Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 332
worship and not just a storage place for ritual pots.
Unfortunately, our information of there being a separate gude ritual which could be brought into
sequence with other rituals marking the calendrical order of the Dghweɗe tradition is not
sufficiently supported. The only source is one sentence from an interview with Zakariya Kwire
and dada Ɗga, who pointed out that 'the ritual upstairs' (gude) was done after har khagwa and
before har gwazgafte. We know that har khagwa was the closing ritual for har ghwe and har jije,
and that it was done after, and not before, har gwazgafte. This is at least in tune with what
bulama Ngatha and bulama Bala from Korana Basa stated, who both said that har gwazgafte was
done before and not after threshing. I am quite sure that I misunderstood what Zakariya Kwire
and dada Ɗga were saying about the sequential order of har khagwa, and that it was done before
the bull festival (har daghile) and not before the threshing ritual (har gwazgafte). The closing
ritual for har ghwe and har jije was performed in sequence with har gwazgafte only after the
guinea corn had been harvested, threshed, and safely stored inside the granaries in the foyer of
the house.
We will learn, in the chapter about the bull festival, how the lower room continues to play an
important role as a place of worship, for example when the bull is ritually slaughtered, and we
will continue to show the gender interplay of the architectural groundplan of a Dghweɗe house in
the context of the rituals of reproduction. We wonder whether the lower gude has a particular
symbolic meaning, considering that the Dghweɗe like to use anatomical metaphors to describe
some of their cosmological ideas. 'Stomach' of thala is a good example of this, and perhaps lower
gude could be interpreted similarly. It is certainly a place where the first wife and mother of
thaghaya stored valuable things, where grain and ritual pots were stored, and following from this
we are quite certain that her gude tighe was a ritual place in its own right.
Har gwazgafte – slaughtering a he-goat for divinity before threshing guinea corn
Har gwazgafte was the main ritual linked to the threshing of guinea corn, and a man who had
a full storage basket (kawire) sitting in his front yard would die if he did not carry it out as
requested, so bulama Bala explained. The emphasis here was on the word 'full', but this time
it was not a known family ancestor who might make the demand in a dream, but a more
universal supernatural force. The sentiment bulama Ngatha describes was based on the
Dghweɗe belief in gwazgafte, which is not only their word for divinity but also for the allpowerful God, and the fear of dying if the processes of threshing and storing the freshly
harvested guinea corn were carried out without the required sacrifices. This was of particular
importance if the temporary storage facility near the house was full. We saw photos of open
granaries in the previous chapter. To do this successfully, not only did a he-goat have to be
slaughtered, but the road would be blocked off, and the rest of the family had to stay indoors
while the father of the house applied intestinal and stomach contents to the temporary storage
facility of the guinea corn. Another sacrifice to the doorposts marking the entrance area of a
house completed his activity, which bulama Ngatha described to us as a ritual dedicated to his
'house god', a translation we will discuss further below.
Before we describe what we know from our few oral data on the ritual of har gwazgafte, we
need to remind ourselves of the geographical space forming the outside of Buba's house.
Plates 44a to 44c show Buba's front yard and entrance area on the same platform level, but we
need to keep in mind that the storage facility outside a house and the main entrance might
indeed have been on different topographical levels. Also, the threshing ground, not visible
below, could have been further away depending on the topography of the hillside of the
settlement unit. However, in Buba's case the storage facility was on the same platform level as
the main entrance, and we have seen him, together with his wife, sitting on the base of one in
Plate 23a (see Chapter 3.11). Unfortunately we only have images of Buba's entrance platform
taken during a millet year, but we use them here because we want to demonstrate the spatial
aspect of the ritual of har gwazgafte in the context of a topographical example with which we
are already familiar.
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