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CHAPTER 1

Ethiopia: The Lie of the Land

Modern, landlocked Ethiopia occupies the largest portion of the territory known as the Horn of Africa. Bordered on the south by Kenya and on the west by Sudan and South Sudan, Ethiopia’s access to the Red Sea in the north is blocked by Eritrea and in the northeast by Djibouti. The eastern tip of Ethiopia is wrapped by large, number-7-shaped Somalia, whose long coastline takes in both the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The topography of Ethiopia is complex, but the center of the country is dominated by a high plateau with an altitude ranging from 1,290 meters to a peak of more than 4,500 meters. The central plateau is intersected diagonally by the Great Rift Valley. From this plateau, the land drops away—in places sharply—to the lowlands of the north, west, south, and east. Lake Assal, in the Afar or Danakil Depression, one of the hottest and driest places on earth, constitutes Ethiopia’s lowest point at 155 meters below sea level. The country is watered by the many rivers that rise in the mountainous regions of the plateau and wash down toward the Nile on the west, with others, like the Awash, flowing into Djibouti and Somalia; and the Omo, feeding into Lake Turkana.

Drawing an arc from the western border of Ethiopia with Sudan to the Kenyan border in the southwest is Oromia, the region occupied by the Oromo people (see map 1.1). Oromia, constituting one of nine ethnically defined administrative regions (or kililoch), occupies the largest land allocation of all the regions (353,007 square kilometers), which accommodates the largest single population group (approximately 40 percent of a total estimated Ethiopian population in 2016 of 102,374,044).¹

The topography of the Oromia region is varied and is generally divided into three principal topographical categories, ranging from the mountainous areas of the Ethiopian central plateau in the north to the grassy lowlands in the east, west, and south. Despite several substantial rivers and other water sources in Oromia, the region, like the rest of Ethiopia, is vulnerable to periodic and often devastating climate-driven droughts and famine.

MAP 1.1. Modern Ethiopian administrative regions (source: adapted by Sandra Rowoldt Shell).

More specifically, the three major topographical localities of the Oromia region can be divided into (a) the western highlands and lowlands; (b) the eastern highlands and lowlands; and (c) the areas falling within the East African Rift Valley region.

In the context of the Oromo slave children, the most significant of these localities are the western highlands and lowlands. Under the present political dispensation, this area of Oromia takes in the modern administrative zones of North Shewa, West Shewa, Jimma, Illubabor, East Wellega, and West Wellega. In general, the region features a rugged plateau with a slightly lower altitude than the land farther north. The highest peak is Mount Badda, rising to 3,350 meters above sea level. The western lowlands cover a smaller area of this region.

The eastern highlands and lowlands, incorporating the Arsi, Bale, Borena, East, and West Hararge zones, have an altitude ranging from 500 meters above sea level in the undulating lowlands to Batu Mountain, which peaks at 4,307 meters above sea level. The plateau here features inhospitable rocky desert land supporting a sparse population.

Some forty million years ago, one of Africa’s most spectacular geological phenomena resulted in the splitting of the African tectonic plate, forming a continuous rift stretching 6,000 kilometers from northern Syria to Mozambique. The entire geological phenomenon, still often described loosely as the Great Rift Valley, is actually a series of separate rifts. Where the valley intersects Ethiopia from the Red Sea in the north through to the Kenyan border in the south, it is more accurately described as the Great East African Rift. Splitting Oromia from north to south, the East African Rift Valley region takes in part of the Arsi and East Shewa zones. Volcanic hills, lakes, and depressions fill the valley, while high mountains frame the ridge of the rift.

FIGURE 1.1. Mountainous terrain between Axum and Lalibela in Ethiopia (photograph by Johann Wassermann, 1994).

Terrain and topography impact patterns of human settlement and mobility. Clearly, the particular ruggedness of Ethiopia’s terrain has had, over time, a distinct bearing not only on human settlement and mobility but also on security and the economy. The more rugged the terrain, the greater the challenges for transportation and trade. Over the centuries, humans have used ruggedness and altitude to defend their homes and their livelihoods. Fortresses and fastnesses built at higher altitudes allowed for visual and strategic advantage in times of hostility. Accordingly, the Oromo commonly used the terrain to secure their settlements and strongholds in the mountainous regions of Oromoland against marauders and slave raiders. The mountains and the rocky terrain served as a natural fortress.

