Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 428
the weather, and to achieve this they had to rely on divinity in the form of God (gwazgafte) as
the Supreme Being who resided at the highest possible point above the multiple upper worlds
called ghaluwa.
In cosmographic terms we have conflicting information as to how many ghaluwa there were
above one another. For example, Zakariya Kwire was convinced that there were altogether
nine worlds above, and that the earth was constantly moving. Bulama Ngatha insisted that
there were seven worlds above and seven worlds below the 'room' of luwa (this world) and
referred to them as ghaluwa (worlds above) and luwa mbarte (worlds below). We do not
know whether Zakariya Kwire had ever been influenced by the concept of a spherical
worldview, but during my time in Dghweɗe I spoke to other people who were convinced that
the earth was a disc with an umbrella world above. They had no concept of planetary
movements or that the earth orbited the sun, a cosmographic view linked to Copernican
heliocentrism. The cosmographic orientation of the pre-colonial Dghweɗe was preCopernican, underpinned by the seasonal experience of their mountain environment, and in
oral historical terms this was addressed by legendary and mythological accounts.
There seem to be several expressions referring to the next world, one is luwa mbarte while
another is luwa cege mcenana (mcenana meaning 'the dead'). There is also the word fke,
meaning 'hole', which dada Ɗga used to refer to the world beyond. It seems that luwa mbarte
was the more common expression, and we also see in our list the same words reversed as
mbart luwa. While mbart luwa referred to the east as the place where the sun reappeared daily
out of the 'anus' or 'bottom' (mbarte) of the world, luwa mbarte was where the sun rose in the
next world after it had disappeared in the west (ksluwa) of this world. As well as the 'bottom'
from where the sun rose daily, the north and south of their mountainous world were referred
to as the 'sides of the world' (dhambal ce luwa) with the same words used for both. Dhambal
was also used to refer to the sides of the human body, but this does not imply that dhambal ce
luwa meant the world was viewed as a human body. We know that mbarte not only meant
'anus' or 'bottom', marking the east and the direction from which the sun was seen to rise from
the ancestral world into the world of their descendants in this world, but also meant a new
beginning, as in kambarte for lineage section in terms of local group formation.
The cosmological sequence of mirror worlds was perceived to exist deep inside of what we
refer to as the primordial ground, and high above in what we call the celestial world. This can
perhaps be seen as a reflection of the desire to prepare for bad times. At first sight the
association of multiple mirror worlds below this world appears in reproductive terms to be a
more convincing social mirror image than God and his family living in the world above.
However, regarding the cosmological journey taken by human life, bulama Ngatha claimed
that humans were born from the celestial world above but died into the next world below,
which hints at the religious belief of life and death as a cosmographic ideation which needed
to pass through this world in order to be ritually managed. We do not know whether there was
the belief that the next world below was populated only by ancestors, but we do know that
they were seen to go through the same cycle of life and death as their descendants in this
world, meaning that they also died and became ancestors in the world below that one.
We found a similar idea about the workings of deep earth among the Mafa of Gouzda, which
confirms a regional dimension of flat-earth cosmography and the belief in multiple worlds
below and above this world. In contrast, the Mafa of Gouzda had different ideas to the
Dghweɗe regarding the journey of the sun during the night. The Mafa imagined that the sun
transformed into a ram after it had gone down in the west. The ram would then run in a semicircle through wilderness or bushland along the outer rim of the earth imagined as a disc, to
transform back into the sun again the next morning when it rose in the east. We do not know
whether the Dghweɗe also had a narrative of a 'wilderness' similar to that of the Mafa, but we
were only told about a cosmic mountain chain forming the outer rim around this world.
Looking at our illustration in Figure 25, we can only speculate as to whether the cosmic
mountain chain, separated from this world by a snake eating its tail, can be interpreted as an
uninhabitable space outside of this world (luwa). According to my research, the Mafa of
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