Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 514
order', and three slices to a person of 'male birth order', but does not adequately explain what
is meant by this. We can therefore only speculate that it refers to whether the first child born
to a person's father was a boy or a girl, since this was an important issue, not only with
respect to symbolic classification but also to a man’s good fortune in having a son who was
the first child born to him by his first wife.
We will explore this further in the next chapter where we will also discuss issues of symbolic
classifaction, but here we want to raise the critical question of whether Wolff mistakenly
reversed the number four being allocated to the female and the number three to the male birth
order. The reason we suggest this is that the Mafa of the Gouzda area considered number four
as male and number three female, because they argued that it was not possible for a female to
have a higher cardinal number than a boy as part of their birth order. They added a silent one
to the number two for a girl as firstborn child and to the number three for a firstborn boy,
because they wanted the reproductive doubling inherent in number four to be symbolically
allocated to a boy as the more desirable firstborn child. Regardless of whether the same logic
applied to Wolff's interpretation of the numbers four for female and three for male, it remains
that gender and birth order were very important in terms of symbolic classification. The same
applied to the meanings of left to right, as we know from our discussion of the left side of the
foyer area, seen as a representation of the female/male symbolism as part of Dghweɗe
architecture. Looking at the importance of the different numbers, and the left and right aspects
of the ritual treatment to bring back a kidnapped spirit as a possible cure for erectile
dysfunction, suggests that Ɗagha diviners might well have applied similar gender-orientated
algorithms to treat such an illness.
Conclusion
In this chapter we showed two ways of decision making in Dghweɗe. The first was an
important element of social organisation which had also been used during colonial times to
promote self governance in the Gwoza hills, while the second was about divining as a specific
form of decision making and as a tool closely related to prescribing ritual procedures. We
then concluded that in late pre-colonial times the concept of majority was not based on any
form of traditional chieftaincy across Dghweɗe, but was an expression of the belief that a
lineage majority held the blessing of successful collective socio-economic reproduction. We
know from previous chapters that successful social group expansion led to conflict, at the root
of which was the issue of local group formation linked to lineal descent. This process was
ritually legalised by a succession of earth priests who were representatives of a system of
ancestor-centred seventh-born lineages, rather than lineages represented by patrilineal
seniority. On a more ego-centred level of lineal descent, the seventh born (thaghaya) as
family thaghaya inherited the house, infields, trees and other assets across five or more
generations, while the firstborn and other brothers had to forge a new start nearby or even
further away. This could lead to infighting between patrilineal 'brothers', and new lineage
majorities eventually emerged to replace the previous ones.
At the root of this situation of localised lineage expansion was the labour-intensive system of
terrace cultivation, where much dung had to be produced by the mixed farming system to
maintain soil fertility over many generations. As a result the egalitarian social organisation of
Dghweɗe society required a high ritual density, in which not only lineage expansion and local
group formation was embedded but also marital exchange across exogamous descent groups.
We showed how sophisticated and developed the pre-colonial system of community relations
was in the description of adult initiation (dzum zugune), but even the best organised
egalitarian system would presumably have ceased working if important cultural base elements
were removed or changed by colonial influences and planned interventions.
Unfortunately British indirect rule made several such interventions that severely jeopardized
the self-regulatory course of indigenous management of unity and peace in the hills. One was
the promotion and force of downhill migration via the attempt to introduce a system of
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