Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 459
Chapter 3.18
The significance of the seventh and the eighth-born child
Introduction
Chapter 3.6 dealt with the use and meaning of social relationship terms in the kinship
vocabulary of the Dghweɗe, but explicitly excluded the seventh-born son (thaghaya) due to
interconnected complexities and the central role the seventh born played in the Dghweɗe
belief system. One of the complexities is that the positive image of a boy as the seventh-born
child needs to be seen in relation to the negative image of the eighth-born child. Instead of
being ritually promoted, eighth-born children were historically cast out or fell victim to
infanticide. We have already referred to the ancestor-centred thaghaya lineages which
represented good luck on the local group level, epitomised by the patrilineal succession of
seventh-born descendants as earth or lineage priests.
This aspect of Dghweɗe social organisation is about group membership through classificatory
lineal descent, and the formation of what we refer to as localised clan and lineage
groups. Ancestor-centred group membership and the succession of lineage priests is the issue
here, which we need to distinguish from the intergenerational inheritance rights of seventhborn sons. 1 We will illustrate how succession in relation to the inheritance of property was not
based on classificatory descent but operated along genealogically uninterrupted branches of
matrilateral full-brothers. We will also show that it is important to differentiate between wifecentred and family-centred seventh-born sons, in the context of which a seventh-born son of a
wife from a secondary marriage was considered as seventh-born in waiting.
We already know that the seventh-born son of each farmstead inherited the house, infields
and other assets, and on his death passed most of it on to his own seventh-born son. In this
chapter we explain how the seventh born was not always the actual seventh born. So, for
example, if the husband and father of the house (zal thaghaya) had only a fifth and a sixthborn son, it was the sixth born who became thaghaya, but never an eighth born, unless there
was no other son. If there was another to take the role of thaghaya the eighth born could fall
victim to infanticide and his life might end straight after his birth. It was explained that the
infanticide of the eighth-born child, whether a boy or a girl, would guarantee that all previous
seven children lived, but we know that a ninth, tenth and even eleventh-born child could
become thaghaya if it was a boy and all his older brothers had died. The naming tradition of
the Dghweɗe reflects this custom, because from the sixth born to the eleventh born their
names referred to their birth position.
Before starting with the naming traditions of the Dghweɗe, we will briefly examine the literal
meaning of the word thaghaya. So far we have used various translations to refer to their role
as ritual custodian, but have never attempted a semantic exploration of the term. Despite there
being no literal translation of its meaning, we recognise that ghaya is a reference to house or
farmstead, while the prefix tha is most likely a reference to cattle, and therefore indirectly to
manure production for sustainable resource management. This leads to thaghaya, and we
believe that the term thaghaya for seventh-born son, even though it contains no literal
reference to the number, implies the number seven simply because of the auspicious ritual
role attached to a seventh-born son. From the perspective of inheritance, the seventh born was
also seen as the ideal youngest son, and we will do a little subregional comparison of this in
the last chapter section. What made the seventh born of the Dghweɗe different was his ritual
entitlement, and therefore we aim to explain why we think the seventh-born son as
1
Alan Barnard and Anthony Good (1984:68ff) point to the importance of distinguishing between
descent and inheritance and/or succession, and not to mix up the two, which is rather difficult here.
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