Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Book - Page 1 (paperturn-view.com)
This is the online version of the book I copy-edited recently. It tells the history of the people of the Mandara Mountains in northern Nigeria, their self-sufficient way of life, beliefs and customs. When they were invaded by Boko Haram in the early 2000s many were killed or had to flee, and the ones who remained were enslaved by the radical Islamists. The introduction to Chapter 3.16 on page 423 describes the localized flat-earth world-view and cosmology of their not so distant past. "In cosmographic terms the fundamental cognitive orientation of the Dghweɗe of the late pre-colonial past was within an archaic flat-earth model in which we think they saw themselves at the centre of the world. This cosmographic orientation inspired their ideas regarding the workings of the world, which was not a global one surrounded by a universe, but a land mass with a deeper ancestral world underneath and a celestial ‘umbrella world’ far above the winds and clouds. In their world, the sun rose in the morning out of the 'anus' of the deep earth in the east, and disappeared in the evening in the west to produce daylight in the next world below." Many thanks to ethnographer Gerhard Müller for the privilege of working on his book.