Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 469
the Wandala or the Fulani. As mentioned above, we do not know for sure whether such an
eighth-born boy was still considered as a potential for bad luck if a first wife gave birth to
another boy later on.
Another important aspect of the infanticide which I failed to establish during my field
sessions was whether there was any ritual aspect to it. During the few post-field inquiries
mentioned above following the cultural destruction caused by Boko Haram, it was strictly
denied that it ever contained any ritual aspect. On the other hand, twins were excluded from
infanticide and rituals were performed for twins, highlighting their importance. Considering
that the seventh born (thaghaya) held such an important position in the context of the
Dghweɗe ritual calendar, it is hard to imagine that infanticide of the eighth-born child was
completely detached from ritual meaning. We can only speculate as to a possible connection,
but have decided to go no further due to lack of sufficient oral data. We still want to point to
the infanticide of twins in other cultures being the only other form of infanticide of which we
are aware, but as the main aim of this book is to present Dghweɗe oral sources we will leave
it to future historians to explore that connection.3
We have no idea how ancient the practice of the infanticide of the eighth-born child was, but
can be sure that it was an important feature of late pre-colonial times. We are also certain that
the practice cannot be interpreted as being detached from the importance of the seventh-born
son as custodian for the ritual promotion of fecundity. We have referred many times to the
issue of cyclical climate emergencies, in particular following the long wet period of the 17th
century which has consisted of at least four very severe arid periods over the last 300 years
(see Figure 16 and Chapter 3.8). Whether the importance of the seventh born can in any way
be linked to the fact that there are records of the palaeoclimatic history of the region telling of
a cycle of seven years of famine (Beauvilain 1989, tome 1:116) must however remain
speculation.
What seems to be certain nevertheless is that the Dghweɗe had developed a very specific
ritual culture of crisis management in which the seventh-born son played a very prominent
role in counteracting bad luck triggered by emergencies leading to famine. In the same
context the systematic exclusion of the eighth-born child from the reproductive process can be
seen as the ritual management of bad luck in the reverse way. Whether the numbers seven and
eight have a specific symbolic meaning in the context of the patrilineal promotion of
fecundity will be discussed further in Chapter 3.22, where we compare Mafa and Dghweɗe
ways of ritual counting when it comes to the birth of boys and girls.
The lucky and the unlucky ones
The idea of a seventh-born son being good luck and an eighth-born child being bad luck
seems to have been common among the Dghweɗe of the past. This was reiterated to me in
2016 in a phone conversation with John, but it had already been pointed out on a couple of
occasions during fieldwork sessions. At the time I still thought that the concept of bad luck
around the birth of the eighth child only related to boys, due to the importance of the seventhborn son in his role as ritual custodian. We now realise girls also fell victim to infanticide, and
therefore like to think that the sacrifice was to ensure that not only other sons but also other
daughters survived. Although sons were important for leading the ritual process and engaging
with the divine aspects of good and bad luck, without daughters there would have been no
reproductive processes to be ritually managed in the first place.
We suggested that perhaps the practice of infanticide of the eighth-born child was a form of
population control, and explained that it ended in around 1925 when the British officially
changed it to adoption. However we also gathered some information to suggest that before
1925 there might already have been other ways of avoiding bringing up such an inauspicious
3
See for comparison Helen L. Ball and Catherine M. Hill (1996): 'Reevaluating "Twin Infanticide"'.
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