center of the Goba administrative region renowned for its thriving marketplace. No sooner had they arrived than she was told that she was to be sold for corn. Given the severity of the drought, the value of all food, including corn, was hugely inflated. People were starving throughout the land. Bartering children for food became a desperate means of survival.
Family, Kinship, and Slavery
Suzanne Miers, a historian, and Igor Kopytoff, an anthropologist, suggest that Western notions of slavery—that the slave was “first and foremost a commodity, to be bought and sold and inherited”—were, at best, questionable in the context of traditional African societies. They contend that in the common “Western” image, the slave was simply chattel possessed totally by another, with no control over his own life or destiny. This chattel status allowed the slave to be inherited, transferred, or sold at will. Ill-treatment, even to the point of death, was legal. Slave status was intergenerational; slaves occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder and stayed there.5 Miers and Kopytoff emphasize the need to consider the influence of “rights-in-persons” within African social and kinship relationships. These rights, which Miers and Kopytoff aver are “usually mutual but seldom equal,” are present in virtually every social relationship. In terms of these rights, children can expect to be cared for and protected by their parents, husbands have certain rights over their wives, and parents have rights over their children.6 Transactions in terms of these rights-in-persons, say Miers and Kopytoff, are fundamental to African kinship and marriage systems and distinguish African from other slave systems.
The analyses of the data documenting the composition of the children’s families and the conditions of their enslavement suggest a reexamination of the concepts of kinship and slavery in the context of this study. Paul Bohannan, an anthropologist, suggests that in precolonial Africa, slave owners exchanged slaves for other slaves, never for money. In his article on the Tiv people of Nigeria, Bohannan emphasizes the unique exchangeable values of rights in human beings, particularly of dependent women and children, expressed in terms of kinship and marriage.7 This notion is consistent with the Africanist suggestion that owners did not buy slaves in precolonial Africa for money, but rather incorporated them into their families. On the other hand, Ned Alpers, a historian focusing on the political economy of the Indian Ocean slave trade, alludes to Yao male relatives selling their children “for what was very likely the simple acquisition of trading goods.”8 According to Richard Allen, a historian of the slave trade of the Indian Ocean, the sale of children by their parents or relatives was a “common mechanism” in southern Asia. The catalyst for such sales was often indigence or want in the wake of droughts, floods, and other natural calamities. “Human life,” Allen writes, “became exceedingly cheap during these periods of severe economic hardship.”9 Families selling their children is neither a new nor an uncommon phenomenon.
Within kin groups, where “rights-in-persons” prevail across a range of relationships, the acquisition or absorption of kin could be used to increase the size of a kin group and thereby to augment a kin group’s influence, wealth, and power.10 Miers and Kopytoff describe the concept of the “slavery-to-kinship” continuum wherein the status of slave and kin member merge and where neat definitions become blurred and slavery itself becomes ambiguous. Kin, in Africa, whether adopted, dependent, client, or slave, stood side by side and could meld and merge in the way that tenants, serfs, and slaves did in feudal Europe.11 The most marginalized in African societies could occupy a form of chattel status, but the chattel nonetheless remained along a “continuum of marginality whose progressive reduction led in the direction of quasi kinship and, finally, kinship.” The overlap and blending of slavery and kinship, in the view of Miers and Kopytoff, occurs in the latter portion of the continuum, “and it is here that the redefinitions of relationships we have described took place.”12 They believe that the singular stamp of African “slavery” is the existence of this slavery-to-kinship continuum.
Much of what Miers and Kopytoff address applies to the Oromo family structure. For example, the Oromo have a long-established tradition of adoption, or guddifachaa. Mekuria Bulcha, in dealing with the centrality of the Oromo kinship system to Oromo history and sociology, confirms what Miers and Kopytoff claim, explaining the guddifachaa as a system through which the Oromo could adopt individuals who would thereafter be regarded as members of the household’s putative descent group, or gosa. Further, through gosa membership, they were integrated into the larger collective of the community and, ultimately, of the nation.13 Guddifachaa not only accords with Miers and Kopytoff’s concept, but the practice goes further, penetrating the realm of the wider Oromo society.
Ayalew Duressa, a social anthropologist, observes that most scholars have ascribed the practice of guddifachaa among the Oromo to their love of children, maintenance of the family line, and as a means of acquiring labor power and access to an economic resource at both household and community levels. He notes further that some historians consider it a mechanism used by the Oromo people to incorporate (or assimilate) non-Oromo ethnic groups in the vicinity or as a means of alliance creation. However, few such studies have taken into account the influences of kinship, the economy of the people, family size, and household structure on its practice—nor, conversely, the impact that guddifachaa might have had on these issues.14 One such study is that of Dessalegn Negeri, an Oromo social work scholar, who has also explored the societal impact of the guddifachaa system among the Oromo, noting, inter alia, its role in the creation of social bonds and building up resources where additional children were regarded as potential material assets.15 The Oromo sociocultural system of guddifachaa has its roots in the Oromo gadaa system of democratic governance and, as such, both endorses and transcends the individual Oromo family structure, impacting and shaping Oromo society at community and national levels.
Evidence emerging from the narratives of the Oromo children suggests substantive deviations from the kinship continuum model as well as from either the Bohannan or the Africanist notion of internal African slavery as outlined above. Nor can the guddifachaa system incorporate the diverse experiences of many if not most of the children in the group.
These considerations of family incorporation are key as we explore the age and family structure of the Oromo children.
Age Structure
As with the differential in the sex ratio between the Atlantic and the Horn of Africa slave trade,16 age is particularly significant in any study of the local slave trade (see the full discussion of the sex ratio of the Oromo children on page 209–210). Unlike the Atlantic trade from West Africa to the North American, Brazilian, or Caribbean territories, the most sought-after slaves were not young men intended directly for the plantation. Mekuria Bulcha, alluding to the reports of nineteenth-century travelers, maintains that the majority of captives exported across the Red Sea were young girls between the ages of seven and fourteen years, with a general ratio of two females to one male. There were virtually no slaves over thirty years old.17 Bulcha underscores this point further, using data derived from observations made at the ports of Massawa and Tadjoura, by stating that “a large proportion of captives exported from the Red Sea ports during the nineteenth-century were children and adolescents. Young girls between the ages of seven and 14 years represented the largest group.” He goes on to cite figures given by Belgian diplomat Edouard Blondeel van Cuelebroeck in the report of his sojourn in Ethiopia between 1840 and 1842. According to Bulcha, Blondeel quoted official figures that excluded numbers gained through smuggling, reflecting that about “600 captives, mainly Oromo, including 300 girls (most 12 or 13 years old), 200 boys and 100 eunuchs were exported from Massawa in 1839.”18 In the Horn of Africa, the trade was manifestly a trade in children.
When the missionaries and their Afaan Oromoo–speaking colleagues interviewed the Oromo children at Sheikh Othman, not all of the children were able to tell the missionaries their date of birth. Instead, the missionaries had to rely on visual observation, physical attributes (including height and developmental
