Skip to main content

Shrines in Africa: History, Politics, and Society: 1. Pots, Stones, and Potsherds: Shrines in the Mandara Mountains (North Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria)

Shrines in Africa: History, Politics, and Society
1. Pots, Stones, and Potsherds: Shrines in the Mandara Mountains (North Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria)
    • Notifications
    • Privacy
  • Project HomeShrines in Africa
  • Projects
  • Learn more about Manifold

Notes

Show the following:

  • Annotations
  • Resources
Search within:

Adjust appearance:

  • font
    Font style
  • color scheme
  • Margins
table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Half Title Page
  3. Africa: Missing Voices Series
  4. Title Page
  5. Copyright Page
  6. Table of Contents
  7. Introduction
  8. 1. Pots, Stones, and Potsherds: Shrines in the Mandara Mountains (North Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria)
  9. 2. The Archaeology of Shrines among the Tallensi of Northern Ghana: Materiality and Interpretive Relevance
  10. 3. Earth Shrines and Autochthony among the Konkomba of Northern Ghana
  11. 4. Shrines and Compound Abandonment: Ethnoarchaeological Observations in Northern Ghana
  12. 5. Constructing Ritual Protection on an Expanding Settlement Frontier: Earth Shrines in the Black Volta Region
  13. 6. Moroccan Saints’ Shrines as Systems of Distributed Knowledge
  14. Index

1

Pots, Stones, and Potsherds: Shrines in the Mandara Mountains (North Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria)

JUDITH STERNER (ALBERTA COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN) AND NICHOLAS DAVID (UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY)

ABSTRACT

In pre-colonial times the Mandara mountains were home to numerous small-scale societies practising varied economies and at varying levels of social complexity. Case studies that monitor varieties of shrines and their uses in the petty chiefdom of Sirak, in a larger Sukur chiefdom that specialized in iron making, and in Gudur, which we interpret as a ritual paramountcy, show that the division of ritual labour tracked but did not parallel that of labour in general. In a religious context characterized by a distant high god and omnipresent spirits and in an environment subject to repeated but unpredictable natural disasters and, in recent centuries, exposed to raiding by plains states, ritual specialists came to serve multiple communities. One cluster of communities, created by a diaspora from Gudur, relied on a chief, Bay Gudal, for protection from natural disasters and to ensure their fruitfulness and that of their animals and crops. Study of Gudur shrines and traditions throws light on the nature of the diaspora and indicates that this chief’s roles included those of priest, rainmaker, and diviner but that his power was limited in practice, if not in the perception of diasporan communities whose distance favoured its mythical exaggeration. The study of shrines not only documents the familial roots of political power and the importance of considering shrines’ congregations for understanding historical process, but, in a reversal of received views, reveals Gudur as a less complex ritual and political entity than Sukur.

Keywords: Sirak, Gudur, Sukur, Mandara mountains, Cameroon, ancestors shrines.

Les pratiques religieuses de la plupart des populations nonislamisées du Mãdara [Mandara], sont caractérisées par un trait commun : la représentation par des pierres polies et des bourmas (ou poteries) d’êtres auxquels on rend un culte. [de Lauwe 1937:54]1

INTRODUCTION

It is not surprising to anyone who has walked the paths of the Mandara mountains that de Lauwe’s attention was drawn to sacred pots. For these pots are not all kept in the darkened recesses of a shrine room or beneath a granary: some are left upon the tombs of their former owners; some are tucked into rock outcrops to protect against dangerous spirits, and others are reused for secular purposes or abandoned. Nearly seventy years after de Lauwe’s visit to the region, the tradition of sacred pots, potsherds and stones continues even though diminished by the influences of Islam and Christianity. In this paper we follow de Lauwe’s lead in analyzing in a regional and comparative perspective those artefacts and ecofacts that are the “material focus of religious activities” and thus are shrines according to van Binsbergen’s minimal definition (cited by Colson 1997:47).

The region with which we deal is not the Mandara mountains as a whole but that part of it within which communities are found that, in whole or in part, claim connections usually of descent to Gudur, reputedly a major religious centre (Fig. 1). In discussing Gudur we make use of Kopytoff’s (1987) concept of the internal African frontier, considering Gudur as, in his terms, a “metropole,” but in a broader sense the whole Mandara mountain area can be considered as a frontier within which, as innumerable oral traditions insist, people have for centuries been migrating at various scales to found new communities and to merge and abandon old ones. It is this frontier process that underlies the cultural similarities that we have earlier described in terms of montagnard participation in a common symbolic reservoir (David and Kramer 2001:206–18; Sterner 1992).

Map of the Mandara mountain area.

Fig. 1. Map of the Mandara mountain area of Nigeria and Cameroon showing selected communities and ethnic groups, towns and rivers. Capital letters indicate those groups of which a substantial part claims descent from Gudur. While certain Mafa chiefs and rainmakers including those of Soulede, Vreke, and Mudukwa claim Gudur descent, this does not appear to be generally true of this large ethnic group. The same can be said of the Daba and Gude.

Follow for extended description

We shall argue first that in the numerous small-scale montagnard societies of the region the division of ritual labour is closely related to that of labour in general and to social complexity. However before proceeding we should clarify the context of our observations. By the late twentieth century an earlier system of interaction with the spirit world had become much attenuated by “modernization,” the growth of markets and towns populated by practitioners of Islam and Christianity, and the mission-based spread of Christianity to the countryside in which the majority of the population continues to live. Nonetheless, despite the competition of world religions, local religions and ritual, though practised now primarily by those, mainly elders, who have not been exposed to Western-style education, survive and, together with the historical evidence provided by ethnographers and others, provide a substantial basis for inference. Thus we can state that, in the pre-colonial period, which here ends in 1902, Mandara montagnards practised a religion that combined belief in a distant high god and numerous spirits with whom they established contact through various material foci, stones and pots being the most common. The spirit world was populated by ancestors and a vast variety of other spirits: of places, those of mountains and water points (wells, springs, pools) being among the most important, of crops, diseases, of one’s own doppelganger soul, and many others. Contact with these spirits, which often took the form of an offering or sacrifice and a negotiation in the general manner described by Kopytoff (1971), took place both according to a ritual calendar and on other occasions when need arose. In both situations divination was often practised, sometimes by the person responsible for the cult but often by specialists. Divination determined an auspicious time for the ritual, if necessary the spirit to which the ritual should be addressed, and the nature of the offering and form of the rites, which often comprised a magical component. Thus divination, communication with spirits through shrines, and magic were inseparably linked. It was only in the period following World War II and especially since independence in 1960 that this system of beliefs and practices was seriously challenged by the extension of the power of the state and the modernizing influences noted above.

The original field material presented here is drawn mainly from Sterner’s research at Sirak (between 1986 and 1990) and that of Sterner and David at Sukur (between 1991 and 1996) and most recently at Gudur (2004). An earlier paper (David and Sterner 1999) sketches the nature of the Sirak and Sukur polities and these are described in greater detail by Sterner (2003), and Sukur also by David and Sterner (1995, 1996). Gudur is best known from the work of Seignobos (1991a), a human geographer with long and wide experience of northern Cameroon, and Jouaux (1989, 1991). In an ethnographic present located in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Sirak is best described as a petty priest-chiefdom and Sukur as a chiefdom committed to a village iron-smelting industry. Seignobos characterizes Gudur as a theocratic chiefdom and Jouaux hesitates between chiefdom and kingdom. Our recent research there led us to identify it rather as a form of ritual paramountcy exercised by the chiefdom of Gudal over a group of petty chiefdoms mostly speaking the same mofu-gudur language and collectively known as the Mofu-Gudur (David in press). Despite these differences and although, unlike Sirak, both Sukur and Gudur exerted, to a lesser and greater extent respectively, an influence over certain of their neighbours, the cultures of all three polities resemble each other much more than they differ.

In what follows we have omitted much ethnographic detail on ceramics that can be found in our earlier publications (David 1990; David et al. 1988; Sterner 1989a,b, 1992, 1995, 2002, 2003; Sterner and David 2003) and those of others (e.g., Barreteau, Sorin and Mana 1988).

SIRAK

Before there were pots, the ancestors ‘resided’ in stones and when beer was offered to them it just rolled off their backs. But in a pot the beer remained just like in a person’s stomach.2

Sirak, while considerably smaller than Gudur and most other Mandara mountain communities, comprises the same basic elements: there is a chief and six clans whose ancestors came from different settlements, Gudur being one, and decided to be “as brothers.” And as at Sukur, Gudur and among many other groups, there are two castes – farmers and smith/potters (Sterner and David 1991). Men of the latter caste are responsible for funerals and other ritual activities, including a near monopoly on divination; the women monopolize pot-making and may be engaged in the rituals associated with the vessels they produce.

