Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 490
not reproduce as a lineage ancestor. That the curse of his mother led to his inability to have
sons might have been to do with the fact that he could not find a suitable wife, and this would
explain why he was not successful in terms of lineage expansion. Unfortunately we have no
data on how long primary marriages lasted in the past, but a seventh son could also come
from a secondary marriage if all the sons of the first wife had died. This indicates that it was
perhaps more important for a husband and father to have a seventh son than it was to have the
son born to his first wife. Still, as we will find out in this chapter, a primary marriage was the
ideal circumstance in which to have such a seventh born. This interpretation is also
underpinned by the fact that a seventh born as lineage priest was seen as the most suitable to
ritually manage fecundity in the community, with all its unpredictable social and
environmental conditions.
We have already mentioned on several occasions that there were three ways of marrying in
Dghweɗe, and marriage by promise is the one we consider to be equivalent to primary
marriage. It was based on the friendship between exogamous patrilineages that had no history
of matrilateral intermarriages over the previous four generations. This peaceful way of finding
a wife included the proviso that a future son-in-law would help his future in-laws with their
farming. Such an ideal primary marriage was already facilitated before the birth of a girl by
exchanges of gifts, and sealed on her birth by a marriage by promise. The other two ways of
marrying were that a boy and a girl would fall in love and want to get married, while the third
way of marrying was what we have already referred to as marriage by capture. These latter
ways of marrying were in our opinion less than ideal marriages, but unfortunately our sources
about the three ways of marrying are too indirect to prove this. Perhaps the inappropriate
marriage of Mughuze to Hembe's daughter could be seen as such proof. We therefore
contextualise this presumption with the fragments of Dghweɗe oral historical narratives
already presented, to underpin our hypothesis about the importance of an established process
between families for potential marriage partners.
Ekkehard Wolff (1994:101ff) gives a description of the Lamang of Hiɗkala marriage system,
but Wolff does not explicitly distinguish between different ways of marrying. He makes no
explicit reference to marriage by capture, but describes a form of romantic kidnapping as a
consequence of an arrangement between the fathers of a boy and a girl even before they were
born. In the context of this, Wolff's oral source refers to the possible attempt of the girl's
family to re-capture the kidnapped bride, but only if they thought the promised girl was not
yet ready to fulfil the marriage arrangement (ibid:104). The only written source to explicitly
refer to a marriage by capture appears in an ethnographic novel by the former colonial officer
Stanhope White (1963) about the Zelidva, in which this particular historic way of marrying is
central. I decided to collect oral data about the marriage system very late during my time in
Dghweɗe, and I asked John Zakariya to speak to our Dghweɗe friends and to write down
what they told him. John did this in 2004, but he does not say to whom he actually spoke. He
presented me with two versions which we will review in this chapter. One thing we can
conclude is that Stanhope White most likely put too much emphasis on marriage by capture,
as it is obvious that marriage by promise as a result of an arrangement between families was
historically the much preferable option.
There was one more way of marrying in Dghweɗe in the past, which was that a man could
'inherit' (wura) his deceased brother's wife and unmarried daughters. The first is known in
social anthropology as levirate marriage. We briefly discussed this way of inheriting a widow
of a brother as a wife as part of the Dghweɗe inheritance system in the chapter about the
seventh born (thaghaya) (see Chapter 3.18). The mechanism behind it was that the potential
bridewealth from the marriage of such an 'inherited' daughter went to the brother who had
married the widow. We will not discuss the practice of the Dghweɗe levirate here, but want to
keep in mind that it existed as a part of the socio-economic dimension of inheritance in their
late pre-colonial marriage system.
As mentioned, in this chapter we are neglecting which particular parts of the traditional
marriage system survived until Boko Haram took over the Gwoza hills and destroyed the
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