Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 454
older man when I met him. Considering that two of them died after one sacrifice, we have at
least five who did not, and they are all descendants of Btha-Viwaya. We have artificially
added 25 years for each lineage priest descending from Btha, and only ten for the two who
were not from Btha. This allows us to imagine that Duwatha and Ngwiva might have been the
custodians of Durghwe when Barth passed by and wondered how life was up in the hills.
I find the last sentence of the interview interesting. It says that because the ritual owners of
Ghwa'a did not allow other people to sacrifice on their territory, they could not sacrifice on
other people’s territories either. This shows the egalitarian dimension of custodianship, and
emphasises that the relationship aspect of patrilineal belonging was an important sentiment of
local group formation. However, nothing was ever written down, and there were no dynastic
issues of succession if it came to ritual responsibilities linked to territory, except that
specialist lineages were more or less excluded. The exception were the Gudule, who played a
special role in being responsible for starting the bull festival, but Ghwa'a reportedly carried
out a ritual at Durghwe before the Gudule released their first bull. That ritual at Durghwe was
linked to the completion of the final stage of adult initiation (dzum zugune) which could now
run parallel to the bull festival. While the first two stages of dzum zugune started after the
sacrifice for deceased family ancestors (har ghwe and har jije), the last two stages were
connected to the beginning of the bull festival. In the context of this, a sacrifice to Durghwe
seems to have had a higher sequential priority, and could be seen to underpin our
hypothesises of 'Johode' (Ghwa'a) as an early arrival zone.
As we learned from the oral history of the fight between the Vaghagaya-Mughuze and the
Gudule, the increase in population number of one group over another could cause an existing
ritual order to reverse. Population increase must therefore be seen as a root cause for conflict
over land resources in the context of social group formation, and Durghwe was perhaps a
universal image for interethnic and regional unity, despite the chronic shortage of arable land.
In that very sense Durghwe was for all the people, but the ritual responsibility remained with
Ghwa'a. The ritual role of thaghaya as the seventh born was here cast in lineage terms, such
as the Btha lineage, and before Btha, his father Viwaya owned the responsibility. They passed
on their ritual responsibility along lineage lines, and it had to be the lineage of the seventhborn son as lucky custodian of successful local reproduction who owned the entitlement of
ritual responsibility for the cosmological power of fecundity represented by Durghwe.
Perhaps this interpretation is supported by the fact that my Dghweɗe friends told me that there
had once been a change regarding the ritual responsibility, but that the ritual handling of a
powerful place like Durghwe included the possibility of a lineage priest dying as a result of
that very duty. This reminds us of the 'slaughtering for God' ritual at the doorposts of the
entrance of a house, in which the father and owner of the house could likewise die if he did
not follow the ritual order correctly. We wonder at this point whether the ritual management
of an egalitarian but chronically dense population, which was much needed for the labourintensive agriculture, added to the stress of the custodians of Durghwe. We also need to
consider in this context that the fear of death as a result of mismanaging a ritually dense local
community not only applied to Ghwa'a but was the general situation across the Gwoza hills
and beyond. The ritual regulation of group formation therefore caused a fragmentary nesting
effect which can be heard in oral history, and which explains why we see such a complex
system of overlapping ethnolinguistic groups who have been living, transforming and ritually
re-nesting there for centuries. We therefore hope that Durghwe will be remembered as a
symbol of inter-ethnic unity and peace of the subregional late pre-colonial past.
The cosmological architecture of Durghwe
In this section we aim to explore the cosmological dimension of Durghwe, by producing an
illustrative model of its architecture according to the description of our two protagonists. We
draw from bulama Ngatha's statement that conceptually this world is like a room, with a
ceiling which is the firmament, a floor which is the earth, and a snake biting its tail surrounds
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