GRAPH 5.1. Places of origin of the children’s captors (source: Sandra Rowoldt Shell).
The diversity in location of the children’s homes is echoed in the range of territories from which their captors were drawn. Almost half (48.8 percent) of the captors hailed from five principal regions, and nearly a third (31.3 percent) came from thirteen additional territories. The evidence in this study is of a widespread practice of slave raiding within the southern and southwestern regions below Abyssinia. This evidence indicates that slave raiding in the south and southwestern regions, while feeding into the Red Sea slave trade, was also part of a widespread domestic slaving system. The raiders came from a wide range of local groupings, including raiders from within Oromo subgroups.
Who Captured Whom?
Linking the places of origin of the raiders with those of their captives produced some consistent patterns. The following graph (5.2) shows the relative proportions of both raider and child origins in a cross-tabulation.
The graph includes a map of modern Ethiopia with the administrative region of Oromia shaded. The places of domicile of the five dominant raider identities or ethnicities are indicated by arrows. All of them lived either within what is now Oromia or in adjacent territories. Only the three outsider groups—the “black Arabs,” the “black men,” and the “Mahommedans”—constituted foreign agencies. Note that the Sidama (Abyssinians), the dominant raiders, targeted mostly the children identified as Oromo plus a far smaller proportion of Kafficho. The raiders from Sayo and Leka, both places in what is now Oromia, were interested in seizing only Oromo children, while raiders from Kaffa, like those from Sayo and Leka, also targeted their own. Slightly more than half of the children they captured were Kafficho, with the remainder being Oromo. A Gurage raider captured the single Gurage child in the group, “Black men” captured the one Shangalla child, and a raider from Obojote seized the only Yambo child.
GRAPH 5.2. Places of origin of raiders and of children (source: Sandra Rowoldt Shell).
Gender of the Captors
Slave raiding in the Horn of Africa was decisively a male preserve: 93 percent of the Oromo children’s captors were men. The women enslavers, who made up the remaining 7 percent, lured the children away from their homes rather than seizing them by force, possible examples of the “trickery” to which Fernyhough and Abir allude.8
Modes of Capture
The following polar pie diagram (graph 5.3) illustrates the gender differences in the capture experience. The inner, middle, and outer rings show the experiences of the girls, boys, and all the children, respectively.
The aggregated majority of the children (55.8 percent) were subjected to some form of violence at the moment of capture. They were seized either with a show of force (29.1 percent) or through other forms of violence (26.7 percent). A total of 17.4 percent of the children were taken by nonviolent means, namely, kidnapping; while 15.1 percent were bartered. A small percentage (7 percent) were born into slavery. However, there were clear differences between the experiences of the girls and the boys.
GRAPH 5.3. Modes of capture by gender of child (source: Sandra Rowoldt Shell).
Many more boys than girls were captured after a show of force: 35.7 percent of the boys were captured through “seizure,” compared with 22.7 percent of the girls. A further 35.7 percent of the boys were captured through a form of violence other than “seizure” (i.e., “other violence”), as were 18.2 percent of the girls. Adding the two variables of “seizure” and “other violence” for each group allows for a more comprehensive view of the difference between the genders. The aggregated totals show that 71.4 percent of the boys were enslaved using some sort of violence, as opposed to 40.9 percent of the girls. On the other hand, adding all the nonviolent modes (barter, theft, and enslavement from birth) shows that 23.8 percent of the boys were enslaved without violence, compared to 54.5 percent of the girls—more than double.
Not all the enslavers were armed and not all of them used violence to acquire their slaves. Here the major gender differences emerge. For example, as graph 5.3 illustrates, many more girls than boys were captured following the nonviolent process of barter and negotiation. Traders and raiders entered into negotiations to acquire 15.1 percent of the children. Of these, 11.64 percent were girls and 3.5 percent were boys. Nonviolent theft accounted for another 17.4 percent of the children, 11.6 percent being girls and 5.8 percent being boys. A gender breakdown of the aggregation of these two nonviolent modes of capture (38.9 percent) shows that just under a quarter of these were girls (23.2 percent); while less than a tenth, or 9.3 percent, of those children taken nonviolently were boys. Twice as many girls (4.7 percent) were born into slavery (i.e., their families were already enslaved when these children were taken from their homes) as boys (2.3 percent).9 Far more boys than girls experienced violent capture of one form or another. In treating the girls more gently, the raiders were likely to have been influenced by their higher export demand and buyers’ insistence on intact girls.
A majority (57 percent) of those who enslaved the children acted alone, particularly in the process of enslaving the girls compared with the boys. Only a handful of the enslavers acted in groups of two (4.7 percent, split evenly between girls and boys); groups of three (4.7 percent, all boys); and groups of four (2.3 percent, all boys). The rest of the children (31.4 percent) did not comment on the number of their captors. Two boys reported that gangs of four men had abducted them. One of them, Nuro Chabse (see appendix B; narrative 31), was seized by four men while looking after his father’s oxen and sheep. The other boy, Gamaches Garba (narrative 18), told of a group of four men who seized him and carried him off while he was herding his father’s cattle. Three men abducted Tolassa Wayessa (narrative 38) while he was playing not far from his house. One may conclude that kidnapping teams were involved in the capture of boys, but did not dominate the slave capture.
As graph 5.4 indicates, almost four times as many boys (38.4 percent) were captured to service the domestic slave system as were sold directly into the external slave trade network (10.5 percent). This is in clear contrast to the girls, of whom half (50 percent) were sold into the export network; the other half entered domestic servitude.
Oromo girls and eunuchs were the highest valued of all slaves in the Horn of Africa external trade.10 This might account for the higher percentage of girls than boys being captured specifically for the export network.
The enslavement of the children was not, at least at point of capture, a mass or overtly syndicated operation, though it is possible that single captors acted alone in the field but were part of a larger slave trade network controlled from elsewhere. However, the high proportion of children who were seized in the first instance to service the internal slave system (64 percent) rather than the external slave trade chain indicates that domestic slavery was endemic and was initiated for the most part on an individual basis.
GRAPH
