Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 449
and we can vaguely recognise the western part of the high valley separating the Dghweɗe
massif from the Gvoko massif. Barth says he wished he had sketched this first proper view of
the top end of the western chain of the Gwoza hills. The reason he did not was that Billama,
his interpreter and main assistant, was not with him. Perhaps this explains why there is no text
record of Mt Legga, and no mention of the Guduf saddle by Barth.
Figure 26c shows his first view, at least from close up, and not far from Uje Kassua on
Moisel's map (who seems to refer to Barth's Palamari as Falama). We think this is how it
might have looked to Barth when he first saw 'Mt Deladeba' and then decided to mark it as a
single mountain. He was most likely not close enough, or at a slightly different angle, and
therefore did not see the Mora hills visible afar in our reconstruction. I remember that view
from my own journeys. Suddenly the top end of the Zelidva spur appears in a quite majestic
way on the horizon, out of an otherwise very flat plain so typical for the southern Lake Chad
Basin. It is a pity I never managed to travel the route that Barth took, to see for myself which
mountain tops he might actually have seen.
We presented the Tur tradition in its wider subregional context in Chapter 3.3, and mentioned
Mt Gulak as an early point of entry which we think resulted from an earlier pre-colonial
north-to-south tradition of origin from the area of Barth's Molghoy, close to our Mutube. We
then connected that tradition to the Margi of Mulgwe, and established a Margi tradition in Tur
which linked back to Mt Gulak. We developed the hypothesis that the 18th century led to a
strong south-to-north migration as a result of a wet period which ended about fifty years
before Barth's journey. The 19th and 20th centuries were marked by frequent short-term
climate emergencies of great aridity, and if we compare Barth's time in June 1851 with the
palaeoclimatic context of Figure 16 (Chapter 3.8), we recognise that this might have been a
rather arid phase too. We refer to that period as late pre-colonial times, and can speculate that
Durghwe was possibly in high demand as an interethnic shrine at that time.
This hypothesis is supported by our conclusion that Durghwe was presumably by far the most
important rain shrine north of the 11° latitude, and that Barth's Mt Legga was therefore ideally
positioned as a mountain with a similar ritual purpose. We know from our oral sources that
people came from outside Ghwa'a to ask for assistance for a great variety of reasons, not only
because of rain. In the past this included any kind of plague such as locusts, or disease such as
smallpox. It was then that interethnic sacrifices to Durghwe were most likely carried out. We
can also make an informed guess that the local Btha lineage were the custodians of Durghwe
during the mid-19th century, and that it was their seventh-born lineage priest (thaghaya) who
carried out such regional requests. Those requests came for example from Gvoko, and also
from as far away as Tur. We know that during the end of the Hamman Yaji years Durghwe
played a role as the most northern mountain shrine in the organisation of resistance, which
included Tur as a key ally. They all reportedly came to Ghwa'a to participate in the campaign
against the violent raids of Hamman Yaji.
In the next section we will present the oral account by Zakariya Kwire and dada Ɗga of
Ghwa'a about the legendary significance of Durghwe as a mountain shrine, and will introduce
the reader to the cosmological dimension of Durghwe. We think that the collective memories
of our two protagonists were part of a late pre-colonial belief system that was in place when
Barth travelled down the western plain in early June 1851. We will present Durghwe as a
model case to obtain a better ethnoarchaeological understanding of the DGB sites from the
northern slopes of the Oupay massif. We linked these sites to the early cultivation of sorghum
in a mixed farming system where it was most likely that the production of animal manure was
the critical element, and we suggested that the ritual importance of guinea corn can be linked
back to that early pre-colonial period. That the three pillars of Durghwe were seen as
granaries endows them with cosmological meaning, and they were believed to have given
sorghum to the ancient people through the cracks, only visible to the close observer, on their
otherwise impenetrable surface.
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