Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 395
performances took place after the bull festival, while the ngwa garda and the ngwa hamtiwe
had started around the same time as the sacrifice to the deceased father (har ghwe). We
conclude from this that dzum zugune could indeed go on beyond the bull festival. It is of
course difficult to imagine that the two steps of the second stage could be divided, and that it
was only the first stage that was completed before the bull festival while the other three stages
coincided with it.
At this point we need to remind ourselves that the bull festival survived longer historically
than dzum zugune, and that the latter, from listening to Zakariya Kwire and dada Ɗga, might
have ended fifty or more years before it was reconstructed from their memories for me in
1996. At the time, which we infer was during the mid- to late-1940s, our two main
protagonists would have been in their early thirties, but we failed to ask whether they had ever
performed it. They had certainly witnessed it, and they reported from a time of the tail end of
late pre-colonial history. It was still alive in many ways during British colonial times, but we
are only able to reconstruct its basic performance structure from oral sources.
We infer that the unsettling period at the end of World War One and the raids of Hamman
Yaji might have contributed to dzum zugune being more difficult to perform, while it stopped
altogether during the later colonial period when the failed resettlement scheme resulted in the
killing of lawan Buba. Unfortunately I did not come across any mention of adult initiation
traditions in written colonial sources, and only very little regarding the bull festival, but we
believe that the latter might well have lasted into the early days of national independence. We
therefore consider ourselves lucky to have been able to reconstruct such a detailed memory
account of dzum zugune and have been able to present it here as a genuine piece of oral
history. What we can perhaps be sure of is that dzum zugune played a key role in late precolonial Dghweɗe ritual culture and it did not survive colonial times, but our protagonists
have provided us with sound data for our Dghweɗe oral history retold.
Open questions arising from our oral sources about the role of Gudule
Perhaps this is a good moment to discuss why the Gudule, according to our oral sources, did
not perform dzum zugune, especially considering their relevance to the bull festival. After all,
dzum zugune was about keeping land fertile over generations and defending it against the
invasion of strangers by a competitive system of family traditions that could even produce a
food surplus. In their role as thaghaya (seventh born) of Dghweɗe, the Gudule were very
important ritual representatives for Dghweɗe as a whole. We therefore wonder about the
claim of some of our oral protagonists, that Gudule did not perform dzum zugune because
they did not belong to Dghweɗe, despite them being considered first settlers. Several
questions arise by following that claim, but most of these questions about their alleged
difference in local origin cannot be answered with satisfaction from oral sources.
One of the claims was that the Gudule started the bull festival for the whole of Dghweɗe
because they were first settlers, but we have already worked out that this was more connected
with the oral history of southern Dghweɗe. The Gudule, together with the Hembe clan, were
seen as early settlers before the expansion of the Mughuze-Ruwa, after a long battle in the
course of which the Vaghagaya-Mughuze eventually defeated them in Gharaza. We have also
argued that the Tur tradition itself might have been quite a late pre-colonial development,
considering that Mughuze himself was an outsider who had originally been fostered by
Hembe. The claim by some of our oral sources that the Gudule were different but at the same
time autochthonous seems a contradiction in terms. Even the name 'Gudule' is somewhat
puzzling, considering that it is the same as 'Gudul' for the Mofu-Gudur on the eastern side of
the northern Mandara Mountains. We know that the Gudule were said to have listened to the
drums of their 'brothers' in Gudulyewe (Gudur) across the northern mountain range.
The situation reminds me of an oral-historical detail from the Mafa of Mazay, where a small
clan called 'Ruwa' represented the autochthonous settlers for the more numerous clans of
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