Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 405
rewilding by a natural process of reforestation. This view was of course driven by political
rather than ecological considerations, and the maintenance of the fertility of the soils by longterm manuring was not even mentioned by the opponents of Stanhope White, only natural
reforestation. Also, Stanhope White was possibly not aware of the extent to which the
maintenance of terrace fertility was not only a matter of repairing them regularly, but also one
of continuing the presumably functioning subsistence economy of mixed farming and manure
production. We now know that the final death blow regarding any chance of reviving the
terrace cultivation system of the Gwoza hills, for example through sustainable tourism, was
dealt by Boko Haram, who used the mountains and their remaining traditional inhabitants as a
backup for their own survival as invaders. Neither the Nigerian government nor the
international community did anything to stop that from happening.
Before the arrival of Boko Haram, the environmental vulnerability to food shortage as a result
of bad harvest was particularly apparent in the eastern plains during a severe food crisis
across the Gwoza LGA between July and September 1998. This was already four years into
my time of visiting Dghweɗe, and so I was particularly aware of serious famine in the former
resettlement area of Barawa, while the people up in Ghwa'a reportedly suffered to a lesser
extent. One of the reasons given was that up in the hills they still had granaries. This
experience led me, during one of my following visits to Dzga, to sit down with John Zakariya
and talk about changes in land tenure and crisis management. That interview is reproduced in
parts in Chapter 3.10: 'Working the terraced land', where for example socio-economic
changes in leasing out of land were addressed. One of the new methods was the system of
short-term leases for money, and one of the impacts of this was the reversal of the importance
of the guinea corn year in favour of the millet year for cash crop production. In the second
part of the same interview John explains how and why the changes in crisis management
failed the local community of Barawa during the famine of 1998.
Crisis resolution in change (drafted in collaboration with John Zakariya in Dzga, shortly after
the severe food crisis leading to famine in Barawa between August and September 1998):
The concept of wealth and wellbeing was based in the past on the view that a father of a house
could sustain a crisis caused by a bad harvest by relying on the surplus of foodstuffs (mainly
guinea corn, beans, and millet) he had stored in his granaries. This was ideologically backed up by
having a system of initiation into responsible adulthood, which a man had the chance to achieve
over seven years. This was known in Dghweɗe as dzum zugune (dzum means referring to, going or
becoming, and zugune means male, therefore manhood means 'going male' in the sense of
becoming a responsible adult in an environment of very scarce resources). Having completed
dzum zugune meant that a man had freed himself from being confronted with a future food crisis
by having filled all his granaries, and he demonstrated this in the last stage of the initiation
ceremony by being capable of sharing out a whole granary among his fellow villagers. Dzum
zugune was, until about fifty years ago, a type of preventative crisis management system to sustain
a serious shortage of food that would otherwise have led to famine.
Nowadays the concept of achieving manhood has changed, and with it the way of managing a
potential crisis. This is mainly down to the introduction of a market economy leading to cash
crops and meat for sale, the production of which is now at the heart of the concept of being
considered a successful man. Hiring land for cash crop production and the storage of crops, millet,
beans and groundnuts, does not have the purpose of sustaining through a shortage of food, but the
crops are to be resold for cash to make a profit. It is much more difficult nowadays to find a man
who keeps all his three granaries filled, meaning having two full granaries in reserve. Nowadays
normally one full granary is seen to be enough to feed a family for one year.
Also to mention in this context is the production of local beer, which is sold for cash on local
markets. The women who make the beer and sell it often use guinea corn to make cash. The cash
might be used for buying clothes, cooking oil, salt, Maggi cubes, to buy animals or even to pay the
bridewealth for a son.
The possibility of a shortage of food appears towards the end of the rainy season, one or two
months before the new harvest. If the harvest is very bad, the following year might lead to serious
famine. Reasons for a bad harvest are mostly natural circumstances such as too little or too much
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