Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 539
became, the higher their need to take care of good luck, and perhaps therefore to perform the
rituals of man skwe.
The exposure to a semi-arid mountain climate so close to the increasingly arid zone south of
Lake Chad was a significant environmental factor, and food shortage leading to famine and
death was most likely the worst luck that could occur. A complex ritual culture had emerged
which served the Dghweɗe as a strategy of collective survival for managing crisis situations.
The structural complexities of this were manifold and not only embedded in their kinshipbased adult initiation system and architecture, but also in the way the ethno-genesis of the
Dghweɗe was relayed in an oral historical sense. We described the importance of the
integration of outsiders as founders, and how apparently they only succeeded because they
were in possession of a legendary clan medicine which caused them to reproduce and expand.
By connecting the collective memory of the south-to-north migration with the palaeoclimatic
evidence of the whole of the 17th century as a wet period, we came to the conclusion that the
Tur tradition of origin was most likely historically linked to that climate change. It not only
triggered population pressure and patrilineal infighting, but also changed tribal war alliances,
which in our opinion led to the late pre-colonial ethnic re-formation of the Dghweɗe, and we
hypothesised that this re-formation was represented by the travelling bull festival as a
cosmological symbol of unity and peace.
We tend to think that the Ɗagha peacemaker lineage possibly developed during this period, as
might all the other specialist lineages, including the Amuda as the powerful subregional
ethnic clan group of divine cornblessers. Amuda had inherited Cissus quadrangularis from his
father who had brought it as divine food from the celestial world and who then married the
daughter of a local man. Amuda's full-brother was called Ganjara and he became the founder
of a rainmaker lineage among the Glavda, while the Vreke clan of the Moskota hills became
the most powerful ritual specialists of the subregion. In comparison to the Godaliy of the
Gwoza hills, the Mafa chief of Vreke owned all the different clan medicines and kept them
locked in a special room with no visible entrance (Chapter 3.13). On the western side of the
Dghweɗe massif was Hambagda from where Mughuze-Ruwa had received a clan medicine,
and which pointed back to tradition of the Ɗagha diviners linked to the Margi area of
Mulgwe. It seems that all these late pre-colonial influences had established a ritual culture in
which Cissus quadrangularis was central, which together with other plants of similar ritual
significance was referred to by Mathews in 1934 as gadali.
I remember from 2002, being told by the Mafa of Kuva (a village in the centre of the DGB
area) that a group of 'Godaliy' had once come to Kuva because they wanted to collect a
certain type of plant that grew near DGB1, the largest of the archaeological DGB sites.
Unfortunately, at the time I did not connect the ritual density of Cissus quadrangularis in the
Gwoza hills with this statement, and therefore did not explore the information further. We
remember, from Chapter 3.3 about the wider subregional context of the Tur tradition, that the
Mafa of the DGB area claimed that the Godaliy had been the last inhabitants of DGB1. The
Mafa tale from the village of Kuva that a group of Godaliy had once come to collect such a
ritual plant might not carry any historical truth, but knowing that it could well have been
Cissus quadrangularis they were looking for surely underpins the connection between the
ethnonym Godaliy and the ritual significance of Cissus quadrangularis in the Gwoza hills
area.
We have now reached the end of our Dghweɗe history from the grassroots, and I agree, the
ending is less than spectacular, emphasising that we do not really know very much and that is
nothing new. We also realise that we have reshaped the few fieldnotes available from my time
in Dghweɗe, and that much of our interpretation has raised more questions than answers. I
also admit that perhaps the presentation tells more about me as an ethnographer and area
specialist of our wider subregion than it does about the local people who lived and farmed
there for hundreds of years. However, I think it is good to have written it all down and to have
presented as many oral accounts as possible as they were originally collected in the field with
the help of my friend and research assistant John Zakariya. Without John I would have not
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