Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 23
Preface
Azaghvana means 'I say!' in the Dghweɗe language, and this statement in the way it was
expressed was also used to refer to the Dghweɗe as distinct ethnolinguistic group. The subtitle 'A fragmentary history of the Dghweɗe of the Mandara Mountains' implies that we are
putting our Dghweɗe protagonists at the centre of the ethnographic narrative while writing
their history from the grassroots, and at the same time our aim is to embed their oral historical
perspective into the wider subregion of the northwestern Mandara Mountains. My
ethnographic work began in 1981 among the Mafa on the Cameroonian side of the wider
subregion, and in 1994 I started working in the Gwoza hills and lived among the Dghweɗe,
but withdrew in 2010 because terrorists of Boko Haram had invaded their mountain
homeland. This led to the death of many and destroyed their collective memories as
montagnards. Between 2012 and 2016 many of my Dghweɗe friends fled the mountains and
adjacent plains. They now live in refugee camps or are trying to rebuild their lives elsewhere,
while the Gwoza hills remain too unsafe to return and conditions of life there have changed
beyond recognition.
It was due to witnessing the destruction of the Dghweɗe culture before my eyes that I decided
to write this book from a personal perspective. I had already made several attempts to write
about the Dghweɗe and what I knew about the ethnography of the Gwoza hills in general, but
I felt a growing sense of dissatisfaction in not putting my Dghweɗe friends at the centre of it.
There was also the critique I have harboured for quite some time about ethnographic writing
in general, which is in my view the increasing tendency of ethnographers to enjoy writing for
each other more than translating and discussing the oral testimonies of their protagonists. This
led me to imagine how the Dghweɗe as survivors and future historians of their past would
want me to write. In the course of my quest for such proclaimed authenticity I felt
increasingly inadequate but decided to see it through. The result is this fragmentary narrative
which also aims to fill a regional gap, and my only defence is that I have been doing crossborder fieldwork in the area for several decades.
In 2003 I published The Way of the Beer, a work about the Cameroonian side of the
mountains, which is a re-enactment of history through rituals carried out among the Mafa who
are also terrace farmers of the Mandara Mountains. The Mafa are the immediate neighbours
of the Dghweɗe and I was very interested in how their ritual culture could be read as oral
history. In 1994 I was awarded a grant by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to begin
ethnographic work in the Gwoza hills, because as a result of colonial history they had been
neglected by ethnographers. In Part One we present a summary of the ethnographic survey I
made at that time, and introduce the reader to how I experienced the Gwoza hills before the
occupation of Boko Haram. In Part Two we learn that the Dghweɗe massif, with Ghwa'a at its
centre, was once an early arrival zone from where other groups evolved. The pre-colonial past
of the Gwoza hills also includes Kirawa as the first capital of the Wandala, but we also
consider the stone ruins of the DGB site in the Mafa area to be part of the wider subregion. In
the chapter on colonial history we present the Gwoza hills as an Unsettled District under
British indirect rule, where a conflict emerged between the Dghweɗe and the new colonial
elite in Gwoza town who wanted to bring about their downhill migration.
Part Three presents Dghweɗe oral culture by contextualising fragments of their history with
what we learned in Part One and Part Two, and also by ethnographically connecting the
Gwoza hills with the rest of the Mandara Mountains. We achieve this by contextualising
Ghwa'a, as early arrival zone from Tur, with similar south-to-north migratory traditions of the
wider subregion, which includes migratory traditions of the Mafa from the DGB area.
Throughout Part Three we present the interconnected ethnographic fragments from Dghweɗe
with the aim of forming a shared history from the grassroots, and critically underpin the
perspective of our oral protagonists with paleoclimatic and other early key sources. By
examining our source material along the lines of a narrative of a pre-Copernican worldview
we reconstruct the Dghweɗe way of life as a sophisticated historical achievement in which
xxi