Some twenty-one distinctively named and differently decorated pot types are made for use as shrines. The categorization of shrine types below, developed in cognizance of Mather’s (1999:79) classification of Kusasi (Ghana) shrines, emphasizes the nature of the spirits and of the social entities or “congregations” that serve and are served by the shrines.

Household shrines

Shrines held within households have diverse associations and functions. They contain potent and dangerous spirits, including those of the household’s ancestors and others that are the “property” of or are associated with individual family members.

Ancestor shrines

The most common shrine pots at Sirak are those made after the end of the period of mourning to contain the spirit of an ancestor (Fig. 2). The holder or custodian of such a pot must have living siblings or descendants on whose behalf he or she makes specified sacrifices. When a man dies it is his eldest surviving son (or daughter if there are no sons) who will have this responsibility. A senior man will serve the cult of his father, his father’s father, and his father’s mother, all represented by pots that are kept in a special small room in his house.3 A youngest son (or daughter) keeps the pot of his mother in his senior wife’s kitchen. Annual sacrifices, as well as sacrifices undertaken upon the advice of a diviner who is a member of the smith/potter caste, are made at these ancestor shrines on behalf of the descendants. Children who do not inherit responsibility for their parents’ shrines may use a piece of quartz or a potsherd to make their own offerings.

It is not uncommon for an immigrant of many years to participate in the ceremonies of his new community, but to continue within the confines of his home to use the ancestor pots of his natal village and conduct the rituals in the style of his former home. This and other evidence indicates that montagnard emigrants also take their ancestor pots and certain other shrines with them when they emigrate to found new communities or join others already established.

Three large pots placed inside a hole in the ground. The pots decrease in size from right to left. An old dish and some hay are placed beside them.

Fig. 2. Sirak shrines: from right to left, father, father’s father, and damaged father’s mother pots, left in their small room in an abandoned house.

Other potent spirits

The most common shrine in this category is that of the spirit associated with millet and sorghum. This shrine consists initially of a piece of quartz usually kept beneath the head of household’s primary granary. The householder makes sacrifices at this shrine several times a year, often after consultation with a diviner who may recommend the sacrifice of a particular animal or for a granary pot to be made to house the spirit.

Pot shrines relating to hunted leopards and the spirits of men killed in war represent another category of potent spirits that require placation; these exist now only as heirlooms and memories.

Upon the birth of twins, who are regarded as both fragile and dangerously potent, a set of pots comprising a small beer jar and a bowl is made for each twin.4 After a first sacrifice, others must be made annually in conjunction with the village-wide purification ceremony. On this occasion the parents, the twins and other close relatives assemble in the kitchen. Beer is poured into each twin pot and bowl, and over the twins themselves. This is essential not only for the well-being of the twins and their family but for the entire community.

Personal shrines

Unlike among the Mafa, Sirak do not possess a personal soul pot. However, the placenta is conceptualized as the baby’s double and as having a soul that requires some attention. Placentas are buried beneath an upturned pot, pierced for the passage of the spirit. A woman’s flour storage pot is used for a girl baby’s placenta and a man’s tripod meat cooking pot (legs removed) for a boy’s.5 These pots, located behind the mother’s room and outside the house wall, are left in place so long as the compound is occupied.

Gawula, the biennial male initiation ceremony, commemorates the attainment of elder status. Not every man will be initiated, for he must already be married, he must have another candidate as a partner, and his older brother(s) must have already been initiated. Each initiate receives a large jar used to serve beer to the other initiates once it has been consecrated with an offering of flour and water. When the owner dies it is placed on his tomb with a hole knocked in the base.

Many heads of households possess a pot known as the “shrine of tears” that is used to maintain harmony in the household. After an initial offering overseen by the smith/diviner, beer from this pot is shared with the household head’s children; subsequent offerings are made after consultation with a diviner. The wife of an elder may have an equivalent vessel.

Clan shrines

As the generations pass, male ancestors cease to be pots but are replaced by potsherds or pieces of quartz placed in clan sites, thus becoming elements in collective shrines served by the senior clan elder. The chiefly clan has a shrine atop the mountain where members of this clan formerly lived – it consists of pots that contain the spirits of leopards and enemies slain by clan members. In this shrine there were the remains of several such vessels, fragments of small bowls that had originally covered their mouths, and bones of sacrificial animals. In theory each clan has such a shrine. Some, perhaps once all, clans also have (or had) pot shrines to protect their members against disease.

Both types of clan shrines occupy permanent sites. Sacrificial animals are killed, prepared, and eaten at the site, and cooking pots may be left nearby.

Nature spirit shrines

Some “wild” or nature spirits are localized, being associated with water points, trees, rock outcrops, mountains, or other sites. These spirits and the shrines associated with them are called halalay. Such spirits are easily offended, for example by persons committing adultery in their vicinity, and require placation. If a person falls ill after cutting down a tree, a diviner may recommend that a pot be made. The afflicted person then returns to the tree with the diviner and the potter. After drinking some beer, a mixture of beer and ground sesame is put in the pot, which is left beneath a rock. Another type of halalay keeps the water in wells from leaving. Before a new well is lined with granite slabs, the neighbourhood elder responsible makes a sacrifice that is subsequently repeated annually. Halalay sites may be further marked with upright stones.

Shrines that protect against spirits of disease are usually made for an individual and are not localized, although there is one shrine where pot necks are left and offerings made by those suffering from ear problems. Once near a path Judy Sterner came across a pot with an anthropomorphic head like a Mafa God pot that had been made for someone who had suffered a seizure.

Community shrines

It is characteristic of Sirak that community shrines are few and little emphasized. Judy Sterner knows of, but has not visited, one to which the chief goes to sacrifice to the spirit of the mountain on behalf of the larger community. Another elder prays for rain on behalf of the people of Sirak, and it would seem reasonable to describe the focus of his rites as a community shrine, but Judy Sterner has no personal knowledge of the shrine nor of him and his practice. In case of serious drought, appeal used to be made to the chief of Gudur.

Discussion

What is most characteristic of Sirak and many other smaller montagnard polities, including Mafa settlements (Müller-Kosack 2003), is that heads of households, while they may be assisted by diviners (generally of the smith/potter caste), are for the most part ritually self-sufficient and that individuals take considerable ritual responsibility for themselves. Clan rituals are not emphasized. In the annual rites of purification, it is not priests but the parents of twins whose ritual acts, undertaken independently within their scattered households, sum to provide protection for the community as a whole.

The consequences of (a) this substantial ritual self-sufficiency, and (b) a tendency – inferred rather than documented – for smith/potter caste diviners to suggest that their clients invest in a suitable pot through which to engage the spirit responsible for their situation, include a greatly elaborated set of shrines, here for the most part materialized as ceramic vessels, numerous examples of which are present in most households and can be found distributed widely through the community territory.

SUKUR

Sukur has the same social and cultural building blocks as Sirak and other communities – a chief, several clans, a potter/smith caste, and the use of pots and stones as shrines. But there are significant differences, for Sukur specialized in industry and trade and was in part dependent upon its neighbours for the raw materials necessary for iron-making. It has a chief with a reputation and influence extending beyond his community but at the same time relies for its rain upon a ritual specialist resident in neighbouring Wula. There are twenty-one clans, some including that of the chief with claims to Gudur origin, and an extended set of titleholders. The chief of Sukur initiates important ceremonies after divination by himself or another diviner – several past chiefs of Sukur were renowned diviners – however sacrifices and other offerings are made on his behalf by priestly titleholders.

Household shrines

Sukur ancestor pots are far less elaborate than those of Sirak; they are very small and normally undecorated, or may not even be pots. A small usually plain jar is the model for ancestor and most other shrine pots, and the process whereby it comes to represent the ancestor is somewhat different from at Sirak, here beginning in a vessel given to a young man at his initiation into adulthood. The general term for such shrines is suku, a term also applied to ancient lower grindstones (tson), commonly believed to be made by God, used for similar purposes (David 1998).

In theory ancestor shrines are served very much as at Sirak, but we have a strong impression that the cult of ancestors is less elaborate and is practised less frequently. A shrine that, by its name, suku juk, refers to a collectivity of lineage ancestors, may well not exist in actuality. If there are clan shrines at Sukur, we are not aware of them. As at Sirak the spirits of twins are considered powerful and potentially dangerous. The associated pots are nearly identical to those at Sirak, but rituals practised by the parents of twins do not, when summed together, protect the community.

Placentas are buried beneath upturned pots behind the mother’s room and within the compound wall. A woman’s first child receives a small plain jar. Every year during the purification ceremony, the mother offers a chicken and beer on the shrine. When the next child is born, the pot is passed on and is finally abandoned when all the children are grown and no longer in need of protection.

