Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 329
divide represented exactly that (Muller-Kosack 1988), which shows that the same feature can
have a different meaning between ethnic neighbours, despite them being so close. The Dghweɗe
also considered children born with their feet first to be extraordinary, but used the same small
aperture pots for them as for children born the usual way, as in Plate 41b.
There was another ritual pot called sunde, which was a pot used to bury the placenta after birth.
Parts of this pot would be visible, and a sacrifice would be performed over them. Unfortunately
we have no further data on this, but placenta pots were a very familiar cultural feature across the
Mandara Mountains. For example, among the Mafa it meant that someone originated from the
house where the placenta was buried, and people took from this evidential fact the entitlement to
participate in some of their birth families’ rituals (Muller-Kosack 2003:125).
Even though women did not have personal spirit pots in Dghweɗe culture, deceased mothers
reportedly could have them. Bulama Ngatha explained that the pot was used to wash the
mother's dead body and that it was kept under a rock near her grave. The pot was also used to
prepare a sacrificial meal at her grave, for which meat was cooked together with a piece of
cow skin, beans, ground fat and bones. There was another ritual pot which would have been
kept in her former kitchen. This pot was called dung ga baya (pot for a deceased mother) and
was filled with beer, and it was her oldest son who would have started the ritual consumption
of such beer. If there were grandchildren they would have participated also. Considering that
the pot used to serve beer for a deceased mother in her kitchen was not called tughdhe, we
strongly assume that it did not have a small aperture, unless it was like a dungwe spirit pot
similar to those for children as shown in Plate 41b.
Table 8 below provides us with an alphabetic list of ritual pots I compiled together with the help
of John Zakariya, from his translations during interviews with various local sources 5, which we
subsequently reviewed and completed in the context of compiling this section about types of
ritual pots. We do not claim our list to be in any way complete, but it does give a good insight
into the importance of ceramics in Dghweɗe ritual culture. We can for example see how ritual
pottery was linked to certain places in the house, and how they were related to themes of
cosmological dimension and religious belief. This especially applies if we see them in the
'stomach' of thala and the granaries, or the ancestor stones and the tiny ancestor rooms that were
outside but still close to the house. We have already learned that khalale, as the place of worship
for local lineage groups, no longer had any ritual pottery attached to it, not even a cooking pot
stored nearby, this being the case with the grave of a recently deceased mother.
We learned that almost all ritual beer pots were linked solely through the father and husband (zal
thaghaya) of a family home as the living representative of his deceased father and grandfather.
We remember that a man’s wives became members of his patrilineage, and that there was a
potential splitting point between sons of different mothers referred to as 'kitchen' (kuɗige). In the
context of this, the lower kitchen (kuɗig tighe) of the first wife was next to the 'stomach' of thala
as the main part of a Dghweɗe house shrine. Only after her death would each have a ritual beer
pot stored in her former kitchen, for which the oldest son of her 'kitchen' (kuɗige) had the ritual
responsibility. We do not know whether her ancestral beer pot had a small aperture or whether it
was a cooking pot, but if it did, it was only for that particular woman we know about and does
not imply universality. We can only assume that this was not only a result of patrilineality, but
also the patrilocal rule of residence. All other beer pots with small apertures (tughdhe) were
male, but they did not go beyond the deceased grandfather (zal jije), who appears to be at the
centre of Dghweɗe ancestral family worship. We know there was the deceased great grandfather,
but he did not have a ritual ancestor pot in the 'stomach' of thala, and was only represented by a
potsherd aligned with his ancestor stone.
We learned about the functions of some of the various ritual tughdhe, and how the freshness of
the beer was maintained with the help of the small aperture technique, especially in the context of
the tughdhe kule for drinking at the grave of the deceased father during har ghwe. We remind
5
Mainly bulama Ngatha, Faɗa Mofuke, dada Dukwa, dada Ɗga, Zakariya Kire and Gambo Ghamba
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