Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 344
the whole of Dghweɗe and not just to the Vaghagaya. We presume that this greater
integration happened during the later part of the pre-colonial period, perhaps as late as the
Fulbe expansion.
The previous two chapters have been about the architecture of the house, including the house
as a place of worship. We have shown how the system of generation mates (skmama), up to
the paternal great grandfather, ritually interacted in small neighbourhoods of farmsteads on
terraced hillsides. We suggested that the 'stomach' of thala represented the cosmological belly
of the Dghweɗe house shrine, with the three ancestor stones at its inner front and with specific
ritual pots stored inside. There was also the ritual sauce kitchen for a man's exogamous
lineage brother, and the two kitchens, one to the left and the other to the right, of a smooth
front dry stone wall. The granaries were situated on the inner side of a foyer area, between the
central passageway with its row of sitting stones and the upper passageway leading to the
lower and upper room complex. We referred to the lower part of the house as the foyer area
containing the ritual centre of a traditional homestead. We explained the interconnectedness
of the animal sheds which were linked to the lower and upper room complex, and the
architectural gender divisions across such a household compound. The bull shed was adjacent
to the upper room of the father and owner of the house, and we were told that this was
because a father and husband of a house (zal thaghaya) always wanted to be near his beloved
bull.
While we have been looking inwards, understanding the inner makings of a house, we are
now looking outwards, towards the legendary and mythological past, and how this helped in
shaping Dghweɗe ritual traditions promoting fecundity. We mentioned the dry and the wet
seasons and how the production of manure and the control of rainfall were embedded in
Dghweɗe cosmological thinking. The latter was also a result of past collective experiences of
regular exposure to drought and the resulting loss of 'freshness' as a precondition for fertility.
The legend of Gudule beating the drums for their brothers in Gudulyewe on the other side of
the northern Mandara Mountains tells of an audial connection with the wider world, going
from the intimate rituals inside a house to a chain of social celebration connecting
communities, stamping the very ground of their mountain existence.
The newly thatched roof of thala had the ritual stick called tsaga protruding from the flat roof
behind it, with branches reaching into the sky. The stick was covered with a tent of zana
mats 1 and decorated with traditional clothing which was also hung over other parts of the
newly thatched roof of thala. Family members would put on this clothing when the bull was
ritually released, and then dance together with the celebrating crowd. The Gudule were
responsible for starting both the roofing and the bull festival, but before the bull festival they
beat the drums and put their ears to the ground to listen for the responses of the drums of
Gudulyewe. We know that the chief of Gudur was once seen as a major rainmaker in his
region, someone who had specialist ritual powers. His lineage ownership of a clan medicine
for increasing fecundity seemed to increase in proportion to the distance between the locality
of Gudur and some of the montagnard groups claiming they once had access to it. The link to
water was not only in the name Gudulyewe (yewe = water), but appeared in different contexts
across the wider region. For example, my unpublished 1988 fieldnotes concerning the Vreke
clan of the Moskota hills (see Figure 4) contain the information that the chief of Gudur would
prepare his kule (clan medicine) on a fire lighted on top of a dedicated waterhole.2
Zana is a Hausa word, while the Dghweɗe for 'zana mat' was dhava (see list of useful grasses). We
continue to use the Hausa word for such mats here. The Dghweɗe used the Hausa word more often
during my fieldwork, which illustrates how the language had already changed by then.
2
Another version of his kule also included the sacrifice of a bull or an ox without horns to the spirit of the
waterhole. In Mouhour (half way between Mokolo and Goudour) a local man explained that the chief of
Gudur was a regional rainmaker. In the DGB area I was told that the first bull ever to be used for a bull
festival was born to a cow previously owned by a water spirit, and sprinkling earth on the backs of cows
would prevent the water spirit from taking them back (Muller-Kosack 2003:110). David and Sterner (2005)
1
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