Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 460
community custodian and symbol of successful reproduction mattered so much to the
Dghweɗe.
To explore this further we will also take a closer look at the consequences of the inheritance
system of the Dghweɗe, and discuss the finer details of the seventh-born son inheriting the
lion’s share of all the assets and not just the house and infields. This will be followed by a
section presenting a summary of the ritual roles of the seventh born as lineage or earth priest
and in all types of local custodianship tasks. This included the specialist lineages, for example
the senior rainmaker who started ritual planting for the whole of Dghweɗe. The seventh born
as thaghaya was not only the first to be ritually served in the context of his own extended
family, but was also the one who started many ritual sequences once he became a custodian of
the earth or a senior representative of one of the specialist lineages. We remember that the
Gudule were seen as the thaghaya of Dghweɗe because they started the bull festival, while
the Thakara of Ghwa'a saw themselves as 'first born' or 'senior brothers' because Ghwa'a was
accepted as the more ancient settlement.
Finally we will contrast the ritual role of the seventh born as key custodian with what we
know about the infanticide of the eighth-born child. Captain Lewis (1925) was the first to
mention the infanticide of the eighth born in the Gwoza region, but he did not refer
specifically to the Dghweɗe. Our oral sources do however show that infanticide was widely
practised, and we know that the British changed the custom to a legal form of adoption in
around 1925. We will present the few oral records we have about the historical practice of
infanticide, and discuss exceptions and suggest their possible explanations. One cause may
have been the collective memory of regular environmental uncertainty, in the context of
which the infanticide of the eighth-born child could be seen as a form of population control,
or a cruel but necessary reminder of the loss of reproductive potential as a result of past food
shortages. We remember, from the chapter about adult initiation (dzum zugune), how
important it was to prepare for the worst-case scenario of food shortage.
Unfortunately we cannot finally determine whether there was any ritual attached to an eighthborn child falling victim to infanticide. Twins and the son born after twins did not fall victim
to it, and we will examine the underlying ideas of good and bad luck, and try to explore
whether there might have been a link to the Dghweɗe belief in the extraordinary birth of twins
in relation to the seventh-born son as a symbol of socio-economic hope. That eighth-born
girls as well as boys fell victim to infanticide suggests there was no gender aspect to it. This
was not the case regarding the seventh-born son, who was not only economically advantaged
but occupied a key ritual role for the community as a whole. We know that it was always men
who were seen to risk their health or even their lives during complex ritual performances.
Perhaps the special entitlement of the seventh-born son can be seen as a key aspect in keeping
not only the community safe but also the custodians carrying out the rituals. This allows us to
see the seventh-born son not only as the one with the entitlement to manage fecundity, but
also the one who guaranteed the successful survival of families and lineage groups in face of
the ongoing threat of environmental crises.
The Dghweɗe naming tradition
We pointed out in the introduction that the word thaghaya does not literally mean seventh
born, but 'cattle in the house', as a reference to sustainable subsistence in the context of the
household compound. We reached this interpretation through John Zakariya's suggestion that
the prefix tha was a reference to cattle, leading to 'cattle in the house' when tha was placed
with ghaya for house or farmstead. We have already pointed in various contexts to the likely
semantic root of the seventh-born son representing the collective hope for the long-term
sustainability of the Dghweɗe mixed farming system. It appears that the auspiciousness of the
seventh-born son as successful survivor was connected to the inauspiciousness of his eighthborn sibling falling victim to infanticide. The only alternative to infanticide was that the child
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