In Ethiopia, the rugged topography not only provided a modicum of protection against the predations of slave raiders but also presented traders with the problem of postcapture transportation. The external Ethiopian slave trade, which supplied the markets of Arabia and India, was predicated on the successful transportation of slaves from inland regions to established entrepôts on the Red Sea coast. Negotiation of the towering mountains, craggy outcrops, and steep escarpments of the Ethiopian centroid was only possible via treacherous, rocky pathways.

Ethiopian Population and Demographics

Polyethnic present-day Ethiopia comprises as many as eighty different population groups, speaking some eighty-four languages and divided across its nine ethnic regions in a system of ethnic federalism. That Ethiopia’s nine regions are ethnically defined has enabled critics of the system to draw comparisons with the racially driven Bantustans and the general spatial engineering of South Africa’s pre-1994 apartheid regime. The Ethiopian system of ethnic federalism has, in practice, proved one of ethnic dominance, and, as in apartheid South Africa, the ruling group makes up a tiny minority. In 2016, the ruling Tigrayans constituted a mere 6 percent of the total population of 102,374,000. By contrast, the Oromo people amounted to approximately 40 percent and the Amhara roughly 27 percent of the total population.² Historically, the Oromo have consistently constituted the numerically dominant proportion of the population since incorporation into Abyssinia (old Ethiopia) by Emperor Menelik II in the late nineteenth century. However, as in previous centuries, the Oromo today remain a political minority occupying the administrative region of Oromia.

In earlier writings about the peoples of Ethiopia and in earlier accounts of the Oromo—including in the narratives of the freed Oromo slave children at Lovedale Institution—writers commonly used the term “Galla” to describe the Oromo people. However, in Amharic, the language of the politically and economically dominant Amhara people of Ethiopia, the word Galla means “uncultured” or “immigrants.” The term has long been considered pejorative by the Oromo people, and the use of the old ethnonym, now considered both obsolete and offensive, was declared illegal in 1974.³

In this work, the term “Oromo” is used to describe the largest Cushitic-speaking people of Ethiopia. Although they occupied, in the late nineteenth century, a plurality of principalities, the Oromo people were, as now, united in language, religion, and political culture, most notably the democratic administrative system of gadaa and a collective Oromo identity. While occupying different principalities, each under the leadership of a local king or chief, the Oromo shared what Mekuria Bulcha refers to as the “myth of common descent.”⁴ In the late nineteenth century, although they shared a common language, they did not, at that time, share a formally defined and named Oromo territory. Despite this, the Oromo principalities hung together across contiguous territory to the south and southwest of Abyssinia in what was then referred to collectively by cartographers like John Bartholomew as “Galla Land” and more recently as “Oromoland.” It was these territories that Sahlé Mariam, king of Shewa (later Menelik II),⁵ expropriated—and effectively colonized—in the late nineteenth century, absorbing them into his vision for a new, united Ethiopia.⁶ The unity of Oromo ethnonationalism would finally be recognized in 1991 with the establishment of their own “state-space” in the modern administrative region of Oromia.⁷ But of course the granting of a state-space within a supposedly unified country neither ensures nor implies self-determination.

Writing in 1885, Rawson W. Rawson, a renowned British nineteenth-century public figure, geographer, and statistician, cites figures given by the celebrated French geographer Jacques Élisée Reclus in an article on European interests in the Red Sea hinterland.⁸

Map 1.2 uses proportional circles to represent Reclus’s relative land and population figures for the different groups in the region roughly covering the area of modern Ethiopia.⁹

MAP 1.2. Reclus’s population figures overlaid on a modern outline map of Ethiopia (source: generated from Reclus’s data by Sandra Rowoldt Shell).

According to Reclus’s figures, the Oromo represented 41 percent of the total population. The map demonstrates this numerical dominance. Rawson adds a caveat regarding the accuracy of these figures, saying, “They can, of course, only be approximate.”¹⁰ Reclus’s figures nonetheless provide an acceptable estimated base of core population data for the region and era in which to embed the Oromo children’s narratives.

