Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 274
oil was extremely important in the past, but the women had stopped making it. Apart from the
fruits, we assume the use of its timber continued, but as with the palm tree, we do not know
whether this led to mahogany trees also being felled.
Plate 18f shows a man harvesting from a tree next to his house, by standing on a rock and
using a sickle on a long wooden stick. We are not sure what the man is harvesting since we
cannot identify the tree. We however include the image because it shows that trees were an
important asset in the past, but many uses, not only ritual ones, had already changed during
my time. Plate 18g above shows a man collecting a felled branch of a tree he has dried out in
the field, which he is about to move around, most likely intending to make firewood. Our next
subsection will briefly list what we know about euphorbia trees.
Euphorbia trees as fencing
Before moving on to our next section about useful grasses, we will briefly introduce the
Dghweɗe way of classifying euphorbia trees, which are not to be confused with vavanza
(Cissus quadrangularis), a mistake once made not only by myself. As far as I know euphorbia
did not have any ritual significance when used as fencing, for instance along pathways
leading out of a settlement area. There were two main types of euphorbia trees in Dghweɗe:
• hula’a
• mahide
The hula'a euphorbia tree was the one used along pathways some distance from the house,
while the mahide euphorbia was presumably used for fencing around the house. I do not have
any photographic evidence of them being used as fencing around a house, but noted down
that John explained that the Dghweɗe distinguished between two types of mahide euphorbia
by allocating gender to them:
• mahide zal nana (husband/male)
• mahide nis nana (wife/female)
We do not know whether both were used as fencing, but wonder whether the reference to
male and female in terms of fencing had something to do with an area in or around the house
being prone to conflict. That euphorbia trees used for fencing could have some supernatural
aspect after all, was confirmed by a third type known in Dghweɗe:
• ghayike
According to John, ghayike was used in the past for fencing, and looks like mahide but is thicker.
He told me that Fada's wife did not give birth because of something in a ghayike from Kwalika. We
do not know whether Fada's wife was from Kwalika, or whether it had something to do with
sorcery coming from Kwalika, but know that in the past euphorbia could cause infertility.
Useful grasses, weeds, and vermin
This section aims to give an impression of the local knowledge Dghweɗe mountain farmers
had about useful plants while they cared for their mountain environment, not only in terracing
and manuring the ground but also in cultivating grasses. In the context of this, they also had
distinct knowledge of plants we would identify as weeds, but the Dghweɗe had no specific
word to distinguish between useful grasses and weeds. We discuss in Chapter 3.22, where we
introduce the classification of living and non-living things, that the Dghweɗe liked to
distinguish between those that were defined as useful plants and those that played a role in
food production. This principle did not always seem to apply, as we will learn in Chapter 3.14
about the different stages of adult initiation, where those which did not have an obvious use
were still important as part of the ritual dress code. In this chapter section we present a list of
vermin, and medicines used by rainmakers such as carpet grass. For example, beans were
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