Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 500
patriline of the honoured grandfather. However, the same term jije (grandfather) could also
refer to the sons of ego's mother's brother, implying that these terms also covered nephews
and nieces on the matrilateral side. Perhaps the reader would like to have another look at
Figures 13a and 13b in Chapter 3.6 where a schematic explanation in the form of illustrative
structural sketches is presented.
In our opinion none of these established social and ritual relationships would have developed
in the same way if marriage by capture had been the main way of marrying in Dghweɗe. We
can easily imagine however that forced marriages might have become more frequent during
periods of food shortage or other types of crisis which led to intermittent poverty and the
breakdown of planning for peaceful marriage alliances. There might also have been other
reasons why the ideal primary marriage by promise no longer worked in practice, such as
overpopulation and conflict over land resources. These too might have led to an interruption
in catering for peaceful relationships between local groups, and the breaking of the fragile
structure of patrilineal and matrilateral extended families resulting from generations of
planned marriages. Unfortunately we do not have any oral data on such scenarios, but we
know that warfare was a prominent feature of Dghweɗe oral history as a feature of the
expansion of the Vaghagaya lineages in southern Dghweɗe, a conflict we allocated to the late
pre-colonial period. In the context of this, the politics of marriage alliances, not only within
the shrinking Gudule clan group but also between the Dghweɗe and the Thakara lineages of
Ghwa'a in northern Dghweɗe, might well have been impacted, meaning that the lineagerelated exogamy of the Thakara clan group might have only come about during the late precolonial period.
Concerning the marriage option where two people might have been attracted to one another
and planned to marry without notifying their parents, we have an example of this in the
legend of how Gudule cut off the white tail of his father's favourite cow to give it to a girl he
desired (Chapter 3.13). We remember that Gudule was punished by Tasa by being deprived of
his ritual entitlement for rainmaking, but remained seventh born (thaghaya) and so inherited
most of his father's land. Perhaps we can interpret this tale by assuming that the gift was
inappropriate, and therefore a marriage between Gudule and the girl would have been
inappropriate. Gudule tried to ignore the authority of his father by presenting the gift, but then
remained obedient and married the girl that Tasa had already arranged for him by presenting
gifts himself to the family of the planned marriage. This obedience might have allowed
Gudule to remain family seventh born even though he had been severely misbehaving. This is
of course speculation, but highlights once more the importance of marriage by promise for
general prosperity and for maintaining the successful mountain farming way of life in the
Gwoza hills.
In the next chapter we will present oral data on two past ways of decision making in
Dghweɗe. We will first present the power of majority known as gadghale, and how it was
instrumented by the British during colonial times. Next we will show the importance of
divination as a traditional method of decision making, by listing the different types of
divination the Dghweɗe once practised, followed by an illustrated example of divination with
a ritual type of floating Cissus quadrangularis called vavanz mandatha. We will use the
healing session resulting from a divination in Ghwa'a, in which a Ɗagha diviner demonstrated
how he safeguarded the abducted spirit of a local client by citing sorcery as a possible
explanation for the illness.
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