Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 322
neither do we know what happened to his house as he died between 2005 and 2008. This was
shortly before Boko Haram occupied the Gwoza hills.
Why ritual beer pots (tughdhe) had small apertures
We have already learned from bulama Ngatha (1995) how after his death his tughdhe thala
would be smashed and the mouth with the small aperture broken off the neck in the process,
while larger potsherds from the remainder of the pot would be used to dig the grave. We also
learned about the potsherds used in the stomach of thala during har ghwe, representing the three
family ancestors dada, jije and wuje, arranged in the same sequential order as the ancestor stones.
Unfortunately we do not know whether they were potsherds from a ritually smashed personal
tughdhe thala, or whether they could be from any other pot, ritual or domestic.
Neither do we know what happened to the ritually broken mouth of a personal tughdhe thala.
Plate 39a, with images from a rubbish heap, shows the reverse side of such a broken mouth with
the small aperture (e) visible from the inside. Looking through the rubbish heap shown in Plate
39b reminded me of looking for surface finds of similar broken small aperture necks at all the
DGB sites in 2001/2002. I learned to recognise them by identifying the remaining parts of the
small aperture mouths as parts of broken necks. Later we excavated a combined pierced and
broken top of such a pot, which was ritually positioned.2 When I surveyed the distribution of
small aperture beer pots in our subregion, I discovered a whole culture of similar small aperture
beer pots to the north, but not to the south of the DGB sites, including the foothill areas of the
Gwoza hills. It turned out that they were ritual beer pots linked to the type of ancestor cult
described above, and I include the Dghweɗe example here as evidence of their
ethnoarchaeological significance in the interpretation of pottery discovered in the form of broken
necks with small apertures on the surfaces of the DGB sites.
Before we return to the discussion of what bulama Ngatha might have meant by breaking off the
mouth of a personal tughdhe thala after the death of the owner, we will describe the technology
of making small apertures for ritual beer pots in Dghweɗe. I was introduced to this by Lakwa 3, a
potter from Dzga, who in 2004 demonstrated to me the technique of closing the neck of such a
pot with a disk of clay, which was subsequently pierced with a millet stalk to produce the typical
small aperture. As the last step, Lakwa would form the funnel on top of the aperture disk as
shown in Plate 38a. The sequence of the eight images presented below show the whole process.
Plate 38a: Lakwa demonstrates how to make a small aperture disk (a) for a tughdhe pot
The heap of discarded potsherds shown in Plate 39a and 39b below show examples of broken
necks with small apertures. It was situated next to the abandoned house we used in the previous
chapter as an example of a ruined foyer (see Plate 22b).
See position of two broken pots combined: http://www.mandaras.info/DGB_NCameroon/fv68.htm
Lakwa and her husband were both Traditionalists and he died earlier in 2019. They were both still living
in Dzga and I was told over a year ago that they too had been forced to farm for Boko Haram.
2
3
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