Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 356
(pagh means 'pour it away', yewe means water). During that performance people blow horns and play
flutes, while women make those gutural sounds called yaka. Pagh yewe is the cutting of a certain
vavanza into water. The name of this vavanza is mandatha. The water is poured over the feeding
place of the bull who is still in his shed. This feeding place is called ma'ira. This is done three times.
Now the room is cut open in the external side of the shed so that the bull can come out.
The Ɗagha diviner first assessed whether the bull was dangerous, and if he thought this was the
case he used a specific type of ritual Cissus quadrangularis called vavanz mandatha to calm the
bull down. This seemed to happen in the morning, as in the early afternoon the eldest of the
lineage of the owner of the house came to perform pagh yewe, which consisted of water with
slices of vavanz mandatha swimming about in it, being poured three times over the bull's
feeding place. The feeding place was called ma'ia and we know that it was the threshold between
the bull shed and the upper room of the father of the house (see Plate 34b). 7 We do not know
whether the eldest of the lineage was the actual eldest or a generation mate (skmama). Next, the
shed was cut open on the outside and the bull released into the backyard. We do not know how
the shed was cut open, but need to remember that it was made of solid dry stone walling and it
was about one meter deep into the ground compared to the floor of the father's upper room.
We are not sure how the bull escaped from the backyard after release. We remember that the bull
shed was directly connected to the upper room of the father and owner of the house, and
therefore was an element of the main house (see Figure 19a and 19b). This presumably meant
that perhaps further arrangements had to be made to get the bull out into the open space of the
terraced hillside of the settlement, where it was caught and tied to a tree with a special rope:
The bull runs and the people run as well and some young men even try to catch the bull. After the bull
has been caught they tie him to a tree. There is a special rope for that, which is called matatala. Now
they take the drum and beat it over the bull’s back. At the same time the wife of the owner holds her
calabash over the bull's backside. If he has two wives the other one holds her calabash over the hump.
The husband is now dancing and singing together with the people.
Young men try to recapture the running bull and tie him with a special rope called matatala to a
tree nearby. We do not know what matatala means, but remember that ropemaking was an
exclusively male task (see Plate 16a). We also know, from the Lamang bull festival of Hiɗkala,
that their rope for tying the bull after release was also called matatala, and that the Vile people
passed a matalala rope on to Hambagda after the Vile had finished their bull festival (Gwoza
notes 1994). Also among the Mafa, a ritual rope called teɓa played an important role, and I have
described that in great detail (Muller-Kosack 2003). We do not know whether the Gudule passed
a matatala rope to Hembe (see Table 9) after they had completed their bull festival. We can
therefore only assume that passing on a matalala rope meant that the sequential order of the
travelling bull festival was a unifying bond between settlement units.
We need to imagine that it was most likely a rather large crowd playing flutes and trumpets,
moving backwards and forwards so that the sound of the music undulated, echoing around the
hillside of Gudule.8 It seems the funeral drum (timbe) was beaten over the bull's back after he
was recaptured and tied to a tree. Perhaps the funeral drum was beaten because the beloved bull
of the father of the house was about to be taken back inside to be sacrificed. We think it was the
first wife who held her calabash over the bull's backside, while the hump was reserved for a
further wife. It is not impossible that the calabash of the first wife was from the loft of her lower
room, where we know important ritual tools were stored. The husband did not participate in this,
but instead danced and sang with the crowd. The reason might have been that he was very upset
7
There are some questions arising from the variety of vavanza used, and whether it had to be a Ɗagha
from the peacemaker lineage or whether a regular Ɗagha diviner would have been enough. We know that
mandatha literally means 'to calm down', but the same vavanz mandatha was also used for divining
(Chapter 3.21). One property of vavanz mandatha was that it floated in water, and the fact that the eldest
used slices of it in water and poured it three times over the feeding place before the bull’s release suggests
that his action was to calm the bull down.
8
In 2000 I witnessed the bull festival of Zlama, a Mafa village on the eastern slopes of Mount Ziver,
and recommend the reader to visit the slideshow at: www.mandaras.info/NorthernMontagnards.html
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