against another or within the same ethnicity. Rugged terrain provided a natural defense against slave raiders as well as providing caves in which to hide. High altitudes meant the ability to monitor incoming routes for invaders.10
Bred for its strength and agility as a mountain packhorse or workhorse, the Oromo horse’s bloodlines originated in Ethiopia and spread along the Red Sea coastline. Today, these bloodlines have been diluted to such a degree with centuries of interbreeding that the strain has almost disappeared.
Only four children reported owning one or more horses, all of them boys. Tolassa Wayessa’s (see appendix B; narrative 38) father owned one horse; and the fathers of Liban Bultum (narrative 27) and Wayessa Tikse (narrative 41) owned two apiece; while Tola Urgessa’s (narrative 37) father owned four horses. Although Tola’s was a home of considerable wealth in the context of the other families, each of these boys came from advantaged circumstances when compared with the rest of the children. One anomaly emerges: If horses were a mark of wealth, why did none of the chiefly daughters mention horses in their narratives?
Only 17.5 percent of the children mentioned owning any sheep: 14 percent owned “several,” while 3.5 percent owned “many.”11 Gutama, the putative young essayist on “Gallaland,” does not mention sheep among the animals commonly farmed by the Oromo. However, his perspective could have been compromised by his youth and was likely to have been limited to his own experience, particularly if his father farmed the honey-producing bees that led to his arrest. Although Gutama’s family appear not to have owned any livestock, he explains in his memoir that Oromo women were responsible only for the domestic work within the house and had no outdoor, agricultural role: “The Gallas are not lazy people. The men never allow their wives to go and build the house for them, and they won’t allow them to go and labour in the fields all day for food, while they sit down in their huts and smoke their long pipes. The women there do not work like that but they only work in the house while their husbands till the ground” (appendix D).
The kingdom of Gera, where Gutama lived, is now one of the woredas (or administrative zones) in the Oromia region and occupies much the same territory as the old kingdom. With an altitude ranging between 1,390 and 2,980 meters above sea level, much of the land in Gera is not arable. Coffee, grain, and spices are the primary crops, but the terrain remains largely inhospitable to livestock. Gutama’s personal experience of husbandry might therefore have been scant and his knowledge of gender roles in other regions could have been skimpy. Certainly, among the Oromo children’s families in this study, some widowed mothers were forced by straitened circumstances to venture into the fields to engage in reaping or other agricultural manual labor (see mentions of widows’ field labor on pages 43, 190).
Even fewer children mentioned goats. Only 15.1 percent said their families held any goats, and of these, 10.5 percent of the boys and 2.3 percent of the girls said their families owned “several goats.” The same proportion of girls (2.3 percent) and none of the boys claimed that their families owned “many goats.”
FIGURE 3.2. Cavalry on the Wadela plateau in Ethiopia (source: Trevenen J. Holland and Henry Hozier, Record of the Expedition to Abyssinia [London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1870]).
Mixed livestock holdings would have been common, as meat and milk formed core components of the Oromo diet. However, according to Gutama’s memoir, they eschewed game, pork, and wild fowl, while most avoided poultry and eggs as well: “Gallas never eat wild animals. They don’t eat pigs in northern Gallaland; and they don’t eat any kind of birds; and few people eat fowls or eggs. But there are some tribes that live among the Gallas, that eat nearly everything” (appendix D).
When the Oromo children reached Lovedale Institution in the Eastern Cape in South Africa, the children did not take long to acclimatize to local ways. A happy discovery was that the amasi (sour milk) and mealies/mielies (corn or maize) on which they had been raised at home were part of their daily food regimen at the institution.12
From the details provided by the children, the relative levels of wealth and status of the Oromo families emerge as crossing all social strata, from the humblest level of servitude to the elevated thresholds of the local royal houses. Any a priori assumptions that slaves were garnered from only the poorest and humblest of Ethiopian society have to be abandoned. The trends suggested by the children’s evidence suggest that captives were acquired from a broader spectrum of social strata than hitherto suspected. The existence of slaves drawn from the more affluent strata is not unknown. Published personal accounts of slaves coming from wealthy, high-status families do exist, but these have numbered few to date.13 Without further first-person, eyewitness accounts, the social origins of African slaves will probably remain one of the many conundra of the first passage, but historians should not be able to assume any uniformity of wealth or status.
A convincing majority of the boys emanated from agricultural origins rooted firmly in the peasant class. They were differentiated by type of land tenure, which determined gradations of status and material wealth. The girls’ families, equally freehold and feudal (35.3 percent each), and with almost as many born into slavery (29.4 percent) at the lower end of the social ladder, ironically included four daughters of chiefs at the upper extreme. The boys had a far stronger freehold tenure representation (64.5 percent) against 25.8 percent brought up in a feudal environment and only 9.7 percent already living under servitude, with neither royalty at one extreme nor large numbers born or already absorbed into domestic slavery at the other. The majority of families with freehold tenure should, in theory, have been able to enjoy the stability of a higher standard of living and greater family security. In reality, the individualistic nature of freehold tenure—without the potential for protection by landlord or overlord—actually increased their vulnerability to enslavement. Even the demonstrated wealth of some of the boys and the chiefly status of four of the girls did not insulate them from being captured.
In sum, the families of the Oromo children were drawn from every social stratum—from the lowliest slave environment to local royalty. Captors and raiders did not seek out the lowliest as the most vulnerable. Instead, they targeted families from all strata, driven in part by the exigencies of Menelik’s invading forces to feed Oromo slaves in large numbers into the train of the external slave trade. The insights into wealth and status of the targeted families made possible by the children’s narratives may open the way to further examination in future studies. No class or group was safe from the slave raiders in Oromoland.
CHAPTER 4
Topography, Domicile, and Ethnicity of the Oromo Captives
Scholarly research on Oromo slavery suggests that slaves were drawn from a broad area to the south and southwest of Ethiopia, roughly the area of today’s Oromia. Mekuria Bulcha, Timothy Fernyhough, and the authors of localized studies of slavery among the Oromo in the late nineteenth century have drawn their information largely from the accounts of travelers and other commentators.1 The eyewitness narratives of the Oromo children provide the names not only of their countries of origin but of their regions, towns, and villages. Using data drawn from the narratives, the use of geographical information systems (GIS) methodologies made it possible to generate data-specific maps. In addition, variables derived from the narratives have made it possible to pinpoint and analyze their places of domicile and ethnicity against the topography of the country.2
The Topography
Elevated plateaus, escarpments, tablelands, and mountains dominate
