Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 468
Dghweɗe' that captain Lewis’s word 'virgin' was his English translation for the female in the
Dghweɗe tradition of marrying by promise. This entailed a boy or a young man, as the future
potential father of a seventh born, being promised to a girl when she was born. The promise
of marriage was arranged by the father of the future zal thaghaya (husband and father of a
new family) who befriended the mother of his son's intended first wife. In Chapter 3.2 we
discussed the rituals involved in completing such a marriage when the promised girl had
reached reproductive age, so here we simply want to explain why captain Lewis most likely
spoke of 'a virgin by the same husband' when he was in fact referring to a husband and his
first wife casting away their eighth-born child.
Such arranged promises through the promotion of friendship between members of
patrilineages who could intermarry, one being the father of a future husband and the other the
mother of a future first wife, were seen as the ideal way of marrying. During the actual
marriage ceremony the young woman became a member of her husband's patrilineage. The
same would happen again when they had a daughter born to them, and another father of a son
of a patrilineage with which they could intermarry would befriend the mother for a marriage
of promise between their children. This process also caused what we came to know as zbe,
meaning ego-centred matrilateral exogamy between ancestor-centred patrilineages who were
not otherwise gwagha, meaning exogamous to each other (see the generational limits of zbe in
Chapter 3.6). None of this applied to an eighth-born child because they were excluded from
the ongoing process of patrilineally-regulated childbirth.
In another letter, Lewis (ibid) recommends introducing legal adoption for such children, as
otherwise they could fall into the hands of slave traders. The Acting Resident of Borno
agrees, and recommends that the matter should be handled through the Local Native Court,
and that only Kanuri or Hausa should be allowed to adopt such children. Concerning his
earlier quote, meaning before legal adoption was introduced and where he speaks of the
eighth-born child of a 'virgin' being cast away, we can only assume this was a reference to
boys and girls. Lewis (ibid) further reports that eighth-born children were given away all
across the Gwoza hills, and we wonder how old they were when that happened. For example,
if an eighth-born boy was the only son among girls, and afterwards his mother gave birth to a
boy who was a more suitable seventh born, that eighth-born boy might already have been
over one year old. The question arises as to whether some of these unfortunate boys might
have ended up in slavery, but I was told by my Dghweɗe friends that the practice of giving
away an eighth-born child was not linked to slavery and neither was it seen as a tribute
payment.
Lewis (ibid) indirectly contradicts this view of the Dghweɗe, because in 1925 he explained
that some eighth-born children were placed on the route where traders passed by, and to avoid
these children ending up in the hands of slave traders he recommends that the Local Native
Court take control of a new system of legal adoption. In the same letter exchange with the
Acting Resident of Borno, Lewis again speaks of the tradition of infanticide, and we think
therefore that legal adoption as a solution came into existence shortly afterwards. This of
course makes the collective memories of our diaspora sources seem unreliable, especially
concerning the exact nature of the practices regarding the casting-out of unwanted eighthborn children before 1925. It was almost a hundred years later when in 2020 I gained access
to the new information via John.
The other point I failed to research during my fieldwork in Dghweɗe was how the infanticide
was carried out, and we subsequently discovered that it was not done by the parents of the
eighth-born child but by a relative or neighbour. I was informed that the practice consisted of
such a newborn child being drowned in a terracotta container called ghadzaka which was
normally used to water animals. We of course do not know whether this was the only way
infanticide was carried out, or whether there was any other way, but assume that drowning
was perhaps viewed as the most humane method. As we already know, I was also informed
that there was often resistance from families where the eighth-born child was the first boy
born to a family, and that such families resisted carrying out infanticide or giving him away to
466
