Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 421
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dag-gwaya (dag = something; gwaya = disappear)
General meaning: 'Something that disappears magically'. Sorcerers make themselves
disappear magically. Your guinea corn or a tree might magically disappear. Many
such things also happen during the night, e.g. a stone might transform into a cow, or a
water spirit (khalale) appears as a human being, then suddenly disappears again.
The first two terms, thayanga and tsakine, signify personality traits in which the former was
more a reference to the institutionalised versions of such especially talented people such as
rainmakers, while the second was more a reference to people referred to as sorcerers.
Thayanga can be interpreted as a positive personality trait because it served the greater good
of the community, while tsakine was more about injuring the wellbeing of the public. John
pointed out to me that there was no noun for evil or the Christian devil, but only a verb (ski
bazanana) which was about doing bad things or behaving badly. We already mentioned that
the presumed implication of ski bazanana was that there was no negative equivalent of God
(gwazgafte) in the form of a noun, and that it depended instead on what humans did with their
supernatural talents. In the context of this, we showed that a powerful gwal ngurde (specialist
healer) was perceived as incorporating good and evil within himself. He was seen as being
both positively and negatively talented in a supernatural dimension and was therefore a
particularly dangerous personality type. We also showed that such extreme supernatural
characteristics were more or less exclusively a male domain.
We have already introduced some of the more positive ritual agents as members of specialist
lineages. They were for example rainmakers, who were part of the social structure. However
it seems that these talents and gifts were not the result of belonging to such specialist lineages
but were more the result of those talents and gifts becoming institutionalised. The second
category of generally less positive agents was not all negative it seems, and included those
who 'fought wars in the night in heaven (ghaluwa)' as John expressed it. We have already
pointed out that the word 'heaven' might not be a suitable translation of ghaluwa, and instead
have spoken of 'the cosmological world above' where supernaturally gifted healers fought
equally gifted sorcerers.
We will revisit the underlying cosmological worldview linked to those ideas later. In this
chapter we are only concerned with the concept of personhood and personality structure,
showing that the supernatural aspect of personhood was embedded in the specific personality
characteristics listed above. They were not the result of pathological confusion, and we have
already demonstrated in the previous section that the Dghweɗe term kwiya was a separate
concept for a mental disorder that might possibly have similar symptoms to those displayed
by sufferers of witchcraft or sorcery. Supernatural personhood was part of the cosmological
belief system and had a powerful transformational capacity which not only applied to humans
but also to familiar objects of the Dghweɗe environment.
The following section on oath swearing and cursing will throw light on the ritual aspect of the
belief in sorcery as the most negatively perceived dimension of the transformational powers
with which some people were viewed as being endowed. We will describe the importance of
local places specifically dedicated to the public treatment of chronic offenders of witchcraft
and sorcery. We have chosen to include this particular fragment of our Dghweɗe oral history
retold with this chapter, since it demonstrates another institutionalisation of the supernatural
dimension of personhood, this time as part of the traditional justice system.
Proclaiming innocence by individuals accused of sorcery or witchcraft in the past
The Dghweɗe word for cursing is ghawaghawa, while the word for a place where someone
was cursed was referred to as vakwaɗa, best translated as 'swearing place', which is a
reference to swearing an oath of innocence in public. This was what John explained to me in
1995 during a brief interview about past accusations of sorcery, which we present here in the
ethnographic present:
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