Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 398
about the geopolitical aspect of ritual sequencing: first there was har ghwe as the ritual of the
house, next came the bull festival started by the Gudule, followed by the Vaghagaya as the
more numerous lineage section, followed by Ghwa'a as the more senior section of Dghweɗe.
Such a view answers the question why the Gudule did not perform dzum zugune, because it
was secondary to their role as custodians of the bull festival, in which they represented, as
legendary autochthonous clan group, the ethnic unity of late pre-colonial Dghweɗe.
We do not know whether dzum zugune already existed when the Gudule was finally defeated
by the expanding Vaghagaya-Mughuze lineages in Gharaza, an event we placed at the
beginning of the late pre-colonial period when we think Dghweɗe formed. We think that
dzum zugune ended in the 1940s and that the bull festival ended about twenty years later. We
cannot conclude from this reconstruction from our oral sources of the 1990s, whether dzum
zugune existed in the same way during pre-Korana times, meaning before the expansion of
the Vaghagaya. Neither do we know how the bull festival was celebrated at that time, except
that in both cases the continuing production of manure was long known to be crucial for
successful terrace farming. All these factors make our exercise about ritual sequencing rather
academic for the question of why the Gudule did not perform dzum zugune in the late 1940s.
Unfortunately we could not establish any reliable oral-historical sequence of group formation
to suggest which of the ritual services for Dghweɗe as a whole might be the most recent,
including the custodianship of the Gudule for starting the bull festival. It nevertheless makes
sense to infer that this custodianship only came about after Gudule was finally defeated, and
southern Dghweɗe came under the ritual control of the Vaghagaya. This would also explain
why the legendary connection with Gudur was established, and we suggested earlier that this
perhaps also happened in the context of the expansion of the Mafa in the wider subregion. We
know that the Mafa also expanded during late pre-colonial times, which was, in the light of
the bigger palaeoclimatic picture, the reason why we think the formation of the Dghweɗe falls
into that same period of increased rainfall in the northern parts of our subregion.
Much of our palaeoclimatic evidence supports the view that the Gwoza hills were once an
ancient and well-established terrace culture at the northern geographical edge of repetitive
cyclical droughts, in which management of chronic resource shortage was a permanent factor.
The beginning of that development might well have gone back to ancient links with the DGB
sites, as documented by archaeological and early written sources concerning early state
formation at the northern foot of the Gwoza hills. Our table of contemporaneity in Part Two
tried to demonstrate this, and we linked the 17th century, as the last most humid period, to the
most recent development, most likely triggering a south-to-north migration resulting
eventually in the formation of the Dghweɗe as presented in this book. A local history in
fragments from the grassroots, meaning a description of the Dghweɗe as it was told to us by
our oral protagonists before Boko Haram destroyed their culture, was a culture which had
already changed by the time John and I collected those remaining collective memory
fragments of their shared oral history.
The description of dzum zugune from the memory of our two main protagonists underpins this
fragmentary approach, and tells us how little we know about Dghweɗe oral history, and how
limited is our attempt of retelling it. In the next subsection we will show how the neighbours
of the Dghweɗe celebrated their equivalent of dzum zugune, demonstrating that it was a
typical subregional cultural event, perhaps very much confined to those groups who share the
Tur tradition, and therefore enforcing our view that the Gwoza hills were idiosyncratic and
that they might indeed represent a cultural-historical manifestation of an innovation that
began hundreds of years earlier with the DGB sites. Our description of dzum zugune is an
illustration of that possibility, an example of how a competitive system of terrace cultivation
produced a lasting legacy of ritual resource management in an unreliable semi-arid
environment, as is the northwesterly extension of the Mandara Mountains.
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