Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 497
that wife. Even if he marries someone else before they call her back from her father's house, or
even if he has many children from other wives, she remains the first wife and one of her children
will be thaghaya [seventh born].
As before, we need to add to this some aspects from John's shorter version which he
mentioned there in greater detail and which we consider important. For example, there are the
items taken as bridewealth when a sexually immature girl was brought back to her father's
house. There he reports that the girl, still a virgin, was taken back to her father's house on the
seventh day of the marriage ritual, and that the bridewealth consisted of three goats, one
chicken and two pieces of iron called para para. Also, he is more specific on some aspects of
the rituals concerning the young woman being taken out of seclusion, and we add them here
as variations to the above account. So it was for example that the new husband called on a
sister or an aunt of his mother to come and eat the remaining food from the 'wedding cake'.
Also, after the young woman had been taken out of seclusion and after her body had been
rubbed with mahogany oil, she would take the remaining water used during her seclusion and
throw it over the mature young women grinding and singing in the upper kitchen. He also
adds that there was the belief among those young women that any of them on whose feet
cornflour dust fell from the ritual grinding would be prone to being taken into a future
marriage by force. We can only assume that this meant that she would not be an ideal first
wife to a future husband. The fear that this might happen perhaps also indicates that a
marriage by capture was in a way closer to a primary marriage than marrying without notice
of the parents. This throws additional light on the tradition that a girl in love would rather
have pretended to have been taken by force than to have married without notice.
With regard to the money John mentions as a gift given to the newly married young woman,
we perhaps need to acknowledge that the use of money in that context was most likely a
tradition going back to colonial times and as such was a referral to a different socio-economic
system. We know that from 1946 married and unmarried women wore headbands with
halfpenny coins (see Plate 52c) during funerals and dances. Money increasingly became a
symbol of success, especially after independence, and I remember how young Dghweɗe men
struggled during the mid-1990s to buy colourful cotton robes as part of the bridewealth which
had replaced the pre-colonial indigo robes which John refers to as darke. We do not know
when the tradition of marriage by capture ended in Dghweɗe, but infer that its end must be
linked to early colonial times. Perhaps one of the remaining memories of that pre-colonial
tradition was that during my time in Dghweɗe I was often told by my young friends how
expensive it was to get married, and that this was a key feature of their culture.
In the last paragraph of his account, John pointed again to the importance of the ritual tying of
the cowpea thread, and we must conclude from this explicit statement that it was the key
ritual for a marriage by promise. Concerning the dowry, we do not know what John meant by
the iron called para para, but we do recognise the 'black robe' named darke (Plate 57i) from
the list of objects of material culture in the chapter about adult initiation (dzum zugune). What
John refers to as 'black' was to our eyes indigo blue, and it was worn by the ngwa yiye during
the third stage of dzum zugune. Considering that a darke robe was part of the dowry, and also
that the hamtiwe plant (Plate 57a), as well as the borrowing of a jahurimbe bowl with stand
(Place 59a), played a role in the marriage rituals, all items which were also used during dzum
zugune, allows us to date aspects of the oral memories about marrying in Dghweɗe at least
into the late 1930s or early 1940s when dzum zugune was still being performed.
We further recognise that the likely reason why captain Lewis in 1925 referred to the first
wife of a man, who had cast away their eighth-born child, as a 'virgin' (see Chapter 3.18), was
probably because she had previously been a girl who had been married by promise before she
reached sexual maturity. 1 We can therefore infer with some certainty that the three past ways
of marrying in Dghweɗe were most likely representations of collective oral memories going
There is also a colonial reference from 1955/56 (most likely linked to J.A. Reynolds report) which
refers to a 'senior wife (usually a virgin whose marriage has been arranged by a person's father)'.
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