Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 352
the girl he liked with a white tail of a cow rather than that of a bull? We have already learned
that in the past cows were a valuable investment for manure production in those who had the
ability to make iron. Cows had been traditionally leased to people who were unable to
produce sufficient manure, and cows were also used for payments, including bridewealth.
Another factor presumably linked to this is that cows could calve every two years, which was
a particularly good local investment. This of course was long before meat production became
more important than the production of manure, and the symbolic meaning of bridewealth has
also changed as we believe it was considered differently in late pre-colonial times.
The above interpretation of why it was more likely a cow rather than a bull is somewhat
constructed, but the only other indirect reference to cows is stripes of white cow skin being
worn as bandoliers and around the waists of performers in the second stage of the adult
initiation rituals. We will describe these rituals in the next chapter, but want to mention here
that this particular stage involved the mixing of male and female dress elements. The other
context concerned a sacrifice of a white bull to the Durghwe mountain shrine, which was the
main rain shrine, and we will discuss that aspect in greater detail later in a separate chapter.
We can perhaps presume, regardless of whether it was the white tail of a cow or a tail of a
bull, that in both cases the white tail can be symbolically better linked to dung production and
cornblessing than to rainmaking. Still, we should keep in mind that both cornblessing and
rainmaking can be interpreted as mirror images of cosmological pairing in the Dghweɗe ritual
culture of fecundity from below and above from the perspective of this world.
The other reference made in the context of the severed white tail is that Gudule was promised
a special gift in exchange for being excluded from rainmaking, which was the vavanza
(Cissus quadrangularis) used to increase the yield of farm produce. Besides, Gudule rather
than his brother Ske was the seventh born and made custodian (thaghaya), a privilege which
gave Gudule the right to start the bull festival and other traditional activities and sacrifices
related to the concept we have described as ‘blessings from below’. One of the other main
activities the Gudule initiated was the roofing of houses, and apparently the Gudule also
performed har ghwe before everyone else, because they were considered to be thaghaya of
Dghweɗe. We remember that the sacrifice for a deceased father (har ghwe) was in the past
only carried out during a guinea corn year, but that it became annual after the bull festival
disappeared.
It remains unclear why the special gifts Gudule received, and which had led to the separation
of the two tasks of rainmaking and cornblessing, were seen as a punishment. My friend John
Zakariya thought that the punishment of being banned from rainmaking was firstly a result of
his having misbehaved as thaghaya (seventh born). It is only now, while I am writing and
reviewing my Dghweɗe notes, that I realise that it might have been the fact that he did not
wait for the girl to whom he had most likely already been promised in marriage. We will learn
about the three historic ways of marrying in Chapter 3.20, among which ‘marriage by
promise’ was the one a father arranged for his son by befriending the mother of a newborn
girl from a patrilineage with which he could intermarry. Perhaps Gudule tried to break such a
pre-arranged marriage because he fancied another girl.
There is another dimension to Gudule's lost opportunity to marry and reproduce according to
the rules, and like his father before him retain control over cornblessing and rainmaking as
combined ritual blessings from below and above. It was indeed he, rather than his matrilateral
full brother Ske, who owned the ritual entitlement to promote a good yield related to soil
fertility. The division of ritual labour which occurred as a result of his punishment for
disobeying the rules might also have had to do with the loss of the status of the Gudule as the
most numerous local group. It seems that despite that loss there was the advantage of their
position as first settlers, and hence the first movers in the most important communal festival
celebrating the cosmological importance of manure production.
We have already discussed aspects of the division of ritual labour between the various
specialist clans and lineages of the Dghweɗe, a perspective we circumscribed as ‘blessings
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