Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 462
situations. For example we can imagine that a thaghaya by the name of Zuwala would not be
considered very ritually successful during a period of food shortage, and that he might have
been blamed if environmental circumstances had been against him.
The rule as to who would become thaghaya in the context of birth position was quite
straightforward. Firstly, all the children born to the first wife would be counted, starting with
the firstborn and going on to Taɗa via Kalakwa. If all the older sons from these seven had
died, the entitlement of thaghaya would go to the younger sons, starting with Mbthe then
Gwama and continuing through all the other younger sons. Only if all the sons of the first
wife had died prior to the death of the father of the house would the 'relative' seventh-born
son of the second wife win the entitlement. By 'relative' we mean that it did not have to be her
actual seventh-born son, but could be any who was considered closest to the position of a
seventh born (thaghaya). Until then, this seventh-born son would only be thaghaya of his
mother, and not thaghaya of the whole family. If all sons of the second wife had also died, the
same sequential order of the birth of sons would apply to those of the third wife and so on.
This makes clear the fact that the seventh born (thaghaya) was a social institution only linked
to the actual seventh son as long as he was alive. We want to emphasise again that the
reference 'actual' seventh son is in the sense that his six older siblings could have been male
or female. This for example explains how Ghamba Vunga, who was thaghaya and lineage
priest of Ghwa'a during my time, became a lineage priest. He was not named Taɗa, which
would have marked him as the 'actual' seventh born, but Ghamba because he was the firstborn
after twins. If Ghamba himself was the eighth-born child he could have become seventh born
after all his older brothers had died because his extraordinary birth overrode the negative
aspect of being an eighth-born child. Another possible scenario would be that he was the
actual seventh born, which would make Wasa and Wala his older twin brothers.
Concerning Wasa as the older and Wala as the younger of the twins, we infer that Wasa
would have become thaghaya if they were both seen as seventh-born twins. The other
possibility is that Wala would be considered the eighth born, but because he was a twin he
survived. If Wala's older brothers had died, including his twin brother Wasa, Wala would
have become seventh born. All this of course is speculation by applying the rules of the
sequential birth order for the entitlement of becoming family thaghaya as explained earlier. If
a wife from a secondary marriage had also had a seventh son with the husband, her seventh
son would have only been thaghaya of his mother, unless all the previous wives had lost their
sons.
At this point we want to emphasise again the relationship term zal thaghaya for the husband
and father of a seventh born. We know that zal means husband, and thaghaya can be
translated as 'cattle in the house', and the resulting combination shows that the father of a
house saw himself as someone who wished to have a seventh son born to his first wife in
order to increase his socio-economic potential, because the number seven was lucky. To
achieve this, it was presumably important to lessen all risks by taking all sorts of ritual
precautions as his wife’s age increased. He looked after his own spirit as zal thaghaya, and
ensured that his children from the fifth born onwards had extra spirit protection, and while the
wife was not seen to be in need of such separate protection, one ritual that perhaps helped to
ensure that she became a mother of a family thaghaya was the cooking of a sauce in a threelegged cooking pot by a male friend of her husband, to celebrate the first seven months of her
pregnancy. Interestingly, this pot then became the spirit pot of her husband's friend, and sat on
a forked branch above his bed. Now it was not for the mother herself, but had become the
spiritual protection of another patrilineal father. This stresses the unilineal kinship system
practised by the Dghweɗe, and that they used all possible methods to control the reproductive
capacities of their wives, or otherwise suffer bad luck.
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