Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 254
some of their farmland, as we learn later. For instance I remember being told about conflicts
over land rights after an area had been farmed by someone else for a generation or more.
Unfortunately we did not study the land ownership of local neighbourhoods in great detail,
but we know from our Mafa study (Muller-Kosack 2003) that, as a rule of thumb, montagnard
neighbourhoods often had a socio-spatial structure in which members of one extended family
would all live in one ward or a lineage ward nearby. Transferred to Dghweɗe, this potentially
implied that families living in Ghwa'a or Kunde would have had a different reach in terms of
the distance of their farms, because Kunde had developed after Ghwa'a, but both belonged to
the same lineage section which we know went back to Thakara as their shared ancestor. We
do not know whether the Washile-Thakara descendants of Kunde still owned farmland in
Taghadigile and Ghwa'a, even though this is how they had locally expanded. We will see in
Chapter 3.18 that the system of inheritance favours the seventh born, and that his rights can
be passed on across several generations. This means that the priority is for land to be passed
along the lines of a system of seventh born (thaghaya), which presumably concentrates land
assets accordingly across lineage wards. And at the same time, someone who was not a
member of any of the major local lineage sections, but who had moved there from outside,
might still own cultivated land in the ward where his family originated.
Plate 15c: View of Kunde, with newly cultivated bushland (siye) in valley bottom
Plate 15d: Gathaghure in background with greener areas, which mark hamlets and infields
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