Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 29
During my previous visit in November 2005 I encountered something I would now like to
refer to as an early warning sign of what was potentially to come. Often in the evening I had
local visitors coming to my research station in Dzga, and I remember one evening a group of
young Muslim men coming along. We sat on the rocks and talked about all sorts of things,
and I asked them how they felt as Muslims about their right to inherit farmland from their
Traditionalist fathers. These young men insisted that they would rather not inherit the land of
their forefathers, unless their dads converted to Islam before they died. Their sense of
religious identity as Muslims did not permit them to inherit from their 'unbelieving' fathers, a
predicament which denied them the right to inherit arable family land in the hills. They
seemed prepared to put religious belief over material interest.
At the time I was not aware that these young men might have already been influenced by
fundamentalist preachers of some kind. I just thought they had come back to the hills for a
social visit after earning money as butchers in Maiduguri. I remember, in my naivety as a
Westerner and a child of the political idealistic left of the 1960/70s, feeling some kind of
weird counterintuitive kindred spirit regarding their preparedness to break with tradition for
the sake of ideas. However I could not share their sentiment but instead felt a sense of regret,
and would have liked to be able to persuade them to respect their forefathers’ tradition while
at the same time being Muslims. After all, I was more interested in their fathers' views and
memories about the traditional past of the Dghweɗe than I was in their newly acquired
religious radicalism. In 2005 I had of course no idea of how it would all turn nasty only a few
years later.
Contradicting circumstances
The people of the Gwoza hills have a long history of resistance against Islamic conversion,
and as one of the large groups the Dghweɗe played a prominent role in the context of this
only a couple of generations earlier. In 1953, lawan Buba, a retired former village head of
Gwoza, was killed in Ghwa'a (see Figure 3) because he tried to mediate in a resettlement
conflict. Lawan Buba himself originated from Korana Basa, but at that time he was seen as a
representative of the new Muslim elite which had formed in Gwoza town under the auspices
of the British colonial system of indirect rule. The incident, which was officially referred to as
the 'Gwoza Affair' and unofficially as the 'Johode Affray', is well documented, and we will
hear more about it later. At this point, it is only to say that the killing of lawan Buba happened
in the context of an early 1950s attempt to more or less force the Dghweɗe off the hills and
resettle them in the plains. The Dghweɗe did not like this because they did not want to give
up the safety and security of their mountain farms.
An important part of their resistance was the fear of being raided if resettled out on the plains,
a memory of which the Dghweɗe still had from the attacks by Hamman Yaji across the hills.
Hamman Yaji had abused his office as district head and had conducted slave raids in the
context of the upheavals of World War One. The circumstances of the death of lawan Buba in
1953 and the raids by Hamman Yaji about thirty years before had remained in the collective
memory of many of my Dghweɗe friends. The killing of lawan Buba therefore created a
lasting negative legacy in Ghwa'a, where it had resulted in children missing out on access to
primary education even until my time. The earlier mentioned Dzga Primary School was only
founded in 2001 and was the first official state school ever in Ghwa'a. We can confirm that it
was the result of an earlier initiative by Stella Cattini and myself, in which Stella had started
to teach children the basics of English literacy and numeracy under the mahogany tree of my
research station.
Thanks mainly to the financial help of Stella's friends in London and elsewhere, we
eventually managed to collect enough money to finance a separate building for a new centre,
but then the local government closed it down because they classed it as a primary school.
Luckily a delegation of elders went down to Gwoza and spoke to the education secretary, and
it was opened again as the first Dzga Primary School. This example shows that the old
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