Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 542
Dghweɗe friends. As pointed out at the beginning, it has also impacted the general
ethnographic research situation because the Gwoza hills were systematically excluded from
being viewed as an integrated part of the northern Mandara Mountains.
The underlying narrative of our Dghweɗe history from the grassroots is a reconstruction
based on collective memories of pre-colonial Dghweɗe, the cosmography of which we have
classified as pre-Copernican. They saw their mountain locality as the centre of this world and
the sun rose out of its 'bottom' in the east. This cosmographic orientation conditioned their
ideas around reproduction as part of the mixed farming system in which dung played a key
role in fertilizing the terrace fields. Because land was passed on locally, its fertility had been
maintained by the ancestors over generations, and it was believed that there were mirror
worlds below and above the localised version of this world which needed to be regulated by
ritual means. At the same time the labour-intensive farming system required high ritual
density in order to regulate social relationships concerning the land rights of individuals and
local groups. We emphasised the importance of individual competition while terrace farmers
were striving for success, and it was embedded in a network of patrilineal and matrilateral
extended family connections to which we referred as kindred. However there has been a lack
of kindred-related data, because as a result of my previous research I concentrated too much
on lineal descent grouping, but we were able to emphasise the importance of marriage
alliances in reproductive social networks. We came to the conclusion that as a consequence of
their polygynous marriage system the Dghweɗe once formed reproductive alliances across
extended family branches descending from the same 'kitchen' (kuɗige) of full-brothers. They
formed special relationships with their mother's brothers, and we contextualised this aspect
with the social order of the right of individual farm owners to begin 'adult initiation' (dzum
zugune). In the reconstruction of adult initiation we showed how a new candidate (ngwa
hamtiwe) had to give his mother's brother a billy-goat with a cloth called gwambariya around
its neck if he wanted to start dzum zugune before him, but he could only do this if his own
father and senior brothers had already performed dzum zugune.
From our fragmented ethnographic examples we concluded that solidarity along kindred lines
was necessary for successful terrace farming, as was the ambition of individual of farm
owners. However, the complexities were too rich to comprehensively summarise in a
theoretical manner, as presenting the oral history of the egalitarian terrace culture of late precolonial Dghweɗe in that way would have meant losing its descriptive authenticity. This is
why we will highlight here just one possible theory in relation to the already mentioned
gwambariya, in the context of the first step of the second stage of dzum zugune. This was
where each ngwa garda wore a gwambariya cloth around his waist before participating in the
running competition. Before the ngwa garda could start the race, the ngwa yiye, who were in
the third stage of dzum zugune, ritually forced the ngwa garda to kneel before them in
submission. As in all of the other stages of dzum zugune, the ngwa garda consisted of
participants of various ages, and in order to understand this better we need to look again at the
underlying kindred order that this competitive scenario of adult initiation implied. As we
know, such a display of submission would have excluded the possibility of a full- or halfbrother of the performer's own extended family kneeling before a younger brother, because
the performer’s older siblings would have already completed that stage of dzum zugune, but a
brother of his mother could have been among them. Therefore, the fact that the mother's
brother as ngwa garda had been ritually compensated with a billy-goat wearing a gwambariya
around its neck before being forced to kneel before his sister's son as ngwa yiye, indicates that
the Dghweɗe system of adult initiation was based on the solidarity derived from the
genealogical concept of 'kitchen' (kuɗige) which classified matrilateral relationships.
Sets of full-brothers who were sons of the same mother and father had 'kitchen' matrilateral
relationships with their mother's brothers who represented different exogamous patrilineages,
and we concluded that these relationships with matrilateral full-brothers were the result of the
way the Dghweɗe organised marriage alliances. We explained that the Dghweɗe used the
term gwagha to refer to patrilineal exogamy, and used the same term to refer to one another
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