Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 66
Three, particularly concerning the Tur tradition, and other oral historical fragments if
relevant, for a better understanding of the Dghweɗe. The case of the legend of Kumba Zadva,
who was the founding ancestor of the once Lamang-speaking Zelidva, is an example, and the
roles Amuda and Ganjara took as cornblessers and rainmakers. Other relevant examples are
the role of the Gudule in the context of the bull festival, and their link to Gudur (MofuGudur), which can only be understood in comparison with other regional groups, or the
Podoko, who also lived there but left the Gwoza hills in pre-colonial times. Figure 4 at the
end of this chapter gives an overview of how these links need to be seen geographically as
key parts of the northern Mandara Mountains as a whole.
When I carried out the ethnographic survey of the GLGA in 1994, I was intrigued by the
complexity of the situation, although at the time this did not seem to matter a great deal. Take
alone the linguistic situation: There were eight languages spoken in the Gwoza hills, but since
Hausa increasingly took over as the lingua franca, many of the cultural aspects embedded in a
local language appeared historical. This might not be entirely true however, because some of
the contentious issues mentioned earlier, such as the mountains versus plains controversy,
continued to draw from past social imagery, and a language change alone does not make this
disappear. An example is the fact that people of the plain tended to perceive those of the hills,
at least since colonial times, as socially inferior. However it seemed that this had more or less
shifted too, and had at least partially become a matter of disadvantaged mountain groups and
eastern plain groups conspiring together against a historically more advantaged western plain.
How all this will play out in the future remains to be seen, when the process of reconciliation
following the Boko Haram invasion will hopefully succeed.
To better understand the driving forces behind these ongoing conflict issues, we will have to
go into the colonial history of the Dghweɗe. Mathews (ibid) already perceived them as an oral
historical key group of the Gwoza hills, but before exploring this in Part Two and Part Three,
it is necessary to outline its administrative structure, and highlight some of the problems
inherent before Boko Haram. By doing so we will refer back to what we said earlier, and add
more detail, and aim to better underpin our claims with ethnolinguistic and demographic
background data as far as they are available.
Before examining our mapped summary results below, we need to explain that we did not
include the whole of Tokombere District, only the villages along the western foot of the
Zelidva spur. I regret this in hindsight, especially since Tokombere was situated in between
the northwestern foothills of the Gwoza hills and Sambisa forest. We know that it functioned
as a place of transition for Boko Haram, as they were able to move undisrupted between the
forest area and the Gwoza hills by travelling through Tokombere. We know that they also
used the Gwoza hills as a base to carry out cross-border attacks in neighbouring Cameroon.
Years of insecurity of the intramountainous eastern plain and the inability of the Nigerian
army to strategically rise to this challenge led to the loss of hundreds of lives and the
displacement of thousands.
The boundaries of villages and wards
The Gwoza LGA had undergone quite a few administrative changes since the previous local
government reform of 1976, but here we will use only the structure of 1994, being the most
recent spotlight of local history. According to this, in 1994 Gwoza LGA consisted of three
districts. They can be divided into fifteen villages, which in turn were subdivided into over
fifty wards. The administrative structure at that time overlapped with other structures, to
which we refer here as linguistic and ethnic units. They were further divided into
ethnolinguistic subunits, according to the administrative structure of villages and wards.
Figures 3, 3a, and 3b, as well as Table 1, are an attempt to cartographically capture the
complexity of the situation in sequence.
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