Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 269
with beans to be rotated bi-annually, and, as already mentioned, beans had become a major
cash crop not only in the hills but also in the plains. This includes the cash cropping of beans
near Lake Chad during the dry season, in places where the shores of the Lake retreated
annually due to the flatness of the ground. This option too is now gone, due to Boko Haram.
We know that man-made climate change with its resulting greenhouse effect also impacts the
wider Lake Chad region, with the increasing unpredictability of any reliable weather forecast
there.
Table 7a: Agricultural products in the Dghweɗe hills before Boko Haram
Our friends
from Korana
Basa told us
in September
1995 that the
annual
interchange
of millet and
guinea corn
Irish potato
[Hausa: dankal gabatura] (new, only few people plant
was
h ) (both years)
Maize
babəre
traditionally
Yams
ɓal-ghaya (yams from plain becomes mountain yams)
fixed,
and
was
never
Bambara nuts
yandar ɓarma
changed
even if there had been only a little rain during a guinea corn year. The reasoning behind this
was that if they were to repeat any of these crops, the second year would not give much, and it
would increase the risk of insects destroying the harvest. We were told that it was always done
in that way, and that they had no plan to change it. There was certainly some kind of
conservatism apparent in that latter statement. We therefore infer that the few remaining
mainly elderly Traditionalists of Ghwa'a and Korana Basa still practice crop rotation to this
day, since this is what they always did.
Cow pea (beans)
Sesame
Tigernuts
Groundnuts
Sweet potato
Coco yam
Cassava
ngəre (millet year)
zarava (both years)
yughwa (both years)
yandara (both years)
balwida plata (both years)
balwida gaghwe (both years)
mbaya (not much, due to animals being out in dry season)
We do not know how much of their harvest the remaining population of Dghweɗe was forced
to pass on to members of Boko Haram, who were still hiding there in 2019. Many of the
remaining insurgency were reportedly strangers of other ethnic origins, which we listed in an
earlier part of the book. We also doubt that our Traditionalist friends still dare to produce
beer, considering they have presumably been forced to join the sect for the sake of survival.
List of useful trees
The list of useful trees in Dghweɗe shown below is far from complete in terms of identifying
them all botanically, and also far from being complete in terms of number, but still our little
documentation provides some evidence of the importance of trees. We know that many useful
trees were part of the traditional hamlet with its houses and infields. This shows how
important distance was in terms of working the land, and that it did not only apply to where
the manure was brought out, but that distance might also have been relevant for tree
cultivation.
We learned earlier that trees and cows were interlinked in terms of use as part of a chain of
functional subsistence. During pre-colonial times, some trees were important in the making of
charcoal, and that in turn produced iron, which was used to make not only agricultural tools
for working the field but also tools to cut and trim trees. Bulama Bala and the other elders of
Korana Kwandame told us how people invested their surplus from iron production into cows,
which in turn were leased out to produce manure for the fields of those who could not afford
cows. This socio-economic chain was already broken when I was in Dghweɗe, and making
iron was no longer something people did, because secondhand steel from the market economy
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