Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 39
I am not saying that Dghweɗe survivors might not write down their oral history, but to my
knowledge no one ever documented so many collective memory data as John and I did
between 1994 and 2010. I would like to earn the entitlement of speaking on behalf of those
who told us their stories by entitling this book: Azaghvana, meaning literally 'I say', and it is
important to me not to speak of my Dghweɗe friends as my informants, an expression still
used by ethnographic writers, but instead to call them protagonists. This also includes John.
Plate 4a: Group of bulamas and elders of Korana Basa during my first visit
Plates 4a to 4n present pictures of my Dghweɗe protagonist friends. They and many others
were the voices behind what I learned and present here as a generalised version of a Dghweɗe
oral history retold. I am aware that many of the historically minded Dghweɗe will not agree
with a few of my interpretations, but hope that they can still see them as useful ethnographic
sources of their once shared collective past.
Plate 4b: We do not know which ward we visited that day. John is sitting in the centre front.
The photos in Plates 4a to 4d were taken in the second half of the 1990s. Plate 4a is the very
first photo I took in Dghweɗe to show who was participating in our research. It was during
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