Language

Ethiopia’s rulers—and many non-Oromo scholars—often insist that the Oromo people are united only by the Oromo language (Afaan Oromoo). Oromo is an East Cushitic tongue of the Afro-Asiatic language family written in either the ancient Geez script or a modified Latin alphabet named Qubee. While more people (33.8 percent) speak Oromo than any other single language in Ethiopia, the language is also spoken in both northern and eastern Kenya, in Somalia, and in Sudan. It has also been carried farther across Africa by thousands of Oromo people who have fled oppression in Ethiopia in the twenty-first century, seeking asylum or refuge in other countries from Egypt and Libya to South Africa. Across the continent, as the fourth-largest language after the Arabic languages Swahili, and Hausa, Afaan Oromoo is spoken by an estimated fifty million people.¹¹ However, use of the language was significantly repressed from the late nineteenth century until the revolution of 1974. There were few publications by or about the Oromo in their language, and those that did exist were written in the Geez alphabet. In 1956, an Oromo scholar and poet named Sheikh Bakri Sapalo developed a script specifically for Afaan Oromoo, probably designed to conceal the existence of Oromo publications from the Ethiopian authorities. After 1991, the Qubee alphabet was formally adopted. Despite all these politically inspired linguistic hurdles, language is a bonding factor for the Oromo people. However, those who challenge the unity of the Oromo would aver that in every way other than language, they have been—and remain—a disparate people, divided by religion, by interclan squabbling, and by their ready acculturation into the groups among whom they settle.

Religion

While a student at Lovedale, Gutama Tarafo, one of the freed Oromo slave children, wrote a descriptive essay titled “My Essay Is upon Gallaland” (see appendix D in this book), which details an array of features including topography, diet, culture, climate, and religion. Gutama wrote: “The Gallas are heathens in religion. They worship a big tree, and in the mountains. They obey just as the king tells them, and the rule is if a person breaks the king’s commandment, he is taken to the market and punished, by being beaten, or sold as a slave.”

This is the only comment in Gutama’s essay on the religious practices of the Oromo people. Oromo traditional religion is essentially monotheistic, centering on Waaqa, acknowledged as a “Sky God,” a Supreme Being responsible for the creation of the universe. Attached to Waaqa is what Ioan Lewis referred to as a “vague hierarchy of refractions” embracing the natural phenomena—“the sun, moon and stars, the winds, rainbow, rains . . . the hills, trees and water”—the full environmental experience of the Oromo people, hence their reverence for trees and mountains.¹²

FIGURE 1.2. Holy tree festooned with cloth and votive offerings for Oromo worship (source: Guglielmo Massaia IV, 49, in Richard Pankhurst and Leila Ingrams, Ethiopia Engraved: An Illustrated Catalogue of Engravings by Foreign Travellers from 1681 to 1900 [London: Kegan Paul, 1988], 134).

These traditional beliefs, embracing the profound interconnectedness among “human, non-human and the supernatural,” have shaped the Oromo ecological cosmology, which underpins their Weltanschauung—an enduring conservation ethic and culture in their relationship to their land, flora, and fauna.¹³

Although there were zealous but rarely successful attempts at proselytization by foreign Christian missionaries among the Oromo, particularly during the nineteenth century, there was scant influence exerted on the Oromo belief system by the monophysite Abyssinian Orthodox Church or, till the mid-nineteenth century, by Islam. Carl Isenberg, a German missionary and linguist, hints at reasons for this in his disheartened summary of spiritual interactions between the Oromo and their neighbors:

The relation of the Gallas to their neighbours is hostile. The Abyssinian Christians only visit them for the sake of plunder; and the Mahomedans come among them in order to carry their sons and daughters away, by stealth or force, into slavery. The Gallas are, therefore, a nation hating all, and hated by all. They glory not in the promotion of the glory of their Creator, nor of the happiness of their fellow-creatures, neither in the enjoyment of happiness or the possession of wealth; but they glory in the murder of men that are not of their nation. The Abyssinians, indeed, have attempted, by force and by persuasion, to bring them over to a profession of Christianity; but, except in a few instances, quite in vain.¹⁴

Oromo scholar Mekuria Bulcha points to the analyses of Amharic intellectual and historian Asma Giyorgis (or Giyorghis), who converted to Catholicism and pursued a career in the administration of Menelik II. Asma Giyorgis believed that the dearth of conversions to the Abyssinian Orthodox Church, particularly during the Menelik era, could be attributed in the main to a general reluctance on the part of the Orthodox clergy. He suggested that the clergy preferred to leave the Oromo as a “pagan” and subjugated people, making it easier for them to maintain a certain dominance over them, ruling “the Galla like slaves.”¹⁵

