Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 291
There is a single farmstead (5) visible above Buba's house, and we infer that its lower infields
were separated by the path above the homesteads of Buba and his neighbours.
We have seen from our standardised groundplan that the Dghweɗe distinguished between the
foyer and the lower and upper room complex behind it, whereby the lower room led down
into the foyer. We therefore know that the foyer in the front was always the lowest part of a
traditional house, ideally facing the infields underneath. The lower kitchen of the first wife
was always on the left side, making it very close to the 'stomach' of thala, from where the
ritual pots for her husband's deceased father and grandfather were taken to be filled with beer
and kept overnight in her lower kitchen. The left and right kitchen also played a role in the
context of the marriage rituals a new wife went through (see Chapter 3.20).
Behind Buba's impressive roof of thala (1), we see the roofs of the lower (a) and upper (b)
rooms. We do not know how long this house existed, but it would have been at least three if
not five or more generations, because apart from the usual three 'active' ancestor stones in
front of his 'stomach' of thala, he kept 'retired' ones under his granaries, but I never made a
count. Above his lower and upper rooms we see one of Buba's little ancestor houses (c). They
are situated between the trees behind his upper room, and we will see close-ups of them later
(Plate 35a).
One of the most important structural aspects of building a house on a hillside must have been
the sound foundation of its original front. While Plate 24a shows a shared horizontal platform,
the photograph presented in Plate 24b portrays a cluster of three houses staggered upwards
against the hillside. The prominent house in that picture is the one at the centre front (1) and
we can see how the left kitchen (a) sits on a steeply terraced corner platform (A), while the
right or upper kitchen (b) is parallel with the line of the terraced infield (c).
I wonder whether the expression 'lower' kitchen for the left kitchen had a topographical
architectural origin. We could argue, from Plate 24a and 24b, that the left kitchen is
positioned above a steeply underpinned terrace wall of up to three levels (A). There might
well have been a rock underneath, which had been partially destroyed to start the platform of
the house above, with the left kitchen at the lower end. Unfortunately we do not know
enough, and have to accept that the left kitchen was also the lower kitchen, and that it was
associated with the fact that it was the first wife's kitchen. For some reason, the left side of the
foyer was ritually more significant, and there was an underlying gender aspect to this.
Plate 24b: Clustering of houses on three interlinked terraced platforms
289
