Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 409
called 'Gharghuze'. The lineage sections of the Vaghagaya of southern Dghweɗe were, in late
pre-colonial times, the main territorial competitors of the Thakara of Ghwa'a. There was also
the place where the wives of the ngwa kwalanglanga (second stage) performers threw guinea
corn and tigernut flour over their husbands while they were dancing past, as they arrived from
the house of the seventh born, the lineage custodian (thaghaya) of Ghwa'a. Not to forget
Fkagh ga Maruwa, the central location where most of the dances took place, or Fkagh Dzga
where the ngwa hamtiwe (first stage) brought their beer-filled jahurimbe bowls to be counted
by the elders. These were all naturally flat places kept for communal ritual use in the
otherwise often rocky but mostly terraced and highly populated hillside of Ghwa'a, which was
crowned by the mountain Durghwe with the most important subregional rain shrine at its
summit. We remind ourselves that Durghwe, with its three distinctly visible rock pillars,
represented an interethnic place of ritual unity, and it also had a cosmographic dimension in
which the three pillars were seen as three granaries. We will present more oral data on the
Dghweɗe cosmography of Durghwe in greater detail later, as part of Chapter 3.17.
The summary descriptions I produced in the field in 1996, and which followed our map of
public points and places important for dzum zugune (Figure 22), was possibly a bit confusing
at first, and it might have taken the reader some time to become familiar with the performance
elements of dzum zugune, overlapping and/or running alongside one another depending on the
various ritual stages. Of course, our presentation is a reconstruction, and we are aware that it
might not exactly follow reality, but we have to remember that the whole account is based on
memories from the mid-1940s or earlier, when it most likely stopped being performed. We
also discussed the fact that dzum zugune was in sequential calendar terms not only performed
between the sacrifice to a deceased father (har ghwe) and the bull festival (har daghile), but
that the higher stages, in particular the communal initiation (fstaha) near the rainmaker's
house, might have been performed after the bull festival had been started by the Gudule. We
know from the description of the bull festival that it first travelled through southern Dghweɗe
before it reached the northern part of Dghweɗe, despite the latter being seen as more senior in
terms of settlement period and local group formation.
We also tried to explore why the Gudule did not perform dzum zugune, especially considering
their key role as custodians of the bull festival. The sequential order of their starting the bull
festival, as shown by the fact that the senior rainmaker had to wait for them before ritually
planting the spear, potentially gives meaning to the legendary account of Gudule and Ske
having been ancestral brothers of the same mother, of whom Gudule was the seventh born. As
custodian of the bull festival for the whole of Dghweɗe, he had to begin before his ancestral
senior brother from the Gaske rainmaker lineage could plant the spear in the ritual dunghole.
Only after that could the ngwa yiye have their public initiation (fstaha) nearby. However, the
seventh born of Ghwa'a had to sacrifice a bull to Durghwe even before the rainmaker could
place the spear in the ritual dunghole. Unfortunately we do not know whether the sacrifice of
a bull by the seventh born of Ghwa'a at Durghwe happened before or after the Gudule started
the bull festival. We remember that the Gudule themselves had to wait for their 'brothers' in
Gudulyewe (Gudur) to beat the drums, to indicate that they had started it also.
Our presentation of ritual sequencing is far too fragmented to draw informed oral-historical
conclusions. This renders most of our hypothetical assumptions uncertain and speculative,
since some of the sequences might have just been a local coincidence, but they might well
have been a reflection of past ritual sequences across Dghweɗe as a whole. We finally came
to realise that there were too many open questions concerning how dzum zugune might have
been embedded in the wider ritual calendar of Dghweɗe as a whole. We tried to overcome our
severe lack of oral data by employing ethnologically-informed speculation about a possible
scenario of an equivalent of the ngwa yiye stage of fstaha in Gharaza. Our scenario included
the role of the rainmaker and that of the Gudule in the context of dzum zugune in southern
Dghweɗe. We posed the hypothetical question of whether the Gudule had a seat among the
lineage elders of Vaghagaya in Gharaza, considering that the Vaghagaya had finally defeated
the Gudule as first settlers of southern Dghweɗe. We now have to admit that we will never
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