Each Ingessana section is headed by a chief who is at once its political and its religious center. He lives apart in the 'hut of the sun,' the focus of communal ritual, and it is through him that the section maintains its bond with the creator and with the ancestral order. The office fuses sacred and civil authority in a single person, and it has been the chief institutional means by which the Ingessana preserved their own religion against the pressure of Islam along the Blue Nile. Sources treat the role as an enduring office rather than the deed of a single named man.