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The products of locust-bean trees, river, and bush are luxuries not accessible to most commoners. Vagrant humans were sold; dogs and cattle sacrificed to ancestor spirits. The modern privileges of chiefship are sometimes described as substitutes for these traditional rights.
But to the natives their crucial significance lies in the correlative duties and responsibilities they involve. It was a grave moral responsibility, subject to mystical penalties, for any one but a chief to sell a wandering stranger into slavery. Fishing and hunting expeditions are dangerous. Only a chief can fire the bush. The fault for a serious accident falls on him. He must perform precautionary magic before an expedition, and offer placatory sacrifices to render river or bush safe again after an accident.1
These rights and responsibilities are indices of the complex configuration of rights and responsibilities through which chief-ship accomplishes what the natives regard as its supreme end—'to prosper the community* (maal tey). No!am is a medium through which the mystical forces conceptualized in Tale religion are mobilized to ensure the welfare and fertility of humans, animals, and crops—the common good, in so far as it is determined by natural forces beyond pragmatic control. A chief's death brings famine upon the community. His blessing is as potent for good as his curse is dangerous. His office is sacred, imposing on him observances and taboos—very rigorous in the case of the Toyraana —symbolizing his mystical powers and responsibilities. He is the guardian of the community, responsible for the organization of and major contributions towards sacrifices made by it to preserve the beneficence of the ancestors and for the conduct of the annual ceremonies of the Great Festivals. He is the custodian of the sacred objects that symbolize the continuity and perpetuity of the na'am. When a natural calamity threatens, the elders appeal to him for intercession with the ancestors. Most important is his power to regulate the rainfall.
These capacities, derived from the chiefly ancestors, are vested in a chief as the highest representative of his maximal lineage. He cannot exercise them arbitrarily, for his own ends, but only in conclave with representative elders of the clan or community for the
1 Other aspects of communal fishing expeditions are discussed in my paper on 'Communal Fishing and Fishing Magic in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast', J.R.A.I., 67, 1937.