Mosuor

Mosuor is the founding ancestor of the Namoos of Tongo, the immigrant Talensi division of Mamprusi origin. Oral tradition remembers him as a member of the royal Mamprusi house who left Nalerigu in Mamprugu after a conflict and settled in the Tong Hills country, where he married a woman of the autochthonous hill Talis. From him the Namoos descend as a dispersed clan and maximal lineage, and after his death several of his sons founded or joined further settlements. Sacrifice to Mosuor is the exclusive right of the Tongo lineage, marking him as the ritual apex of the Namoo genealogy. Although his descendants assumed political chiefship, it remained the hill Talis, not the line of Mosuor, who kept the earth-shrines and the great god Tongnaab and coordinated the festivals; the two divisions are bound together in the ritual order that Meyer Fortes made the subject of his classic studies of Talensi society.

Domains

• ancestry
• chieftaincy

Powers

• founds the Namoo of Tongo
• receives sacrifice as founding ancestor

Sources

• Mosuor is the apical ancestor of the Namoos of Tongo, a royal Mamprusi exile from Nalerigu who settled in Taleland; his descendants form the dispersed Mosuor clan, and sacrifice to him is the prerogative of the Tongo maximal lineage.: Meyer Fortes, 'The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi' (Oxford University Press, 1945), ch. 4, 'Clanship: The Namoos'. (secondary)
• Namoo oral tradition traces the group to Mamprugu and the founding figure Mosuor.: Jean Allman and John Parker, 'Tongnaab: The History of a West African God' (2005). (secondary)