Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 304
Plate 34a shows Kalakwa's bed in his upper room, but we are not sure whether he still used it
as the traditional area of his house looked quite derelict in parts. We also remember the
picture of Kalakwa's collapsed thala foundation at the end of the previous section (Plate 30a).
The bed was however very traditional, consisting of a mahogany plank without a mattress, a
type of bed to be found across the Mandara Mountains.
Plate 34b shows Abubakar's bull shed. We have chosen this photo because it shows the
lowering of its ground (LG) in comparison to the floor of the upper room, and we also see the
wooden ceiling (C) and the little window (b) that a bull stable had. The bull was kept and
fattened in such a shed for two and sometimes three years before being ritually released and
slaughtered. The bull stable was about one metre deep into the ground and the bull ate from
the threshold of the entrance (A). This was also the point from where the Ɗagha diviner
would check to see whether the bull could harm someone when it was ritually released
through a hole broken in the outer wall (a), see Chapter 3.13.
Plate 34c shows Kalakwa standing in his upper room (A) next to his funeral drum (a) called
timbe which was also used during the bull festival, and we can see the first wife's room below
(B). We know that the Dghweɗe had stopped performing the bull festival possibly a
generation before, and we do not know whether Kalakwa put it there because he knew that I
was visiting. We can reasonably infer that the upper room was the place where a man might
have kept his funeral drum. Later we will learn more about other objects that were kept there.
Plate 34d: Upper room loft opening
Plate 34e: Watering-place outside bull shed
Plate 34d and 34e are our final two images to introduce the architecture of the lower and
upper room complex. Plate 34d shows the opening of the gude dome (c) in Kalawa's upper
room. We can see that the entry to the loft is on the side of the room (A) and we notice the
wood (a) and clay (b) construction supporting it. We think that it was on the side of the room
to facilitate entry with the traditional ladder, of which we have seen an example from Buba's
lower room (Plate 32b). What the image did not display was that the ladder had a fork at the
top to lean it safely against the wall. The interior of the gude dome will not be shown again,
as it is the same as in the lower room (Plate 32d). However we will see in the next chapter
that the gude of the husband was ritually less important than the gude of his first wife.
Plate 34e shows the watering-place in the wall outside Abubakar's bull shed, but the fact that
hay (a) can be seen suggests that the bull was also fed through that opening. We infer that the
bull was able to get his head through the opening to take water, which was perhaps provided
from a large pot in the backyard next to the bull shed. We remember such a possible scenario
from Plate 23g in our section about the various views of the functional spaces around a
homestead, where we showed an old grinding stone as a watering trough.
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