Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 432
fire. There is a variation on the theme, which claims that the guinea corn came out of the
Durghwe mountain shrine, and we will discuss the cosmological significance of this in the
next chapter. Our sources here are the same as in the previous section, but this time bulama
Ngatha of Hudimche is our main oral source, combined with a comparative version from the
Mafa of the Gouzda area. It was at the beginning of my fieldwork in Dghweɗe in 1995 when I
was interested in such tales, though only in a very sketchy way, especially about whether the
Dghweɗe had similar mythological tales to the Mafa. We present first the Dghweɗe account
followed by a variation of a similar account I collected in the mid-1980s among the Mafa.
This is what bulama Ngatha had to say about stones as food and how it all changed:
From the beginning, there was one man and one woman created by God. They walked around to
find something to eat and they found that they could eat stones. The stones were soft. As they
continued like that, it happened that a dog brought guinea corn and fire.
Dog brought guinea corn from God. God gave the dog grain to take it and to keep it where the dog
lived. Dog ate the grain and when he came to earth he shit it out and it germinated from his
excrement. A dog also brought fire on his tail.
The guinea corn brought by the dog was planted and it germinated and gave fruit. They planted it
again and again until the complete farmland was done. When they were in the process of planting
the guinea corn an old women came along and urinated on the stones which were still soft. After
she had done that the stones became hard.
After the guinea corn was discovered they started eating guinea corn. Now they were thinking of
making a sacrifice to their God. Therefore they picked some grain put it into the water to wash it.
They threw the grain away and used the water for sacrifice.
Now an ugly woman came. She collected the guinea corn they had thrown away and put it into
one container. It lasted for a few days and it germinated. Now she ground it and cooked it for the
first day. She cooked it again on the second day. She gathered the liquid part of it into one
container. She kept it and after two days it fermented. When they tested it it was acidy sweet and
they liked it. They asked the woman how she had done it and the woman explained. Now
everybody started doing it.
When they were enjoying guinea corn and beer (ghuze) Hamman Yaji came. Hamman Yaji was
directed by people saying that these people were very wealthy and they had goats, cows, etc. So
Hamman Yaji started coming, killed people and took away their animals and all they had. He was
selling people at the price of one goat or sheep per person.
In 1995 bulama Ngatha was still a Traditionalist and only converted to Islam about ten years
later, most likely under the influence of his son who lived in the plains and came on regular
visits to Hudimche. He emphasised that the first man and woman were created by God and
that they ate stones that were soft until a dog brought guinea corn. While with God, the dog
had been given guinea corn, and after the dog had eaten it he came to this world where it
germinated out of his excrement and was subsequently planted by man. While the guinea corn
germinated and grew, now being under the auspices of man, an old woman urinated over the
stones, an act which rendered the stones uneatable.
After the stones had become hard and the people had started eating guinea corn instead of
stones, they developed the first sacrifice to divinity (gwazgafte) by washing some of the
guinea corn in water, but then threw the grain away and only used the water as a sacrifice. An
old woman collected and kept that discarded wet grain which started to germinate, and was
then cooked by the old woman, and that led to the discovery of sorghum beer. Now
everybody did this until Hamman Yaji came and raided them, because Hamman Yaji had
discovered how wealthy the Dghweɗe had become though their discovery of planting guinea
corn. He killed people and took away their farm animals and sold the people as slaves.
The tale mixes mythological events with recent historical events, presumably to highlight that
the good times of terrace cultivation had not lasted, and that the raids of Hamman Yaji had
been the most traumatic experience of recent oral history. We described the arrest of Hamman
Yaji, and how the Dghweɗe saw themselves as the initiators of this arrest because when they
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