Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 318
zugune), which we reconstruct in detail in Chapter 3.14. At that point we will also learn more
about the extensive ritual role of the beer bowl known as jahurimbe.
Bulama Ngatha further pointed out that his personal tughdhe thala would be removed from his
'stomach' of thala after his death, and that the mouth of the pot would be broken and his family
would take the remaining part to scrape out the grave. John added that bulama Ngatha's personal
calabash would be used for the funeral celebration dance after his death. This was in 1995, but
bulama Ngatha had converted to Islam when I last spoke to him in 2005, and he had died by the
time I visited again a couple of years later. Considering his late conversion, we doubt that his
tughdhe thala was ritually broken and then used to dig his grave.
The word zal not only means husband, as in zal thaghaya, but also priest as it appears in zal jije,
and in the latter case it is a reference to both the family priest and the ancestor pot for the
grandfather. Both had a tughdhe thala, one for the living owner of the house and the other for the
deceased grandfather, while the deceased father had a tughdhe kule but this was not stored in the
'stomach' of thala. This suggests that a deceased father only gained a place in the 'stomach' of
thala after his son as the current father of the house had also died. We do not know whether the
senior brother as dada priest of a deceased father had to assist his junior brothers during every
har ghwe ritual, or whether his ritual role changed once he had introduced them to it by what we
describe in Chapter 3.14 as the kaɓa ritual.
The fact that there was no tughdhe pot stored in the 'stomach' of thala to celebrate the sacrifice
for wuje, reinforces the idea that ritual pots were very much linked to the home. For example
khalale, the lineage shrine served by thaghaya as lineage priest, had no dedicated ritual pots. Any
ordinary cooking pot could be used to prepare the sacrificial meal for such a remote ancestor.
The ancestor stone linked to the deceased great grandfather (wuje) was also the stone which was
removed and put under the granary when the husband and father of a house (zal thaghaya) died
and thaghaya as seventh born inherited it. He presumably needed ritual assistance to replace the
ancestor stones but we do not know how exactly it was done and whether the former dada stone
was placed in the middle and became the new jije stone. It still all points to the deceased paternal
grandfather (jije) being the most important extended family ancestor to be ritually served and
remembered.
We have already mentioned, in the chapter on relationship terms, how jije was used across
generations of both paternal and maternal kin, who referred to one another as jije. This meant that
someone of considerable biological age might have referred to someone much younger as jije,
for instance someone who was the deceased great grandfather's mother's brother's grandchild. In
the context of this, even the sons of one’s own mother’s brother's children could be called jije, as
could any other male person of one’s exogamous lineage. Apart from dada, which was used as
the most general term for a grown-up man, jije was not only used to refer to an elderly man but
was applied across three or four generations. This shows the social inclusiveness of the term jije
for grandfather along collateral lines, in particular towards one’s mother's brother's children.
In 2005, John and I once more interviewed bulama Ngatha, together with my neighbour Faɗa
Mofuke, Gambo Ghamba and John's brother Yakubu Zakariya. Faɗa and Gambo were both
Traditionalists, and Gambo was the lineage priest (thaghaya) of Ghwa'a. The interview took
place in my research station in Dzga, which was later burned down by Boko Haram.
In part of this interview we talked about the use of the tughdhe thala, the ritual beer pot bulama
Ngatha had referred to in 1995 as his personal tughdhe thala. This is when I learned that both
beer pots with small apertures, the personal one and the one for jije, could be referred to as
tughdhe thala. I was then told that both tughdhe would be taken out of thala and brought to the
lower kitchen (kuɗig tighe) the night before the he-goat was slaughtered for the har ghwe
celebration arranged for the following day. The purpose was to fill both pots with ritual beer and
keep them in the lower kitchen of the first wife overnight, to be returned full of ritual beer the
next day to the 'stomach' of thala. We guess that the mouth of the pot was sealed in a certain
way.
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