Asma Giyorgis wrote emphatically of the mutual antipathy simmering between the Oromo and the Amhara during the era of Menelik’s reign: “Even now, the rest of the Galla prefer to be Muslim rather than Christian, because they hate the Amhara; the Amhara priests, the bishop and the clergy do not like the Galla. They believe that Christianity cannot be understood by those whose ancestors were not Christians. Therefore, they do not teach them.”¹⁶

Bulcha argues that the Abyssinian Orthodox Church not only lacked a sense of mission but was also elitist and espoused a “chosen people” ideology that informed their reluctance to proselytize among the “Gallas,” whom they regarded as uncultured foreigners, interlopers, and strangers—decidedly “the other.” Bulcha also suggests that because of the indivisibility of Abyssinian church and state, “the clergy made attempts to convert non-Abyssinians only when it served the interest of their patron the king.”¹⁷ In respect of the interests of Sahle Mariam (Menelik), the king of Shewa, there was greater political and financial advantage in enslaving the Oromo than in converting them. Conversion to Christianity would have placed them outside the potential slave trade pool that was such a fundamental source for feeding Menelik’s economic and political interests. As Bulcha explains, “While recommending the capture and enslavement of the ‘pagans,’ the Fetha Nagast prohibited the sale of Christians to non-believers. Therefore, it may not be surprising that Abyssinian rulers, whose external trade was dependent on the exportation of slaves, were reluctant to spread their faith to the neighbours they constantly raided for slaves.”¹⁸

The Fetha Nagast, the Abyssinian “Law of Kings,” which had its origins in a thirteenth-century Arabic document compiled by a Coptic scholar and jurist named Ibn Al’-Assal, included highly wrought regulations and instructions regarding slavery that were underpinned by numerous religious justifications. Slavery, slave raiding, and the trading of slaves were all clearly condoned—and indeed supported—by ecclesiastical and secular powers alike. Since the inception of the original document, those practices had been codified as legitimate Abyssinian economic dealings. Though the ban on the sale of Christians by Christians to non-Christians was often violated, the embargo would nonetheless have held as a deterrent to the proselytization and conversion of “the neighbours they constantly raided for slaves,” including the Oromo who were located in territories surrounding the kingdom of Shewa on the west, south, and east.

This is not to say there were no conversions to Christianity, whether to Abyssinian Orthodoxy or to Western—Roman Catholic and Protestant—denominations. However, Western missionaries were regarded with suspicion and hostility, with Amharic and Tigrayan adherents proudly defending the independence of their own long-established Abyssinian Orthodox Church that was so intertwined with the state apparatus. As a result, Western missionaries experienced significant difficulties accessing Ethiopia as well as the territories occupied by the Oromo. There were those who were successful in getting approval for their applications to operate within Ethiopian borders and beyond. However, they were invariably expelled within a few years as suspicion and hostility mounted concerning their activities. The Oromo themselves were generally wary of both Abyssinian Orthodoxy and Western Christianity. Asma Giyorgis suggested that the Oromo’s antipathy toward the Amhara and Tigrayan elites in Ethiopia extended to include an antipathy toward their faith and attempts to convert them. Certainly, there is evidence that while the Oromo had been exposed to both major monotheistic faiths over many centuries, Islam would exert the greater influence.

Abbas Haji Gnamo, an Oromo anthropologist, contrasts the “official/establishment” nature of Christianity with the perception of Islam as an “anti-establishment” faith—“the religion of oppressed peoples”—a faith that would have appeared as abhorrent to the ruling elites who regarded Ethiopia as an “Island of Christianity in an Ocean of Muslims and pagans.” Abbas Gnamo believes that Asma Giyorgis was being simplistic and even anachronistic in his explanation that the Oromo would prefer Islam over Christianity because of their hatred of the Amhara elite, on the grounds that Islam’s influence had begun to take hold prior to the imperial conquest of the Oromo. However, it would seem that even divorced from religious influence, the antipathies between the two nations had a long historical reach.¹⁹

