Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 400
is called fstaha, which instantly rings a bell from our Dghweɗe description, while the Glavda
call theirs tsufga. The latter was embedded in their big annual festival known as utiva.
We have already mentioned utiva in the context of thagla, the annual harvest festival of the
Dghweɗe. Luckily we have a good description of tsufga among the Glavda of Ngoshe Kasa
by Elisabeth Gula (1996), which we will use here to compare with dzum zugune, but before
doing that we want to have a look at Table 10 above, where we summarised what John
Zakariya (2001) reported about pughu and fstaha from Gvoko and Chikiɗe, as well as about
the tsufga stages in Glavda.
We do not know for sure whether John's informants were Glavda, Gvoko or Chikiɗe, but we
can see that he had chosen somewhat older men, presumably because they still had memories
of the traditions in question. The account of tsufga we will discuss later in the context of Eli
Gula's work, but want to mention here that the rule of not eating green leaves during the night
possibly means a sauce made of green leaves. However, this example shows that it will be
difficult to say much about that rule. We also see there were other rules, especially among the
performers of tsufga, such as not marrying each other's daughters or not fighting each other
during warfare, or even wrestling with a tsufga mate, as well as not attending the funeral in
the case of the death of a fellow performer. On the other hand, those who did not perform
tsufga had to carry performers on their back and hid afterwards because they feared being
beaten up by them on their way back from a certain place. One of the main differences with
dzum zugune pointed out was that tsufga performers did not have a running competition. It
seems to accord with the rules that they were not allowed to wrestle among themselves and
were not allowed to fight one another in warfare. The other aspect of this account is that
tsufga performers had certain dress codes which involved the use of animal skins. We hope to
make more sense of it all when later we compare it with Eli Gula's description of tsufga.
As for the Gvoko, the message that only someone rich could perform pughu comes very close
to the meaning of what we established for dzum zugune, in that the performer sat on a stool
demonstrating his independence while his people danced and enjoyed the beer and food he
shared out. It demonstrates individual achievement and sharing as signalling wealth in an
otherwise egalitarian society. What stands out is that the Gvoko had no ritual stages of
achievement going over several years, and neither did John's source give any hint of a family
tradition for achieving pughu, or a seniority rule being applied in that context.
We do not know whether the above was the case for the Chikiɗe to the north, who like the
Gvoko to the south were adjacent neighbours of the Dghweɗe. They certainly organised their
adult initiation (fstaha) over several stages, but it seems a slightly shorter period than the
Glavda. What is interesting is that the Chikiɗe went to Gava, which is in Guduf, bordering the
Glavda, and we wonder about the meaning of that. They too wore animal skins which they
replaced in certain ways throughout the stages, and we wonder what John meant by the skin
of an aborted goat. Was it a newborn baby goat or was it a baby goatskin, the abortion of
which was artificially induced for the first stage of fstaha? We also recognise that goatskin
was worn around the head in a later stage, as well as jumping off a rock and avoiding being
hit by a stone since this would have meant bad luck. Finally, dressing up in war gear as part of
the last stage also sounds familiar, indicating that someone was now free to consume
whatever he wanted, as in the case of the Dghweɗe ngwa yiye and bak zalika in the last two
stages of dzum zugune.
While the Dghweɗe bull festival was similar to that of the Lamang, they do not seem to have
had an equivalent of dzum zugune, and neither did the Zelidva, even though the ancestors of
the Zelidva originally came from Dghweɗe. However, they were adopted as local outsiders
and promoted by their Lamang-speaking local predecessors, as we have learned in the
founding legend of Kumba Zadva. That the Gvoko as well as the Glavda had something like
dzum zugune, could again be interpreted in a similar context, namely that the Glavda had
close oral-historical links to Gvoko in terms of their tradition of origin. This gives a vague
suggestion that perhaps dzum zugune had something to do with the Tur tradition. However,
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