Tongnaab, whose name joins the Tong Hills to the word for chief and is often Englished as 'Chief of the Earth', is the paramount god of the Talensi: at once an ancestral 'grandfather' figure and a power of the Earth, embodied in the ba'ar shrine set in the cliffs above the village of Tenzug. Petitioners approach it for children, for the cure of barrenness, and for security, and above all as an oracle that hates evil and exposes witches. Meyer Fortes, who began fieldwork in the Tong Hills in 1934, distinguished the localized ancestral cult from what he called the 'External Boghar', Tongnaab in its role as a trans-regional oracle drawing pilgrims from far beyond Taleland. Although the Namoo hold political chiefship, it is the autochthonous hill Talis who coordinate the great festivals and keep the shrine. Derivative shrines carried out from the hills are called boarbii, 'children of the ba'ar', and it was as such a travelling 'medicine' that the god spread far to the south during the colonial period.