As at Sirak there are shrines for the spirits of men and leopards violently killed, but at Sukur these are not kept in the compound or in a clan shrine but rather in the owner’s field outside the compound walls. Such shrines serve to protect the owner’s farm and possessions from theft and other misfortunes. Every year the owner makes an offering of flour at planting, harvesting, and threshing. If a family member is ill or other misfortunes strike, a diviner may advise the sacrifice of a red cock. The potency of the spirits associated with such shrines is such that they are dangerous to pregnant women. For this and other reasons, an owner may decide to destroy it, an act that requires a sacrifice.

Nature spirit shrines

The nature spirits of Sukur are much like those described for Sirak. They are usually found at water points (springs, wells), rock outcrops, or craggy mountain tops, trees, or groves. These are the dwelling places of hri, a term referring both to the spirit and its shrine, which may include a pot or pots or one or more stones. Hri shrines are immovable in geographic space, whereas suku, even if rarely moved, are localized only in social space. Seven of the most potent are the sites of annual sacrifices that protect the entire community in a manner described below.

Three broken grindstone-mortars found in front of a stone house with a thatched roof.

Fig. 3. Grindstone-mortars of the kind frequently used as shrines at Sukur. These are located next to the council chamber in the northern sector of the chief’s residence.

Community shrines

Zoku, the annual purification ceremony at Sukur, takes place at several locations and initiates a ritual cycle that takes place over subsequent months at a number of hri shrines served by titleholders with priestly functions. The cycle begins with sacrifice of a bull (nowadays a small goat) at a shrine at the base of great gate-like natural granite pillars atop Mixyrux hill. Although this is not made explicit, the Mixyrux shrine constitutes the religious heart of Sukur. The sacrifice is addressed both to the genius loci and to God. A free translation goes as follows:

This offering is for God, may it bring health to the people, may they become as numerous as grains of magnetite ore. There, O spirit, is your food; the offering is the responsibility of my patriline, handed down by my father. The things that enter our houses through holes in the wall, let them be not as snakes but as earthworms on the path at our children’s feet. Spirits, take your food, and bring health and prosperity to the people. Let the grains of millet be as grains of sand so that all may eat. Spirit of this high rocky place, drive evil things away from us, the people. So be it.

One of the priestly functionaries holding the Mbesefwoy title is responsible for this sacrifice. On the evening of the same day, two other titleholders leave the chief’s house and walk through Sukur calling the ancestors to come. They carry a small pot of beer to a shrine on Muva mountain (the highest point in Sukur) where they make an offering to ancestors. The following day the spirits of the dead and those of impurity and disease are driven off beyond Sukur’s borders by a ritual war party of titleholders.

Zoku is the first of seven sacrifices that take place over the next three months at different nature spirit shrines. They are made by Mbesefwoy and other priestly titleholders on routes into and out of Sukur, at sites where powerful nature spirits reside.6 Strips of goatskin are hung across the paths to bar the entry of evil forces. Upon completion of the cycle, Sukur is ritually sealed against spirit and other attacks.

Chiefly shrines

There are several shrines in and around the chief’s house. Some of these take the form of small beer jars while others are grindstones and others again are gateways or gateway elements. These are all associated in various ways with the chieftaincy (see Smith and David 1995). One set of pots, for example, represents previous chiefs and is served by a titleholder, Tlisuku, who acts as the chief’s chaplain.

A shrine named Yawal De’ba is associated with and has perhaps been appropriated by the chief of Sukur. Yawal is a ceremony held in February after the millet harvest at intervals decided by the chief. It celebrates his power and that of his clan but also the acquiescence and integration of past dynasties, representatives of which perform rituals at the shrine. This consists of three newly made pots, the principal being a tall narrow neckless storage vessel with three small horn-like spikes below the rim, which are set in a stone-lined pit.

Another shrine, located within the chiefly residence, celebrates Sukur’s ritual seniority amongst its neighbours. This consists of a grindstone-mortar containing a number of ancient upper grindstones of an elongate shape quite unlike those used today. It is called the tson vwad or grindstone-mortar altar of the hairlocks. “Each of its stones represents one of the chiefdoms in the region to which the xidi [chief] sends … the tlagama title-holder to braid into the new chief’s hair a lock … of his predecessor’s” (Smith and David 1995:454).7 This custom at one and the same time symbolizes the continuity of the chieftaincy and the ritual seniority accorded to Sukur by up to nine of their neighbours, including Gulak (Margi), Kamale (Higi), Wula and Mabas.

Although the Sukur rely primarily for their rain on the prayers of Tluwala, a rainmaker living in Wula with whom the chief deals through emissaries, there is a rain shrine in Sukur located not far from the chief’s residence and close to Yawal De’ba. It is called the suku yam (shrine of water) and appears to serve as a first line of defence in the event of interruptions in the rains. Its story and the associated ritual practices relate it to Gudur and may indicate that it is a community shrine that has been subsumed under the chief’s authority.

An elderly man sits in front of a tree, inside a stone-lined pit. He pours beer on a stone. A tall, narrow, neck-less storage vessel, capped with a spherical stone sits nearby.

Fig. 4. A priestly titleholder offers beer at the Yawal De’ba shrine in Sukur.

While there are other shrines associated with the chief, they can all be comprehended within the framework developed above, except for hri Mcakili, a stone (perhaps a grindstone-mortar) kept hidden beneath a granary cap. Mcakili (or Mpsakali) is the Sukur name for Gudur. The shrine is located next to the chief’s megalithic throne in the ceremonial area outside his residence. Every year, before the main harvest in December, the chief makes an offering here. It is said that long ago if locusts and leopards were a problem this offering consisted of beer and a sorghum paste, the latter obtained from Gudur.8 Thus this shrine is a material statement of the chief’s claim to Gudur descent and a special relationship with its chief. Such ritual legitimation of his authority is all the more needed in view of the long sequence of depositions and abdications of Sukur chiefs (see http://www.sukur.info/Soc/Xidis.htm).

Discussion

Sirak and Sukur share essentially the same belief system but at Sukur, while heads of households and lineages retain ritual responsibility for their ancestors, specialists, in the form of priestly titleholders such as the six Mbesefwoy, act on behalf of the community in the purification and in other ceremonies, including initiation, and the chief’s ritual responsibilities are devolved to Tlisuku. Ceramics are less important as shrines at Sukur than at Sirak, partly because the wives of smiths, who worked with their husbands to fine bloomery iron for sale at Sukur’s iron market, produced pots in lesser quantities and lower quality. Diviners rarely suggest that their clients commission pots and far more frequently advise their clients to place various kinds of offerings, some of which they provide, at crossings of ways. Thus, although there may be as many shrines per person as at Sirak, ceramic ones are certainly fewer.

Community-wide ritual action is always initiated by the chief and is never achieved incrementally by the additive actions of individual householders. Unlike the similar Sirak halalay, several of the Sukur hri shrines combine, in a cycle coordinated by the chief, to protect the entire community. Delicate political adaptations are evident; the chief cannot dismiss the Mbesefwoy and other priestly titleholders responsible for the ritual defence of the polity.

A dimension not present at Sirak is evident in the tson vwa’d shrine that links Sukur to its neighbours while claiming a ritual seniority that, at least until very recently, appears to have been generally acknowledged though not, according to our sources, on the basis of a Gudur origin of Sukur’s chiefly dynasty. However this may be, a legitimacy based on Gudur descent is claimed by the present clan Dur chiefly dynasty in the rituals associated with the suku yam rain shrine and, more forcefully, in the hri Mcakili shrine, where the appellation hri seems to insist on a direct connection between Gudur and Sukur mediated by a nature spirit.

GUDUR

Gudur is not as easily defined as Sirak or Sukur and has meant many things to many people at different times. The name can refer to a clan, a physical space, a regional shrine, the single small chiefdom of Gudal, or a more complex chiefly entity comprising the chiefdoms of, from north to south, Ndeveley, Kilwo, Mambay, Gilvawa, Gudal, Minglia (Mangezla), Mokong, Katamsa, Dimeo, Mofu (Mafaw), Mosso (Maaca’b), Zidim, and Njeleng, this last being the only unit that is not mofu-gudur-speaking (Fig. 5). Masakal in the northeast and Mawuldal to the west are usually included within Gudur, and Mowo, to the east, is also closely associated. These three communities speak mofu-gudur but have strong links respectively with the Mofu-Diamaré, the Cuvok, and the Gisiga. The larger Gudur political entity is characterized by Seignobos (1991a) as a theocratic chiefdom, by Jouaux (1989) as something between a chiefdom and a kingdom, and by ourselves as a group of small chiefdoms that acknowledge one of their number, Gudal, as ritually paramount.9 We all agree that at some time or times in the past Gudur was the point of origin of a diaspora that reached across the Mandara mountains and even down onto the edges of the plains to the west (Fig. 1). Seignobos (2000a:46) now sees this movement, which he regards as part of a much larger pattern of northeast to southwest migration (Seignobos 1991b), as dating to the eighteenth century and involving Gudur colonization of lands to the west.10 Jouaux is noncommittal about both date and process. We differ from Seignobos and argue that the main diaspora from Gudur westwards took place in the mid-nineteenth century as a result not of an expansionist policy but of the substantial defeat of Gudal and its neighbours by the Fulbe, then engaged in the jihad initiated by Usman Dan Fodio. With the hills in Mofu-Gudur territory already densely populated, Gudur, and particularly Gudal, occupants of the plains and lower slopes would have been especially at risk and liable to flee before the onslaught of Fulbe cavalry. It is possible to place this process in the 1830s–1840s on the evidence of Mohammadou’s (1988:125–27) history of the Fulbe chiefdom of Gazawa (east of Gudur) who (re-)established themselves at Gazawa around 1820, from which time on Gudur would have been under more or less continuous attack until its various elements were either defeated or had come to an accommodation with the Fulbe.11

