Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 434
the production of much-needed manure. Perhaps the only hint as to the importance of manure
is found in bulama Ngatha's story about the dog's excrement which served as the delivery of
the guinea corn. It is common knowledge that regional Sahel pastoralism is prehistorically
more ancient than the farming of millet or guinea corn. If we take into account that guinea
corn and animal husbandry formed such a successful symbiosis in the socio-economic culture
of the Dghweɗe, perhaps the legendary illustration is that the result was that stones eroded
and became buried behind the terrace walls of the landscape. Terrace agriculture is a
significant technological achievement, and the mythological interpretation of how it came
about might look on the surface like a tale in which the stones had once been edible before
they became soil, but it could well be interpreted as a piece of oral-historical poetry. 3
There is however a variation in the tale put to us in 1998 by Zakariya Kwire and dada Ɗga of
Ghwa'a, who claimed that guinea corn emerged from the cracks of the three stone pillars of
Durghwe, which are viewed as cosmological granaries. We will discuss this tale in the next
chapter dedicated to the importance of Durghwe, but want to mention here that it was not only
the discovery of guinea corn that was connected to Durghwe, but also primordial water, a
cosmological grinding stone and three mythological bulls. All five elements: the stones,
sorghum, three bulls, granary and water could be seen as cosmological ingredients for the
development of labour-intensive terrace cultivation in the region. This is why we like to think
that the cultivation of sorghum and manure production were prehistorically linked.
These mythological accounts do not give any hint of when it all began, but perhaps at this
point we should remind the reader of the DGB stone structures which were also buried
underground, not just as a result of erosion but as an original underground system of
chambers and passageways. 4 The other aspect of which we should perhaps remind ourselves
is the dating of the sites before the formation of the Mafa. We deduced that the formation of
the Dghweɗe was most likely a result of climate change after the earliest of the DGB sites had
been abandoned. We attempted to link all of this to the emergence of the early Wandala state
in Kirawa, a non-Islamic entity at the time. We further showed similarities to the pottery of
the DGB sites, and the small apertures of pots as a particularly sophisticated method of ritual
sorghum beer storage for commemorated family ancestors, which served, at least in
Dghweɗe, as a way of keeping the beer fresh. Besides this, we argued in the chapter on the
house as place of worship that the idea of freshness was a cosmological concept of renewal,
which we were already aware of from our Mafa research and as such could be applied to the
Dghweɗe worldview.
To aim for freshness and growth as a symbol of successful reproduction requiring human
effort throws light on the old woman who urinated on the stones and spoilt them for serving
as food. Mythologically making it the fault of an old woman points to the fact that she had
passed her menopause and the reproductive cycle of giving birth. In the Mafa context we have
for example the tale that the rainbow was seen as the urine of an old woman, and that the
rainmaker used his rainstones to remove the rainbow to make it rain. Unfortunately, I did not
enquire in Dghweɗe for a comparable mythological tale, but we remember, to mention
Zedima again, the legend where 'the roots of the sun' had been found deep inside the earth,
because Zedima had access to those technologies. His ritual ownership gave him the
entitlement to use the Durghwe mountain shrine as a regulatory method for survival, and in
the legend the now diminished chief of Wandala had to leave the hills for Kirawa.
3
Richard Fardon pointed out an interesting alternative interpretation with the suggestion that the tale
was perhaps a playful reversal, because stones were used to grind guinea corn into a soft state, and it
was perhaps more a reference to its preparation than to its cultivation (email correspondence from
2008).
4
We will return to that in the next chapter about Durghwe, and suggest an alternative
ethnoarchaeological scenario for the ritual function of the underground passageways which are so
typical for the DGB sites.
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