Certainly, there is a persuasive logic in why the Oromo, a populous but oppressed people, would be drawn to a religion of the masses. Steven Kaplan, a religious and social historian, differentiates between Orthodox Christianity, which he maintains took initial hold among the elite core, filtering outward and downward toward the periphery; and Islam, which traditionally grew from the periphery inward toward the core. Kaplan notes that for most of its history in Ethiopia, Islam existed on the periphery of a strong Christian state. It was the religion of traders, craftsmen, and pastoralists, rather than that of rulers and officials.²⁰ Mohammed Hassen, who limits his study of the Oromo mainly to those in the Gibe states, maintains that while there were pockets of sedentary Oromo who espoused Islam in earlier centuries, the more itinerant pastoral Oromo groups tended to adhere to their traditional animist belief system.²¹ Explaining that the spread of Islam was gradual and multifaceted, Hassen presents a rather more nuanced view of the spread of Islam than that of either Abbas Gnamo or Kaplan. Hassen observes that as the spread of Islam was largely through the contact and influence of Muslim traders, there was a practical necessity for seller and buyer to be able to communicate with each other. This meant the adoption of the Oromo language as the lingua franca of trade, and it rapidly became the primary medium for the transmission of Islamic tenets and principles.²²

Hassen suggests a complex dynamic in the spread of Islam among the Gibe Oromo through a “series of gradations in the conversion of the Oromo to Islam which acted as an insulator absorbing Islamic radiation without violently uprooting their traditional values.”²³ First, traders were largely responsible for the geographic distribution of Islam to the marketplaces along the caravan routes. These traders were able to set up strong relations with the Oromo nobility based on mutual commercial benefits. Many of these traders also gradually took over responsibility for the teaching of the children of Oromo nobility and were therefore, in part, responsible for the preparation of future generations of Oromo leaders, at least in the Gibe states of Limmu-Ennarya and Gomma. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Islam had taken hold among the elite throughout all the Gibe states with the exception of Gomma. The kings, in turn, believed they had the responsibility of spreading Islam among their subjects and encouraged Muslim preachers and teachers to establish Muslim schools.²⁴

Hassen indicates that consistent with his “series of gradations,” a duality persisted between Islam and the traditional religion of the Oromo during this spread and growth of Islam throughout the Gibe states. Both change and acceptance were largely syncretic, particularly among the grassroots Oromo population. According to Hassen: “In the end Islam replaced the old religion mainly because it had the full support of the state, while the old religion lacked a literate class, organized preachers, and the ideological strength of Islam. The Oromo believed in Waaqa (sky god), the creator of the universe. To pass from believing in Waaqa to accepting Allah as the creator of the universe was not a formidable transition.”²⁵

Old traditions and rituals were often modified syncretically to embrace the new Islam.

Myths of Origin

There is a widely held view among many historians that the Oromo were latecomers to the highland plateau territory of Ethiopia, entering and settling there only during the sixteenth century. However, Oromo historian Mohammed Hassen challenges this view, claiming that the Oromo, as the largest group of Cushitic-speaking peoples who are known to have populated the Ethiopian region for millennia, are one of the indigenous groups of Ethiopia.²⁶ In support of this claim, he alludes to the assertion by British army officer, colonial administrator, and journalist Sir Darrell Bates that “the Galla were a very ancient race, the indigenous stock, perhaps, on which most other peoples in this part of eastern Africa had been grafted.”²⁷

Bates claims that the Oromo had earlier been driven out of the same lands that were most in contention during the first part of the sixteenth century by the Abyssinian Christians and the followers of Islam. According to Bates, the Oromo, who were then in the lands to the south and west of these territories whence they had been driven, observed the tussles between the two factions with interest, “waiting in the wings for opportunities to exact revenge and to recover lands which had been taken from them.” Regrettably, Bates fails to source these statements, which Hassen later picked up and used as evidence in support of his argument.²⁸ Hassen points to evidence that the Oromo were largely agropastoralists and originally practiced mixed farming.²⁹

In the 1880s, when the Oromo children’s narratives begin, the Oromo were entrenched in the territories to the south and southwest of Abyssinia and Menelik’s kingdom of Shewa. These were the final years of the reign of Abyssinia’s “King of Kings,” Emperor Yohannes IV, who claimed descent from King Solomon through two female lines and had come to power in 1872. By the mid-1880s, Sahle Maryam, king of Shewa (who could claim uninterrupted direct male descent from King Solomon and the queen of Sheba), was determined to place himself first in line to replace Yohannes when the time came.³⁰ This was the era of ascendancy for the man who would become Emperor Menelik II.

In his active pursuit of the imperial crown, Menelik knew that he needed to augment his material wealth and firepower. In that era, firearms had become “a precondition for satisfying wider political ambitions.”³¹ He also needed to expand his territorial domain, which he had achieved through an ongoing program of incursions, particularly to the south and southwest.

