Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 477
might still have answered that they were indeed the actual former parents who now ritually
facilitated bringing them into the house of their new parents.
In this context it might be useful to recall the rituals around the harvesting and threshing of
guinea corn, where the process of transforming the guinea corn into a storable grain to be
taken into the house was also accompanied by a complex ritual process. However, whether
we can see twins as special products of fecundity similar to guinea corn must remain an open
question, but the distinction between indoors and outdoors is similar in ritual significance. We
also remember the importance of cosmological pairing in the image of full-brothers of the
same ancestral 'kitchen' (kuɗige), as in the rainmaker and cornblesser lineages discussed in
Chapter 3.7. Some of our Dghweɗe protagonists even used the image of ancestral twins to
represent 'the blessings from above and below'. This shows how the Dghweɗe viewed the
birth of twins as an extraordinary event, and that their way of pursuing the patrilineal quest
for fecundity and successfully managing communal reproduction was expressed in particular
rituals.
In the next quote from the interview with dada Dukwa, we will present the cosmological
importance of Durghwe as mountain shrine (see Chapter 3.17) regarding the birth of twins,
and other ritual ceremonies around their birth:
Durghwe is the house of twins. The bzaka tree is always found at Durghwe. The bzaka tree grows
where you always find water at Durghwe. On the seventh day the new parents bring the twins out
again by carrying them on the same bzaka leaves, which are still fresh. Also on the seventh day,
two [ritual] beer pots called tughdhe ghwala (twin pots) for holding newly made beer are ready.
The tughdhe for a twin boy has two mouths, while the twin girl's tughdhe is divided by a tonguelike bridge in the middle, representing a clitoris. From now on these two twin pots have to be
filled with ritual beer whenever a ceremony for a family ancestor is performed.
Before the ritual beer from any of the twin pots can be consumed, the former parents have to carry
out a ritual with these pots. Guinea corn flour is put on the foreheads of the twins, and leaves from
the fan palm [dzadza] are bound around the necks of the twins and the necks of the twin pots.
Calabashes are now used for consuming the beer. The drinking of twin beer is called buh dungwe.
Buh refers to the process of applying flour to the twins' foreheads and dungwe is the general word
for a small beer pot. Before the planting, harvesting and threshing of guinea corn or millet, the
ritual buh dungwe also needs to be carried out. If you do not make the twins happy by giving them
sour milk and sorghum beer, the newly planted crops will not germinate. As a result the harvest
will not be rich and the threshing will not produce much of a yield.
Twins can also control a certain type of ants called ngwtire (tururuwa in Hausa) which remove
farm products from your house, but if you make the twins happy the ants will bring the products
back. When the twins are happy they can magically fill their eating bowls (ndafa) with guinea
corn. If you offend someone else’s twins they can get the insects to remove the guinea corn, but if
you reconcile them with sour milk, the guinea corn will come back.
The twins being brought out of the house again on the seventh day of their lives obviously
indicates a lucky event, and we can only infer a connection with the number seven. The other
symbolism of number is of course the pairing itself, and we wonder whether the meeting of
the new and the former parents was also a kind of doubling to celebrate the extraordinarily
successful reproduction represented by the birth of twins. We notice that the number two was
allocated to a twin girl, while the number three was allocated to a twin boy, so we see that odd
numbers such as three and seven were linked to the birth of sons. There is also the underlying
question of whether twins were seen as dangerous, because their doubling represented the
epitome of successful reproduction. We will see in Chapter 3.20 that number two for a girl
and number three for a boy also played symbolic roles during a Dghweɗe marriage ceremony,
as did the two kitchens which were an architectural representation of the polygynous marriage
system. Perhaps there was a need to follow the number two with the number three, as it was
the next higher number, to underpin the huge responsibility of ritual risk management that the
new father of twins had inherited from the former father of twins?
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