Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 22
General Acknowledgements
First of all I want to thank all my local Dghweɗe friends for so patiently teaching me about
their past and present cultural ways until the arrival of Boko Haram. I will only list several of
them here and will present all the other protagonists and respondents in the text. They are
bulama Ngatha from Hudimche, bulama Bala from Korana Kwandame, Zakariya Kwire and
dada Ɗga from Ghwa'a, and baba Musa from Barawa. A special thanks goes to my friend and
research assistant John Zakariya from Barawa because without him I would not have been
able to conduct this research in the first place. I thank Jim Wade and Marta Galantha for
letting me stay in their house on the campus of the University of Maiduguri. At that time they
were both still doing ethnographic research among the Fali of the Mubi area. Jim Wade read
through many chapters of this book before it was copy-edited and he helped me to improve
my ethnographic English. I want to say a big thank you to the late Ulrich Braukämper, who in
the early 1990s was at the University of Frankfurt from where he recommended me for the
DFG research grant to start the long overdue research into the ethnography of the Gwoza
hills. I also want to thank Nic David from the University of Calgary, who in 2000 invited me
to participate in the Mandara Archaeological Project about the archaeology of the DGB sites
in my former Mafa research area. Nic David and his wife Judith Sterner also did ethnographic
research in Sukur and I hiked across the heights of Tur to visit them there. A special thank
you goes to my copy-editor Annie Lawson who transformed my German-sounding English
into ethnographic prose. My other special thank you goes to Kiki Shiouxios for her
encouraging comments after reading some chapters from the perspective of an imagined
general public. Mark Hoser helped with preparing and successfully transferring the final PDF
version to the digital printing company, while Denis Smith designed the book cover to be
transferred with it. There are countless others I have to thank but the list is too long, so I thank
everybody who has ever supported me to make this book possible.
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Technical Notes
Spelling convention of Dghweɗe words
I use the adopted spelling conventions I learned when working among the Mafa of Cameroon,
by writing the lateral fricative as th and dh instead of sl and zl. I also use the implosive ɗ and
the implosive ɓ but do not use any other phonetic fonts such as tones. We use gh for guttural,
r for a hard gutteral, and h for a soft one. I am not a linguist but have standardised the cultural
vocabularies used in this book by relying on my Dghweɗe research assistant to transcribe the
Dghweɗe words.
About maps and illustrations
I made most maps myself, based on topographical maps 1:1,000,000 for Figures 1 and 2, and
used topographical maps 1:50,000 as base maps for Figures 3-3b. Many Plates are colour
photographs taken during field sessions and I converted the ones I found suitable into greyscale illustrations and drew on them with a digital pen in order to bring out the elements I
wanted to emphasise. This was particularly important for the reconstruction of Dghweɗe
vernacular architecture, and I added reference numbers to the illustrated greyscale images so
the reader can easily identify descriptions referred to in the text. I have also used field
drawings that Stella Cattini kindly produced for me while I was working on adult initiation
(dzum zugune) rituals, by combining them with photographs I took of the dresses and
adornments the Dghweɗe once used. There are also many illustrations from ethnographic
contexts, such as ritual pathways or illustrations of war alliances, and they are all included
below as Figures. Finally there are Tables to further describe past ethnographic data on the
history of clan and lineage names, demographic data and data linked to the seasonal calendar
of the Dghweɗe.
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