| caption: |
chapter two - the village |
| caption: |
small size of Nzemi villages due to poor agricultural land |
| caption: |
Kuki immigration; breaking into small settlement |
| note: |
footnotes indicated by boxes within square brackets |
| text: |
The difference is due to the type of country which each tribe inhabits. The Aos have ample and easy land for cultivation, favouring the growth of large settlements when these are required for defence. The Central Nzemi have steep and scattered agricultural land which occurs in patches or pockets with wide tracts of useless and precipitous ground between, and villages of even moderate size have difficulty in finding sufficient land for their needs within reasonable distance of the settlement. There is thus for the Central Nzemi a direct conflict between the defensive need for a large settlement and the small population which the land accessible from that settlement can support by the favoured agricultural method shifting cultivation. The Central Nzemi villages where this conflict was most marked, those in the particularly mountainous region round the two peaks, found a solution in a system of cycle-migration which will be considered in detail in a later chapter. [2 [Record T86706] |
| text: |
The immigration of the Thado Kukis into the Central Nzemi area in 1850 and their subsequent settlement there virtually ended Central Nzemi cycle-migration, and as the peaceful conditions prevailing since 1879 removed the need for large defensive settlements, there became apparent a tendency for (13) villages to subdivide into clusters of small settlements. This had in fact been a normal phase in the process of cycle-migration, [3 [Record T86707] |
