Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 259
brew beer. The women are not allowed to taste beer while they are brewing. During menstruation,
women call somebody to brew beer on their behalf only if they feel physically unwell.
During harvest, everybody helps cutting, but for transporting only the younger ones who are still
strong carry the harvest home, women as well as men. If there is much to carry you often call for
help. Women however have to stay away when the guinea corn is taken to the temporary storage
facility. Women can put millet onto the drying roof but they are not allowed to climb up.
Before threshing, there is ɗuf ɗala, a sacrifice. After that, there is har gwazgafte, which includes
throwing stomach contents onto the storing facility with the guinea corn. The next day the
threshing starts. If you have a full store [of guinea corn] and you do not perform these rituals
before threshing, the husband will die. While these sacrifices are performed the rest of the family
must be indoors and people outside are not allowed to enter or to talk to him. The road to the
house will have to be closed by thorns beforehand.
For animals, there is huɓa (Urginea maritima). This plant is put into water and the mouth of the
goats and sheep are put into that water. This increases the reproductive capacity of animals and is
done on the day when they are released back to the fields after harvest, but before threshing.
During threshing, the men make baskets, kulge, for carrying the unthreshed sorghum or millet to
the threshing ground. It is men who put the guinea corn into the basket while the women carry it.
The men do the threshing. After threshing, the women come to separate the chaff by using
calabash and basket (tughba). After separating the chaff the men carry the guinea corn or millet to
the granary. The work of children during threshing is to collect corn that has fallen outside and to
look after small children.
After threshing, the women bring the corn stock of harvested guinea corn home. The women
weave tughba baskets. They also go for cutting firewood. A man will cut grasses for roofing the
house. They also produce rope (za’a) for roofing. If women produce rope, their husbands will die.
Even if the husband is ill he would not make ropes. However, widows can make rope. Women are
not allowed to roof but can carry the guinea corn stock to the roofing men.
Taking the manure from home to the farmland is the work of women but men can help. Dung
builds up in the stable during the rainy season and is taken out [into the fields] after harvest, [still]
during the dry season. The manure from a bull or cow is removed [from the stables] through a
window by the men and is stored behind the window so it can rain on it. It is stored there until the
dry season when the women carry the manure to the terrace fields.
During preparation for planting, about one or two months before planting, if a man has farmland
he did not use, he will clear it and start hoeing it in the dry season. This is called dhal susiye
(susiye = fallow land; dhal = 1st hoeing in the dry season). If you do not have fallow land you
clear your already used farmland (kla pana). Arranging and maintaining terraces is man’s work.
The above account shows an ideal way of how working the land was once shared within
terrace farming families. It starts by showing the flexibility for women to stay at home during
the planting period, for instance when there were children mature enough to help out. A
teenage boy would accompany the father while an older girl could replace the mother at
home. There were certain plants only cultivated by women, in particular tigernuts, okra and
eleusine, and also plants used to make soup. Because by then teenage boys might be going to
work in Maiduguri (or Yola), there were changes, and women held a bigger responsibility.
This involved tasks they would not have carried out before the change, and it presumably also
included daughters after a certain age embracing the same changes.
We learned that women were not excluded from planting during menstruation, but when it
came to preparing food they were if unwell. We also learned that a woman was excluded
when it came to putting the harvest in the storage facility for drying. In the context of that,
this was handled even more strictly when it was a guinea corn year. In this case they were
excluded from threshing but were allowed to separate the chaff from the corn. Only men
could put the guinea corn or millet into the granary. We also see that the making of ropes for
roof-making were solely the jobs of men, and breaking that rule would have meant that the
husband might die. On the other hand, bringing the manure out to the fields seems to be a task
specifically allocated to women.
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