Across the Voltaic peoples of Burkina Faso and its neighbours, political authority and ritual authority over land are held by different people, and the division is the key to how these societies work.
The naaba, the chief, holds political office and descends from the conquering lineage. The tengsoba, usually translated earth priest, descends from the lineage held to have arrived first, and holds the relationship with the tenga, the earth itself, understood as a power that must be addressed before land is cleared, a grave is dug, a house is founded or a wrong committed on the soil is put right. The earth shrine is his to sacrifice at, and his authority over land allocation is independent of the chief's authority over people. A newcomer seeking land goes to the tengsoba, not to the naaba.
That arrangement produces a distinctive politics. It gives the descendants of the conquered a permanent institutional position that conquest did not remove, and it makes the two offices mutually dependent, since a chief who has lost the cooperation of the earth priest cannot settle anyone. Anthropologists have treated it as one of the clearest examples anywhere of a deliberate separation of powers arrived at without a written constitution.
It also explains one of the less reported dimensions of the current insurgency. Jihadist groups in the Sahel have targeted earth shrines and traditional authorities as directly as they have targeted churches, because the tengsoba is both a religious figure of the wrong religion and the person who allocates land, and displacing him transfers control over the land itself.
The office continues in most communities, including where the family concerned is nominally Muslim or Christian.