Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 546
also be identified among the Lamang of the western foothills. This suggests a long
contemporary history of the ritual importance of sorghum beer during an earlier phase of the
DGB area and the adjacent plains surrounding the Gwoza hills when the Wandala of Kirawa
of that early period were pre-Islamic. We found no such ritual beer pots among the Wandala
of Kirawa as it had long become Islamic and only archaeological excavation could provide
such evidence, but we identified legendary evidence of a mountain origin of the Wandala as
part of the Tur tradition among the groups of the Gwoza hills. This suggests a long
contemporary history of the ritual importance of sorghum beer during an earlier phase of the
DGB area and the adjacent plains surrounding the Gwoza hills when the Wandala of Kirawa
of that early period were pre-Islamic.
We compared some of the roles of outsiders linked to the Dghweɗe legend of Katala-Wandala
as mother and first wife of Tasa, and of Gudule and Ske as full-brothers of the same ancestral
'kitchen' representing cornblessing and rainmaking. It was not unusual in Dghweɗe legendary
accounts for structural key events to be presented to me as actual historical events. We
demonstrated how bulama Ngatha described the mythological invention of sorghum and the
attacks of Hamman Yaji as equally true events, and the legendary accounts might have
bridged early and late pre-colonial times. We like to conclude that it was the underlying preCopernican terrace farmers' view of the world that set the background for this kind of oral
historical accounting. We used the cosmological image of 'blessings from the celestial world
above' represented by rainmaking, and 'blessings from the primordial world below'
represented by cornblessing, to comprehensively underpin this worldview. While the first was
more relevant during the growing period, the second played a greater role during the
harvesting period, and we were able to attach similar cosmological images to sorghum
cultivation and manure production. We subsequently suggested that these concepts might
already have been of cosmological importance during early pre-colonial times. It is difficult
to believe there is no connection between the contemporaneity of cyclical climate change, the
DGB stone structures, and the emerging Wandala state at the entrance of the
intramountainous eastern plain between the Gwoza hills and the Moskota hills.
By including the rising Wandala state in this hypothesis we realise that Kirawa as the oldest
mountain capital had already existed for about 350 years by the time the Wandala finally
converted to Islam in the early 18th century. That Durghwe, the most northerly subregional
rain shrine, was very likely a pre-Dghweɗe arrival zone from the south during the 16th
century, makes this part of the Gwoza hills a possible cosmographic centre during the end
phase of the DGB period, at least from the oral historical perspective of our Dghweɗe
protagonists. For example, the legendary accounts of our Dghweɗe sources claimed that
Kunde was once a Wandala settlement, and we underpinned the connection with the legend of
Zedima who collected 'the roots of the sun' from the primordial world below to establish
montagnard superiority in rainmaking over his father-in-law the Wandala chief of Kirawa.
Another aspect was that the Tur tradition included most of the groups of the Gwoza hills and
also the Wandala themselves, a fact we can further underpin with the evidence that a dialect
of Wandala was already spoken around the northern foothills during pre-colonial times.
However, the question of whether the Wandala of Kirawa once had anything to do with the
DGB sites remains circumstantial. Perhaps we need to see the change of direction in terms of
population movement as a cyclical event also, and that the underlying cultural-historical
element was passed on in the long term by the shared local language, and only in the short
term as part of ethnic belonging. In that way, an underlying long-term oral historical message
might well be embedded in the cultural practice of the late pre-colonial Dghweɗe we have
reconstructed from the collective memories of our oral sources.
One of the main aspects of our Dghweɗe oral history retold is the ritual management of socioeconomic reproduction. In the context of this we were able to show the importance of dung
production, by documenting the ritual dunghole near the senior rainmaker's house which had
not been used for at least 60 years. We were able to show that many of the sequential rituals
had changed in the meantime, and demonstrated those changes by studying the oral history of
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