Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 35
For the survivors of today and the historians of tomorrow
I made several attempts to write about the Dghweɗe and the Gwoza hills, but the process of
developing a final approach happened under the impression of the increasingly devastating
effect Boko Haram had on their mountainous homeland. After all, their terrifying presence
had stopped me from visiting again, although at first I thought that this was only temporary.
This was the time between my last visit in 2009/10 and 2012, a couple of years before the
Boko Haram insurgents had managed to establish themselves for good in the Gwoza hills.
My first attempt to write was in 2010 after I had been unexpectedly forced to retire from my
job as a psychiatric social worker in London, a result of the 2008 financial crisis. All the years
before I had not been able to concentrate on publishing anything much, but was more
concerned with maintaining a dual career in which my main focus was to collect ethnographic
field data with the perspective of publishing after retirement at age 65. The premature
retirement from my main breadwinning job at the age of 60 and my last visit to Dghweɗe
coincided, and suddenly I found myself confronted with a large corpus of fieldnotes, with no
longer having the distraction of maintaining a dual career, but nevertheless with no plan of
how to proceed.
The first thing I did after I found myself stripped of a regular income, but also with the feeling
of being stranded as I could not make further trips to the Gwoza hills, was to type up my
Dghweɗe notes. I had collected them between 1995 and 2010 in a series of about eight visits.
Each of them had lasted an average of about six weeks and had taken place during the rainy
as well as during the dry season, but more often during the dry season. There was another set
of fieldnotes from my initial ethnographic survey of the Gwoza hills in 1994. They had
already been typed up in 1995 before I even started doing my first session in Dghweɗe,
which, as a result of that survey, I had identified as a key group of the Gwoza hills. The first
set is referred to as Gwoza notes and the second set as Dghweɗe notes, but before I explain
how my Dghweɗe notes became the ethnographic base of this book, the first thing is to
explain how my Gwoza notes fit into it.
The Gwoza notes not only contain ethnographic survey data about all the other groups of the
Gwoza hills, but also some first survey notes about the Dghweɗe. The latter will play an
important role in Part Three, in 'Dghweɗe oral history retold', while a summary of the survey
will be presented in Part One, in 'The Gwoza hills before Boko Haram'. It will be seen further
below how Part One is structured, but I want to mention at this point that it is not only an
introduction to the ethnography of the Gwoza hills, but also a presentation of the
administrative structure of the Gwoza LGA. There now follows an explanation of the
circumstances of how I collected my Dghweɗe notes, and how I finally processed them to
form the ethnographic information base for this book.
My interest in working on the ethnography of the Gwoza hills, and the Dghweɗe in particular,
was inspired by my previous work among the Mafa. The latter is the montagnard neighbour
of the Dghweɗe to the east and southeast, along the other side of the international boundary.
However, unlike for the Mafa, there was no prior ethnographic literature on the Dghweɗe,
except for some mentions by Renate Lukas (1973) and Ekkehard Wolff (1971). I therefore
consider my fieldnotes to be the first truly substantial ethnographic research ever conducted
among the Dghweɗe. There were nevertheless quite a few colonial reports, to which we will
refer in the context of Part Two, in ‘Key sources towards a shared subregional past’. Among
the colonial reports it is A.B. Mathews' work from 1934 which stands out, and which I used a
lot during my fieldwork to compare oral historical traditions, and we will refer to his data in
all three parts of this book.
My research assistant for my Dghweɗe fieldwork was John Zakariya from Barawa but with
roots in Ghwa'a. He was a student at the University of Maiduguri and about to complete his
degree in economics when we become close friends in the process of working together for so
many years. He features quite a lot in this work. He lost his home in Barawa as a result of
Boko Haram and remains deeply traumatised, and now lives in the outskirts of Abuja. We are
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