Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 491
local Dghweɗe culture by also practising a form of marriage by capture. Boko Haram
abducted hundreds of girls and enslaved many of them into forced marriages, a practice
dramatically described in Edna O'Brien's novel 'Girl' (2019). I know about similar cases that
some of my close Dghweɗe friends had to endure when their daughters were abducted by
Boko Haram in that way, and I still feel like crying when I think about the trauma the girls
and their parents must have gone through. We do not know when exactly traditional marriage
by capture ended, but presume that it came to an end at the same time when in around 1925
legal adoption for unwanted eighth-born children was introduced by the British, a
circumstance described in Chapter 3.18 as an unlucky birth.
Finally, in this introduction to the past ways of marrying in Dghweɗe we want to refer to how
Hamman Yaji (see Chapter 2.2) abducted married women and unmarried girls and sold them
into domestic slavery before the British finally stopped him in 1927. The vulnerability of the
Dghweɗe people to social exploitation by outside forces came mainly from the plains, and the
disregard and misinterpretation of their past traditions reach far back into history. We only
need to remind ourselves of how Leo Africanus (1529) for example described the mountain
populations of Borno as backward and primitive in comparison to the aristocratic societies of
the plains. This view might have been revived by the Boko Haram invasion of the Gwoza
hills, in the context of which the Dghweɗe are again at risk from being pre-judged as
backward and primitive. One reason for this book is to describe Dghweɗe culture, and
explicitly not to decontextualise the memories of our local protagonists, but to preserve them
in this oral history retold from the grassroots and thereby treat their oral history as equal to
any other source material we consider relevant in reconstructing a shared history of our
defined wider subregion.
We start this chapter by structuring and summarising the ethnography of John's two accounts,
then discuss the underlying socio-economic and ritual questions in some detail, and attempt to
work out the importance of the three ways of marrying in Dghweɗe during late pre-colonial
times. One aspect we will focus on is how the marriage ritual described by John can be linked
to the spatial aspect of the design of a traditional Dghweɗe house. We will also point out
some possible changes during colonial times and after independence, which we will attempt
to conclude from the key material items used as bridewealth in the past.
Three ways of marrying in Dghweɗe according to John Zakariya
We merged and quite significantly re-edited some aspects of the two accounts by John, and
present them here mainly as one account while pointing out additions or variations. We stick
to his presentation in terms of the underlying ethnography, especially concerning the very
detailed account of the crucial rituals around a primary marriage by promise.
The three ways of marrying in Dghweɗe were called:
•
•
•
Dugh dzugwa
Dugh pata
Dugh viya
Dugh means 'girl', while John translates dugh dzugwa as 'befriending a girl' and describes a
scenario in which the father of a boy might have started to give gifts to a mother who had
given birth to a girl, and that this would make the girl dugh dzugwa to his son. John's example
makes it instantly clear that it was not the boy wooing the girl, but that the relationship
between families set the scene for a future marriage. If we take into consideration that the
friendship between the families would have been based on the exogamy rules described in
Chapter 3.6, we realise that this would have meant the promised girl would eventually move
to the house of her husband. We think that this was the underlying reason why the boy's father
initiated the friendship with the girl's mother, because the girl would eventually become a
member of the lineage of her future husband.
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