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.
CHAPTER 2
The Family Structure of the Oromo Captives
There is a general lacuna in the slave trade literature of the Horn of Africa and elsewhere in Africa relating to the family structure of those who were captured and enslaved. Fred Morton’s examination of a small body of narratives by East African child slaves offers some insights.1 The sixty-four personal first-passage narratives of the Oromo children in Children of Hope illuminate slavery and family structure as few sources have done to date. Each of the narratives opens with the child’s name, age, parents’ names, orphanhood, number of siblings, total family composition, and kinship structures.
Inevitably, all the Oromo children would experience the impact of what the economic historian Mike Davis has described as “a truly biblical conjugation of natural and man-made plagues”2 at some stage of their enslavement and to one degree or another.
For example, Bisho Jarsa, who had two brothers, was fourteen years of age when first sold into slavery. Both her parents were dead by the time she was first taken away from her own country. Her explanation of their deaths goes some way toward explaining the high rate of orphanhood among the Oromo children and their enslavement. According to Bisho’s narrative, her mother and father “both died at the same time, during the prevalence of a sickness which carried away a great many people. The cattle also died in large numbers. . . . A famine was all over the land at the time” (appendix B; narrative 48).
Bisho was captured in the middle of May 1889, when the “cruel days” (referred to by the Oromo as the bara beelaa or bâraa balliyyaa) of famine and the onset of human diseases had begun to creep in on the coattails of drought and failing crops. As early as 1888, starvation, bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid, smallpox, dysentery, and a host of other diseases had begun to make inroads. Bisho’s parents succumbed to one of these.3
As indicated in the excerpt from her narrative cited above, Bisho also alluded to the rinderpest, introduced into Ethiopia in November 1887. Some reports posit that by the time the disease had run its course, as many as 90–95 percent of the Ethiopian cattle population had succumbed to the disease (see discussion on page 27). Cattle were central to the lives and livelihood of the Oromo farmers. They were their primary source of meat and milk, oxen were essential for pulling their plows, and the size of their herds constituted an important indicator of wealth and status. Bulls in particular represented wealth and feature prominently in Oromo memorial grave art depicting the principal accomplishments of the deceased.4
Bisho was sent with
