Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 37
Gwoza hills as a sub-region, I felt unhappy and realised that everything I wrote was somehow
too detached from the reality of what happened at the same time in Dghweɗe. We have seen
above how this was the time when the situation deteriorated and that the whole of the Gwoza
hills came under the control of Boko Haram. For months on end there was only very little
hope. The Gwoza LGA, one of the poorest regions of Nigeria, became even more neglected
by the Nigerian government during that time, and as a result the Nigerian army felt incapable
of accessing the hill area. So I went back to reviewing what I had written about the colonial
past, but while I was doing that I could not stop myself thinking of my Dghweɗe friends who
were about to lose their homeland for good.
At that point I was writing about the unsettling effect of the late colonial period, a time when
the Dghweɗe of Ghwa'a, under the newly formed local Muslim elite in Gwoza town, were
forced to leave the mountains and settle in the adjacent plains. In my head, I started to make
links between the past and present, and wondered how the survivors of the Boko Haram
attacks and their future descendants as historians of tomorrow would want me to write about
their forefathers' history. This happened while I was writing about the arrest of Hamman Yaji
in 1927 and the killing of lawan Buba in 1953, events that presented an ideal scenario of
writing history from below by comparing the official colonial and the oral witness accounts
from Dghweɗe. I realised at this point that I should leave much of the oral accounts intact in
the way they had been interpreted for me by John. When I then began to plan Part Three, and
looked at the corpus of my Dghweɗe notes, I had to make up my mind how I wanted to
process them from field documents into a Dghweɗe oral history retold.
As a next step, I decided to filter out a list of topics, purely guided by the thematic structure of
my Dghweɗe notes. I then gave each topic a name derived from the main theme, and then
ordered them by starting with those topics which would relate most to the settlement history
of Dghweɗe. I began with the oral history of names and places, which lead over to the oral
history of local warfare linked to those names, followed by traditions of origin linked to a
reconstructed Dghweɗe lineage tree, which we again attempted to reconnect back to the oral
history of place names. Because I had filtered out about 25 thematic ethnographic topics, it
was not possible in the beginning to get the sequential order of their presentation right. I had
to start to write up a few initial topics first, to see how to arrange the rest of the topics in such
a way that would be thematically suited. By then it was 2016 and the Dghweɗe as I had
known them did not exist any longer in the Gwoza hills.
A history in fragments from the grassroots
My first working title for my final approach to writing Part Three was 'A Dghweɗe oral
history in fragments', which was inspired by a book called Fragments of History pertaining to
the Vill of Ramsgate (1885), in which the author presents the history of Ramsgate in Kent
according to available historical and geographical sources of the time. I thought that I could
also treat my Dghweɗe notes as historical fragments by presenting them with the greatest
possible local authenticity, simply by not filling in missing information by any theoretical or
comparative methods, but just by letting my fieldnotes speak for themselves. The plan was to
see whether an underlying narrative would evolve, which I could then hopefully contextualise
further, perhaps into a comprehensive Dghweɗe oral history.
While I was following this preliminary approach, I came across a book by William Tronzo
called The Fragment: An Incomplete History (2009). It consists of a collection of essays on
art history and criticism by scholars of numerous disciplines. Tronzo summarises his book in
the form of an intellectual advertisement as follows:
Almost everything we know about the past comes from physical and narrative fragments. Yet a
fragment is not simply a static part of a once-whole thing. It is itself something in motion over
time, manifesting successively as object, evidence, concept, and condition.
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