Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 541
GENERAL CONCLUSION
As a result of the First World War and the subsequent Treaty of Versailles the Gwoza hills
that separate the Nigerian Gwoza hills from the Cameroonian side of the northern Mandara
Mountains have long been neglected by ethnographers. The area was first divided into a
British and a French mandated sphere and later as a result of two plebiscites both sides gained
national independence in 1960/1. On the Cameroonian side this led to a series of ethnographic
studies inspired by French researchers while the British did not maintain such a relationship
with the Gwoza hills. The result was that many studies of the Mandara Mountains did not
even include the Gwoza hills on the maps, giving the impression that the Mora hills and not
the Gwoza hills were the most northerly extension of the Mandara Mountains. This is
significant because the Gwoza hills are the only mountain range to reach into the semi-arid
plains south of Lake Chad far beyond the 11th parallel north, and they are also the range more
or less directly linked to Kirawa as the centre of the formation of the early Wandala state.
This omission has become even more apparent since the archaeological exploration and exact
chronological dates that have been obtained from the stone ruins of the DGB sites along the
northern slopes of the Oupay massif to the immediate south of the Gwoza hills. They
demonstrate a pre-colonial subregional contemporaneity with Kirawa as the pre-Islamic
capital of Wandala, long before it moved to Doulo and then to Mora. Therefore this Dghweɗe
history from the grassroots presents the missing link.
The wish to preserve my Dghweɗe notes with the greatest possible authenticity was triggered
by Boko Haram recently taking over and controlling the Gwoza hills as a hiding place and
potential action zone for their cross-border terrorist activities. The Gwoza hills are still unsafe
today, and the memory accounts presented here might eventually be the only Dghweɗe oral
history source collected from their original mountain homeland. The way they have been
presented here demonstrates my awareness of that historical circumstance, which has also
made me particularly careful not to unpick my fieldnotes for the sake of a more theory-driven
approach based on ethnographic comparison. With this aim in mind I have used very little
additional ethnographic source material but have relied more or less exclusively on my own
fieldnotes. The background was that I had already been doing ethnographic work in the Mafa
area of Gouzda on the Cameroonian side, and had also collected oral history data from the
Moskota hills and other areas overlapping the international boundary. This allowed me to
consider the northwestern Mandara Mountains as a wider subregion, not only from the
perspective of its original pre-colonial setting but also from the view of my own ethnographic
work, in the context of which I have presented the Dghweɗe of the Gwoza hills as a missing
piece of the puzzle.
This approach has led to a way of writing that has an emotional undertone, being the result of
many years of friendship that have caused me to care personally for the losses of so many of
my Dghweɗe friends and the situations that others of the Gwoza hills have encountered. I
concluded that if I did not put their oral testimonies at the centre of the narrative, and merely
summarised the accounts as selective illustrations for theoretical comparison, I would not be
able to write with a voice of personal integrity. This is also why I chose 'Azaghvana' as the
title of this book, as it means 'I say' in the Dghweɗe language, almost as a way of protesting
against not being heard and historically recognised. It turns out that 'Azaghvana' as an
ethnolinguistic reference to the Dghweɗe also has another dimension, namely that an overall
sense of Dghweɗe ethnicity has been a result of colonialism and subsequent independence,
but this was not necessarily a feature of how the Dghweɗe might have seen themselves as an
ethnic group in pre-colonial times. My ethnographic research across the international divide
reveals how the collective memory of the Dghweɗe regarding past relationships with their
neighbours on the Cameroonian side might have been affected in oral historical terms since
early colonial times. The international boundary dividing the subregion has created a
geographical division that has not only conditioned the collective memory accounts of our
539
