Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 324
filled with ritual beer inside the lower kitchen, and were to stay there overnight before being
moved back into the 'stomach' of thala the next day (see Figure 20a).
Keeping the beer fresh for sequences of rituals was perhaps the most important aspect of the
small aperture. We remember that the ritual slaughtering period started after threshing and when
the new crop was stored in the granaries. The seasonal aspect might well indicate that freshness
was a symbol of life, and a reminder of the planting and growing period when everything was
fresh and green, rather than dry and cold with the wind of harmattan making it even dryer. Was
the mouth of a personal tughdhe thala ritually broken as if to say that this person had taken his
last breath, because the pot no longer has the ability to contain life? We will learn more about
the concept of soul (safa = breath) and spirit (sɗukwe = shadow) in the context of Dghweɗe ideas
around the structure of the mind in Chapter 3.15.
Perhaps a comparison with the Mafa from the Gouzda area can help to give more meaning to the
cosmological concept of freshness. I learned from my Mafa friends that the concept of freshness
as life force could be linked to the growing season (Muller-Kosack, 2003), an ethnographic detail
which encourages me to consider something similar in Dghweɗe, but I never explored this
interpretation while I was with my Dghweɗe friends. We know that the Mafa only formed as the
dominating ethnic group after the DGB era had come to an end, and the same presumably applies
to the Dghweɗe as we came to know them. Still, I was able to establish (Muller-Kosack, 2004)
that small apertures as the main feature of ritual beer pots could only be found to the north, and
not to the south of the DGB complex. This coincides with the south-to-north migration we linked
to the Tur tradition. The fact that ritual beer pots with small apertures were not only found in the
mountains but also among the groups around the foothills of the Gwoza hills suggests an earlier
date for the distribution of such pots, perhaps when the DGB sites were still active as places for
promoting freshness during earlier periods of drought.
We will not elaborate any further on this here, but hope that our chapter section exploring the
question of why the ritual beer pots the Dghweɗe referred to as tughdhe had such small apertures
is a useful one. We do think that the forefathers of our Dghweɗe friends might well have had
similar cosmological ideas about freshness as the Mafa, and that the small aperture was not just a
practical means of keeping sorghum beer fresh while on a ritual journey, but that it was rooted in
their view of the world and the successful promotion of fecundity.
In the next section we will explore the types of ritual pots found in a Dghweɗe house, followed
by more exploration of relevant ritual spaces in and around such a house. The loft (gude tighe) in
the lower room of the first wife and the entry area of a house come to mind. The latter required
the threshing ritual har gwazgafte, best translated as 'slaughtering for divinity'.
Types of ritual pots found in a traditional Dghweɗe house
We have presumed so far that the small aperture served to control the freshness of the beer, and
we concluded from the use of tughdhe kule during har ghwe that this was useful for the timing of
its ritual consumption. It also made the serving of the beer a memorable experience, because it
could be poured very gently. We further pointed out that the concept of freshness might be linked
to the planting and growing season, and as such had a cosmological dimension. The religious
significance of sorghum beer perhaps represented the continuity and renewal of that freshness,
and har ghwe and har jije as bi-annual core rituals of a family home made the deceased father
and grandfather the most important extended family members to be remembered.
We further showed that an eating bowl ndafa was used, together with the ritual bowl jahurimbe,
to libate sorghum beer over the relevant ancestor stones. Most ritual pots unfolded their reach in
the context of every house where zal thaghaya and his nuclear family formed the corporate base
unit. That would have made the ritual density of houses as places of religious observance very
high. We realise that har ghwe and har jije exemplified such a dense network of ritual exchanges
represented by senior brothers and their grandfathers' generation mates acting as family priests
across shared connections of patrilineal descent. Together with the fathers of each family home
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