Chapter 3.15Dghweɗe ideas around existential personhoodIntroductionHere we mainly want to explore Dghweɗe ideas around traditional selfhood and spirithood. Ihave been pondering whether to make this a separate chapter, or should I include it in the nextchapter about worldview and cosmology? However I have decided to separate it because it ismore about the mechanisms of individual self-conceptualisation than the general mindset ofsociety, and therefore deserves to be singled out.1There was a time in the mid-1990s when I asked about the Dghweɗe words for soul and spirit,and I tried to explore the interplay between those two concepts in the context of the localbelief in witchcraft and sorcery. This was because I wanted to progress from just anunderstanding of institutions and local group formation, and wanted to understand theDghweɗe concept of components of the mind. We will see in this chapter how oral memoriesabout belief in witchcraft and sorcery take on specific forms, but we cannot present all thedifferent aspects in question, such as divination. Divination is not included as a component ofDghweɗe existential personhood in this chapter, but we will present what we know about it inChapter 3.21 as part of our data on past ways of decision making.This chapter is more about personality structure and personality traits, and how we think theyneed to be understood from the perspective of the Dghweɗe structure of the mind. In previouschapters we presented the way relational personhood was embedded in a ritually dense patternof egalitarian competitiveness, where patrilineal extended family priests were seen asmanagers of hope for good luck and avoidance of bad luck as part of the religious beliefsystem. Now we will try to construct a comprehensive model towards an understanding ofexistential personhood, which will help us to better imagine the pre-Copernican mindset ofDghweɗe adults of the past, and how their view of the world was conditioned by thecosmographic orientation we will describe in the subsequent chapter. During this attempt toreconstruct the mindset and worldview of late pre-colonial Dghweɗe from the perspective ofindividual actors we will remain aware of the patrilineal kinship system practised.In the first chapter section we start by presenting the concepts of safa (breath or life) andsɗukwe (shadow), and explore the limitations of translating them respectively as soul andspirit. In the same comprehensive way we will begin to discuss the concept of divinity(gwazgafte), to obtain a first understanding of how the belief in the supernatural as SupremeBeing influenced individual wellbeing and social action. We will explore the underlyinggender aspect of the supernatural world by introducing the reader to the meaning of ghaluwaas the word for the cosmological world above, which was seen as a place of spiritual warfarebetween sorcerers and specialist healers. In light of this, we will briefly discuss the wordshatane (shaitan in Arabic 2), used by one of our protagonists for 'evil spirit', as most likelybeing a pre-colonial influence of Islam, and will explore the modern re-conceptualisation ofDghweɗe words used in the translation of the New Testament by Esther Frick (1980). We willshow how the Christian belief system had already influenced the underlying Dghweɗeconcept of existential personhood during my time. It certainly influenced my ethnographictranslations, as my friend and research assistant John Zakariya was a devoted Christian. Thisbecame particularly obvious when we explored the ideas of soul and spirit, and of a celestialworld above this world which had been substituted by the belief in Christian heaven and thespirit of God. Both of these constructs of spirithood were translated into the Dghweɗelanguage as part of the 1980 Bible translation. They represent concepts of divinity which have12Unlike F.J. White (2013) we see existential and relational personhood as two sides of the same coin.Shaitan is the word for evil spirit in Islamic belief and it is derived from the Hebrew word satan.409
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