Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 515
colonial self governance after changing the late pre-colonial system of egalitarian lineage
majorities into a system of administrative pseudo-chiefs. As a result the British district
officers became increasingly frustrated and developed more and more prejudices about the
alleged backwardness of the hill populations. In reality it was the emerging Islamic elite in
Gwoza and Bama who had the upper hand, and they manipulated the situation to their
advantage. This led in 1953 to the killing of lawan Buba in Ghwa'a, in which one of the main
administrative representatives of Ghwa'a, bulama Fulata, was also almost killed by two
lineage brothers. Still, this did not stop district officer Reynolds describing bulama Fulata as
the representative of an underlying chiefly system, in order to justify the British failure of
indirect rule of the Dghweɗe montagnards, which led to decades of their marginalisation from
Gwoza town, especially in the case of Ghwa'a. Having read through district officer Reynolds'
report of the mid-1950s, he appears in his analysis of the social structure of the Gwoza hills to
have relied particularly strongly on a descriptive narrative derived from lineage theory for his
suggestions for better indirect rule. We remember that the Gwoza hills had already been
declared an Unsettled District in the 1920s.
In the second chapter section we described another dimension of Dghweɗe egalitarian social
organisation, by showing how divination played a role as an expression of ideas around the
concept of divinity as part of existential personhood. In the context of this, it was the
individual diviner, either as a member of a specialist lineage group or as a specially gifted
individual, who brought the spirits of individuals who had fallen victim to sorcery attacks
back into their physical bodies. Thanks to Wolff's documentation of a very similar ritual
treatment from the Lamang of Hambagda, it was possible to connect a spirit that had been
taken and brought back into the body with a cure for erectile dysfunction. We further showed
not only how the Dghweɗe belief system was put into motion here, but also how rituallycharged plants of the local environment, such as the slices of a variety of Cissus
quadrangularis or the leaves of the wulinge tree, played roles as tools of divination and spirit
rescue. We pointed out that unlike the concept of majority, divination required a special
human talent made available for private and public use. In the light of this, we showed that
public divination was possibly carried out as part of larger ceremonies and with greater public
attention, while personal divination was perhaps more to do with diagnostic health issues or
the monitoring of expected bad luck within families.
Again we realise that the house as a place of worship was where such individual and
household-oriented divination was carried out. The architecture of a traditional house
provided an ideal scenario for a variety of ritual performances, regardless of whether they
were to do with the worship of the immediate paternal family ancestors, marriage ceremonies
or bringing in the harvest. It seems that it was the father of the house who was seen to be most
at risk of losing his spiritual health, often because he did not follow the calendrical ritual
order needed for successful terrace farming. Therefore his spirit required special protection by
his personal god pot standing on a fork of a branch above his bed. His children also had
personal spirit pots, while his wives were protected through him. It was a huge responsibility
for a father of a house to take care of his family on a regular basis. The spiritual dominance of
a married man was not only reflected in cosmological views regarding the workings of
divinity, but also resulted in the view that male sorcerers were considered more dangerous
than female witches. We like to conclude that this view was also a reflection of the
competitiveness and ongoing issues of environmental uncertainties with which the precolonial Dghweɗe were regularly confronted, as the traditional inhabitants of the semi-arid
Gwoza hills to which they geographically belonged.
In the next chapter we will concentrate on aspects of symbolic classification and the
classification of living and non-living things. For the former we will try to show how the high
ritual density of Dghweɗe montagnard culture can be perceived to be reflected in a certain
symbolic pattern often presented as pairs, such as odd and even numbers, left and right, the
numbers two and three for female and male, and the numbers seven and eight for good and
bad luck. We will hypothesise that the ritual importance of symbolic classification was a way
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