Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 335
explain why the doorposts might have been seen as a representation of the divinity
(gwazgafte) watching over the house. The idea of God as Supreme Being seems to become
localised or personalised as 'house god' represented by the entrance posts of the house, in a
similar way to the god pot watching over the father while he sleeps.
Plate 45a: Storage basket with sorghum
Plate 45b: Bulama Ngatha's in 1995
At the beginning of this section we quoted bulama Bala saying that if a man who had a
storage basket full of sorghum for threshing did not perform har gwazgafte, meaning
'slaughtering for God', he would die. This meant in reverse that if someone did not have a full
storage basket, he did not necessarily need to perform har gwazgafte. This at least was what
bulama Bala of Korana Kwandama and elders explained to us in 1995, that in the past there
were perhaps more domestic animals, but due to epidemics, livestock might suddenly be
wiped out. In such a case one elder would sacrifice a he-goat on behalf of the rest of the
community. We also remember that in the past more people invested in cows, and leased
them out to those neighbours who could not afford cows to produce sufficient manure.
This all changed with the use of chemical fertiliser, but here we are imagining a time when
the production of animal manure was still a key activity. During the rainy season after
planting, the domestic animals had been taken into the house, or kept in a temporary
enclosure outside and fed with grasses. The manure of the bull and the cows would be moved
through a small window into the yard behind the sheds by men only, while the goat manure
from the second shed of the lower room could be emptied by women. The manure was
exposed to rain in the backyard for further maturing and was then brought out to the terrace
fields by the women before planting. The animals would then be released after the harvest,
apart from the bull which was ritually released, recaptured and sacrificed, after the he-goat
slaughtering period was over, according to the bi-annual cycle of the guinea corn year.
Bulama Bala's explanations confirm that the participation in the prescribed chain of ritual
events was much influenced by how well a household performed economically, which
involved careful planning and resource management, a process embedded into a cycle linked
to the biannual calendar of crop rotation. In the context of this, most billy goats and fattened
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