Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 426
mythological tale about the arrival of sorghum to the legendary tale from colonial times about
the arrest of Hamman Yaji.
In the final section we will discuss the Dghweɗe belief in a Supreme Being (gwazgafte). We
will show that the Dghweɗe viewed God as having a family and children residing in the world
above the 'hard sky' (ghaluwa), and address the gender aspect of gwazgafte as creator and
overseer. We will explore the social mirror aspects of this cosmological model by showing
how it not only repeats itself in the ancestral world below but also in the celestial world
above, by introducing the belief that God and his wife were parents themselves. We not only
show how the children of God can be seen as personal gods of humans, but that they were
also exposed to death as humans are. We will describe an aspect of divinity which killed
people, perceived as 'god the thief'. We will refer back to the material manifestation of the
belief in personal gods by discussing the gender aspects of the architecture of the house as a
place of worship.
As so often before in this book, our oral sources are extremely limited and fragmentary. Our
main protagonists on local cosmologies are bulama Ngatha of Hudimche and bulama
Mbaldawa of Tatsa and elders (1995). At the time my main objective was to compare the
cosmological ideas of the Dghweɗe with what I already knew about the Mafa of the Gouzda
area (Muller-Kosack 2003). In a later stage of our fieldwork, John and I also asked Zakariya
Kwire of Ghwa'a to review some of the local traditional ideas on cosmography. Concerning
our Mafa sources, we will use them mainly to refer to local similarities but will also discuss
some important differences. We will not pursue a wider comparison of these concepts, but
prefer to assume that some of them could have been quite widespread while others might have
been typical for the Dghweɗe only.
This world (luwa) as a mountainous disc with a hard sky above (ghaluwa)
Any Dghweɗe expression referring to the world as a whole would be misleading if we were to
see the earth as a globe. We therefore first need to point out that the Dghweɗe of the past
perceived the world as a large disc in which their mountains were seen at the centre of the
earthly universe. In that sense, luwa meant 'earth as far as one can see' from a local Dghweɗe
perspective. This included not only all Dghweɗe settlements but also those of their Gwoza
hills neighbours and those in the the adjacent plains. In that sense, luwa referred to the
familiar physical world around them from the perspective of how the Dghweɗe people lived,
worked and reproduced. From such a localised montagnard viewpoint, the word luwa was a
reference to the civilised world and the general notion of human settlement.
Before attempting to relay a late pre-colonial traditional Dghweɗe cosmographic view of the
world by summarising and discussing the oral sources available to us, we will list relevant
expressions in which luwa appears in different contexts:
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luwa (general word for this world with an emphasis on human settlement)
luwa haya (settlements of the people living in the plains)
khuɗi luwa (agglomeration of houses in the hills with their infields)
ghaluwa ('hard sky', the celestial world above the visible firmament)
gwal tung ghaluwa (mythological creatures as earthly supports for the 'hard sky')
luwa cege mcenana (world of the dead)
dhambal ce luwa (the sides of the world, north and south)
mbart luwa (anus or bottom of this world, meaning 'east' or 'beginning')
luwa mbarte (where the sun rose in the next world, and general word for the next
world)
ksluwa (meaning west, no literal meaning for ks)
We defined the word luwa by referring to it as a general word for this world in the context of
a localised flat-earth worldview. We pointed out that the traditional Dghweɗe worldview
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