Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 465
underestimates their importance and value as they were assets of continuously-manured
terraced fields and therefore of highest quality.
The first three examples in Figure 28b show scenarios of how eight and five plots of farmland
would have been distributed if the deceased father had only one wife, while the other two
show scenarios as if he had sons from two wives. We will now quote the description of the
examples as presented in Muller-Kosack 1996 (page 151):
If, for example, someone had only two sons and eight plots, then five will be for the second born
who is now considered as the seventh born and three for the firstborn. If someone has three sons,
then three plots are for thaghaya and three for the firstborn, but only two for the middle one. With
five plots and three sons, two go to thaghaya, two to the oldest and the second son gets only one
piece. If someone has two wives and only one son from each wife, but five plots, then three plots
go to the son of the first wife and two to the son of the second wife. Where the second wife has
two sons, each of them gets one of these two plots. This indicates that the seventh born is always
the son of the first wife. If she has only one son he would be automatically thaghaya, even in a
case where the first wife has left and her son grew up under the care of the second wife.
Unfortunately I can no longer find the field record of this account and I assume it was made
with the help of John. If doing the same now we would possibly try to better work out the
system behind it, but we can nevertheless recognise that for example the oldest son inherits
more plots than any other son, except of course the seventh born (thaghaya). The assumption
that a family thaghaya was always the son of the first wife is also incorrect, and we know that
if all the sons of the first wife had died, the sons of the second wife would have inherited the
entitlement. The quote correctly points out however that the son of a first wife kept the
entitlement of thaghaya for the whole nuclear family even if his mother had left and married
someone else. We should also add here that any woman going into a secondary marriage
might already have had children from a previous marriage, and that the primary marriage was
the most likely one in which to give birth to an ideal family thaghaya born to a zal thaghaya
as husband and owner of a house.
The excerpt (ibid) also points out that as in the case of farmland, trees were also privately
owned and passed on as part of an inheritance, and the most important trees were Khaya
senegalensis (tsra), Borassus aethiopum (wurighe) and Anogneissus leiocarpus (wa'iya). It
states (ibid) that if someone had only one of these trees, it was always the seventh born who
inherited it, and we invite the reader to also look at Table 7a in Chapter 3.10 where the
usefulness of those trees is explained. We have to admit however that we do not know
whether the three useful trees mentioned here were automatically inherited by the seventhborn son if they were found on the infields, but infer that they were treated as separate assets
of inheritance (wura).
Unfortunately, we do not have oral data of how exactly cattle and other farm animals were
passed on, but infer that it was the seventh born who received the lion’s share. We also
remember that not only land but also cows were often leased out to produce dung for the
person looking after them, and we doubt whether such leased-out cows could easily be taken
back by those who inherited them. This might have been even more of an issue if the original
cows leased out a couple of generations ago had continued to reproduce and as a result
produced even more dung for fertilisation of infields.
A worse problem possibly occurred when it came to leased-out farmland, and I remember
court cases between families over such land rights. We know for example that someone might
have given a friend or brother some of his uncultivated bushland, and over generations their
descendants might have turned it into valuable farmland. They might even have settled nearby
to achieve this. Another potential issue of contention might have been trees that had been
leased out, and we remember some of these tree assets being used as bridewealth for marrying
off a son. The most contentious asset was of course leased-out farmland, especially if we take
into account that someone might have used his own dung to manure a plot of land, and was
now asked to give it back, even though his grandfather or even great grandfather might have
started fertilising it.
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