Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 544
alliance across traditional village boundaries. We compared this with the potential role of the
Gudule as representatives of the first settlers of southern Dghweɗe when they wanted to leave
for Gudulyewe (Gudur) because they had lost their reproductive capacity as the largest local
clan group. The Gudule had been defeated by the expanding Vaghagaya, but when they said
they would leave altogether for Gudulyewe, the Vaghagaya asked three of their 'brothers' to
stay behind. This request implied that they were considered to be the authentic first settlers of
southern Dghweɗe.
Unlike the Dghweɗe, the Mafa had developed chiefly clans as a result of ethnic expansion,
and in Chapter 3.21 we described how the British colonial officers might have used that
knowledge to promote an egalitarian system of chiefly self-governance in the Gwoza hills.
The Dghweɗe never had such a chiefly clan system, but we were able to show that the oral
historical management of soil fertility was linked to a similar pattern of autochthony as
among the neighbouring Mafa on the Cameroonian side of our subregion. The Dghweɗe way
of dealing with the rise and fall of population number was equally regulated by ritual means
when it came to local group formation. We argued that the underlying reason for this was the
cosmological worldview of the Dghweɗe, which mirrored their system of lineal and patrilocal
socio-economic reproduction managed by a cyclical ritual calendar linked to the agricultural
seasons. The cycle began with the family ancestors of the house, and ended with the travelling
bull festival in which the wider community of southern and northern Dghweɗe participated.
Three paternal ancestors of a living father and owner of a house were represented by three
ancestor stones in every household. The seventh-born living son of a deceased father
represented good reproductive luck, while the eighth-born child in the past was cast out or fell
victim to infanticide. Every father and owner of a house was a potential father of a seventh
born, a symbol of ongoing reproductive good fortune which transcended Dghweɗe ritual
culture on the descent group level. The lineage representing the seventh-born branch of a
local group provided the most important custodian of the land that their members had
manured and farmed.
The local ancestral connection to the next world could be equally linked to autochthonous
settlers who had previously manured the farmland. An additional aspect was the chronic
shortage of arable land in the semi-arid mountainous environment, and the Dghweɗe had been
exposed to environmental emergencies leading to regular food shortages from at least the very
wet 17th century. Paleoclimatic data linked to the changing water levels of Lake Chad helped
us to construct this view. We compared the archaeological dates of the DGB sites with early
written sources about the formation of Kirawa as pre-Islamic Wandala capital, and compared
the oral history of south-to-north traditions of origin across the wider subregion with the same
cyclical pattern of climate change. As a result of this comparison we came to the conclusion
that Ghwa'a as early arrival zone from Tur most likely already existed in the 16th century,
which showed that it was contemporaneous with the end of the DGB period. We constructed
a theoretical scenario in which the largest of the DGB sites had been reactivated by the 'Pagan
usurper' mentioned by Ibn Furtu in 1576, which led to the siege of the foothill of Kirawa by
the Borno king of Idris Alauma. We subsequently connected the rise of the Mughuze-Ruwa of
southern Dghweɗe with the Tur tradition of the much wetter 17th century, when the Wandala
capital moved to Doulo and the DGB period came to an end. We identified the formation of
the Mafa and the Dghweɗe as being contemporaneous, and referred to that period as late precolonial times, also represented by their war alliances described at the beginning of our
Dghweɗe oral history retold.
We therefore want to generally conclude that as a result of cyclical climate change, the
kinship-based local alliances of the ethnic group we refer to as the Dghweɗe were based on
local descent group compositions that did not last very long. This did not mean their descent
system did not work, but only that successful local reproduction was a constant factor
conditioning it. Strategies for the sustainable management of good and bad luck were
therefore deeply embedded in the Dghweɗe way of life, which extends further back than the
type of ethnic unity we described in the oral history of the travelling bull festival. The main
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