Igor Kopytoff’s African frontier thesis provides a framework for understanding Gudur’s regional significance, for many of the polities of the Mandara mountains constitute a

local frontier, lying at the fringes of the numerous established African societies. It is on such frontiers that most African polities and societies have, so to speak, been ‘constructed’ out of the bits and pieces – human and cultural – of existing societies. This posits a process in which incipient small polities are produced by other similar and usually more complex societies. (1987:3)

Map of the chiefdoms of Gudur.

Fig. 5. Gudur, showing its component chiefdoms [and nearby communities mentioned in the text].

Follow for extended description

Following Kopytoff (1987),12 we can consider Gudur as a centre or “metropole” from which the frontier process began with the creation of “frontiersmen,” people who because of Fulbe attacks and locusts (Lavergne 1943) left their home settlement on the advice of “Ngom,” supposedly the ninth chief of the Gudal line but in fact the first who can be solidly situated in history. This placed them in an “institutional vacuum” where they “begin a process of social construction that, if successful, brings into being a new society” (Kopytoff 1987:25). This “re-institutionalization” takes place on a frontier that is not necessarily a geographical vacuum, for the immigrants often encounter others that share many similarities in culture, language, and material culture. The immigrants either join an existing group on the frontier or establish their own society, one that is constructed “not out of whole cloth but from a cultural inventory of symbols and practices that were brought from a metropole and that pre-dated any particular society being observed” (1987:34).

In the present instance, Gudur migrants, moving in small contingents towards the west, would have risked capture and enslavement by other montagnards. The Mayo Tsanaga valley and that of its tributary, the Mayo Goudoulou, offered the easiest axis of penetration by Fulbe raiders, and so the inhabitants of these valleys, disproportionately Gudal and of Gudal clan, would have been the most likely to have been displaced westwards. When seeking refuge amongst the inhabitants of the area, it would have been very much in their interest to emphasize their value as warriors and farmers, and to talk up their connections with a chief possessing the power to control plagues and other misfortunes and to ensure the fertility of humans and their stock. Rather than founding their own settlements, they frequently joined others, whence the widespread existence at Sirak, Sukur, and among the Kapsiki, Higi and other groups, of clans that claim Gudur origins and others that do not. The lack of Gudur metropolitan knowledge of the diaspora fits well with this reading of history, as does the absence of Gudal participation in the installation of chiefs of the diaspora polities and the general lack of special relationships between diaspora communities.

The new and growing communities so formed would have had, according to Kopytoff, to validate themselves to themselves as well as to other polities in the region. Self-validation in the discourse of the Mandara implies establishing ancestry, in this case exotic but nonetheless honourable. Validation vis-à-vis others entails having a “charter that drew upon widespread regional values, themes and traditions, and upon historical events and memories that carried prestige in the region as a whole” (Kopytoff 1987:72). The migrants from Gudur would have worked hard to advance the claims of Gudur to embody such a charter. And so many clans came to claim direct or indirect Gudur descent and to believe that their communities’ well-being might be ensured by their leaders’ access to the powers of Gudur’s chief. As van Beek (1981:118) astutely observed “one can claim a Gudur origin on account of the ritual importance of that village, and not because one really is of Gudur stock.” It was not enough, however, just to claim a Gudur origin; it was also necessary – at least in theory – to return on occasion to “recharge” rain-making paraphernalia, receive new medicines, or seek protection from locusts or renewed fertility and fecundity. Such journeys to Gudur are better remembered on the periphery than at the centre.

At both Sirak and Sukur we were told of envoys who had journeyed to Gudur bearing gifts for the chief of Gudal, in return for which they obtained protection from leopards, disease, drought, and especially locusts. Indeed, it was in the 1930s, during a catastrophic set of locust invasions, that the last envoys went from Sukur to Gudur. What was it that they found? What shrines did they visit?

Household, clan, community and nature spirit shrines

Little has been written of these shrines at Gudur, and during our two-month stay we learned of them only incidentally. The range of ancestor pots described by Barreteau et al. (1988) is similar to that of Sirak, and, as at Sirak, a special room in the compound is built to house them. On Gilgam mountain we visited a collective shrine where chiefly ancestors of the Masacavaw clan were represented by decorated jars (Fig. 6). There and elsewhere our attention was drawn to halalay, which here are clan shrines – perhaps with aspects of nature spirit shrines – usually located in sacred groves. We know also of shrines where the earth priests, often but not always members of clans considered as autochthonous that have lost or ceded political leadership to later-comers, carry out sacrifices on behalf of the community. Thus the present Maslaslam, earth priest of the Ngwadaama clan, informed us that his ancestor had ceded the chieftaincy of what was to become Gudal to Biya (otherwise known as Bi Dilgam or Nguéleo), the first Bay (chief of) Gudal, who had arrived from Mowo bringing with him salt, a common symbol of civilization (see also Seignobos 1991a:237). Mowo, located only eight kilometres to the east, appears to have been an earlier magico-religious centre that, likely under pressure from the plains states of Wandala and Bagirmi, lost its ritual pre-eminence, its shrines and ritual being dispersed, some to Gudal and others to Mofu-Diamaré settlements (Seignobos 1991a, 1995).

All in all it would seem that the household, clan, and community shrines at Gudur – and in other chiefdoms of the group – differ only in details from those of Sirak and Sukur. We are ignorant as to the functions of nature spirit shrines, which surely exist. However, our limited investigation of titleholders’ duties does not suggest that there are any equivalents to the Mbesefwoy or Tlisuku nor anything comparable to the ritual circumscription of Sukur, sealing it against exterior physical and spirit attack.

Chiefly shrines and chiefly divination

When Biya arrived from Mowo by a roundabout route dictated by his bull, he brought with him rain stones. These, like the bull, had been bequeathed to him by the chief of Mowo whom he had been serving since he had arrived there as a boy from Wandala some years before. There are two types of rain stones: one kind brings rain and the other, named after the rainbow, stops it falling. These stones are kept in the chief’s house in a tripod pot covered with the skin of a hyrax. The rain sacrifice for Gudal begins after divination by the chief of the smiths and an antelope has been hunted. It is inaugurated by four of the titleholders in the chiefly cemetery, one of whom addresses the ancestors. The party then moves to the chief’s house where he sacrifices the animal in the presence of the rain stones, quite possibly anointing them with its blood. We were told by our Gudur assistant that the last time this had happened was in the late 1950s.

Whereas this ritual has all the aspects of one carried out on behalf of the community by and under the auspices of the chief, sacrifices for rain on behalf of other communities would appear to have been conducted by the chief in his house either alone or at least without the formal participation of titleholders. In such cases the chief was, we suggest, not acting as chief of Gudal or of Gudur, but either as a particularly powerful diviner or a rain-maker, a “sorcier” in the words of de Lauwe (1937), one of the first Europeans to meet Bay Takwaw II, chief of Gudal from 1930 until his death in 1980. The shrines described by de Lauwe are kuley, pots specially made for that purpose.13 In a photograph of the chief (de Lauwe 1937:plate IV:2), a kuley pot is visible in the background.

A man in a jacket stands in front of two jars in a grassy field. Another man stands nearby. The field is lined with small hills.

Fig. 6. The Masacavaw clan ancestor shrine on the small Gilgam massif (Gudal chiefdom).

It is not possible from de Lauwe’s account to sort out which sacrifices are for the chief’s lineage, and thus like sacrifices carried out by other household heads, which others are for Gudal, which, if any, are for Gudur in general, and which are for clients from more distant places. In 2004 we asked chiefs and titleholders of nine of the fifteen chiefdoms commonly assigned to what we regard as the Gudur paramountcy how they obtained their rain. Only two, Katamsa and Mofu, informed us that they had never relied on Gudal. Katamsa has, we were told, been going to Mowo “since the time of the whites” and Mofu has its own rain-makers. And only Mofu admitted ever going to Gudur to seek protection against locusts. It would seem therefore that the chief of Gudal never carried out sacrifices or any other ritual on behalf of the entire set of Gudur chiefdoms that acknowledge his ritual pre-eminence – those in which “Toute la tradition est commandée par Gudur,” as we were told by the chief of Zidim, Chef de Canton de Mofu-Sud.

