the male captives from the determination of slave-raiding invaders.
No people can be enslaved without there arising a reciprocal attitude of defiance—what Wallerstein refers to as the “counter-assertiveness of the oppressed”13—which may lead to a growth in proto-nationalist thinking. Thus, as Menelik’s power grew, the Oromo became more unified. The ethnic homogeneity of the group resulted in a reciprocal proto-nationalism over time. This gradually coalesced in the names of the administrative regions of the emergent country of Ethiopia, more specifically the delineation and naming of the modern administrative region of Oromia and even the emergence of the Oromo Liberation Front and calls for independence.
The ethnicity of the children was overwhelmingly Oromo, with only a handful of other ethnicities with strong genetic and political ties with the Oromo. Homogeneity characterized the captivity. The children came from towns and villages dispersed across a wide stretch of Oromo territory, primarily following the lines of the mountainous regions along the rim of the escarpment. A statistically significant gender difference emerged, with the boys coming mostly from homes in the highland regions, while the girls came from areas as much as 400 meters lower in altitude on average. The full significance of this disparity is unclear. Perhaps the girls, highly sought after for the external slave trade, were easier to capture in the lower altitude regions, making for a speedier passage to the coastal entrepôts. The children’s evidence, opening up the geographic and topographic range of slave raiding among the Oromo in the late nineteenth century, allowed for a full and precise placement.
If we can consider the Oromo captives of this study as a snapshot of the process of enslavement of vulnerable people in that territory, we see that the captives were remarkably homogeneous in terms of their ethnicity, and this is reflected in the profile of modern Ethiopia. The secular effect of this core and periphery was to establish a reciprocal nationalism in the south, which we can recognize in the contemporary demand for Oromo liberation and independence. This was an ancient reaction evident in the Greek and Roman Empires and in such a familiar biblical example as the Jews—the original peripheral people—fleeing their Egyptian slavers. In considering the Jews and their potent ideas of nationhood, who could deny that this was a response to their enslavement? The model of the core and the periphery helps explain the particular case of Abyssinia and the emergent Oromo nation.
PART II
Routes: From Capture to the Coast
CHAPTER 5
The Moment of Capture
Scholars of the Oromo slave trade, informed by the accounts of travelers and other observers, have recorded that slave raiders generally either kidnapped, purchased, or seized their Oromo captives as spoils of war.1 Timothy Fernyhough goes further, mentioning a broad spectrum of ways in which the trade in slaves was augmented. These included state-sponsored expeditions, the thefts of those already enslaved (confirmed by Henry Darley, a traveler), the seizure of children as they tended livestock, housebreaking at night, ambushes, natural disasters such as famine and drought, debt redemption, and retributive procedures for real or fabricated crimes.2 Mordechai Abir and Timothy Fernyhough both refer to instances whereby Oromo parents even used trickery and deception to sell their children or other kin into slavery.3 These are broad allusions drawn from travelers such as Antonio Cecchi, Henry Darley, William Cornwallis Harris, Charles William Isenberg, and Johann Ludwig Krapf, as well as from other sources. The Oromo captives’ firsthand accounts informing this study provide a rare opportunity to go further and to explore in detail the moment of capture in the life of a slave child.
Fred Morton, in his study of thirty-nine East African child slave narratives, posits that for the children, “life’s memory was anchored in that place and moment.”4 This chapter will focus on that moment, examining the identity of those who captured the children, as well as their ethnicity, gender (both men and women were involved in the slave trade), occupation, and slaving group. The children also indicated whether or not they recognized their captors, whether they had any existing kinship bond or other relationship with the captors, and whether the captors acted alone or in a group. In addition, they told of how they were captured, whether their captors used violence during the captures, whether their captors were mounted or on foot, and whether they were sold for money or bartered for food or goods.
Who Captured the Children?
The external Red Sea and Horn of Africa slave trade is regarded in the older, secondary sources as having been instigated and driven largely by “Arabs.”5 At point of capture, however, the agencies were different. All but two gangs of slave raiders were drawn from local groups. Even at trading level on the way to the coast, Arab intervention emerged only at, or close to, the termination points of the journeys. Though the Red Sea maritime slave trade was ultimately Arab-controlled, it was not, in this study, Arab-initiated in the interior, or at point of capture.
The majority of the children (70.9 percent) did not recognize their captors, while 9.3 percent recognized kin, 3.5 percent recognized neighbors, and a further 16.3 percent recognized persons known to them. There were two noticeable gender differences: more girls did not know their captors, and no girls recognized any of their captors as neighbors. That the children recognized almost one-third of those who initially enslaved them is not altogether surprising, given that the majority of their captors were local. However, that more girls than boys did not recognize their captors and were not enslaved by their neighbors would support the notion that the majority of slave raiders targeting the girls came from farther afield, possibly as direct agents of the external trade. (This subject is developed further in chapter 6, “On the Road.”)
The following graph (5.1) illustrates the range of ethnicities and places of origin of the captors. Just under a quarter of the children (23.3 percent) identified the Sidama as the raiders who enslaved them. There is a degree of ambiguity surrounding the term “Sidama.” The word means “Abyssinian” in Afaan Oromoo (see the discussion on page 36).6 There is also a small ethnic group situated farther south named the Sidama, who, like the Oromo, were victims of Menelik’s expansionism from the late 1880s.
Today, the Sidama occupy their own administrative zone within Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (SNNPR). With their own language and traditions, and a long administrative history dating back to the ninth century, they currently make up 4.1 percent of the Ethiopian population. The pressures on the Sidama people at the time the children were captured were similar to those experienced by the Oromo themselves.7
Almost one-tenth of the captors (9.3 percent) were from Sayo, an Oromo kingdom; a further 8.1 percent of the captors came from Kaffa (a territory with whom the Oromo shared strong historical links and a border); 4.7 percent were from Leka (now a part of modern Oromia); and 3.5 percent of the captors originated in Jimma, also now a part of modern Oromia. The rest of the captors came—mostly singly—from some thirteen other local territories, almost all within the borders of modern Oromia.
Three of the boys referred to their captors’ identity not by geographical allusion but by ethnicity, religion, or hue. For example, Aguchello Chabani referred to “black Arabs” (see appendix B; narrative 1); Bayan Liliso referred to “Mahommedan raiders” (narrative 9); and Amanu Bulcha referred to his captors as “three black men” who came out of the forest, pounced on him, gagged him with a piece of cloth, and carried him off (narrative 2). With nineteenth-century Christian missionaries recording the children’s narratives, the researcher needs to be alert to possible missionary bias against Islam in their accounts. However, there is no firm evidence of this.
