Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 456
Figure 27: Cosmography of Durghwe with croaking toad and the three bulls in deep water
We would like to compare the aspect of topographical visibility with the visibility of DGB
sites on the northern slopes of the Oupay massif. All the DGB sites overlook the northwestern
end of the Mandara Mountains, and they remain more or less visible to one another the higher
the sites rise topographically, being rooted on various high points of the northern slopes of
Oupay massif. Among them, the highest was found near the summit of Mt Oupay, but they
were all man-made buildings, architectural structures consisting of smooth dry stone walling
with underground passageways. We hypothesise here that they might have been cosmological
representations of the inner life of terraced mountainsides, serving not only locally but also on
a regional level for the ritual promotion of fecundity.
We mentioned earlier in a footnote, the legends of foothills being seen as collapsed
cosmological buildings on both sides of the Dghweɗe massif. These were seen as towers that
people once tried to build to access much-needed rain. In the case of the foothill known as
'Bebe' in Vile, the higher they built, the less they were able to communicate with one another.
This meant the people working on top of the tower were not able to relay the warning
received from God not to carry on. On the Barawa side, there was a similar legend about a
collapsed pile of rocks known as 'Dheye' at the beginning of the mountain path from Barawa
leading up to Ghwa'a. Two legendary men blew a horn to communicate from the top of the
tower, but the tower collapsed, and underneath the stones was water, and the bulls and cows
of the water spirit came out of the water during the night. A local story goes that several
generations ago, during pre-colonial times, a man by the name of Dzahlava came along and
put some dung on the place of the collapsed tower, and as a result he developed a great wealth
of cattle.
We think that our Dghweɗe friends referred to the legend of Dzahlava because they wanted to
underpin their view that the rock pillars of Durghwe were rooted in an independent source of
water, and that underneath those three pillars lived three cosmological bulls of white, black
and ash colour. According to our friends, those three bulls came out in the night and ate grass
at Tar Durghwe. My Dghweɗe friends did indeed wonder whether I had seen those bulls, and
explained that they belonged to the water spirit known as khalala, which we know was also
the word for lineage shrine. The cosmological importance of Durghwe was beyond lineage
affiliation however, and had a universal significance, and was there for everyone!
Our Dghweɗe friends also wondered whether someone might have thrown dung on the bulls
appearing out of Durghwe in the night so the water spirit would not be able take them back. I
remember a similar narrative from the Mafa area of Gouzda, where the first ever bull of the
bull festival had been taken away from the water spirit by using dung. In a way, this statement
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