Menelik steadily augmented the territorial dominion and power of his realm, principally by expanding into the Oromo lands to the south and west through successive battles, including that fought at Embabo near the Abbay-Gibe watershed. He was also careful to extend his Shewan hegemony northward by incorporating the Wollo (or Wello) region to the northeast.

To cement his ascendancy, he recognized above all the strategic importance of securing the old trade routes to the southeast, thus opening up access to the sea and foreign trading opportunities. This would mean taking the ancient walled city of Harar (see fig. 1.3). The city had fallen temporarily under Egyptian control in 1875 when, by establishing this foothold, they hoped to take control of the whole of Ethiopia. This proved to be an abortive exploit, and they eventually abandoned Harar in 1885. Seizing the moment, Menelik attacked and conquered Harar at the battle of Chelenko in January 1887, thus adding considerable heft to his growing imperial ambitions.³² When Emperor Yohannes died from a wound sustained in battle against the Sudanese Mahdists in March 1889, there was little doubt that Menelik would be his successor.³³

FIGURE 1.3. Ancient walled city of Harar (source: Richard F. Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa; or, An Exploration of Harar [London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856], frontispiece).

Menelik’s ambitions were not limited to his successful territorial and hegemonic advantages. He was equally bent on raiding these—and other territories he had no intention of colonizing—for whatever spoils and levies they might yield. The spoils included livestock and slaves. Menelik, as king of Shewa, had long benefited substantially from the slave trade. Despite his public lip service to the abolition of the slave trade, he actively promoted its expansion during these latter decades of the nineteenth century. Simply put, there was too much potential for profit in the trade in slaves and he was, arguably, the trade’s greatest beneficiary in Ethiopia.³⁴ Harold Marcus maintains that Menelik was Ethiopia’s “greatest slave entrepreneur.”³⁵ He demanded that taxes be levied on slaves passing through Shewa, as well as a tax of one Maria Theresa (MT) dollar (or thaler) on every slave sold within his kingdom. Prisoners captured in the course of his predatory battles, or zamacha, were sold in slave markets, and he built up his own court’s slave allocation through tributes paid in slaves.³⁶

With the monies accrued from the profits of the slave trade, Menelik was able to satisfy not only his tactical need but also his personal passion for weapons. According to Marcus, Giovanni Chiarini—an Italian explorer who spent two years in the kingdom of Shewa (1876 to 1878)—described Menelik as “fatalistic and a good soldier, [who] loves weapons above all else.”³⁷ To acquire his weaponry, he courted the European powers, notably the French, with whom he had established his first European contact and of whom he is reported to have said, “The French are my friends; it is upon them that I shall base the hope of my reign. I give you all my confidence and my friendship; my country is yours, and you are amidst a people who also love you.”³⁸ Among his principal French gunrunners was, rather surprisingly, the celebrated French poet Arthur Rimbaud.³⁹

The Oromo largely resisted Menelik’s predatory attacks until 1886. Thereafter, despite their larger numbers, the insufficiency of their firepower was no match for Menelik’s superior and growing ordnance strength. Enslaving the Oromo offered him an open opportunity to continue to augment his mounting military superiority. According to the historian Jon R. Edwards, by the late nineteenth century, slaves had become one of the most significant Ethiopian export commodities, and “in addition to the fillip to the trade generated by his disruptive wars of expansion, [Menelik]’s generals brought thousands of slaves home to Shewa after their expeditions.”⁴⁰

Menelik’s efforts bore fruit. When the wounded Emperor Yohannes died on 10 March 1889, Menelik finally claimed the imperial throne thanks to his determination, his ruthless political ambitions, and his augmented purse and military power. He was crowned Emperor Menelik II in the Entotto Maryam Church on 3 November 1889.

