paid “prize” money for every slave liberated, and, all too often, the crews aboard Britain’s naval vessels regarded slave dhow hunting and the liberating of “prize slaves” as something of a sport. As Lindsay Doulton has pointed out, the prize money, which was distributed among the crew proportionately to rank, was an incentive not only to sign up for naval service but also to track and secure as many slave vessels and their slave cargo as possible, regardless of the levels of violence used in their apprehension. Prize money, albeit at a lower rate, was paid out on the corpses of slaves as well, victims of “collateral damage” in the inevitable skirmishes between navy and slavers.37 Fortunately, British naval officials were required to document their activities minutely, so the primary documentation of the naval interventions during which the Oromo children were liberated is substantial.38 Christopher Saunders, Richard Watson, and Patrick Harries are among those who have contributed substantially to what we know about the impact of “prize slaves” at the Cape of Good Hope.39
This study takes its place within the literature as a unique, comprehensive analysis shining twin spotlights on two issues for which scholarly sources of information are woefully scarce. The first shines further light on the history of an underresearched geographic area of Africa. The second spotlight, most significantly, illuminates the scarcely documented first-passage experience through analyses of experiential narratives of the period not only from capture, but from cradle to the coast, told by a group of enslaved children themselves.
South African Missionary Efforts
Nineteenth-century missionary education at the Cape has long been the subject of vigorous debate. Critics have questioned the motives and intentions of the missionary establishment, categorizing all missionaries as agents of colonization, conquest, and capitalism, as well as destroyers of autochthonous culture. Others, like the husband-and-wife team of John and Jean Comaroff, while examining the influences of culture, symbolism, and ideology, have nonetheless drawn sweeping generalizations from too small a base of specific empirical evidence, regarding missionaries as “the human vehicles of a hegemonic worldview.”40 Still others have examined the impact of the missionaries primarily through studies of African converts (the kholwa) and the linkages between mission stations and the rise of South African Black Nationalism. Norman Etherington has contributed an impressive personal canon of publications on southern African missions over the last thirty or more years. His scholarly significance runs deeply within the genre and leaves a substantial imprint on broader southern African issues.41
Individual missionaries approached their spiritual and temporal tasks in the Eastern Cape in different ways. The humanitarian Dr. John Philip presented an illuminating counterposition to the Comaroff motif. Philip committed his missionary and personal life to relentless and outspoken opposition to the injustices perpetrated by the colonial government in the dispossession and dehumanization of the amaXhosa. His battle for justice and human rights brought him into conflict not only with the colonial powers but also with the white settlers of the Eastern Cape and with the majority of his fellow missionaries.42
The Reverend Tiyo Soga, on the other hand, conveyed a more ambivalent picture of the missionaries’ role. On the one hand, suspicion and resentment bred hostility against the intruding Christianizing force in the midst of the amaXhosa. This was matched, on the other hand, by a desire for education and the material benefits enjoyed by the invading strangers.43
Lovedale Mission, begun in 1823 through the efforts of the Glasgow Missionary Society, spawned the leading missionary institution in the Eastern Cape—arguably in the country—which opened its doors nearly twenty years later in 1841. The primary focus of the Scottish missionaries on the Eastern Cape frontier was education. They imparted their belief in equality and Christian brotherhood along with some useful secular teaching. However, working within the context of colonial influence and controls meant that they could not always match their ideals with their actions. They raised African hopes and expectations that could not be met in the context of the Cape political environment. Nonetheless, they offered Africans at their institutions the opportunity for a new, common identity that could transcend both clan rivalries and national divides.44
Countering this interpretation is the postmodernist view of missionary discourse and African response, which suggests, inter alia, that Victorian Christians (like James Stewart at Lovedale) spearheaded “a narrative in which Africans are metaphorically characterised as an ‘infant’ race in the more general march of ‘civilisation’ worldwide.”45
Gender issues in the mission context have prompted considerable discussion on subjects including missionary education that reinforced the stereotypes of women’s roles in home, classroom, and workplace. Nineteenth-century missionaries and educators never quite lost sight of the gendered, domestic, and largely inferior role of young African women.46 A feminist subset of critics suggest that the missionaries wanted to turn young African girls into Victorian women, with their place firmly rooted in the home. However, placing women in the home released them from agricultural labor. In defense of the missionaries’ more complex motives, they wished to emancipate women from the fields and to render the males into Christian yeomen. This movement began with the Watson Institute at Farmerfield in the Eastern Cape in 1838 and spread throughout South Africa.47
Support for this notion comes in an essay (included in this book; see appendix D) written by one of the Oromo boys, Gutama Tarafo, while at Lovedale. Drawing a direct comparison between the Oromo and the Xhosa people, Gutama insisted that Oromo men would never allow their wives to work in the fields. Instead, the Oromo women had dominion over the family home. As a male Oromo teenager, Gutama tellingly championed the right of women to be relieved of heavy manual field labor and to regard their position in their homes as one of domain rather than servitude.
Ethiopia and the Oromo People
Ethiopia, of all African countries, has a sui generis historiography.48 However, the preponderance of Ethiopian studies have largely bypassed the history of the Oromo people, focusing on the agencies of power rather than on those who have been, and remain, powerless. Even those critical of the successive monarchies remained state-centered, focused on the rulers rather than the ruled, giving little attention to the powerless and the ordinary people in the southern regions below the geographical boundaries of old Abyssinia.49
The middle years of the twentieth century saw a surge in both Ethiopian and Oromo scholarship. However, the tendency remained to valorize the elite and powerful with barely a nod to the conquered peoples—including the Oromo. Identity politics wielded in Ethiopian halls of power played a powerful role in suppressing the history, the culture, and even the language of the Oromo people. Given that the Oromo were (and are) the largest population group in Ethiopia, the leading Tigrayan elite feared that to permit recognition and widespread knowledge would promote a sense of Oromo identity. Given their superior numbers, this would, in their view, place Ethiopian identity at risk. However, at the height of the period of the Derg—the administration put in place following the socialist military revolution that overthrew the Ethiopian monarchy in 1974—Oromo scholars, many of whom had already fled the country and were living in the diaspora, took the reins into their own hands. In the vanguard of these were Mekuria Bulcha, Mohammed Hassen, and Asafa Jalata, who began writing about their own and others’ experiences, exposing the historical, political, and social causes of forced migrations of Oromo from Ethiopia. These studies initiated a burgeoning of nationalist—particularly Oromo—scholarship.50
Interestingly, in the early twenty-first century and echoing evolving changes in historiographical approach, non-Oromo scholars like Bahru Zewde, who had hitherto focused on the history of the ruling elite, began exploring Ethiopian democracy from the bottom up, partly redressing the criticisms of their earlier work.51 In recent years, Oromo scholarship has responded to the intransigency of the ruling party and the growing oppression
