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Chapter three - the Ram or village community |
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the kadepeo and the autochthons |
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founding of villages an original lineages |
| note: |
footnotes indicated by boxes within square brackets |
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2. The Kadepeo and the Autochthons. |
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We have seen that a Central Nzemi village of average size will contain from 8 to 10 tsami, but however large the settlement, and however many tsami there may be in it, the ownership of the site belongs only to two of them. One will be of the Nriami moiety and the other of the Neomi, and they claim descent from the first founder and co-founder respectively. The first Central Nzemi settlements would therefore seem to have followed a pattern familiar elsewhere among the Naga tribes. The colonists were composed of two bodies, one drawn from each moiety, so that the the colonists need not seek wives outside their own village; the leader of the larger body was the village founder, while the leader of the smaller body became the co-founder. In by far the greater number of existing Central Nzemi villages, and in all those settlements which are believed to have been founded at the time of the earliest Nzemi migration into the present Central Nzemi area, the chief founder was a man of the Nriami moiety. The one or two villages, such as Nenglo, where the chief founders were Neomi, are small, late colonies which have broken away from long-established Nriami-founded villages such as Hangrum. There is thus a strong suggestion that Nriami was the dominant moiety. |
