of African history and put my feet firmly on the quantitative path. He was simultaneously my most rigorous critic and my strongest supporter. My gratitude to him knows no bounds. Requiescat in pace.
Introductory Ruminations
In the summer of 2007, thirty-five years after I had come across an obscure reference to a group of liberated Oromo slave children at Lovedale Institution in the Eastern Cape, I sat spellbound in the University of Cape Town’s African Studies Library as Neville Alexander, the grandson of one of those children, recounted what he remembered of a woman named Bisho Jarsa and her remarkable story. The children had been enslaved in their lands located to the south, southwest, and southeast of Abyssinia (old Ethiopia) in the late 1880s.1 They were taken to the coast and crammed into dhows that were to ferry them across the Red Sea to further bondage in Arabia. British naval gunships intercepted the dhows, rescued and liberated the children, and took them to Aden in today’s Yemen, where a Free Church of Scotland mission station at a nearby oasis, Sheikh Othman, took them in. Eventually, a group of sixty-four of these Oromo children were transported thousands of kilometers away and entrusted to the care of Scottish missionaries at the Lovedale Institution in South Africa.
Dr. Neville Alexander was a man of towering intellect and firm convictions. He was also an intrepid campaigner for justice who had spent ten years as a political prisoner on Robben Island and subsequently became one of South Africa’s most distinguished educationalists. There we were, sitting side by side near the library window, bathed in late afternoon sunlight, as Neville recalled his frail, old Oromo grandmother, a former slave girl named Bisho Jarsa. Neville remembered Bisho when he was a young boy in Cradock, a small town in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. He remembered his grandmother murmuring to herself in an incomprehensible language. His younger siblings would run to their mother, Dimbiti, asking, “What’s wrong with Ma? Why is she talking in that strange language?” Dimbiti, Bisho’s daughter, would respond soothingly, “Don’t worry about Ma. She’s talking to God.”
But who were these Oromo children and why were they here in South Africa? In February 1972, I began working for Rhodes University’s Cory Library for Historical Research2 in the Eastern Cape. Within weeks, while familiarizing myself with the library’s manuscripts and the various card catalogs, I came across several entries reading “Galla slaves.”3
I was baffled. Who were these “Galla” slaves and what was their link with the Eastern Cape? As I asked questions of then head of the Cory Library Michael Berning and explored further, I discovered that the cards referred to a cluster of documents in the archives of Lovedale Institution relating to a group of sixty-four Oromo children who had been enslaved in the Horn of Africa during 1888 and 1889. These children had different experiences of enslavement, but all were eventually put aboard dhows headed for the Arabian slave markets on the opposite shores of the Red Sea. One set of dhows was intercepted and their cargoes of slave children liberated by a British warship in September 1888. However, as Bisho Jarsa’s story related, a further group of dhows was similarly intercepted by the Royal Navy, and a smaller group of Oromo slave children were liberated in August 1899. Both groups of children were transported to Aden in Yemen, where they were taken in by a Free Church of Scotland mission at Sheikh Othman, just north of the city. Two of the missionaries applied themselves to learning the children’s language, and, with the assistance of three fluent Afaan Oromoo speakers, they interviewed each child, asking for details of their experiences effectively from their earliest memories to the moment they reached the Red Sea coast.
It was soon obvious that the children, weakened by their experiences, had severely compromised immune systems and were therefore easy targets for disease. When a number of the children died within a short space of time, the missionaries decided to find a healthier institution for their care. After medical treatment and a further year of recuperation and elementary schooling, the missionaries shipped these sixty-four Oromo children to Lovedale Institution in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.
Despite the wealth of documentation on these children in the Cory Library and other South African libraries and archives, the story of the liberated Oromo children of Lovedale had lain virtually unexamined for more than a century. As I probed deeper, I felt a frisson of speculative anticipation. Here was evidence and documentation of an unprecedented nature. Here were potentially important personal narratives of slavery and the slave trade, overlooked for far too long. The flame of what would prove to be a lifetime interest in and fascination with these Oromo children—their origins and their outcomes—was ignited deep within me there in the Cory Library over forty years ago.
However, my passion was tempered by pragmatism and life circumstances that intervened. At the time, I was busy with my part-time professional studies at Rhodes as well as working at the Cory Library. In addition, I was a social science graduate without a history major. It took years to acquire the essential grounding in history master’s-level study, first at Rhodes and later at the University of Cape Town, always driven by that unquenchable flame.
What I could do immediately was to make photocopies of the children’s narratives to take home. Many years later, I showed them to my husband, the late Robert Shell, a leading historian of Cape slavery. As one of the few cliometricians in the history profession, he was proficient in the use of quantitative methodology. Robert read the stories through with gathering enthusiasm. He pointed out that these stories, besides being a set of rare individual mini-biographies of slave children, were clearly the result of consistent interviewing and lent themselves readily to systematic analysis. He told me that if I encoded these narratives, translating them into numbers, the children’s stories would allow for, at the very least, an opportunity to glimpse trends in the patterns of slavery and the slave trade in the Horn of Africa—in addition to enabling the individual children to tell their own stories. Theirs were authentic African voices relating their first-passage experiences within weeks of their liberation.
Analysis at a group level meant mastering the methodology of quantitative history (cliometry). Further, the nature of the documents suggested the development of a cohort-based, longitudinal prosopography, based on the core documentation of the Oromo children’s own first-passage accounts. While biography is familiar as a tool by which we examine the lives of individuals, prosopography is a collection of biographies that allows for the study of groups of people through systematic analysis of their collective characteristics. Prosopography hands the historian a tool with which to discover common attributes within a group as well as to highlight any variation. From that variation, historical knowledge is generated.
In looking at the history of prosopography, we discern three distinct phases. In the first phase, prosopographers focused on studies of elites, mostly in the classical era, producing static, paper-based texts in the precomputer era. Almost without exception, the earliest applications of prosopography were within the context of studies of classical, Byzantine, and medieval nobility.4 In 1929, Lewis Namier, an influential historian, launched his lifelong prosopography of eighteenth-century British parliamentarians. His work dominated British historiography during the 1930s.5 In response, the British Parliament commissioned the Houses of Parliament Trust, which, in 1951 and under Namier’s oversight, began the monumental project of documenting the biographies of all British members of Parliament.
Static text prosopographies were not the preserve of the precomputer era alone. In 2005, Ghada Osman, an Arabic scholar and linguist, published a rare slave prosopography—a bottom-up rather than top-down study—examining the position of foreign slaves in Mecca and Medina during the sixth century.6 To do this, the author looked at Christian slaves used as “teachers” of the Prophet and slaves used as builders of the Ka’aba, as well as a selection of Byzantine, Abyssinian, Egyptian, Persian, and Mesopotamian slaves in Mecca and Medina during the same period. She listed the names of slaves and as much biographical information as she was able to glean from the available sources.
Prosopographers of the second phase also engaged in top-down studies of elites but had moved
