Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 526
One of the main ambitions for a future first wife of a man was to give birth to a seventh son as
an expression of lucky reproduction, and in the section about symbolic classification we
argued that divinity as a communal principle of pairing perhaps brought about the lucky
number seven. For an example we used the way the Mafa of the Gouzda area carried out
ritual counting by adding a silent number one as a representation of divinity to the numbers
for a firstborn girl and a firstborn boy. Considering that divinity as a singularity was
perceived in both cultures as a symbol of death, ritual pairing was a critical religious principle
in managing communal survival. This was the case for example in rituals related to the birth
of twins, or as described in the chapter about specialist lineages related to cosmological
pairing. Our conclusions are only hypothetical however, but being based on oral sources from
both cultures they are examples of subregional variation.
Concerning the above, arriving at the lucky number seven as an odd number in which a
promised girl became a first wife and member of her husband's family and then a mother of a
seventh-born son, needed the pairing with divinity for successful socio-economic
reproduction. In our opinion the birth of twins was a demonstration of such divine pairing,
and that the Dghweɗe thought they were reincarnations of twins of former local parents
incorporates the underlying idea of community reproduction. However, the pairing needed
both sexes, which was cosmographically repeated by interaction not only with the world
above where God and his wife and children lived, but also with the next world below this
world where everything was believed to happen in mirror-image and in reverse. Not only did
the ancestors eat with the left hand, but the sun also shone in the next world while there was
night in this world. A seventh-born successor and owner of a farmstead was often spiritually
guarded by the three-legged personal god pot installed above his bed while he was asleep. We
realise that his spirit pot and all the other gender-related architectural manifestations of the
house represented his divine responsibilities as successful landowner, husband and father.
In the next chapter we will present the ritual culture of Cissus quadrangularis, known in
Dghweɗe as vavanza. In Chapter 3.3 we already mentioned the significance of the Godaliy
tradition of the alleged former occupants of the DGB sites. In 1934 district officer Mathews
used the word 'godali' for what he translated as a 'cactus' variety used to increase the birthrate of expanding social groups. We worked out that the word possibly originated from the
Fulfulde, and that the Godaliy tradition was perhaps a late pre-colonial development. In the
final chapter we will not explore how far back in history the ritual use of Cissus
quadrangularis goes, but aim to present the density and cultural richness of this most
significant ritual plant, which might have been used by their adjacent Mafa neighbours from
the DGB area as an ethnonym for other groups of the Gwoza hills, besides the Dghweɗe.
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