Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 346
We will then discuss the position of the bull when slaughtered, with his body in the lower
room of the first wife and his head stretched across the foundation stones (ghar malga) of the
upper passageway. Finally we will present our source material on how the bull festival once
travelled across the different settlement units of Dghweɗe, reinforcing the communal aspect
and the unity it brought to its two main parts. We then show an illustration of how the bull
festival travelled from Gudur to Gudule in Dghweɗe by the sound of drumbeats, and how it
travelled from Gudur via Podoko in the Mora hills to the Vreke of the Moskota hills.
There was another communal festival called thagla, which we translate as ‘harvest festival’.
This was mentioned earlier in the context of the discussion of the Dghweɗe seasonal calendar.
We placed it in terms of its sequential ritual order after the end of har ghwe and har jije
(slaughtering of a he-goat to the deceased father and grandfather) but before the bull festival
(har daghile). Unfortunately our fieldnotes on thagla are very limited, and there is
contradicting data on its position in the calendar. Because thagla was a religious festival
belonging to the community as a whole, and not just the extended family and close
neighbourhood of generation mates, it will be discussed before the bull festival. We will
further discover that the discussion of thagla as a communal annual event is of oral historical
importance in the context of a similar harvest festival starting in the Moskota hills. In the past
they travelled from the Vreke to the Glavda and neighbours, and we will learn more about the
resulting cross-border connection after describing the Dghweɗe harvest festival in the first
section of this chapter.
The ritual place of thagla (harvest festival)
We already pointed out that thagla was most likely performed annually, that is during both a
millet and a guinea corn year, and that those who could afford to sacrifice a bull did not have
to perform thagla during that year, only har ghwe. Because the bull festival was already a
thing of the past during the early independence period or before, we wonder when thagla also
came to an end. The first interview I did in Dghweɗe was in December 1994, with Musa
Kalakwa Dawa and a group of elders in Barawa. Musa Kalakwa Dawa was a Christian, in his
80s at the time, and my translator was Ibrahim Vile from Gwoza town, which meant that the
interview was in the Hausa language. I quote below what Kalakwa Dawa had to say about
thagla:
The thagla festival is a communal sacrifice. It is announced communally that the thagla festival is
going to take place. The whole community is involved. That means all of them cook beer for the
sacrifice and offer animals. After the horn is blown to inform all the people, the elderly people
will get tobacco and a hen. In return, the elders give the people a word of wisdom and pray for the
safety of the strangers who are coming to grace the festival and to have peace among themselves
and to avoid calamity during the festival. The elders will be called upon to pray before the festival.
The festival involves the whole community, but the sacrifice done has no specific pottery.
Musa Kalakwa Dawa and elders clearly say that thagla was a communal festival, in which
'strangers' also participated, and that there was no specific ritual pottery linked to it. By
strangers he means visitors from other parts of Dghweɗe, perhaps even from neighbouring
groups like Gvoko, Chikiɗe or Lamang. He said elsewhere that thagla was done before har
ghwe, which differs from what bulama Ngatha said in 1995 (see Chapter 3.8).
Also, Zakariya Kwire (1996) explained that thagla was done in both years, but only in the
guinea corn year was it done after har ghwe and before the bull festival, while during a millet
year it was done after threshing and before har ghwe. He also confirmed that in the past har
ghwe and har jije were done only in a guinea corn year, a claim we have already addressed in
the context of the bi-annual calendar of crop rotation. We give below a short description of
what Zakariya Kwire had to say about the performance elements of thagla:
Before putting grain into the water for thagla, a trumpet is blown. Everybody who wants to
perform thagla now puts grain into water. Then, when the grain is ground, the trumpet is blown
again. The day of the beginning of thagla celebration, the thaghaya of Ghwa'a starts consuming
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