26o AFRICAN POLITICAL SYSTEMS
common good. But he is also bound to exercise them; they are obligatory because, as trustee of the ancestors, he benefits by the rights of na'am bequeathed by them, which belong really to the maximal lineage. Hence a proportion of the economic goods he obtains through them must be distributed amongst the segment heads.
This configuration of rights, responsibilities and mystical powers binds a chief and his community in reciprocal dependence. Political boundaries are an innovation frequently causing acrimonious disputes between chiefs and headmen. A chief, in the native system, is the pivot of a community consisting of a series of zones of increasing amplitude and diminishing integration. At the centre is his own maximal lineage and clan. One or two contiguous clans may be closely associated with it, forming part of this central community in all but the genealogical sense. Its area of residence is approximately that within which the chief owns all the locust-bean trees. Beyond this stretches a zone of unrelated clans acknowledging the chiefs mystical value for the common good and his correlative right to vagrant humans, but otherwise independent of, sometimes even hostile in warto, his clan. Divided by local, genealogical and ideological cleavages which may precipitate open conflict over divergent interests, such a cluster of clans emerges as a community in ritual collaboration for the common good, especially during the Great Festivals or if a natural calamity threatens. It represents a balance, usually, between Namoo and non-Namoo units, the pivot of which is the bond between chief and tsndaana.
Without the blessing of the Earth, a chief's mystical powers are void. Thus the final phase of his investiture is his ceremonial reception by the t&idaanas of the community in turn, who present him to their Earth shrines (toggbana) with pleas for blessings on his chieftaincy. Frequently thereafter he must send animals to them to be sacrificed to the Earth. He is powerless to ensure the welfare of the community without their ritual collaboration. He cannot hunt or fish his bush and riverwithout a tendaana's blessing. Finally, on his death a chief is buried secretly by a t&idaana. A community, whether it is a single clan or a group of clans, is politically defined by the complementary functions of chief and t&tdaana.
The relationship of chief and tendaana is one of polar opposition and mutual constraint limited by and maintaining their joint responsibility for the common good, validated by myths like that