Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 493
or sour milk, and we will see below that the subsequent marriage ceremony consisted of
indoor rituals, for which we need to re-familiarise ourselves with the architectural layout of a
traditional house. If we consult Figure 18 of Chapter 3.11, we can see that the children's room
(kwadgara) was part of the foyer area where we also find the elements of the house shrine
(thala) and the ancestor stones, and the two kitchens in front and the three granaries towards
the back of the foyer. We remember, when looking at the house from the front, that the left
side of the foyer was more endowed with ritual importance than the right side where the
children's room and the upper right kitchen were situated.
Before moving on to the next section in which we detail the various aspects of the principal
marriage ritual of the past, we want to review what John discovered about the way the actual
capture of a woman was organised. Reportedly, a man who could not find a woman to marry
would ask some strong men to go and capture a woman who was not related to him. If a
woman forced that way was with her brothers, relatives or people from her village, they
would fight these men. If the men were not strong enough they would be defeated, but if they
were strong enough they would take the woman by force. Sometimes this resulted in war
between one village and another. We still do not know from John's account whether only
unmarried women were captured in this way, and we can only assume that the strong men
mentioned by John captured not just any woman, but the particular woman the prospective
husband had in mind. We neither know whether such a marriage by capture was only
restricted to Dghweɗe, or whether the practice extended for example to Chikiɗe.
Unfortunately all these questions cannot be answered, and neither do we know how ancient
the three principal ways of marrying in Dghweɗe were, but we make the preliminary
assumption that they were common during late pre-colonial and perhaps early colonial times.
John's description of the various ritual steps of marrying in the past
We mentioned kla dughwe as the term used for ritually initiating a woman into the family of
her future husband, which according to John's testimony was not only an important ritual for a
marriage by promise (dugh dzugwa) but also for the other two ways of marrying, that is
without notice of the parents (dugh pata) or by capture (dugh viya). We will try to
demonstrate that only a marriage by promise can be seen as a primary marriage, since it
brought about the status of a first wife and a mother of a seventh-born son (thaghaya), while
the two other methods can be seen as less ideal secondary marriages. In the context of this, it
was the ritual tying of a cowpea thread around the waist of the promised woman during her
ritual seclusion which seems to signify a primary marriage. It remains unclear however
whether all the other aspects of the marriage rituals presented in John's notes were performed
for the other two ways of marrying in Dghweɗe, which we identified as secondary marriages.
Therefore we need to leave that question open while we present and contextualise the
following ethnographic account.
Before a new bride was taken into seclusion into the children's room in the house of the
groom, a ritual was carried out in which the bride had to sit on a particular cornerstone (malga
malga) which was one of the foundation stones of the house, while her future father-in-law
sprinkled her with water from a ritual calabash. We know about two places in the house
where such a calabash was stored, and recommend the reader to refer back to Chapter 3.11
about the architecture of the house to see that one location was the house shrine and the other
was the loft of the room of the first wife. The second storage place where a ritual calabash
was kept reflects the important ritual position of the first wife. The process of sprinkling
water over the girl was called yew fstaha which means something like 'ritual water'. John
describes how the girl would try to duck away from the water, which was sprinkled three
times over her as she sat on one of the foundation stones of the house of her future husband.
After that, she was ready to become an initiated member of the groom's family, which
included her future protection by the 'gods of that family' as John phrased it. The latter refers
to the Dghweɗe belief in the protective role of paternal and ancestral spirit pots, the
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