Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 354
Mathews (ibid) also mentions the Gudule trying to arrange marriages:
To this day, they do not go in for the marriage by capture (and subsequent payment of bride price)
which is common among the others. They prefer to arrange their marriage by negotiations
beforehand.
We first have to point out that Mathews' 'Mangala' was not the ancestor of Gudule, but one of
the three 'sons' of Gudule who stayed behind after the Gudule were defeated by the
Vaghagaya-Mughuze. What is interesting is that sixty years before my research, Mathews
already says that the Gudule were reduced in size and left Korana for Gharaza and
subsequently moved to Gudule. He also considers the Gudule to be the first settlers of what I
have sometimes referred to as the southern part of Dghweɗe. Whatever is the case, we can
fairly safely infer that the Gudule are in oral-historical terms the representatives of the once
most numerous pre-Korana clan group of what was then still referred to, from the perspective
of Ghwa'a, as 'Gharguze'.
Mathews' second quote brings us back to the marriage system of the Dghweɗe, and that the
Gudule preferred arranged marriages over marriage by capture. We already mentioned a third
option, called marriage by love or fancy, and pointed out that Gudule, as the seventh-born son
of Tasa and his first wife Katala (daughter of Wandala), misbehaved by cutting the white tail
of his father's beloved cow to give it to the girl with whom he had fallen in love. That
Mathews writes that marriage by capture 'is common among the others' is correct, because
that was indeed the rare option of marrying when marriage by promise did not allow
sufficient suitable marriage partners. The tale of how Gudule was excluded from rainmaking
seems to be a many-sided story, but it is obvious the Gudule formed a specialist clan in
Dghweɗe with ritual responsibilities for the whole of Dghweɗe, not because they increased in
number, but because they reduced, although unlike the Ɗagha and the Gaske, the Gudule
have their own settlement and clan territory.
Typical performance elements of the bull festival in Gudule
The following account is from our interview with a group of elders in Gudule in 1995. As before,
we leave the interview in the ethnographic present but break it up into individual paragraphs to
produce short summaries with comments and interpretations. Please remember that any field text
in (...) was part of the original field translation, while [...] are comments or explanations added
later for better comprehension. We also need to remember that the elders reported from
memories of one or two generations ago, when the bull festival was last performed:
The first preparations for the bull festival are to do har ghwe and har jije, followed by har khagwa.
Next, you put guinea corn into the water to do har daghile. You remove the guinea corn from the
water so that it will germinate. After germination, you dry it. On the day you dry it, you carry the big
drum to Gulve (in Gudule). There they beat the drum for their brothers in Gudulyewe. After that has
been done, the germinated and dried grain will be ground. It now gets cooked in water and then it gets
cooled and then cooked again the second day after it has shown signs of fermentation (tha'a). After
that it is kept in a large pot and after two days it is put into a beer pot (tughdhe). During this process
people come dancing because you have a bull in your house. After the beer has been put into tughdhe,
the following will happen on the main day of the bull festival.
We are already familiar, from our chapter about the house as a place of worship, with the
slaughtering period after the threshing of guinea corn, and know about the sacrifices to the
deceased father (har ghwe) and the deceased grandfather (har jije). Unfortunately we do not have
much to add about the closing ritual (har khagwa), except perhaps that parts of the meat from
har ghwe and har jije were kept and then cooked together for har khagwa as part of a ritual
related to the continuity of the extended family. Bulama Ngatha (1995) added that only in
Ghwa'a would they have used a weak and dying goat for har khagwa, which raises the
question of whether within Dghweɗe there had been differences in how the closing ritual was
performed.
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