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Chapter Twenty-six. Tribesmen Of Tirap |
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political feuds and inter-village rivalries |
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In more recent times Mintong was involved in a feud arising from a marital quarrel. A generation ago a daughter of the chief of Mintong was married to a man of great Ang class of Ninu village. In the course of a quarrel her husband sent her back to her parents. Although her father was able to arrange a second marriage with a kinsman of the powerful Ang of Pomau, the men of the chiefly clan of Mintong felt insulted by their kinswoman's repudiation at the hands of her first husband and they prepared a raid on Ninu. However, the Ninu men, warned of the plan, forestalled the raid and, ambushing a group of Mintong men, captured six heads. Therefore all the villages belonging to the Niaunu block, to which Mintong still belongs, joined in a raid on Ninu and captured three heads. Had the whole area not been brought under the control of the N.E.F.A. administration, this feud would probably have smouldered on with the occasional capture of heads. Even in 1962, some thirty-five years after the original clash, those Mintong and Ninu villagers who had lost kinsmen in the fighting remembered the unresolved feud and refused to accept food in the houses of the killers of their relatives. |
