Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 340
(gude) of clients' houses. Unfortunately we do not know whether the 'bundle' was hung in the
opening of the upper (male) or the lower (female) loft of the client, while the rainmaker went
around binding magulisa to make the beans flower successfully during a millet year, but
remember that it was intended to be visible. We can only guess that it might also have visibly
hung there to bless the agricultural efficacy of the farmstead, and we remember that the
lowered animal stalls were interlinked with the architecture of the lower and upper room
complex, so it would be seen from there also.
Ndruwe Dzguma also mentions humtara, a variety of vavanza (Cissus quadrangularis), which
was used to put into a he-goats mouth, which would subsequently burst and the goat would
die instead of being slaughtered by the knife. John explained to us that this kind of sacrificing
was often done before harvesting or threshing of guinea corn. However we do not know
whether this meant that a he-goat was ritually killed in that way for the tswila and the har
gwazgafte rituals, but know that these were the main rituals in which a he-goat was sacrificed
during the period of harvesting and threshing guinea corn. Perhaps it was also done when the
crops grew really badly, as described by Ndruwe Dzguma, and dag mbarɗe was produced in
Viringwa Ruta's house, and the people of Ghwa'a brought a he-goat to be sacrificed over the
rainmaker's ritual 'bundle' itself. We learn later in Chapter 3.21 that rainmakers could be
forced by local lineage majorities to make rain in certain places if there was an extreme
shortage of rainfall.
The above was a worst case scenario in which the Gaske lineage had to produce rain or face
the anger of the local lineage majority. Still, it seems that the house of their senior rainmaker,
where the most ancient and powerful rainstones were kept, played a central role in the
rainmaking rituals for the larger community. However there were possible far worse case
scenarios, such as when a sacrifice to Durghwe, the main rain shrine of our subregion, needed
to be attended, but such sacrifices would have been carried out under the custodianship of the
lineage priest or thaghaya of Ghwa'a. We know he was from the Btha lineage and was not a
member of the specialist rainmaker lineage Gaske. For the Gaske of the past, the house of
Viringwa Ruta of Ghwa'a remains, according to Ndruwe Dzguma, the most important place of
their ritual presence in Dghweɗe. Unfortunately the man who lived there during the time of
my visit had, according to our sources, already given up rainmaking.
Conclusion
In this chapter we worked out that the worship of family ancestors did not go beyond the
deceased great grandfather (wuje) of an extended family. In the context of that, it was the
deceased father (dada) and the deceased grandfather (jije) who received special ritual
attention in the form of the two dedicated ceremonies har ghwe and har jije. If we consider
that an extended family might have consisted of individual household compounds of the sons
of a deceased father, it was the oldest son who introduced all his younger brothers into the
worship of their deceased father. In contrast, it was the different wives of a man who
determined which 'kitchen' (kuɗige) those sons would belong to, and in the context of that, it
was the first wife and her seventh-born son (thaghaya) who received special attention.
Implied with this was that neither the seventh born nor the first wife needed to be the actual
seventh born or the actual first wife, but it was the role that counted. This was for example
expressed by the fact that the firstborn had to serve his seventh-born brother (who might have
a different mother) first before he could serve all his other younger brothers. The architecture
of the house displayed the institutionalised ritual aspect of gender, which was particularly
powerful in the husband's sauce kitchen adjacent to the first wife's lower kitchen and the
'stomach' of the house shrine (thala). During har ghwe an exogamous lineage brother cooked
a sauce there, which was then used in combination with the ritual beer brewed in the first
wife's lower kitchen and libated over the ancestor stones.
We showed that the ritual aspect of the house as a place of worship was interconnected via a
network of extended family members which widened over three generations as represented by
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