Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 90
This is of course speculation and there is no mention of a climate crisis in any of our relevant
early written sources, except perhaps indirectly by Ibn Furtu, who tells us that king Idris
Alauma of Borno had to come back a second time with enough provisions for his troops to
successfully carry out the siege. It is nevertheless reasonable to infer that even though Umar's
'pagan' brother was hiding on top of the Kirawa foothill, and finally surrendered to the king of
Borno, the previous pagan rulers of Kirawa had a relationship with the people of the Gwoza
hills which was not just based on iron. Whether it was a tribute relationship, in which perhaps
sorghum and iron were paid to keep them safe from slave raiding in the hills, we do not know.
Neither do we know whether Ghwa'a for example already existed at the time, but we will
demonstrate in Part Three that Korana Basa most likely developed later, in the context of the
long wet period of the 1600s, when the DGB sites finally came to an end and the Wandala
capital was moved to Doulo.
Tribute arrangements and the link to slave raiding in the hills
Before we lay out the appropriate time frame for this chapter section, it is necessary to
summarise and recapitulate our chronological approach. We can conclude from the previous
section, that all our early written and other scientific key sources only provide us with a
relative time frame to draw chronological conclusions from our oral sources, of which the
latter consist of two types: first our actual ethnographic oral history accounts from Dghweɗe,
and second those of the Wandala Chronicles from the early 18th century. Concerning the
latter, we attempted to filter out a list of Wandala pre-Islamic rulers from Forkl's critical
review of original Arabic key sources, and used Umar's brother as a historical figure because
he was mentioned by Ibn Furtu. We then connected the absolute date of Ibn Furtu's account
and connected it with Jean Maley's palaeoclimatc dates from the Lake Chad water levels. We
subsequently arranged the kings before and after Umar and arrived with king Agamakiya's
son Abalaksaka as the first Wandala ruler, who lived permanently in Kirawa.
We did this in a form of relative chronology by giving every Wandala king an average of 25
years of rule, and by linking them equally with an average of 25 years of change in Lake
Chad water levels. We arrived at a relative date of contemporaneity between Abalaksaka and
the beginning of extreme aridity in the region. We then linked our list of Wandala rulers and
our palaeoclimatic dates with the DGB sites, and by relying on MacEachern (ibid), we
identified about 200 years, from 1400 to 1600AD, as pre-historically the possibly most active
period of contemporaneity between the DGB sites and Kirawa. We finally predicted that
Ghwa'a might have already existed during the second part of that period, while we assumed
that Korana Basa most likely developed after the DGB period ceased. We pointed out that we
underpin this hypothesis later in Part Three, in the context of our Dghweɗe oral history retold.
To find a historically sound starting point for a diachronic time frame for our Dghweɗe oral
history accounts of tribute arrangements and slave raiding in the hills, we have decided to first
consult the earliest colonial key sources. By doing so we can identify that the period starting
about 1902 was key, because this was the date when the first mention of names and places in
Dghweɗe could be established from the maps of Max Moisel (1913). We elaborate on this in
the first chapter of Part Three, which allows us to establish that most of the names of
Dghweɗe settlement units we presented in our ethnographic survey of 1994 already existed at
that time. To present the oral historical evidence of the chronological sequence of a northern
(Ghwa'a) and southern (Korana-Basa) division as the main geographical manifestations of a
pre-colonial Dghweɗe, remains an important objective. To achieve this, we go backwards in
time by relying more or less entirely on our Dghweɗe oral sources, and in this way discover
the traditional mechanisms, which explain how Korana Basa emerged while Ghwa'a already
existed. We already suggested the period of the very humid 17th century as the most likely
palaeoclimatic time frame, during which Doulo came about as the new Wandala capital.
In the context of this chapter section, we will, however, start with the 18th century, and show
the importance of the late pre-colonial Wandala, who in the early years had converted to
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