Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 279
Conclusion
Our chapter: 'Working the terraced land' is very fragmented indeed. We started with terraces
and soils, and were able to establish that kla pana (cultivated land) is a reference to intensive
agriculture on man-made terraces which had various natural soils, but which had to be
improved by a complex system of anti-erosive measures, crop rotation and regular manuring.
However this system had started to change perhaps decades before my arrival, by the
introduction of chemical fertilizer and increased downhill migration.
We learned that there was once a system of iron production, which possibly produced a
surplus of iron in particularly industrious families, in the form of iron bars, which were
invested in cows. The cows in turn were often leased out to those who did not have cows,
solely for the purpose of obtaining manure to improve the fertility of their terrace fields. This
system had already changed quite some time before my visits to Dghweɗe, and we also
learned about the past system of leasing land in the hills to raise enough to pay the
bridewealth for a man's son. In more recent years before the arrival of Boko Haram, a system
of short-leasing land in the plains seems to have made terrace farming increasingly less
attractive for cash cropping.
Due to population increase there was an ongoing shortage of land in the hills, presumably
leading to a reversal of the significance of guinea corn, while beans during the millet year
became economically more important. One of our hypotheses was that the latter might have
brought about a loss of the ritual importance of guinea corn. We were also able to see how
there was a change in the social division of labour, in that women began to carry out
agricultural work which before was perhaps only done by men. We also learned that trees
were once an important asset of a man, but tree cultivation was also increasingly in decline,
partly induced by the introduction of new technologies and building materials such as zinc for
roofs.
We gave lists of useful plants such as grasses, and were able to see that the usefulness of the
fan palm was unrivalled. Some plants were used by the rainmaker to increase the yield, and
he also used those grasses to tie certain trees to control strong winds. There were also certain
medicines to increase the yield of crops that were mainly controlled by the rainmaker, and we
have learned in previous chapters that the other specialist lineages were also involved, but it
seems that the ritual calendar of the Dghweɗe gave the rainmaker the most important role
during the active and more labour-intensive part of the year. We earlier emphasised the oral
historical dimension of the documentation of change, according to which the ritual role of the
rainmaker seems to have survived the longest.
In the following chapter we will reconstruct a traditional house, and begin from there to show
how the intensive agricultural system of crop rotation and animal husbandry had its material
centre in the farmstead, the stone architecture of which was amazing and unique in many
ways. Apart from the material richness of the architecture, the house was also the ritual centre
of managing the reproductive forces of fecundity. We have already pointed out that the house
was the centre of those religiously motivated activities, which we will demonstrate in detail in
the chapter about the house as a place of worship. To underpin our analysis of the ritual
dimension of the house we first need to obtain an understanding of the architecture of an ideal
Dghweɗe farmstead of the past.
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