Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 407
dancing the yiye and shouting 'Yi Ye, Yi Ye', was certainly not an option. We know that Boko
Haram took over Gwoza town and turned it into an Islamic caliphate for about six months
between August 2014 and March 2015, before it was freed by the Nigerian army, but the
mountains were never liberated and were just left to their own devices.
We do not know what exactly happened in Ghwa'a during that period, or later or even now,
but we do know that it was and partially still is in a terrible crisis, and that it must have left
serious traces in their collective memory and sense of identity. If we speak of the Dghweɗe
now, we have to acknowledge that the majority of them no longer live in their familiar
homelands, neither in the mountains nor in the adjacent plains. In the context of this, the
Dghweɗe originating from Ghwa'a and Barawa might have been hit the hardest, because
Barawa, as the former resettlement linked to Ghwa'a, is in the eastern intramountainous plain.
Some of the land there is much contested, since it is very good for profitable onion
cultivation, while the terraced hillsides of Ghwa'a are still not freed. We pointed out earlier
that an unknown number of our oral protagonists fell victim to Boko Haram, and the
surviving Traditionalists were then forced by the terrorists as their temporary rulers to farm
for them.
Conclusion
This chapter has shown that dzum zugune was perhaps the most distinct ritual aspect of
sustainable risk management and crisis prevention once practised by the Dghweɗe. Our
reconstruction of the tradition is by far the most convincing demonstration of how culturally
sophisticated and well established in socio-economic terms the method of terrace cultivation
still was in this part of the Gwoza hills, at least during early colonial times. We remember
how Stanhope White tried to alert his colonial colleagues to the importance of preserving the
physical part of the rich terrace culture of Ghwa'a, but the history of it being labelled an
Unsettled District did not allow for that, even leading in 1953 to the killing of the former
village head of Gwoza, lawan Buba, in Ghwa'a, an event that deeply traumatised and
marginalised this part of Dghweɗe for a long time afterwards. The sad development of how
Dghweɗe eventually fell victim to Boko Haram, who used the hills as an operational base to
launch attacks in the adjacent plains, and then as a means for survival, is indeed
heartbreaking.
It is in particular the immaterial cultural aspect of dzum zugune which shows how, in an
egalitarian society, individuality and wealth creation found a space to express itself for the
general good and long-term wellbeing of the Dghweɗe community of Ghwa'a. On the one
hand there was the aspect of family tradition and the support family members gave to one
another in keeping dzum zugune going for the living. On the other hand, the death of the next
person in line to start dzum zugune would reopen the cycle for new candidates, if that
deceased senior had not managed to perform it during his lifetime. However, any potential
successor had to demonstrate, with his first sacrifice to his deceased father (kaɓa), that he
could save enough guinea corn to provide beer and food for all his extended family members
before he could even consider starting it. As a family tradition, dzum zugune also included the
kindred of the various mothers of the sons of a man, and their sons too would have passed on
beer and a billy goat to their maternal uncles if they wanted to perform dzum zugune ahead of
them.
The system of saving crops as a sign of the economic success of the head of a household
compound marks the nuclear family out, not only as the residential but also as the basic
corporate group when it came to preventing a potential food crisis. The Dghweɗe system of
dzum zugune not only promoted competition among individual family heads, but also
cooperation between extended family members, by not just relying on age but on personal
ability to succeed. Someone who had achieved dzum zugune would have achieved a status
that was very desirable for members of the wider Dghweɗe community. Our comparison with
for example the Glavda tsufga ritual has shown how that status was reflected in the sequential
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