The shrines and rituals described by de Lauwe were all located within the chiefly residence, one small room containing the pots representing the chief’s father, father’s father (FF), and father’s father’s father (FFF). Whether acting on behalf of his household, his community, or as a diviner, the ritual ingredients (beer, animal, flour, etc.) and pots are often the same or very similar. Individuals came with offerings in order to obtain a cure for disease or have children, while others came as emissaries to seek benefits – rain and fertility being pre-eminent – for their villages and to stave off misfortunes of many kinds including leopards, caterpillars that destroy the millet, and locusts. How successive chiefs of Gudal acquired these other powers is unclear, and they did not in fact control locusts but, as described below, only access to those who carried out the sacrifices.

De Lauwe does not mention two of the most important shrines at Gudal, the first of which is a small room without doors and windows located at Yideng Bay, the original residence of Gudal chiefs, on the spot where Biya’s bull sank into the ground (Fig. 7). How precisely this shrine is served and its mysterious contents used are unknown to us: like the hri Mcakili at Sukur, its prime function would seem to stand as a guarantor of the legitimate authority of the chief.14 The second shrine is that of the locusts, to which we now turn.

The locust shrine

While the chief of Gudal conducted the rain sacrifices himself, he did not control the locust shrine himself nor carry out the requisite sacrifices. Instead the shrine, located in the eastern Usa (or Wusa) quarter of Gudal but in fact almost as close to Mowo as to Bay Gudal’s residence, was operated by the senior member of the Masuwa clan. There is convincing evidence in the form of oral traditions (e.g., Barreteau 1999 [collected in 1986] and a tradition collected by us from the son of the present elder responsible) that control over this shrine was on at least one occasion contested by the chief of Gudal but that, ultimately unsuccessful, he had to accept the Masuwa’s authority over it. He nonetheless controlled outsiders’ access to it, from which he no doubt derived economic benefit.

According to Beauvilain (1989:116–17, 129) locust invasions in the greater region are reported for the 1880s, 1893–1900 and 1930–39.15 The severe famines of the 1930s that resulted from successive locust infestations are well-documented and still remembered by the elderly. The famine of 1931 was particularly severe in the Mandara mountains: “Les monLes montagnards gardent encore un souvenir très vif de la dernière grande famine de ce genre, survenue en 1931” (Boutrais 1987:25). Some Mafa preferred to hand over their children to Fulbe rather than to see them starve. De Lauwe makes no mention of the chief of Gudur’s powers over locusts, despite his presence in the region while their invasions were still occurring. The most detailed descriptions of the response to locust infestations and of Gudur’s role in it come from British mandated territory.16 At the start of the locust invasions in 1930, the chief of Sukur, described by Assistant District Officer MacBride (1937:3) as the “sole accredited agent for the Priest of Gudur,” collected a tax to construct an iron vessel to contain “all the locusts of the world.”17 Kulp, an American missionary in the region at the same time as MacBride and Shaw, was informed that part of the chief of Sukur’s power was due to the belief that he had

A small hut with a thatched roof and a stone-lined boundary lies in a field of many trees. A donkey stands nearby.

Fig. 7. The room lacking a door in Yideng Bay, former residence of the chiefs of Gudal. The chief is said to have received visitors and dispensed justice under the tree at the top left of the picture.

… the power to drive out the locusts which have been destroying so much of the crops in the last seven years or more. But since a part of the rite which must be performed to drive out the locusts is the sacrifice of two virgins, it is reported that fear of British officials has operated to prevent him carrying out the rite, hence the locusts still are in the country. (Kulp 1935:17)

Although it would be surprising if locust invasions at Sukur were not combated by ritual action, we know of no Sukur shrine dedicated to this purpose and have never heard of any sacrifices there involving virgins of either sex. But perhaps Kulp’s mention of virgin sacrifice does indirectly explain why de Lauwe learned nothing of the locust shrine; Bay Gudal would not have wished to advertise a ritual activity likely to have been severely sanctioned by the French.

It is possible that the locust shrine in Usa quarter dates back to the period of Mowo ritual pre-eminence. According to Seignobos (1991a:247), the Masuwa are responsible for the locust sacrifice, a position they had previously held at Mowo. They discovered the shrine site: an open tomb from which locusts were emerging and spilling out over the fields. They warned the chief of Gudur who gave them the responsibility for the sacrifice to be carried out in his name.18 But if indeed the Masuwa had, as Barreteau’s (1999) tradition suggests, brought their expertise in dealing with locusts with them from Wandala territory further north, then it seems as likely that they maintained this role when Mowo disintegrated as a dominant polity, and that the options open to the chief of Gudur were only to acknowledge or, as we have already seen, to challenge their stewardship.

The site on the small Mabasa massif, five kilometres west of Mowo and four kilometres east of Gudur’s chiefly quarter, is in a natural amphitheatre amidst a grove of Sterculia setigera trees.19 When we visited it in July 2004, it was much overgrown (Fig. 8) compared with Seignobos’ (1991a:244–45) sketch of the site in the dry season. There are many upturned pots, all with holes deliberately made in the bases. Our guide informed us that each sacrifice required three – a tripod meat pot and two large storage pots, one “male” and the other “female.” It was our impression that pots generally occur in such sets, of which we were able to identify between thirteen and fifteen, a total that should represent the minimum number of sacrifices.20

Two men and a woman stand on a hill with overgrown grass and shrubs. A few upturned pots lie between them.

Fig. 8. The locust shrine in the Usa quarter of Gudal. Note the large upturned pots.

Following an account of the conflicted relationship between the chief of Gudal and the head of the Masuwa clan, known as “No locusts in Wandala,” Barreteau’s tradition, recorded it seems from a non-Masuwa source, provides a detailed description of the locust sacrifice:

All returns to normal, but the following year as they are cultivating the millet, the locusts appear once more. The chief [of Gudur] consults the diviner – the sacrifice of a man is required. People in other villages consult diviners as well. They come to see the chief of Gudur who tells them that a man and a woman must be sacrificed. A messenger is sent to the chief of Gidar [other sources indicate Hina] who, having many people [perhaps a reference to slave raiding], provides the victims. The victims and a billy goat are taken to Wusa. The Masuwa pray before the altar of “No locusts in Wandala” and sacrifice the goat. The meat is cooked and left in a container with porridge. There are two openings for the locusts, one male and the other female. The man who makes the sacrifice lays a mat over the holes. The male victim seats himself above the male hole, the female victim above the female hole. They are served the meal. As they eat the locusts come up and eat away the mat. As the mat falls into the hole the victims are pushed in. The hole is closed with leaves of the blood plum [Haematostaphis barteri, a tree that bleeds red] and earth. The locusts will return no more. If they do the Whites will know what to do. There are no longer people to make the sacrifice. (1999:158–64)

We obtained an almost identical description of the locust sacrifice from our Masuwa guide. Seignobos’ (1991a:248–49) description, also obtained from Masuwa informants, is very similar (and cf. Jouaux 1989:277–78). Seignobos (1991a:243) comments on the difference between details of the Masuwa version of the locust sacrifice and those he obtained from informants at Wula, Gili, and Udah on the western margins of the Mandara mountains. The former describe a tomb or hole in the ground, the latter a rock cleft or room containing locusts, closed with doors of iron. Strümpell (1922/23:56–58) learned in 1906 or 1907 from the Kapsiki of a pot kept at Gudur in a special hut with doors of iron that contained a magical liquid. If these doors were opened or damaged by an unauthorized person, calamity would strike the region; epidemics would wipe out humans and animals, whirlwinds would destroy villages, and locusts would devour the crops in the fields. He also mentions offerings sent to Gudur by the chief of Sukur that include a virgin girl and a black horse.21 In the early 1990s we recorded a range of similar stories at Sukur.

All these accounts except Strümpell’s refer to the 1930s, when the last remembered journeys to Gudur took place. We were told by the son of Sukur’s last emissary, who travelled with representatives from nearby Wula Mango, Kurang, and Damay, that they variously took: a horse, a gown, and six slabs of iron with four legs each; a slab of iron with four legs to stop the locusts; eight men with nine sheets of iron to seal the hole from which the locusts came, and a horse as a gift for the chief of Gudur. During the same period the people of Sirak are said to have sent the chief of Gudur a young girl, a bull, or grain for protection from locusts.

