Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 401
we do not want to invest in that idea, since other key features of cross-cultural significance,
such as the concept of the seventh born being a symbol of good luck, were distributed
differently, as was the belief about the reincarnation of twins.
We will go on to compare the distribution of twin culture and the belief about the seventh
born being special, but here want to concentrate on what else we know about the Glavda
tsufga, and contrast it with the Dghweɗe dzum zugune, in the hope of making dzum zugune
more distinctive as a cultural variation. Cultural variation seems typical for the Gwoza hills
and the Mandara Mountains as a whole. We know for example that initiation of the youth into
adulthood was quite common among the Sukur and the ethnic Wula to the south of Tur, a
tradition also found among the Margi of Futu and the Fali of Mubi. On the other hand,
initiation for married men into adulthood was more to be found to the north of Tur. We
wonder whether the different climates have anything to do with that. After all, the 11th degree
latitude is a climatically recognised frontier between the more humid southern and the much
dryer northern Mandara Mountains. We realise that this climatic frontier is almost identical to
where the Tur heights share the same latitude with the DGB sites on the northern slopes of the
Ziver-Oupay massif.
In the above we are only making a preliminary cultural-historical suggestion as it is perhaps a
shared palaeoclimatic circumstance. We will return to it when discussing the transitional
socio-economic changes in terms of crisis management as a result of negotiating the risk of
food shortage, in the final section of this chapter. To master food shortages by producing a
surplus for storage was likely to have been more important in the dryer north of the western
Mandara Mountains than in its more humid southern parts. Next we are going to compare the
Dghweɗe dzum zugune stages with elements of the Glavda tsufga, one as mountain farmers
and the other as farmers of the adjacent intramountainous eastern plain.
According to Eli Gula (1996), tsufga was a core element of a bigger festival known as utiva,
and according to her there are no literal translations known in Glavda for tsufga or utiva. Eli
Gula points out that tsufga signified becoming an accomplished adult as a married Glavda
man, once he had performed all six stages. She also mentions Peter Athba (1989) who wrote
his final year essay on the Glavda, but he referred tsufga only briefly and claimed it consisted
of only five and not six stages. Both Eli Gula and Peter Athba had relatives in Ngoshe, but
unlike Eli, Peter was a native speaker, while Eli had to rely on her cousin John Debawa as
translator. John Debawa was also my Glavda interpreter during my ethnographic survey of
the Gwoza hills in 1994, during which time I also met Eli. Sadly, Eli Gula died in 2020, and
this account is in honour of her memory.
We have already mentioned utiva, the harvest festival which travelled across the northern part
of the Gwoza hills, including Zelidva and Guduf, and which presumably started with the
Vreke clan in the Moskota hills, but we know that the Glavda occupied the Moskota hills
before the expansion of the Mafa. My research in Vreke did not find any link to tsufga, but
we were able to establish that utiva was known as matamai in the Moskota hills, and we also
know that it was similar to the annual harvest festival that the Dghweɗe called thagla. We
remember that thagla was the only communal ritual that took place annually in Dghweɗe, and
it was explained that all communal festivals had ended due to recent cultural transformations.
These changes likely led to the end of thagla, while the sacrifice to the deceased father of a
married man (har ghwe) was eventually performed annually instead of bi-annually.
We do not know for sure whether tsufga was actually a core element of utiva, or whether it
was performed only during a guinea corn year, as was the case with dzum zugune in
Dghweɗe. Neither do we know as such about fstaha, the equivalent of adult initiation in
Chikiɗe, but we do know that utiva travelled as far as Chikiɗe but did not go into Dghweɗe. It
is therefore difficult to say whether tsufga and fstaha were performed annually only recently,
or were likewise in the past. We neither know how long along ago tsufga and utiva stopped
being performed, but assume that utiva lasted longer, as did the Dghweɗe thagla festival. The
opinion of Bulama Ngatha that the first stage of dzum zugune started with thagla, a view
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