Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 438
orientation and attempted to point to the cognitive implications that such a view of the world
implied. It was a mountainous living world, however the earth was not a globe circulating in
seasonal sequences around the sun, but the earth was at the centre and the sun rose out of its
'rectum' bringing daylight from the east, then the sun sank back into the earth in the west
where it brought daylight to the next world where the ancestors lived. Below the next world
they imagined multiple other next worlds which looked exactly like this world, and it seems it
was common to think that there were up to seven such next worlds, all mirror images of one
another. A similar idea existed for the celestial world above, where God, his first wife and
children lived. That world above this world was separated from the surface of the earth by an
atmospheric space called vale, imagined to be below a 'hard sky' (firmament) and where the
breathable air, wind and clouds were part of this world. The idea was that the 'hard sky'
separated the celestial world from this world and was imagined to rest either on an outer
cosmic mountain chain or a wall of calabash gourds, and a cosmological snake with its tail in
its mouth surrounded the living world. It was thought that the living world would come to an
end if the cosmological snake died.
We interpreted the past cosmographic orientation of the Dghweɗe as a contextualised version
of their mythological worldview in which development had taken place over time, starting
with a period when stones were soft and served as food, together with fruits of trees. It was a
carefree life until an old woman urinated over the stones which caused them to become hard
and no longer edible. We interpreted this as an environmental crisis in which drought and lack
of fertility might have occurred, represented by a post-menstrual woman no longer able to
give birth. What happened next was that dog went to the celestial world where God lived, and
God gave the dog sorghum to eat. When the dog came back to earth, humans found that
sorghum had germinated from the dog's excrement and they started planting sorghum.
Because people wanted to honour God for the sorghum he had given them, they put the
sorghum into water and used the water for libation and threw the sorghum grain away. Next,
an ugly woman came along and collected the discarded sorghum, which had started to
germinate because it was wet from the water. She took it and put it in a pot and cooked it
repeatedly. Implied with this was that the dog had also brought fire from God by carrying it
on his tail. The ugly woman left the germinated and boiled sorghum and it started to ferment,
and when people tried it they found that it tasted acidic and sweet at the same time, and this
was how the ancestors discovered sorghum beer (ghuze).
The Dghweɗe now lived a very carefree life again, which lasted for a long time because after
they had buried the stones and built the terrace fields and houses they developed a culture of
mixed farming in which they produced manure for keeping the terrace fields fertile. This went
on for a long time until Hamman Yaji raided. This mythologically enhanced version of events
was relayed to us by bulama Ngatha, and we discussed it here by suggesting that perhaps the
traumatic raids of Hamman Yaji were the most prominent event in oral historical memory, as
he continued raiding after the German colonial powers had lost their footing in Borno as a
result of World War One. We referred to the Dghweɗe version of the arrest of Hamman Yaji
in which the Dghweɗe sought help from the British colonial powers by the ritual means of
Cissus quadrangularis, under the auspices of Vaima. Vaima was from the peacemaker lineage
Ɗagha and was the first bulama of Ghwa'a during early British colonial times, and was
quoted by Lewis (1925) under the name of 'Baima'. The transition from pre-colonial to
colonial times, and finally to national independence and modern times during which the
Dghweɗe culture transformed, was perceived by bulama Ngatha in such a way that in his oral
account he contextualised these changes with the mythological discovery of guinea corn. We
mentioned that the traumatic slave raids of Hamman Yaji during early colonial times in the
Gwoza hills have only been surpassed by the occupation of Boko Haram.
We also discussed the Dghweɗe belief in gwazgafte as Supreme Being, and showed that God
was perceived as male and that he had a wife, whom we presumed to be his first wife and
mother of his children. Interestingly there was no name for God's wife, or any reference to her
as a goddess, and in terms of sacrificial responsibilities she was as powerless as a man's first
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