The Famine Days

In the same period, coupled with the danger posed by Menelik’s territorial predations and the incursions of his slave raiders, the southern regions were on the cusp of what came to be called bara beelaa (or bâraa balliyyaa) by the Oromo—the “famine days,” “cruel days,” or “time of suffering.” This period materialized into the worst drought and famine in Ethiopian history, extending from 1887 to 1892, peaking in 1890–1891. The onset was signaled by the failure of the summer rains in 1887, resulting in drought and excessive heat that shriveled the crops.⁴¹ Researchers working in the field of climate, water, and weather information have attributed the incidence of various droughts across the continent of Africa, but particularly in southern Africa and in the Horn, to climate phenomena linked with El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), “a coupled air and ocean phenomenon with global weather implications.”⁴² The effects of ENSO may manifest themselves thousands of kilometers away from the epicenters of these phenomena. Researcher Tsegay Wolde-Georgis, in a study examining the Ethiopian climate over time, posits that the El Niño phenomenon may be regarded as an early warning indicator of drought in Ethiopia. In his chronology of El Niño and drought and famine in Ethiopia covering more than four centuries, from 1539 to 1993, Tsegay Wolde-Georgis tables 1887 through 1889 as El Niño years in Ethiopia.⁴³

In the first week of April 1888, it was reported that men were “starving and suffering from dysentery.”⁴⁴ Crops had failed. Food was at a premium. In November 1888, one of the Roman Catholic mission journals published a letter from Monsignor Nicolas Bettembourg, the procureur of the Roman Catholic Congregation of the Mission, reporting on worsening environmental conditions in Ethiopia in the preceding months:

Almost all Abyssinians are under arms, and this state of hostility is causing great misery to our poor Catholics. To the continual arson and looting that had almost ruined them, is added an epidemic [rinderpest] which deprives them of much of their herds. To make matters worse, crops have been lost through lack of rain and famine has begun to reign in the districts of our Christians. Even at Massawa commodity prices have doubled and it is very difficult to get food, so the dearth of supplies has been even more marked.⁴⁵

Plagues of locusts, caterpillars, armyworms, and rats swarmed across the country, destroying crops and carrying disease.⁴⁶ On 8 November 1887, by which time Ethiopian cattle were beginning to feel the impact of the onset of drought conditions and were increasingly vulnerable to disease, an Italian expedition, under the leadership of General San Marzano, arrived at the port of Massawa and was stationed in the Hamasien province, the ancient political and economic center of Eritrea. Lamberto Andreolis, an Italian “contractor, purveyor, and ship-owner,” is believed to have imported a shipment of cattle for these troops from India through the Red Sea port of Massawa.⁴⁷ Unbeknownst to the Italians, these imported cattle proved to be riddled with rinderpest. As early as 2 April 1888, there were reports that “transport animals [were] dying of rinderpest.”⁴⁸ The disease ripped through the Ethiopian bovine population like a bushfire fanned by savage winds and then swept down the continent of Africa, reaching the southernmost tip in 1896, when southern Africa’s cattle herds began to succumb to the disease.⁴⁹

The human population of Ethiopia was similarly crushed. Many starved to death and many fell ill. Famine, cholera, bubonic plague, and associated diseases took hold and thousands died. Swarms of locusts and caterpillars invaded the lands and decimated what was left of the crops. Conditions during this period, as recounted across the literature, attained biblical proportions in terms of the multiple climatic and ecological calamities enveloping the land. When the drought eventually broke in 1892, observers reported that between one-third and one-half of the human population of Ethiopia had died.⁵⁰

It was in this climate of political vulnerability and ecological disaster that the families of the Oromo children central to this study found themselves in the late 1880s.

The complex topography of Ethiopia—with its highland plateaus, grassy lowlands, and also hot desert lowlands ending in the Afar Depression—provided a dramatic topographical backdrop for the ordeals of the Oromo children. Distributed across these landscapes, the population of Ethiopia was (and remains) complex and ideologically divided, with the Oromo people the numerically dominant group. Three religious systems predominated among the Oromo: traditional religion, Islam, and Christianity. All three coexist in modern Oromia, the home of the majority of Oromo in Ethiopia and one of the nine regional states of Ethiopia designed around ethnic identity. The unique Oromo gadaa system provided a democratic framework until its influence waned in the face of conquest. Nonetheless, it retains a strong symbolic significance and could serve as the basis of a mechanism of regional governance for Oromia under the existing federal system. Nationally speaking, however, the plurality of ethnicities, cultures, languages, and religions suggests that Ethiopia is destined to remain a divided country. This division has been glaringly evident in view of the protests in Oromia and farther afield in recent years against the then Tigrayan-led minority regime. Dr. Abiy Ahmed, the new Prime Minister since April 2018, is an Oromo. Hopes run high that much-needed reforms in the system of governance in federal Ethiopia may take place under his leadership.