Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 486
Conclusion
It seems that an important reason for rituals around the birth of twins was not only to reduce
the risk of food shortages but also to proactively increase the yield of crops. Twins had to be
pleased and always treated equally in order to avoid them causing a bad harvest. In addition,
twins seemed to be the Dghweɗe epitome of successful community reproduction in socioeconomic and religious terms. They were generally welcomed by the Dghweɗe but they had
to be ritually managed, which included divination for the identification of their former
parents, and straight after birth the diviner also established whether they had been reborn to
bring good or bad to their new parents. It seems that most of the time they were believed to
bring good, at least as long as all the necessary rituals were carried out, which often included
other parents of twins, beginning at their birth (or should we say reincarnation) and ending at
their funerals.
Durghwe, the most important mountain and subregional rain shrine of Dghweɗe, was seen as
the house of twins, which links reborn twins to rain and water as a source of fertility and
freshness. This was represented by the leaves of the bzaka tree which the former parents of
twins collected at a place at Durghwe where water was found throughout the year, even
during times of extreme aridity. The leaves of the bzaka tree were still fresh when the twins
were brought out of the house on the seventh day after their birth. Also, during the funerals of
twins all the parents of twins in the local community would ideally ritually tap with guinea
corn stalks on the calabashes with water locked inside, and we interpreted this as a sign of
hope that the twins would be continuously reborn to further the reproductive good luck
against possible reproductive bad luck of the local community.
In the section on Dghweɗe ideas around conception we attempted to show that the gel-like
mixture made from male sperm and menstrual blood, which was the female equivalent of
sperm (perhaps another way of describing eggs), went from a liquid state via a
transformational gel-like state into a solid form with the help of divinity. We linked this with
the gel-like mixture made from guinea corn flour and sour milk which was an important
recipe for welcoming the birth of twins. These ingredients played a role during the rituals that
the twins and the parents of twins had to perform, suggesting that guinea corn flour and sour
milk might have been a metaphor not only for successful conception but also for success of
the mixed farming system. We based this hypothesis on the concept that the birth of twins
represented the increase of the yield of crops, ensuring long-term food storage and hence
survival of the community in the otherwise crisis-ridden semi-arid environment where the
labour-intensive system of crop rotation and manure production was practised.
We also tried to contextualise our ethnographic interpretation of the rituals and beliefs around
twins with earlier conclusions reached about the Dghweɗe concept of fecundity, such as the
importance of the seventh-born son and the father of the house as progenitor and protagonist
in the ritual promotion of fecundity. We reminded ourselves of the importance of the first
wife as the most important mother, and in the section about Dghweɗe ideas around
conception we showed that the ritual dominance of the male did not imply that procreation
could be achieved without an equal contribution from the female. A gel-like mixture formed
in the fallopian tube and was made solid by divine intervention, represented by an amulet in
the shape of a fallopian tube. Finally we showed that sexual maturity was the key to
successful reproductive sexual intercourse, and if this rule was not followed the human fruit
would remain unripe and lead to miscarriage.
In the next section we will present what we know about the three historic ways of marrying in
Dghweɗe. We have already referred to marriage by promise as being the most desirable
method, but there was also marriage by capture. The latter perhaps indicates that patriarchal
control over the female capacity to give birth might even have led to marriage by force, but
this was not the most desirable way of marrying. As in so many of our previous chapters, we
only have very limited oral data on the Dghweɗe marriage system, but we will try our best to
outline its basic ethnography. One of the points we will highlight is the importance of the
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