A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991. Bahru Zewde
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the king’s lands. Their immediate governor then takes his share in kind of every grain (say a fifth), and feeds besides a certain number of soldiers at the expense of the householder: he has rights to oxen, sheep, goats, butter, honey, and every other requisite for subsistence; he must be received with joy and feasting by his subjects whenever he visits them, and can demand from them contributions on fifty pretexts – he is going on a campaign, or has just returned from one; he has lost a horse or married a wife; his property has been consumed by fire or he has lost his all in battle; or the sacred duty of a funeral banquet cannot be fulfilled without their aid.
(Plowden, 137–138)
Inasmuch as the gult was given as a reward for military service, the whole system tended to foster a military ethos. To be an armed retainer of a lord freed one not only from the drudgery of farming but also from the harassment and persecution of the soldier. Conversely, the life of the peasant became increasingly precarious. Perennial victim of the vagaries of nature – such as drought and locust invasions – the peasant was simultaneously at the mercy of the marauding soldiery. The wars of the Zamana Masafent were particularly destructive in this respect. The system of billeting or quartering soldiers in peasant households subjected the latter to numerous exactions and indignities. Mansfield Parkyns, a British traveller of the early nineteenth century, has given us gruesome details of the fate of a peasant who was roasted alive as a penalty for having hidden some butter from the insatiable soldiers billeted in his house.
Although detection entailed such frightful punishments as the one just described, hiding grain was one of the ways by which the peasant tried to ward off the human locust. Burning grain was another, although such measures were no less wasteful socially. Often, too, the peasant abandoned farm and homestead and fled for security – either to a place of less insecurity or to join one of the many bandits who mushroomed in this period. Commenting on the despoliation which such a situation created in one of the northern provinces, the missionaries Isenberg and Krapf had this to say:
[T]he Wag country . . . is decidedly one of the most important and interesting provinces of Eastern Abyssinia. It would admit a larger population and a high degree of cultivation of the soil, if a better government ruled this country. It would be necessary, however, for such a government to do away with the system of annually plundering their subjects, as this is the very means to destroy commerce, order, cultivation of the ground, and every improvement of human society. At present the Governor comes annually with his troops and takes away what he pleases; and the consequence is that the inhabitants conceal their treasures and take to flight to the mountains; whereupon the Governor destroys their houses and fields.
(Isenberg and Krapf, 486–487)
States and peoples of southern Ethiopia
The history of early nineteenth-century Ethiopia would not be complete without a description of the peoples and principalities of the southern half of the country. It was the unification of these two parts in the second half of the nineteenth century that gave birth to modern Ethiopia. The peoples of southern Ethiopia had attained varying degrees of social and political organization. The term ‘southern’ is used here not in the strictly geographical sense, but as a convenient category embracing those states and peoples which did not directly engage in or were peripheral to the imperial politics of Gondar. Their organizations ranged from communal societies to states with powerful kings and elaborate mechanisms for the exercise of authority. Examples of the latter kind were the kingdoms of Kafa, Walayta and Janjaro. They are often known by the generic linguistic term of Omotic, because of their location in the vicinity of the Omo river.
The kingdom of Kafa traced its origins back to the fourteenth century. The economy, as in both Walayta and Janjaro, as well as among a number of Cushitic and some Semitic peoples of the south, was based on the cultivation of ensat (‘false banana’, Ensete ventricosum). A class of peasants, holding their own land but being forced to give labour service, formed the human base. They were supported by slaves acquired through raiding or trading, or as payment for debt. The first written reference to the kingdom goes back to the sixteenth century, and the state reached the apogee of its power at the turn of the eighteenth century. At the apex of the political and social hierarchy was the king, the tato, assisted by an advisory council of nobles, the mikrecho. While Orthodox Christianity had managed to win many adherents among the ruling class, possession cults, headed by the ibede gudo, the supreme spiritual leader, predominated among the masses. The state obtained its revenue from taxation and customs dues on the prosperous trade with the Oromo states which emerged to the north of Kafa towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Slaves constituted the main item of export trade, followed by ivory, coffee and honey.
The kingdom of Walayta to the east also had equally remote origins, its beginnings being associated with Motolomi, of medieval fame, who according to tradition was converted to Christianity by Abuna Takla-Haymanot, the Shawan saint. Motolomi is said to have founded what came to be known as the Walayta Malla dynasty, which lasted up to the fifteenth century. It was then superseded by the ‘Tegrean’ dynasty, so called because it was reputedly established by Tegreans who had initially come to the region as settlers. The power of the king, the kawa, was autocratic, extending to a prerogative over all land, which he could grant to the class of warriors, the goqa, as a reward for military service. After a popular uprising in the middle of the nineteenth century against the excesses of the reigning king, the power of the kawa was attenuated and subjected to checks by an advisory council and assemblies of regional representatives.
3. Ethiopia in the nineteenth century
The Janjaro, who called themselves the Yam or Yamma, were an agricultural people located to the north-east of Kafa, along the western edges of the Gibe river. As in the case of Walayta, an indigenous dynasty (the Dida or Gamma) reportedly came to be replaced by one of northern origin (the Mowa). At the apex of the political pyramid was the king, the amno, who (in contrast to the case of Kafa, where political and religious powers were divorced) also acted as the chief priest and was given attributes of divinity. The lower tiers of the hierarchy were occupied by – in descending order of importance – a state council of twelve astessor, whose chairman (the waso) was highly influential, provincial governors (erasho) and district chiefs (ganna). The economy was based on land worked by a tribute-paying peasantry, with trade and crafts (more particularly iron-casting and weaving) playing a supportive role. The external relations of Janjaro in the nineteenth century were characterized by a long and bitter conflict with the neighbouring Oromo kingdom of Jimma Abba Jifar – a conflict which ended with the absorption of both into the empire of Menilek II.
Jimma Abba Jifar itself, named after its founder Abba Jifar I (r. 1830-1855), was an example of the Oromo states which emerged in south-western Ethiopia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In one of the most interesting processes of social transformation in Ethiopian history, the Oromo, who initially had an egalitarian and republican system of socio-political organization based on age-groups and known as the gada, developed monarchical institutions. The main factors for such a transformation were the changes that the Oromo underwent from a pastoral to an agrarian mode of life, and the class differentiation that this brought about. The continuous wars of expansion that the Oromo waged in the course of their migrations and settlement also tended to strengthen the powers of the abba dula (the war-leader in the gada system) at the expense of the abba boku (the traditional titular head of the Oromo community). This evolution towards monarchical power was manifested in two regions. The first was in the area of the Gibe river, hence the name ‘Gibe monarchies’. The second was in present-day Wallaga, in western Ethiopia.
Five such kingdoms emerged in the Gibe region: Limmu-Ennarya, Jimma, Gomma, Guma and Gera. As its name suggests, Limmu-Ennarya was an Oromo state established on the remains of the medieval kingdom of Ennarya, which had existed in a state of tributary relationship to the Christian kingdom. Initially Limmu-Ennarya was the most important of the Gibe states, primarily by reason of its control of the long-distance trade that linked the