Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 325
as a place of worship, they were responsible for the handling of key pots dedicated to their
deceased fathers and grandfathers, forming patrilocal networks of patrilineal brotherhoods. 4
Bulama Ngatha (1995) generally distinguished for us the following basic categories of terracotta
pots in Dghweɗe:
•
•
•
•
•
Tughdhe
Ndughwe
Shire
Sake
Ndafa
- general name for a beer pot
- general name for a pot used for cooking beer and storing water
- general name for a pot used to fetch water
- general name for a cooking pot used to prepare food or sauce
- general name for an eating bowl and to serve sauce
We note that a ndughwe can be used for cooking beer and for storing water. In the previous
chapter we saw a large pot for brewing beer inside one of the lower kitchens, and we also saw a
large water pot next to an old grinding stone outside a house, presumably used to water animals.
A tughdhe is generally much smaller and was only used to pour beer for ritual consumption. We
already know that they generally have small apertures, and we present their various uses below.
A shire is a pot to fetch water and is much lighter than a ndughwe because it often needs to be
carried over long distances. These routes become much longer during the dry season, and I
remember hearing women talking while they were walking by my house before sunrise to fetch
water from a distant source. After it had arrived safely at the house, the water was then poured
into the large ndughwe. We spoke about the social division of labour in an earlier chapter, and
that it was mainly a female task to collect water for the house.
I do not know much about cooking pots (sake), but we have seen some in the previous chapter,
piled up on top of the grinding stones in one of the upper kitchens. They are used to cook food
and sauce, which is mainly millet or sorghum mash with various sauces made of leaves. We
remember, from the list in an earlier chapter about working the land, how the leaves of the
various trees around the houses would be used to cook sauces. However, the border between the
mundane and the ritual seems to be fluid, and an ordinary cooking pot that was regularly used to
cook ritual meals might eventually have come to be referred to as sak batiwe, a specific ritual
cooking pot.
A more sophisticated version of the above seems to be the one portrayed in Plate 40a, which has
three legs. We saw an example of this in Kalakwa's father's ancestor room at the end of the
previous chapter (Plate 35e), where we referred to it as sak batiw gajije (cooking pot for room of
jije). This particular ritual cooking pot was called a sak sage, which is best translated as 'cooking
pot on legs' (sage = legs). The only other similar ritual pot with a bowl on top was the already
mentioned jahurimbe, which had a decorated stand rather than three legs. It was used for serving
beer and sauce. A jahurimbe was much more finely made and was only used in ritual contexts.
Another three-legged cooking pot was referred to as sakgharhfire, which meant 'cooking pot
above the bed'. We show in Plate 40a below, the one bulama Ngatha allowed me to photograph
in 1995.
A sak sage became a sakgharhfire as a result of a ritual transformation from a 'cooking pot on
three legs' to a 'cooking pot above the bed', and seems to be of interesting ritual significance. A
sak sage was transformed from a three-legged ritual cooking pot to a spirit pot when the first
wife successfully reached the seventh month of her first pregnancy. The transformational process
was marked by a ritual called kɗafa which involved the cooking of a ritual meal by a male friend
of the husband, and on the same day the wife's hair was shaved for the first time since the
beginning of her pregnancy. After bulama Ngatha had himself carried out such a ritual, he took
4
Chapter 3.6 listed such social relationships as sknukwe (lineage brothers who could not intermarry) or
ghwagha (group in a line of agnatic descent who could not intermarry) as opposed to mbthawa (lineage
brothers who could intermarry).
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