Reading the shrine is problematical: the thirteen- to fifteen-pot clusters presently visible could all represent sacrifices carried out in the 1930s on behalf of Gudur itself and non-Mofu-Gudur. Since that time, there have been no acridian invasions. However Strümpell’s account is indicative of the activity of the locust shrine at least as far back as the invasions of the late nineteenth century. The various accounts of the sacrifice contain elements of cliché. For example, the treacherous seating of a person on a mat that then collapses beneath them occurs in Fulbe stories, and the containment of a misfortune behind or within an iron door or cauldron is a western Mandara element with resonance far south among the Chamba, where “worn out hoes were used to block the hole from which locusts would otherwise emerge to ravage their crops” (Fardon 1990:74–75). But this is not enough to discredit the general truth of these accounts, and it would seem likely that on at least one occasion humans were sacrificed, an event almost without parallel in the region and indicative of the depth of the people’s despair. Other victims seem sometimes to have been acceptable: according to Podlewski (1966:89) Bay Takwaw II of Gudal recalled the sacrifice of a young couple at the locust shrine when he was young and told him that he had sacrificed a horse there.22

What does seem certain is that the locust shrine served a clientele that, besides Gudal itself, consisted primarily of diasporan communities. Of the other chiefdoms of the paramountcy, we know of only two that admit to have ever relied on the locust shrine, while five deny having made use of it at any time. As in the case of rain, it was groups from beyond the Mofu-Gudur that came to Gudur for protection against locusts.

Discussion and conclusions

If Gudur was indeed a polity larger and more complex than Sukur, then we would expect greater specialization of ritual labour, but this seems not to be the case. As noted above, household, clan, community, and nature shrines are, to the best of our knowledge, not significantly different in structure from those of Sirak and Sukur and closer to Sirak in terms of their materialization as ceramics. Whether at Gudal or in other of the Gudur chiefdoms, there were no priestly titleholders comparable to the Mbesefwoy of Sukur. Nor, while the chief of Gudal initiates the cycle of annual purification ceremonies that bring in the new year in most, if not all, the Mofu-Gudur chiefdoms, is there anything comparable to the Sukur shrines involved in celebration of the chief’s rule of his community and his ritual seniority among the neighbour chiefs. While the chief of Gudal was held in considerable awe and enjoyed some privileges and benefits in his own and the other Gudur chiefdoms (Jouaux 1989), his pre-eminence seems to have been very largely limited to the ritual sphere, where it served in our view primarily to provide a charter for a Mofu-Gudur social world that, transcending the microcosms of the petty chiefdoms, facilitated the conduct of social, political and economic life on a broader and more sustainable scale – not unlike, in its way, the potlatch institution of the northwest coast of North America.

Thus, in terms of its shrines and of its economy, which unlike Sukur’s did not involve the integration of neighbouring communities in specialist production, Gudur appears less rather than more complex a political entity than Sukur. On the other hand, as the result (we argue) of historical circumstances peculiar to the Fulbe jihad, chiefs of Gudal were able to extend the range of their divining practice to a remarkable degree, attracting a clientele that, albeit drawn mainly from communities of the Gudur diaspora, was more widely dispersed than that of any other diviner we know of, past or present. We must distinguish here between the chief’s priestly role in carrying out purification and perhaps other ceremonies on behalf of Gudal, his role as a rain-maker for Gudal, some other Mofu-Gudur and some outsiders, and his use of the same material – his ancestral shrines and the rain stones legitimately inherited by his forebear from the chief of Mowo – when acting as a diviner and purveyor of medicine on behalf of outsiders in search of fecundity of humans, animals, and crops, and of protection from natural disasters.

Although the scale of Bay Gudal’s divining practice was exceptional both in its geographic scale and in the powers attributed to the medicines offered his clients, its pattern accords with Mandara norms. Strümpell (1922/23:57) states that Sukur and Kapsiki communities (many of whose clans claim Gudur origins) made contributions to Gudur’s “powerful priest” in order to obtain his goodwill, for even powerful Sukur relied upon the favour of the Bay Gudal. Outsiders who sought Bay Gudal’s aid appear to have regarded him with a degree of awe and perhaps fear that, unlike in the case of some powerful Mofu-Diamaré chiefs (Vincent 1991:333ff.), was not backed up by the threat of physical force but only by his purported ability to either bring or withhold the rains or to unleash plagues of locusts. For example, van Beek’s (1981:118) Kapsiki informants stated that representatives of the Bay Gudal visited the villages of those dependent upon Gudur to see if they “followed the ancestors.” Although it is improbable that such visitations ever occurred (van Beek, pers. comm. 2004), it was claimed that the sanction for not doing so was locust-induced famine. Thus Bay Gudal was to be feared more by outsiders than by his neighbours because, as Jouaux (1989:283) suggests, following de Heusch (1962:1470), “L’éloignement du chef [et donc ‘perte de contact direct avec L’éloignement du chef [et donc ‘perte de contact direct avec le peuple’], renforcé par divers tabous, est favorable à une exagération mythique.” However, even within Gudur, Jouaux (1989:280) states that the overriding attitude towards the chief derived from her extensive interviews with inhabitants of the many Mofu-Gudur chiefdoms could best be summed up as follows: “on avait peur du chef de Gudur car il pouvait bloquer la pluie ou envoyer les criquets.” It must be stressed that these fears relate not to the powers inherent in shrines served by the Bay Gudal but rather to those, analogous to those of a sorcerer (as de Lauwe so astutely recognized), possessed by him as a person.

It is indeed ironic that, despite his great reputation, Bay Gudal’s control of the most renowned shrine was at best indirect. For the locust shrine at Usa is the only Gudur shrine that can be described as both regional and tied to a particular place rather than to a particular person, although even this characterization requires qualification.23 Although the shrine may well predate the Gudur ritual paramountcy and have been inaugurated in the period of Mowo’s ritual ascendance, it appears from the evidence at hand to have primarily served diaspora communities. In this sense it is hardly a regional shrine but rather one that came to attract a widely dispersed clientele that had in common their socio-political link to Gudur. It is noteworthy, for example, that so far as we know, none of the Mofu-Diamaré polities located only a few kilometres to the north ever sought the protection of the Usa locust shrine; nor did they regard Bay Gudal with any particular respect.

The locust shrine, guaranteed as genuine by its historical link to Mowo, is in fact only one of the ritually charged remnants of that polity’s dissolution. There is another locust shrine at Gabaka in Mofu-Diamaré territory that also derives from Mowo and which is also served by a Masuwa priest. Similarly, besides those rain stones inherited by the first Bay Gudal from Mowo, others from the same source went to Morley in Mofu-Diamaré territory. Each of these last-named shrines – and there are others – attracts clients from a considerable area and could be described as “regional shrines.” But it would be more accurate and productive to view this from a different perspective and to regard each and every shrine as having a clientele, or more precisely a congregation. Thus, the congregation of the Catholic shrine of Lourdes in the French Pyrenees may be said to extend to Australia but does not include Protestants or Muslims living in the village. The areal extent of the congregation is less interesting than the processes that have produced the distribution. In the case of the locust shrine and of the rain stones, we have offered an interpretation of those processes. As regards Gabaka, Morley, and similar shrines, much more of the kind of research initiated by Seignobos (1995) into the history of Mowo and its descendant communities is required for their congregations to be understood in historical terms.

The classification of shrines used in this paper relates on the one hand to their congregations, varying from a single individual, to a household, a lineage, a clan, a whole community, or a larger entity united by history, most commonly in this study the Gudur diaspora. Another dimension involves the referent of the shrine. This includes: a single (or group of) human spirit(s); God (as in Mafa Zhikile pots but not present in Sirak, Sukur, or Gudur); nature spirits tied to place; and spirits that relate to entities of the experienced world, as of disease or of sorghum. Rain stones – glossed as “the children of water/rain” among the Mofu-Diamaré (Vincent 1991:621) – would seem to have as their referent unlocalized nature spirits, and the referent of the locust shrine would appear to be the locusts themselves or rather their collective spirit.

Shrines are served by persons acting as priests on behalf of the shrine’s congregation. Family rituals provide the model for rituals on larger scales that invoke human, and particularly ancestral, spirits, God and nature spirits also. Thus, when the chief of Gudal makes offerings and prays to his kuley on the occasion of the purification ceremony, he is doing so as the father of his community, as do the individual heads of households. This is so common throughout the world as to be almost a truism (see, e.g., Walker and Lucero [2000] on the Pueblos of the American Southwest and on the Maya). As these authors state (2000:143), rituals never leave the home but are appropriated for political purposes.

