350 AFRICAN POLITICAL SYSTEMS
local colonization, which has been greatly accelerated and amplified in range by the establishment of peace. It is a cycle in the history of a lineage. Young men shift to the periphery for a period; then, as the older members die, some return to take over the patrimony now left to them. The lineage system and the ancestor cult are the centripetal forces. The original home (daboog) of one's father is sacred; to abandon it is to incur the wrath of the ancestor spirits. New colonists, often younger members of the same lineage, replace those who return home. Gradually a permanent nucleus may be formed of descendants of men who did not return to their natal homes, and a new settlement arises. Such settlements are genealogically more heterogeneous than the older settlements. The dispersal of Mosuorbiis must have occurred in this way.
A maximal lineage, however widely it may be dispersed, never ceases to regard the original home (daboog) of its founding ancestor as its true home, very particularly associated with the spirits of its ancestors. Though dispersed, it remains anchored to a definite locality.
No one has an over-right to the farm-land a man holds by right of inheritance or purchase. No one can dispossess him of it, prevent him using it as and when he wills,1 or resume any that he leaves untilled. Land can be borrowed; it cannot be rented. Chiefs and tmdaanas (see below, p. 255) have no over-riding rights of ownership entitling them to rent, tax, or tribute for land. They have, indeed, no more land than they have acquired in the same way as any other elder.
Economically, therefore, the Tallensi are a homogeneous, sedentary, equalitarian peasantry. Every settlement has a few men of more than average wealth, due usually to the fact that they have many sons to farm for them. But no social privileges attach to wealth, though it is admired and envied. Wealth cannot be accumulated. It is partly utilized to add to the number of wives in the joint family, thus progressively increasing the drain on its resources, and is eventually distributed by inheritance. Thus it has only a temporary advantage. There are no economic classes cutting across and detracting from the solidarity of lineage, clan,
1 This was remarkably demonstrated when the Tong Kills were re-settled in 1935-6- After twenty-five years, the people returned to take possession of their ancestral lands without a single boundary dispute or a single disagreement as to the ownership of plots,