Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 548
French practised over the years in our wider subregion. While the British practised indirect
rule, and unsuccessfully tried to allocate to Dghweɗe a system of self-governance using
chiefly councils, the French never attempted to mix traditional and administrative offices. The
difference is the reason why in 2001 I was still able to witness the bull festival of the Mafa of
Zlama at the eastern foot of the Ziver-Oupay massif, where the chief represented the most
numerous and therefore chiefly local clan group. As a traditional chief he had to stay at home
throughout the bull festival, and there was a female gender aspect related to his behaviour. He
was never allowed to be alone but always had to be accompanied by a second representative,
an aspect we have referred to in reproductive terms as pairing or doubling, and which in
different ways was once a feature of Mafa and Dghweɗe ritual culture. In the case of the
Mafa, the pairing or doubling carried an aspect of chiefly descent as a result of successful
reproduction of the local clan group to which he belonged. The Mafa used a system of leaders
(bay) and followers (biy gwala), in the context of which the leaders represented the more
senior lineages, and the followers the more junior lineages of the local descent group. Several
such clan groups formed village alliances under the ritual leadership of those among them
who were locally most successful, who were referred to as 'sons of the leader' (kr biy).
The same system of bay (ritual leader) and biy gwala (ritual follower) crossed into the
structure of Mafa extended families, who applied these terms to their more senior or junior
family representatives in the context of ritual beer drinking, which underpins its egalitarian
dimension. It was in the first instance about patrilineal reproduction linked to the formation of
chiefly clan majorities in terms of number, rather than about constructing dynastic succession,
and I presented these traditions in The Way of the Beer (Muller-Kosack 2003). I was still able
to practice participant observation while working in the Gouzda area during the second half of
the 1980s, and did not need to reconstruct the rituals from collective memories alone. Also,
the Mafa bull festival was still performed in 2001, while the bull festival in the Gwoza hills
had ceased either shortly before or shortly after national independence. The British had
declared the Gwoza hills an Unsettled District while they were busy developing a new elite in
Gwoza town from early colonial times. They were interested in the concept of majority
(gadghale) which the Dghweɗe practised, but the British failed to understand that it did not
have the chiefly aspect that it did with the Mafa. However, the French were not interested in
using any of the traditional structures because they did not believe in indirect rule at all.
Therefore, due to their traditions being uninterrupted I was still able to witness the bull
festival of Zlama on the eastern slopes of the Ziver massif.
Our description of how the Dghweɗe system of majority without chiefs might have influenced
the making of collective decisions cannot be fully understood without applying the underlying
cosmological worldview we have reconstructed. As with sacrifices to community shrines,
there were no cyclical gatherings of elders as the British colonial officers might have liked to
imagine in order to promote administrative self-governance. An important element of
Dghweɗe ritual culture was that a crisis situation was needed to trigger such a majority
decision, and overall authority was based on the reproductive success of patrilineal descent.
This would mean that the representative of the local lineage majority would determine in
which specific locality the Gaske rainmaker should carry out rituals to promote rainfall. This
belief was deeply embedded in the local cosmography, and in the case of Ghwa'a, Durghwe
was the dominant subregional mountain shrine. We described the importance of its visibility,
showed how it was linked to water and how it was seen as the house of twins, and that it had
three cosmological bulls living in its primordial centre. The image of the bull is not
necessarily a direct consequence of the travelling bull festival but is connected to the bull as a
symbol of fertility, for example the Chikiɗe and Guduf never had a travelling bull festival but
they kept bulls enclosed for several years and ritually slaughtered them on the level of the
extended family only. On the other hand, the Lamang, the Dghweɗe and the Gvoko to the
south of Dghweɗe shared a travelling bull festival with the neighbouring Mafa, and we
concluded that the ritual link of the Dghweɗe to Gudur belongs, like the travelling bull
festival of the Mafa, to the late pre-colonial period.
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