Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 425
Chapter 3.16
Localised flat-earth worldview and cosmology
Introduction
In cosmographic terms the fundamental cognitive orientation of the Dghweɗe of the late precolonial past was within an archaic flat-earth model in which we think they saw themselves at
the centre of the world. This cosmographic orientation inspired their ideas regarding the
workings of the world, which was not a global one surrounded by a universe, but a land mass
with a deeper ancestral world underneath and a celestial ‘umbrella world’ far above the winds
and clouds. In their world, the sun rose in the morning out of the 'anus' of the deep earth in the
east, and disappeared in the evening in the west to produce daylight in the next world below.
This chapter puts together the various oral fragments we collected in the mid-1990s about the
historic Dghweɗe worldview and cosmology, and we present it here as a hypothetical model
reconstructed from a limited number of oral memories which we have recast as contextualised
illustrations in our ethnographic imagination.
We begin this chapter about the shape of the world by first examining the concept of luwa as
the Dghweɗe word for this world, the place where life took place. We will show how luwa
appears in other connections, for example in luwa haya meaning the people of the adjacent
plains, and in ghaluwa meaning the celestial world. We will refer back to the concept of khuɗi
luwa as the word for settlement unit and its underlying meaning of 'stomach' of this world, to
indicate the typical lifestyle of the Dghweɗe where manure production was a key element of
keeping the mountain environment fertile. We will discuss the expression luwa mbarte or
'bottom' of the world as being the world of the ancestors, and the idea of multiple
cosmological worlds as mirror worlds not only below but also above the 'hard sky' of the
ceiling of this world (ghaluwa). We will attempt to interpret their idea of multiple worlds by
using the concept of the seventh born as a cosmographic expression of reproduction, which
here takes the form of cosmological fecundity.
We will compare the cosmographic ideas of the Dghweɗe with similar ideas among the Mafa
of Gouzda and the DGB area, and also point out a couple of differences. By doing so we are
not suggesting any historical link to the 'Godaliy' tradition (see Chapter 3.3) of the DGB area,
but only want to underpin our limited Dghweɗe field data. For illustration we will conclude
the section about the most likely cosmographic orientation of the late pre-colonial Dghweɗe
with an illustrative model in which a mountain chain forms the outer rim of the inhabitable
world, and where a snake (sishe) surrounds the living world (luwa) by holding her tail in her
mouth. We will point out that the snake eating its tail is a universal image known as
Ouroboros, and we will briefly discuss its presumed meaning in light of the Dghweɗe
worldview. In that context we will emphasise that the Dghweɗe cosmological snake is more a
symbol of reproduction than one of eternal renewal, by pointing to their subsistence economy
and the chronic climatic insecurity stemming from their palaeoclimatic embeddedness in the
semi-arid environment of the Gwoza hills.
In the following section we will discuss the Dghweɗe mythological tale about how stones
stopped being the main source of food when guinea corn was brought from the celestial world
by a dog. We will again use comparative oral data from the Mafa of Gouzda to underpin the
regional dimension of this tale. As for our cosmographic model, our oral sources are very
limited, but we will see how the tale can be linked to the emergence of terrace cultivation, and
that it underlines the importance of the arrival of guinea corn, and we will link it to the
development of manure production. We will discuss why bulama Ngatha condensed such a
long-term prehistoric development into such an immediate event, as if it had happened in a
moment. By doing so we will try to understand the workings of the underlying worldview
expressed in bulama Ngatha’s approach to oral history, by showing how he connects the
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