Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 36
still in contact and I will often refer to him simply as John. His importance was manifold. He
was crucial in interpreting for me and also in discussing open questions and planning our
ongoing research process. John not only patiently translated my questions into Dghweɗe and
back into English, but also relayed and often summarised what our Dghweɗe friends
answered while I was taking notes. John was also fundamental in transcribing the many
Dghweɗe words for me, and when we translated taped interviews he was the semantic
interlink. John is, therefore, the most crucial interpretative connection between our oral
protagonists in the field and the written version of the Dghweɗe notes that I typed up during
2010.
Processing my handwritten fieldnotes into typed field documents was a very important first
step to bring them together in one format. Turning them into a substantial corpus of fully
accessible and searchable data allowed me to see for the first time the results of our research
in Dghweɗe in its entirety. I indexed them and also produced an annotated list of about 1000
Dghweɗe words and concepts which I had separated. Many of those words appeared to be
double or transcribed in different ways but formed a point to refer back to when needed. I also
had a significant number of photographs from documenting material aspects of Dghweɗe
culture. One part of the corpus of photographs was in the form of slides and another large part
consisted of digital photos. I scanned all the slides in and numbered them to make them
available for choosing those suitable for illustration and printing.
Another very important part of the corpus of my written historical sources consists of the
corpus of archival notes I collected in the National Archives of Kaduna in 1998. I spent a
week in Kaduna, concentrating on the Gwoza hills in general but also on past key events in
Dghweɗe during colonial times. The 'Gwoza Affair', of which I had already documented an
oral account by Taɗa Nzige of Ghwa'a, was one of them. I photocopied a selection of various
archive materials during that week, to have them available for my future writing about the
colonial history of the Dghweɗe, especially while under British indirect rule. In 1999 I also
went to the German Colonial Archives in Berlin, where I studied and collected materials from
the beginning of the German colonial rule from 1902 onwards. That set of data will be
elaborated further below when describing the main chapters of Part Two.
Between 2001 and 2004 I was involved in the archaeological work on the DGB sites, a set of
ancient stone platforms, which brought me back to my former research area in Mafa land. The
DGB complex will feature a great deal in this book, and so do the ancient Wandala rulers of
Kirawa and much more will be heard about them later. It was in 2011 after I had organised
my Dghweɗe notes that I started to write about the pre-colonial and colonial background
history of the Dghweɗe. This was when I explored for the first time what became later the
essence of my approach of setting the pre-colonial background scene, by seeing the Gwoza
hills as being geographically sandwiched between the early Wandala state in Kirawa and the
early terraced platform structures of the DGB sites. At the time I explored quite extensively
pre-colonial and colonial key sources, and elements of Part Two are shortened versions of
that, but in 2011 I was still thinking that I would be able to visit Dghweɗe again soon.
Then, in 2012, the killing of many of my friends in Dghweɗe began, and it was then that I
realised that I might never be able to go back to the Gwoza hills. Only a few months earlier I
had begun to look at my typed Dghweɗe notes and had started with a historical ethnography,
written from the perspective of the social transformations of Dghweɗe society. While events
unfolded I realised that I would have to go back to Dghweɗe to carry out more fieldwork on
the question of how my Dghweɗe friends interpreted their social transformation against the
background of my previous research. Because a study of the social transformation of the
Dghweɗe in their homeland was no longer possible, I changed my approach and instead
began to write about the Gwoza hills as a sub-region of the northern Mandara Mountains.
The reason for the new approach was that I thought I could no longer write about the
Dghweɗe while not seeing a future for them in their mountains. I possibly also struggled with
being too much of an outsider. However, only shortly after I had started writing about the
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