Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 326
the pot home. There he installed it above the head of his bed as his sakgharhfire or personal spirit
or god pot, and added that not every sakgharhfire was a transformed sak sage.
We are not sure what bulama Ngatha's statement meant, but it seems to imply that anything could
become a personal spirit pot above a man’s bed. This possibly resulted in a variety of such
personal spirit pots, but always seems to refer to a cooking pot (sake). Bulama Ngatha referred to
his sakgharhfire as his personal god pot by using the word gwazgafte for the Supreme Being as
well as in the sense of his personal god. We discover below that children too had such personal
god pots or personal spirit pots, and that they were called dungwe, while women reportedly did
not have such personal spirit pots because their husbands looked after their spiritual wellbeing.
That at least was what I was told, and we will put that view into a more comprehensive
ethnographic context later, in our chapter about cosmology and worldview.
We can see in Plate 40a that bulama Ngatha's three-legged spirit or god pot is a former sak sage
which became his sakgharhfire. It was fixed on top of a forked branch above his bed. We can see
the black around the outside of the pot which indicates it was once used for ritual cooking, most
likely in the context of his kɗafa ritual. If we compare the image again with Kalakwa's
grandfather's tiny ancestor room in Plate 35e, we see that both seem to have a second cooking pot
on top. On the other hand, perhaps that was just how a sak sage pot appeared. Unfortunately we
do not have the answer, and perhaps the cooking pot on top was the genuine part of a sak sage.
Plate 40a: Bulama Ngatha's three legged personal
spirit or god pot above his bed in 1995
We ask ourselves whether it had to be
an exogamous lineage brother of the
father of the house who cooked the
ritual sauce for the first wife. We also
wonder whether the kɗafa ritual was in
any way linked to the hope that the first
wife would not only celebrate the
seventh month of her first pregnancy,
but that in the future she would become
the mother of a seventh son (thaghaya).
We can even speculate further, and
assume that because the pot used for
kɗafa became the personal spirit pot to
guard the health of a man during the
night while asleep, it makes the desire to
also have a seventh son born to the first
wife very much a male affair. We
wonder whether the protection had to do
with assisting in carrying out some kind
of religious control, by appropriating the
reproductive capacity of the first wife.
After all, women had the natural
advantage in being able to give birth,
and by taking ritual control over their
reproductive capacity, men might have
felt the need for some extra spirit
protection. We should also note that the
kɗafa ritual was possibly also connected
to the hope that the firstborn child would be a son, making such a son the potential senior brother
of the same 'kitchen' (kuɗige) as his seventh-born brother. It would be his house in which the first
dada ritual would be carried out, also known as kaɓa ritual (see Chapter 3.14), following the
death of the father.
That a father and owner of a house was referred to as zal thaghaya, meaning a husband who
wants to become the father of a seventh-born son, indirectly underpins our suggestion that the
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