Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 518
might go across different colours, such as shades of brown, red, blue or green, in the context
of which darker and lighter shades appeared in classification terms more important than the
actual colour. Unfortunately our presentation is rather limited, but we will still be able to
show what some of the basic principles of Dghweɗe colour classification might once have
been.
On Dghweɗe symbolic classification and Mafa ritual counting
Before showing examples of what we know about Dghweɗe symbolic classification, we will
briefly summarise one particular aspect of symbolic classification among the Mafa of the area
of Gouzda, to which I refer as 'ritual counting'. Depending on whether the first child of the
father of the bridegroom was a son or a daughter, the wedding night would take place during
either a waxing moon or a full moon, because the Mafa considered a waxing moon to be male
and a full moon female. Early in the morning after the consummation of the marriage the
following ceremony took place, which reminds us of parts of the Dghweɗe marriage
ceremony described in Chapter 3.20 where a married woman dipped the bride's and groom's
hands into the food prepared for them (Muller-Kosack 2003:140ff):
With the sound of the first cockerel just before dawn the best woman arrives with a meal and takes
both their hands and puts them into the gandaf (eating bowl). Next, she will ask the bridegroom
whether his oldest sibling is male or female by saying: "How many hands has your father?" If the
groom answers two she would know it is female, whereas three hands would mean that it is male.
Depending on whether the firstborn child of his father was a boy or a girl, the best woman would
dip both of the left or the right hands of the bride and bridegroom two or three times in the gandaf.
As we already know, the Mafa of the Gouzda area practised a method of ritual counting in
which an invisible number one was added to the numbers for girls and boys. A girl appeared
as an even number, meaning riy cew (two hands), but with the added number one this resulted
in three (odd). In the case of a boy, the Mafa said riy makar (three hands), which with the
invisible number one resulted in four (even). This was because despite number two being
officially allocated to a firstborn girl and three to a firstborn boy of the father of the groom,
my male Mafa friends claimed that in reality odd numbers were for females and even
numbers were for males (ibid). The contradiction was then explained by saying that they
silently added a number one to both, so this would make number two for a firstborn girl into
three which was odd, while number three for a firstborn boy became four which was even. It
was pointed out that the reason for this way of thinking was that females moved home when
they married, as discussed in Chapter 3.20 about the importance of marriage alliances for
successful family reproduction. When I asked why they did not reverse it and make number
two masculine and number three feminine when doing the ritual counting, I was told that this
would not be acceptable since men were superior to women and a male needed to be ritually
represented by a higher cardinal number. 2
One explanation of the Mafa was that the hidden added number one was like the dark moon
which could last up to three days, and that the third day was like the invisibility of divinity
before the new moon occurred again. The Dghweɗe referred to the third day of the dark moon
as 'Ɗagha moon' (see Table 5e), claiming they could already see the new moon at that time.
With regard to the symbolic classification of left and right, my Mafa friends used the example
of the left and right hand by explaining that a woman was like 'the right hand' of a man and
this was the reason why a wife would support her left hand with her right hand when she
handed the eating bowl to her husband. If she handed over water or beer she used the right
hand and supported it with her left hand, while the husband received food using his right hand
2
We remember Ekkehard Wolff's (1994) example of number three for a firstborn boy and number four
for a firstborn girl as part of bringing back an abducted spirit among the Lamang of Hambagda, which
reportedly included symptoms of erectile dysfunction (Chapter 3.21). The reason for thinking Wolff
had mistakenly reversed the numbers was because our Mafa friends believed that males could not
accept a lower cardinal number than females when it came to cosmological counting.
516
