Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 34
Dghweɗe was still controlled by Boko Haram. I was told that it would be still far too
dangerous for a Christian to go up there and visit their mountainous homeland.
It was very difficult to get to the bottom of this because my sources were mainly Christians
who had been fleeing Barawa but who had local connections to Ghwa'a. Then in 2019 several
of my old Dghweɗe friends died. One of them was Taɗa Nzige, the senior rainmaker who had
been one of my main protagonists, not only on the history of rainmaking but also as an
eyewitness on the killing of lawan Buba in 1953. Taɗa Nzige had already converted to Islam
when I met him in the mid-1990s. He was one of the initiators to complain to the Gwoza
educational authority when the Dzga Learning Support was closed in the late 1990s. At the
time he had become aware that it was in the interest of the Dghweɗe of Ghwa'a to have access
to primary education, which he had been supporting with his action. Now, after his death, I
was confronted with the rumour that Taɗa Nzige had been one of the supporters of Boko
Haram in Ghwa'a, but we know far too little to make a judgement. His colonial involvement
in forcing down the local population had troubled him, therefore he owned up by giving a
truthful account of the killing of lawan Buba, and he also showed great compassion when he
supported the Dzga primary school. This all shows a complex personal background history.
In 2019 I learned some more disturbing things regarding the corrupting presence of Boko
Haram in Dghweɗe. I now realised who were the true local victims. When I spoke to one of
my sources and was inquiring about life in the hills, I was told that someone I knew as a
Traditionalist friend had alledgedly also joined Boko Haram. He had been the local custodian
of Ghwa'a, meaning he was responsible for many key rituals in the past. We will learn more
about that traditional role in our Dghweɗe oral history retold. My source believed that the
main reason why our friend had converted to the radical Boko Haram ideology was that his
survival was challenged. The case of two of my friends having become victims of Boko
Haram by being forced to join them made me realise that elderly Traditionalists had become
vulnerable survivors of the Boko Haram presence in the hills.
While putting the finishing touches on this book, I remain shocked by what has happened, and
also intrigued by the contradictions and intricacies of what brought all of this about. My
sources on the actual situation in Dghweɗe remain very vague indeed and none of what I
write in this last update of the most recent developments is written in stone. However, it
makes me feel, as the writer of this book, a personal commitment to processing my field data
with the greatest possible respect. The next chapter addresses this, and also explains how the
methodological approach of writing developed and finally took shape.
While we develop that view, we will realise that the survivors of Boko Haram are not only all
those who lost their family members, friends and their homeland, but that one of the main
losses is that of a memory of a once-shared cultural past. This is particularly painful when
living in the diasporas, where one’s own cultural past might become idealized or embroidered
very quickly. This is why I aim for the highest possible authenticity in what my Dghweɗe
friends told me about their cultural past, while their collective memory was still a continuous
aspect of living in their mountainous homeland.
We will see in the next chapter that there is another dimension to my writing, one which has
to do with indirect criticism of academic ethnographic writing in a postmodern world of
social anthropology. In that more scholarly context we will learn what is meant by a fragment,
and that fragments are not just parts of a bigger whole but the result of a process in which one
thing becomes another by writing it down. This is the main challenge in this case, and at the
same time a typical consequence of writing an oral history by developing a historical
narrative from the spoken perspective of local protagonists who remembered for us their
Traditionalist past.
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