Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 404
calendar changed from bi-annual to annual celebrations, and that the big communal festivals
most likely disappeared before the smaller scale ones. We were able to establish a relative
chronological sequence in which we inferred that adult initiation (dzum zugune) might have
disappeared in the second half of the 1940s, followed about twenty years later by the bull
festival (har daghile) and then the harvest festival (thagla), which were all, apart from thagla,
linked to the guinea corn year. We mentioned that the sacrifice to lineage shrines (har
khalale) by the various lineage priests (thaghaya) might well have originally been linked to
thagla, and tend to think that perhaps they became gradually disconnected when thagla
ended. Other communal roles of custodianship (thaghaya), such as that of the rainmaker in
planting the first guinea corn, might have survived, including the privileged position of a
seventh born as thaghaya of an extended family with his right to be served first during the
sacrifice to his deceased father (har ghwe) or grandfather (har jije). Har ghwe might even
have replaced thagla in being performed annually by some families, especially when their
male representatives might have been away from home for seasonal work during the
agriculturally less active part of the year, which was the period when it would have been
performed.
These changes might have coincided with the arrival in the hills of Christianity and Islam
throughout the 1960s and 1970s, connecting the zone with new ideas and technologies such as
chemical fertiliser, and hence the disappearance of dung production. These new social and
technical developments were also inspired by a new labour market system, leading to the
development of Dghweɗe communities in Maiduguri and Yola which might have become
further established throughout the 1980s. The completion of that period brought about the
second generation of young adult males working away from home, and part of that
development coincided with the period when I started my ethnographic work in the Gwoza
hills in 1994.
I remember how I was trying to catch up with some of the fading traditions, particularly in
Dghweɗe, in a period that was brutally ended with the arrival of Boko Haram who finally
took over the hills in 2013. During that violent crisis it was the remaining Traditionalists who
became the saddest victims, because they were forced into conversion for the sake of physical
survival, as they had no opportunity to abandon the hills and presumably saw no other
possibility than to surrender. We know that they were used by the occupying members of
Boko Haram, to farm for them and pay tribute in the form of food supplies, since at least
2017. It was only in early 2019 that the insurgent fighters started to leave the hills, because
they reportedly felt too isolated to continue living under such remote circumstances.
Before we present my field data on changes in crisis management initiated by the food crisis
during the rainy season of 1998, we want to show how the socio-economic circumstances of
traditional crisis management had presumably already begun to change for the Dghweɗe
during colonial times, not through the arrival of a new religion, but more as the result of
world political and technical influences. At the root of this might have been a severe locust
invasion in the early 1930s, as mentioned in colonial reports (Stanhope White 1949-57 and
the 1930 Report to League Nations) and also ritual adjustments made by the British to avoid
conflict between ritually interconnected villages, by stopping successive communal festivals
and replacing them with simultaneous ones to avoid neighbouring villages fighting as a result
of an alleged overindulgence in beer during feasting (Colonial Report to League of Nations
1935:18). Technical changes might have been introduced by new methods of combatting
locust infestation (ibid 1930/31), and chemical fertiliser is mentioned in Stanhope White's
exchange of letters with the resident of Borno between 1949 and 1957 (ibid). The colonial
political agenda not to listen to Stanhope White's suggestions was also linked to the attempt to
bring people down from the hills to better control them, the eventual consequence of which
was a new local Islamic elite in Gwoza town.
We have discussed this in Part Two, and now want to add that it was believed at the time that
the agricultural terraces of Ghwa'a (Johode) in particular, described by Stanhope White as a
unique cultural heritage, would not erode as a result of abandonment, because of their inferred
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