Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 78
period. This makes the Dghweɗe colonial period not only the most recent but also the
historically most convincing period of a reconstructed Dghweɗe past. Archival and oral eyewitness accounts from the early 1950s, such as in the case of the killing of lawan Buba, are
much less apocryphal than the journey to Maiduguri leading to the arrest of Hamman Yaji in
the late 1920s, as they carry the immediacy of the emotional involvement of the teller of the
story. The further back in time we go, the more legendary the Dghweɗe oral accounts seem to
become, something we consider to be one of the main challenges in making sense of them.
One of the reasons is presumably because they were constructed closer to the Dghweɗe belief
system of the pre-colonial past, for instance when the main actors of the legendary journey
from Ghwa'a travelled to the resident of Borno in Maiduguri they were still using pre-colonial
methods of traditional peacemaking, such as the use of Cissus quadrangularis (vavanza) as
clan medicine.
Much of our attempt to present the underlying complexities of the oral source situation, and to
integrate them into our Table of Contemporaneity with the Wandala Chronicles, proves
difficult, as the latter source was written down in Arabic. However we will not discuss the
history of the various attempts to translate them, but will use the most recent translation,
which is by Hermann Forkl (1995). He has a long record of working on the pre-colonial
history of the Wandala state, and did much ethnographic comparative work of the whole
region south of Lake Chad. His ethnographic writings are mostly in German, as is his book
about the various Arabic manuscripts forming the Wandala Chronicles, the history of which
he documents. We are using here his German translation of a copy of one of the same
manuscripts that Eldridge Mohammadou translated into French in 1982. Forkl (ibid 84) found
an almost identical copy to the one Mohammadou had used, and he compares the two and
retranslates them in tandem. Our presentation of his German transcription will be in English,
for which I take responsibility.
Forkl presents a relative chronology of the various rulers. We are particularly interested in the
dynastic history of the rulers of Kirawa, and we represent an alternative chronology by
linking it to the various other sources. This includes the radiocarbon dates from the DGB
sites, as well as paleoclimatic data linked to the dynastic chronology of the Wandala rulers of
Kirawa. In this context we make a further attempt to connect much earlier Arabic sources by
Ibn Furtu, concerning the siege of the foothill of Kirawa by Sultan Idris Alauma of Borno.
While the Wandala Chronicles are from the early 18th century, Ibn Furtu's account is from
about 150 years earlier in the late 16th century, and the other difference is that the late 16th
century was a very arid period that had lasted at least 25 years. We have allocated the latter to
the rule of the siege of Kirawa by the Borno empire, while Kirawa seems to have asserted its
pre-Islamic heritage, and we ask whether this period of Traditionalist 'resistance' against the
Islamic influence from Borno might have been accompanied by a revitalisation of ritual
relationships between the montagnards of the Gwoza hills and the Traditionalist Wandala
rulers of Kirawa.
The question of whether there was such a ritually defined pre-colonial link between the
montagnards and the Wandala ruler of Kirawa during the late 16th century, stems from our
unfolding Dghweɗe ethnography. We presume that the Dghweɗe ritual interventions in
managing environmental crises were triggered by extreme aridity, and as such were common,
and that the geographical closeness of Kirawa to the Gwoza hills was not only useful for a
potential retreat, but also related to the montagnard culture of rainmaking and cornblessing.
We hypothesise that this subregional circumstance was linked to a long mutual relationship of
interaction and exchange, which was not only based on tribute or trade relations, but had a
more essential aspect to do with a pre-Islamic culture of promoting strategies of good luck
and hope for divine intervention in order to survive potential food shortages during times of
severe environmental crises. We hypothesis that this was culturally linked to the invention of
terrace cultivation, for which a mixed farming system was pre-conditional, and we would like
to interpret the DGB complex as a subregional manifestation of this.
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