. The sacrifice started with he-goats, and the following year a bull.
They would lead the animal three times around the grove before sacrificing it. In the past,
water was found there. They put something into the water and animals would drink it to give
more milk. Young men would ask Gwatadhe to give them a girl to marry, while married
women and men asked for children. Women after menopause and aging men would ask for
better mobility to harvest their guinea corn. Unmarried boys and girls made armlets of fresh
leaves of the plant ndarike, also called mboɗahlaka (translation of both these names is
unknown to us), before they stood in front of the stone or rock which was part of the earlier
mentioned grove.
Also inside Gwatadhe was a certain kind of vavanza (Cissus quadrangularis), and people
made rings from it to tie it around their heads. The narrative is that there was one man by the
name Ruwa who was responsible for the sacrifice at Gwatadhe, but he had no children. He
and his wives asked why this was, since he was responsible for the sacrifice at this famous
place. After the next sacrifice his wives began to have children. The man Ruwa also asked for
wives for his lineage mates to marry, to increase the local lineage population.
Dada Ɗga told us there was once a severe fire, and that people from the Mafa area asked the
people of Ghwa'a to sacrifice at Fkagh ga Maruwa since all sorts of unfortunate entities and
energies had fled from that place due to the fire. John said he remembered that during that
year there was a region-wide outbreak of cholera. We think that the Mafa must have seen the
fire from the Moskota massif on the other side of the intramountainous plain. We know that
this was where the Vreke clan lived. We will learn later, in the chapter about the bull festival,
that the Vreke were famous for their powerful clan medicine against diseases and plagues,
which throws additional light on the narrative above (see Chapter 3.13). Altogether we can
see from these few examples that public places of worship were deeply embedded into the
Dghweɗe belief system, in which the mountainous environment and prevention of misfortune
appear as an integrated and interactive entity.
Conclusion
This chapter has shown us how important places of ritual interest outside the house are for the
Dghweɗe. Apart from lineage shrines (khalale) based on independent lineage sections, which
we think existed for most if not all settlement units, there was also the large regional
landmark shrine Durghwe. Because of its subregional and overall cosmological importance,
we will present Durghwe later in a dedicated chapter in Part Three. Other shrines or places are
connected with outcasting, or serve general health aspects, and are often linked to
reproductive themes. Others again are dancing grounds, or played a role in the context of
certain performance aspects of the various stages of adult initiation (dzum zugune). We
pointed out how important it is to further contextualise our ethnographic understanding about
shrines with the wider framework, not only of the social organisation of the Dghweɗe, but
also with the mindset of individuals as actors, and will exemplify this further in a dedicated
chapter about the Dghweɗe concept of existential personhood.
We have particularly emphasised the role of the seventh born (thaghaya) as the priest for
lineage shrines (khalale). We are not sure how the custodianship of the shrines might have
changed over time, and we have failed to pinpoint the precise geographical location of all the
places of ritual interest listed in Figure 6b. Nevertheless, we have hopefully been able to
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