Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 306
tobacco plants, we see a grinding stone with a broken pot on top of it (a). This little grinding
stone reminds us of a similar one we saw in Buba's 'stomach' of thala (see Plate 26c).
Plate 35b above shows Kalakwa's ancestor rooms, and we can see all three of them (a, b, c) in
the backyard to the right side of his upper room (A). The ancestor room in the middle (b) has
a flat stone (g) covering the entrance. Unlike Buba's place, Kalakwa's house was built on a
flatter part of the hillside, allowing for more space. This might have been the reason why his
ancestor rooms were part of his backyard, and the thorny hedge (d) behind them seems to
indicate that too. We remember the plan showing the roofs of a traditional house on the way
to Kwalika (Plate 22a) at the beginning of this chapter, where the ancestor rooms were
located in the grove about 50 yards away from the main house. What we might be able to
conclude from this is that ancestor rooms were more or less detached from the main
architectural structure of a house, but that they were still part of a traditional farmstead and as
such were part of an agricultural service area near the main house.
If we look again at Plate 35b, we see that (f) is where batiw gadada (a), the ancestor room for
the deceased father of the house, abuts with the upper room of the father of the house (A). If
we now consult Plate 35d, we can see that the tughdhe kule (ritual pot for the deceased father)
was resting where (f) is marked in Plate 35b, while (b) marks batiw gajije, the ancestor room
for the deceased grandfather. The ritual pots displayed in Plate 35c and 35e are hidden behind
the flat stone (g) of batiw gajije, but we were allowed to photograph them. Next to batiw
gajije, behind the tree, we see Kalakwa's ancestor room for his deceased great grandfather.
Interestingly, the great grandfather as the most removed of Kalakwa's family ancestors has his
miniature room at the greatest distance from the upper room of the father of the house. If we
remember the impressive view of a traditional house from the front, with the roof of thala and
the lower kitchen to the left and the upper kitchen to the right, we see a similar left to right
order to that of the arrangement of the ancestor stones of Buba's house in Plate 25c. There the
third ancestor stone wuje, dedicated to his deceased great grandfather, was also on the right,
while that of his deceased father (dada) was on the left, and the one for the deceased
grandfather (jije) was situated in the middle.
We will learn in the next chapter that the tughdhe kule (pot for the deceased father), visible in
Plate 35d as (b), played a crucial role in the context of har ghwe (the sacrifice of a he-goat for
the deceased father). Concerning the tughdhe batiw gajije (a), which is the ritual beer pot in
the ancestor room of the deceased grandfather shown in Plate 35c, we remember that there
was also a ritual beer pot for the deceased grandfather called zal jije in Buba's 'stomach' of
thala (Plate 26c and 26d). Finally, there is the sak batiw gajije (d) a three-legged cooking pot
for the deceased grandfather, on top of which we have an ordinary cooking pot (d). The threelegged cooking pot at the bottom (c) of Plate 35e reminds us of the personal spirit or god pot a
father of a house could own, which was placed on a forked wooden branch above the bed in
his upper room to protect his spirit while asleep. We will return to the spatial positioning, role
and function of many of the ritual pots, in the following chapter.
Conclusion
Our chapter on the architecture of a traditional Dghweɗe house has shown how important it is
to understand the mountainous landscape shaped by the forefathers of the Dghweɗe, by the
construction of terraced platform foundations for their farmsteads. The use of stone as a
building material is essential here, resulting in reshaping the landscape of a hillside into a
khuɗi luwa, a 'stomach of a settlement', which we see to be the result of a labour-intensive
agricultural process of creating soil fertility through the regular application of animal manure.
This is reflected in the architecture of the three animal sheds, of which two are attached to the
lower room of the first wife, while the upper room of the husband and father of the house has
the bull shed linked to it. In agricultural terms, the comparable architectural features of the
foyer area were the three granaries forming the storage facility, but rather than stone, these
were made of adobe. Facing the front was the house shrine with the smooth front stone wall,
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