The other strong elements in Mandara ritual, of divination and magic, were also extrapolated from the familial to the scale of the polity or regional congregation. While diviners most commonly (in our limited experience) advise their clients regarding the nature of the offering or sacrifice they should make to a particular spirit, they may also provide herbal or other remedies, some of which can be classed as magical. Similarly, when Bay Gudal divined for envoys from a distant community, he would advise as to what beasts should be sacrificed or other offerings made and provide them with a magical liquid or more probably the dried dregs of beer consumed at the ceremony. This they would take home with them, dilute, and distribute to part or all of the community in order to regenerate failing fertility or for some other purpose. Such potions are also said to have regenerated the powers of the Fali rain-makers (Wade 1997) and of the chief of Vreke (Müller-Kosack 2003:349).24

Finally we wish to emphasize that, since the division of ritual labour and the degree of socio-political complexity are closely related, the study of shrines offers an avenue for the elucidation of political arrangements. It is clear that, at Sirak, heads of households are for most purposes ritually independent, even if they are commonly tutored by smiths. Whereas at Sirak during the New Year’s purification ceremony it is all parents of twins who separately but concomitantly defend their community against misfortunes, at Sukur a specialized set of priestly titleholders, serving hri shrines and communicating through them with God, fulfil a similar function. The chief also delegates his ritual functions to a chaplain, Tlisuku. But when we turn to Gudur, which has until now been universally regarded as the most complex montagnard polity of precolonial times, we find no comparable specialization of priestly roles. On the contrary, the individual Gudur chiefdoms are in their familial and other religious observances much more like Sirak than Sukur, and the specialization of the chief of Gudal partakes not so much of the role of priest chief as of diviner and rain-maker, roles that are more often segregated than combined in Mandara societies (Sterner 2003:198–227).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The fieldwork for this paper was undertaken between 1986 and 2005 in the context of the Mandara Archaeological Project and was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and by a grant to Judith Sterner from the University of London in 1992. It was authorized by the Ministry of Culture, Cameroon, and by the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria. We wish to thank the many local authorities and communities amongst and with whom we have worked, and particularly our assistants, Kodje Dadai, John Tizhe Habuga, Philip Emmanuel Sukur, Markus Ezra Makarma, the late Isnga Dalli Sukur and Alioum Baya Mana. We dedicate this paper to the memory of Isnga and of two much regretted long-term colleagues, Eldridge Mohammadou and Daniel Barreteau, whose historical, ethnographic, and linguistic researches continue to serve as a foundation for our own (and others’) studies, especially in relation to Gudur.

NOTES

  1. “The religious practices of the majority of the un-Islamized peoples of the Mandara are characterized by a common trait: the representation by polished stones and bourmas [pots] of beings to whom worship is offered” (our translation).
  2. Interview with Zera Huvdub ta Zayag (19-07-89).
  3. In the past a finial was placed on the roof of this room; it proclaimed to all who passed by that this man was the head of a minimal lineage. If the custodian is a married daughter, the ancestor shrine room will be built some distance from her husband’s house.
  4. The category of twins in the Mandara mountains includes other multiple births, breech births, and sometimes other “abnormal” births.
  5. Sirak midwives are frequently of the smith/potter caste; some smiths are specialist midwives.
  6. One of these routes has the additional protection provided by six pots buried in the path. These are to ward off attacks from enemies coming from the north.
  7. Several of the rain stones used by MofuDiamaré chiefs to bring or withhold rain are shaped like elongated upper grindstones (Sterner 2003:211n.36).
  8. The last time Sukur emissaries went to Gudur was during the locust invasions of the 1930s. No one we met at Sukur has ever been to Gudur.
  9. Since the 1930s there has been a tendency in both the anglophone and francophone literatures to attribute to Gudur a political and religious importance that we regard as unjustified. Description of Gudur as a “pagan Mecca” (Shaw 1935) or of the clients of Bay Gudal as “pilgrims” invokes a model that is fundamentally misleading – but we cannot argue this in detail here (David in press).
  10. Seignobos (1991a:254) places the apogeeapogee of Gudur considerably earlier at the end of the sixteenth and start of the seventeenth century. No reason is given for the change in Seignobos (2000a).
  11. We do not claim that all those clans and communities that claim a Gudur origin necessarily form part of the nineteenth century diaspora that resulted from the Fulbe conquest. Migration, often at a micro-scale, is a normal process in and around the Mandara mountains, and some Gudur-descended groups to the west of Gudur may have been there considerably longer. Historical research is required to define the situation more precisely. It would, for example, seem likely that the Gudur connections claimed by groups located to the south and east of Gudur (Gisiga, Mundang, and others) mostly antedate the nineteenth-century diaspora.
  12. See Sterner (2003) for further discussion of Kopytoff’s frontier thesis.
  13. The term also means ancestor or spirit or a sacrifice to ancestors (Barreteau 1988). Podlewski (1966:89) also witnessed Bay Takwaw pray to his ancestors for rain.
  14. Whether in fact this room is a “focus of religious activities,” as we believe is the case, or rather a Pandora’s box remains uncertain. The chief of the northern Mafa Vreke polity, who claims Gudur descent, possesses a similarly closed room, which he informed Nicholas David was “full of snakes and diseases.” In either case, its ideological significance is clear.
  15. Seignobos (2000b:111, 112) mentions shortages and famines in northern Cameroon in the years: 1890–93, 1903–04, 1912–14, 1921–27; the locust invasion of 1933 was the most devastating in forty years.
  16. The region had been part of German Kamerun until 1916. In 1919 it was partitioned between Great Britain and France. The League of Nations Mandate did not formally come into effect until 1922 (Barkindo 1985:37).
  17. J. Hunter Shaw (1935) also states that in 1931 contributions were made at Sukur to make an iron door to shut in all the locusts. Other communities (Fali, Cheke, Margi, and Kilba) contributed. In 1934 the chief of Sukur collected one penny from all adult males to be sent Gudur to drive out the locusts (Kulp 1935). MacBride (1937:3–4) also wrote of the “sacrifice of thanksgiving” initiated by the chief of Sukur in 1936 when the locust invasions were coming to an end: “a cock to be killed for every male and an egg to be crushed between thigh and belly by every woman. This sacrifice was performed in most of the villages of the Mandara District and in many of the Mubi villages as well.… The result was an unprecedented shortage of eggs and chickens during the first six months of 1936.”
  18. Jouaux (1989:277–78) discusses the locust sacrifice (kuley nga jaray) in reference to the relationship between Masuwa and the chief of Gudur. While, for her, the latter is the uncontested “master” of the locust sacrifice, the Masuwa of Gudal’s role in carrying it out is crucial; the Masuwa of Zidim provide the sacrificial victims.
  19. Podlewski (1966:89) states regarding the site: “ilfauts’enfoncerbienloinaucoeurdeil faut s’enfoncer bien loin au coeur de massifs caparaçonnés d’immenses dalles désertiques (les cultures y sont interdites); là se trouvent des excavations, aujourd’hui celées et surmontées de poteries, qui auraient été le point de départ des invasions d’acridiens locales.”
  20. Seignobos (1991a:247–48) states that there are some twenty upturned pots – he is referring to the large beer brewing and storage jars – amongst a “chaos” of potsherds and tripod pots. The larger storage pots (those with bodies flaring from a narrower base) are made by the wives of the Mogura smiths. Mogura are a clan of the smith/potter caste affiliated with the Masuwa (Seignobos 1991a:253).
  21. Strümpell’s account conflates the doorless room at Yideng Bay, the medicine given by Bay Gudal to envoys from other communities, and the protection offered by the sacrifice at the locust shrine.
  22. It seems more probable that the chief sent the horse for sacrifice as it is elsewhere stated that the chief of Gudal never visits the locust shrine.
  23. The ancestral shrines and the rain stones of Gudal have been housed successively at Yideng Bay, a chiefly residence on the mountain above it and now in the small compound below where Bay Takwaw’s successor as customary (but not administrative) chief lives.
  24. The practice may be regarded as magical in that the liquid was believed to have a physical effect. In this it was more comparable to a homeopathic medicine in which the active ingredient is diluted to an infinitesimal amount than to the wine distributed at a Christian communion.

REFERENCES

Barkindo, Bawuro Mubi. 1985. “The Mandara Astride the Nigeria-Cameroon Boundary.” In Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations across Africa’s International Boundaries 1884–1984, ed. A. I. Asiwaju, 29–49. London: C. Hurst & Co.

Barreteau, Daniel. 1988. Description du Mofu-Gudur: Langue de la famille tchadique parlée au Cameroun. Livre I – Phonologie; Livre II – Lexique. Paris: ORSTOM.

———. 1999. “Les Mofu-Gudur et leurs criquets.” In L’homme et l’animal dans le bassin du lac Tchad, ed. Catherine Baroin and Jean Boutrais, 133–69. Paris: Éditions IRD.

Barreteau, Daniel, Liliane Sorin, and A. Bayo Mana. 1985. La poterie chez les Mofu-Gudur: La poterie chez les Mofu-Gudur: des gestes, des formes et des mots. Mimeo Mss, Paris: ORSTOM.

Beauvilain, Alain. 1989. Nord-Cameroun: Crises et peuplement, 2 vols. Alain Beauvilain.

