Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 418
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a gwal ngurɗe can be wudiye, or wudiye va if someone could ask him for medicine to
kill someone, or if he used his own medicine to kill. If someone is affected by very
bad sorcery, that person might finally seek help from a gwal ngarɗe who is wudiye va
rather than just wudiye, to find the right medicine to defend himself
people who are mentally disturbed are called kwiya
mentally handicapped people are called ragha (can also mean dangerous)
nzagha kwa is someone behaves oddly, says something most people would not agree
with
Our list starts with the Dghweɗe word rɗa for the sex act, which we also interpret as the word
for sex drive in general because it refers to the action of having sex. It is perhaps interesting to
note in this context that female witches could only kill children up to the age of puberty,
because that was the biological moment when the sex drive indicated the beginning of
physical adulthood which included the ability to give birth to new life. Once a girl or boy had
reached sexual maturity, he or she could no longer be killed by a wadighe, but only by a
zalghede, who might mark the ground with their clitoris or testicles as a symbol of his
supernatural power. On the other hand, we have pointed out that such accusations might have
had a completely different cause, perhaps rooted in a conflict over shortage of land. 5
We also want to repeat here that women were not seen as having personal gods, while
children did have them, but children's were not as powerful as those of men. In our opinion
this implies that the power of gwazgafte as divine protection for fathers included the duty of a
husband to take particular care of the supernatural wellbeing of his wives and children. We
have seen, in the chapter about the house as place of worship, that the father of the house
could die if he did not follow a certain ritual regime, for example performing the sacrifice to
God's doorpost (wuts gwazgafte), which was not only the entry point of a traditional
homestead but also represented a man's house god (see Chapter 3.12).
Our list shows the words for handsome (game) and ugly (baza), and also the use of those
words for being good or bad. We doubt that this implies that the Dghweɗe concept of looks
had a behavioural dimension, but the word baza is also used in ski bazanana (as described in
our next section) which means someone doing bad things. This seems to imply a fair range of
meanings. However, the meaning of being a good or a bad person was possibly better
expressed in the term wuɗiye for a positive personality, and wuɗiye va for a negative
personality. As combined expressions they could take on particular meanings, especially
when it came to defining sorcery. A zalgheɗe for example was only seen as wuɗiye va, while
a gwal ngurde could be both wuɗiye and wuɗiye va. Considering that someone who owned
medicine to treat severe cases of sorcery would have been seen as someone who most likely
combined good as well as bad personality traits, it demonstrates how potentially dangerous
and ambivalent powerful healers might once have been perceived in late pre-colonial
Dghweɗe.
There are other personality traits in our list, which appear as oppositional concepts, such as
being a generous personality (nɗabe) or a greedy one (huwe). We could perhaps identify these
as unselfish or selfish personality types. We do not know whether our Dghweɗe friends would
have thought that someone who was huwe was more prone to committing witchcraft, or
whether a specialist healer could be both huwe and nɗabe. Neither do we know whether
someone generous was seen as being more vulnerable to sorcery attacks than someone
greedy. Of course, this is pure speculation on our side. We infer here that nɗabe and huwe
could refer to anyone, including those who had the special ability to commit sorcery or to heal
5
Godula Kosack (2012:290f) points out that the 245 Mafa women she interviewed in Gouzda in the
1990s about the frequency of sorcery accusations claimed that the most common causes for
contemporary male sorcery attacks were 28% conflicts over inheritance rights linked to farmland. The
next most common cause was 16% envy over the economic success of neighbours, while 14% was
about a personal offence or insult and 12% was linked to spirit abduction (either to initiate an abduction
or getting oneself released) and 10% had to do with everyday conflicts over witchcraft accusations.
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