Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 508
to someone through the image of his own children, and perhaps we can see divination as a
logical tool in finding out what God’s divine plan needed in terms of support in the form of
human intervention. We will learn below how sliced pieces of vavanz mandatha floating in a
calabash of water played a key role in providing a predictive algorithm 2, unknown to us, for
interpreting divinity when it came to saving a lost or abducted spirit. We will add
ethnographic data by Wolff (1994), who describes a very similar treatment among the
Lamang of Hambagda, to throw additional light on the meaning of this particular procedure.
Our oral sources on divination as a method of decision making appear across our Dghweɗe
notes, and we have already referred in previous chapters to some of the scenarios where
divination was obligatory. For example, during a gathering of Ɗagha peacemakers it was
established through divination, most likely with floating vavanz mandatha, that Vaima should
lead the expedition to Maiduguri to launch an official complaint about the ongoing slavery
attacks of Hamman Yaji (Chapter 2.2). As part of the founding legend of the Zelidva (see
Chapter 3.5), a Ɗagha diviner recommended a clan medicine to Ghwasa (grandfather of
Kumba Zadva) to manage his survival as an outsider. We know from Chapter 3.9 that a group
of lineage elders regularly consulted Ɗagha diviners to advise them what type of sacrifice to
a local shrine was required under specific circumstances. This last example might have
occurred in a crisis situation in which a lineage majority (gadghale) might have needed
procedural advice for a specific ritual protocol through the tool of divination. For a sacrifice
to the Durghwe mountain shrine, divination also always reportedly decided whether a
sacrifice was needed and which way it should be carried out. On the birth of twins, divination
served to identify the previous parents of twins, and it was also carried out before a son could
start eating again following the death of his father. If sorcery was suspected, several diviners
were consulted to establish whether an accused needed to proclaim his innocence in public
(Chapter 3.15). We learned that regardless of whether the accuser rather than the accused died
as a result, the bad luck would never follow the diviner who made the diagnosis. Divination
as a tool of collective and individual decision making was in our opinion part of the cognitive
reality of late pre-colonial Dghweɗe, and as such was an intrinsic element of their view of the
world.
The general word used for diviner was Ɗagha, but some non-Ɗagha were also seen as having
a gift or talent for divining. We do not know whether non-Ɗagha as a result of their talent
could also be consulted when it came to more official appointments, or whether they dealt
more with personal problems or expected bad luck. We know from Chapter 3.10 that chuwila
consisted of such an individual-related ritual of a he-goat or a chicken being swung three
times around the head of the household member at risk before it was sacrificed. The diviner
would decide on the procedural details. Even so we can only assume that the diviner involved
could be an especially gifted non-Ɗagha, we do not know the method of divining they might
have applied to find the right ritual way forward.
The following principle divining methods known in Dghweɗe were:
•
•
•
•
•
Pebble (kwire) divination
Crab (dhadhra) divination
Stick (glipa) divination
Cissus (mandatha) divination
Talking (kula kula) divination
Pebble divination was reportedly not very common, but there was the belief that the pebbles
used had been given to the diviner by God. We know it was the most traditional method of
2
Christophe Lazaro (2020:3) uses the expression 'predictive algorithms' as an 'artifical' tool, not only to
refer to predictive digital algorithms in relation to big data but also to what he calls 'natural divination'
as opposed to 'artificial divination'. He defines natural divination as being a direct communication with
divinity, but one which also needs divination algorithms so that the diviner can make predictions to
clients. We have not studied Dghweɗe divination algorithms but are quite convinced that they existed.
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