Boutrais, Jean. 1987. Mbozo-Wazan : Peuls et montagnards au nord Cameroun. Paris: ORSTOM.

Colson, Elizabeth. 1997. “Places of Power and Shrines of the Land.” Paideuma 43:47–57.

David, Nicholas. 1990. Vessels of the Spirits: Pots and People in North Cameroon. 50 mins. Calgary: Department of Commmunications Media, University of Calgary.

———. 1998. “The Ethnoarchaeology and Field Archaeology of Grinding at Sukur, Adamawa State, Nigeria.” African Archaeological Review 15, no. 1:13–63.

———. In press. “La chefferie de Gudur (Monts Mandara, Cameroun) : une hypothèse minimaliste.” In Migrations et mobilite spatiale dans le bassin du lac Tchad (Actes du 13e Colloque Méga-Tchad, Maroua, 31 octobre – 2 novembre, 2005), ed. Henry Tourneux.

David, Nicholas, and Carol Kramer. 2001. Ethnoarchaeology in Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

David, Nicholas, and Judith Sterner. 1995. “Constructing a Historical Ethnography of Sukur, Part I: Demystification.” Nigerian Heritage 4:11–33.

———. 1996. “Constructing a Historical Ethnography of Sukur, Part II: Iron and the ‘Classless Industrial’ Society.” Nigerian Heritage 5:11–33.

———. 1999. “Wonderful Society: the Burgess Shale Creatures, Mandara Chiefdoms and the Nature of Prehistory.” In Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa, ed. Susan K. McIntosh, 97–109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2005. “The Dur Xidis of Sukur.” Web page. Available at http://www.sukur.info/Soc/Xidis.htm.

David, Nicholas, Judith Sterner, and Kodzo B. Gavua. 1988. “Why Pots are Decorated.” Current Anthropology 29, no. 3:365–89.

de Lauwe, Paul-Henri. 1937. “Pierres et poteries sacrées du Mandara (Cameroun).” Journal de la Société des Africanistes 7:53–67 (+ plates).

Fardon, Richard. 1990. Between God, the Dead and the Wild: Chamba Interpretations of Ritual and Religion. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Jouaux, Catherine. 1991. “La chefferie de Gudur et sa politique expansionniste.” In Du politique à l’économique : Études historiques dans le bassin du lac Tchad, ed. Jean Boutrais, 193–224. Collection Colloques et Séminaires. Paris: ORSTOM.

Jouaux, Catherine. 1989. “Gudur: chefferie ou Royaume?” Cahiers d’études africaines 114, no. 29–2:259–88.

Kopytoff, Igor. 1971. “Ancestors as Elders.” Africa 41:120–42.

———. 1987. “The Internal African Frontier: The Making of African Political Culture.” In The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies, ed. Igor Kopytoff, 3–84. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kulp, H. Stover. 1935. “Notes Taken on a Tour in Madagali District in Company with the Touring Officer, Mr W.R. Shirley, June 14–22.” National Archives of Nigeria, Kaduna, Yolaprof J21.

Lavergne, Georges. 1943. “Rapport sur 5 tournées N°173.” 1943. APA 11876/J, Archives nationales, Yaoundé.

MacBride, D.F.H. “1937. Mandara District: Village Histories.” National Archives of Nigeria, Kaduna, Yolaprof J21.

Mather, Charles M. 1999. An Ethnoarchaeology of Kusasi Shrines, Upper East Region, Ghana. PhD dissertation, Calgary: University of Calgary.

Mohammadou, Eldridge. 1988. Les lamidats du Diamaré et du Mayo-Louti au XIXe siècle (Nord Cameroun). Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.

Müller-Kosack, Gerhard. 2003. The Way of the Beer: Ritual Re-Enactment of History among the Mafa, Terrace Farmers of the Mandara Mountains (North Cameroon). London: Mandaras Publishing.

Podlewski, André M. 1966. La dynamique des principales populations du Nord-Cameroun (entre Benoué et lac Tchad). Cahiers ORSTOM, Série Sciences Humaines, III, 4. Paris: ORSTOM.

Seignobos, Christian. 1991a. “La forge et le pouvoir dans le bassin du lac Tchad ou du roiforgeron au forgeron-fossoyeur.” In Forges et forgerons (Actes du 4e Colloque Méga-Tchad, 1988, Vol. 1), ed. Yves Moñino, 383–84. Paris: ORSTOM.

———. 1991b. “La rayonnement de la chefferie théocratique de Gudur (Nord-Cameroun).” In Du politique a l’économique: Études historiques dans le bassin du lac Tchad, ed. Jean Boutrais, 225–315. Paris: ORSTOM.

———. 1995. “Données historiques.” In Terroir de Mowo : Saturation foncière et émigration. Olivier Iyébi-Mandjek, and Christian Seignobos, 69–78 (+ figure and table). MINAGRI (Département Paysanal et Gestion de Terroirs)/SODECOTON/ORSTOM, Yaoundé.

———. 2000a. “Aliments de famine : répartition et stratégies d’utilisation.” In Atlas de la province de l’extrême-nord du Cameroun, compiled by Christian Seignobos and Olivier Iyébi-Mandjek, 111–14. Paris: Minrest, Cameroun, and Éditions de l’IRD.

———. 2000b. “Mise en place du peuplement et répartition ethnique.” In Atlas de la province de l’extrême-nord du Cameroun, compiled by Christian Seignobos and Olivier Iyébi-Mandjek, 44–51. Paris: Éditions de l’IRD and Minrest, Cameroun.

Shaw, J. Hunter. 1935. “Madagali District.” 1935. National Archives Nigeria, Kaduna, NAK 17/3 25073 (3947).

Smith, Adam, and Nicholas David. 1995. “The Production of Space and the House of Xidi Sukur.” Current Anthropology 36, no. 3:441–71.

Sterner, Judith. 1989a. “Sirak Household Ritual.” In Households and Community, ed. A. Scott MacEachern, Richard D. Garvin, and David J. W. Archer, 22–27. Calgary: Chacmool.

———. 1989b. “Who is Signalling Whom? Ceramic Style, Ethnicity and Taphonomy among the Sirak Bulahay.” Antiquity 63, no. 240:451–59.

———. 1992. “Sacred Pots and ‘Symbolic Reservoirs’ in the Mandara Highlands of Northern Cameroon.” In An African Commitment: Papers in Honour of Peter Lewis Shinnie, ed. Judith Sterner and Nicholas David, 171–79. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.

———. 1995. “Life and Death in Mandara Ceramics.” In Mort et rites funéraires dans le bassin du lac Tchad (Séminaire du Réseau Méga-Tchad, ORSTOM Bondy, du 12 au 14 septembre, 1990), ed. Catherine Baroin, Daniel Barreteau, and Charlotte von Graffenried, 63–74. Paris: ORSTOM.

———. 2002. “Potters of the Mandara Mountains.” Ceramics Technical 15:14–21.

———. 2003. The Ways of the Mandara Mountains: A Comparative Regional Approach. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.

Sterner, Judith, and Nicholas David. 1991. “Gender and Caste in the Mandara Highlands: Northeastern Nigeria and Northern Cameroon.” Ethnology 30, no. 4:355–69.

———. 2003. “Action on Matter: the History of the Uniquely African Tamper and Concave Anvil Pot-Forming Technique.” Journal of African Archaeology 1, no. 1:3–38.

Strümpell, Kurt F. 1922–23. “Wörterverzeichnis der Heidensprachen des Mandara Gebirges (Adamaua).” Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen 13:47–74; 109–49.

van Beek, Walter E. 1981. A. “Les Kapsiki.” In Contribution de la recherche ethnologique à l’histoire des civilisations du Cameroun, 2 vols., ed. Claude Tardits, 1:113–19. Colloques Internationaux du Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 551. Paris: CNRS.

Wade, James H. 1997. “Rainmakers and the Problematics of Power in Fali Society.” In L’homme et l’eau dans le bassin du lac Tchad (Séminaire du Réseau Méga-Tchad, J.W. Goethe-Universität, 13–14 Mai, 1993), ed. Herrmann Jungraithmayr, Daniel Barreteau, and Uwe Siebert, 271–84. Proc. Seminar des Internationalen Forschungsnetzes Mega-Tschad, Paris: ORSTOM.

Walker, W. H., and L. J. Lucero. 2000. “The Depositional History of Ritual and Power.” In Agency in Archaeology, ed. M.-A. Dobres and J. Robb, 130–47. London: Routledge.

Annotate

Next Chapter
2. The Archaeology of Shrines among the Tallensi of Northern Ghana: Materiality and Interpretive Relevance
PreviousNext
Shrines in Africa
© 2009 Allan Charles Dawson
Powered by Manifold Scholarship. Learn more at
Opens in new tab or windowmanifoldapp.org