Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 437
'god the thief' was quite powerful because he could kill without a man’s personal god having
any prior knowledge. We have further learned that women most likely did not need personal
gods because they had no sacrificial responsibilities. Social relationships on earth were
reflected in the celestial world, with God, his wife and children, plus other relatives such as
God's brother, being a social mirror image of this world. Because of this, God was like the
father of a house, and as overseer of the world he was male. Therefore it would be expected
that God being perceived as male was the reason the father of a house ritually managed the
relationship with divinity and the celestial world. We have seen however that the traditional
house as a place of worship has many female aspects, not only embedded in the architecture
but also in the ritual behaviour of the performers.
Regarding material objects representing the Dghweɗe belief in God, such as ritual pots and
ancestor stones, Dghweɗe Christians often expressed the opinion that for Traditionalists, these
objects were not symbolic representations of the divine, but that Traditionalists believed the
objects themselves were gods. Their views about their forbears' pre-colonial past reminded
me of the controversy between Catholics and Protestants, about whether the communion wine
was the blood of Jesus or only a symbol. In my opinion it is justifiable to say that in both
cases it is a matter of belief. The main difference is perhaps that in the case of the
Traditionalists, the belief in the power of divinity was not manifested in the written word but
was part of a localised oral culture which had a more figurative way of thinking. In this way,
objects linked to daily life formed the cognitive basis of belief. We remember the eating
bowls and cooking pots transformed into ritual objects to feed and nurture, and which
cosmologically expressed the gender aspects of reproduction.
This brings us back to the title of this chapter, and points to the worldview of the Dghweɗe as
a traditionally oral and egalitarian society farming in a challenging semi-arid environment. In
our opinion all these environmental factors are played out in their cosmological thinking, in
which myths and the belief in a Supreme Being are integrated. There is a strong socioeconomic component linked to a subsistence way of life in which women were seen only as
reproductive assets, a view we hope we have managed to highlight and call out by pointing to
the strong gender aspects in all the rituals described. Concerning the celestial or divine world,
we still do not know whether God had only one or several wives, but we would not be
surprised if the Dghweɗe of the pre-colonial past imagined that God did have several wives,
and perhaps when our Traditionalist Dghweɗe friends said 'God’s wife' it was God's first wife
to whom they were referring.
As we have discovered so far in this book, men and women cooperated along the lines of
kinship and local group formation, including lineage-splitting by 'kitchen' (kuɗige). The
gender division of labour was also expressed in tasks such as rope-making, and cooperation
was shown by the example of a rope for tying a sacrificial bull being passed on from one
settlement unit to the next, as seen in the travelling bull festival of Hiɗkala (Hambagda). The
Dghweɗe belief in a Supreme Being as a male representation of divinity is ritually expressed
by the fact that women were excluded from sacrificing, but at the same time this put a great
weight of moral responsibility upon men as heads of families. We remember how a woman
feared that her husband might die if he did not perform all the rituals in the sacrifice to his
house god during har gwazgafte (slaughtering for divinity) in the correct way. The first wife,
her co-wives and children had to remain indoors during this sacrifice to the doorpost (wuts
gwazgafte). We further saw in the chapter about adult initiation (dzum zugune) that fathers
and husbands were seen very much as warriors, and that they cared for their families by
striving for individual and collective achievement to prevent future food shortages.
Conclusion
We began this chapter with the cosmographic image of how the Traditional Dghweɗe thought
their mountain world was embedded in a universe of multiple worlds above and below the
flat-earth cosmography of this world. We described the vision behind such a cosmographic
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