Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 276
Plate 19a: Ghalahgala (carpet grass)
Plate 19c: Za'aghaya grass is for roofing
Plate 19b: Tgija wushile - applied to beans
We could see how important grasses were, many of them being used for making grass mats,
and we used the Hausa term 'zana mat' to refer to them generally. They were used in many
ways, not just to rest upon, but also as temporary fencing or to store the harvest. As already
mentioned, grasses were used for making ropes as well as for roofing, and others were used
for making baskets, an area we have not covered much at all.
We will see in our next subsection that grasses also served as an anti-erosive measure, and we
list those under weeds and not grasses. This is a very artificial distinction and therefore we
should better refer to them as useful weeds.
A list of weeds
We do not know whether the Dghweɗe had a general word for weeds, but when talking about
weeds in English, John could spontaneously list about a dozen weeds, and we have decided to
list them all below. We have the botanical name for speargrass (tharɗe) only. We see in Table
7d below, that many have metaphorical names, such as 'tigernuts of birds of prey', or 'millet'
or 'guinea corn' of kukwe (dove), presumably marking them out as being of no use to humans.
There are quite a few in the list whose names we do not know the meaning, but there are
others that had a ritual or an anti-erosive function. Unfortunately we do not have any images.
There are three weeds altogether which we could potentially be classified as useful weeds,
and we tend to think that they were not weeded out, for instance when they grew in between
the terrace walls. This would imply that they might have been weeded from the cultivated flat
areas. First of all there was manziwghardha (ghardha = terrace), actually containing the word
terrace to indicate that very function. Then there was dhagla and tuva, which also had an antierosive function. We do not know why dhagla was referred to by John to represent guinea
corn, while he said that ture was like millet.
We remember how Baba Musa (see Chapter 3.7) told us the legend of how the first Gaske
rainmaker pulled dhagla out of a terrace wall and in this way produced emergency water to
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