New Evidence on Slavery and the Slave Trade in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa
20th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (ICES20) – “Regional and Global Ethiopia – Interconnections and Identities”
Mekelle town, Tigray, Ethiopia - 1 to 5 October 2018
Panel ID: 0507
New Evidence on Slavery and the Slave Trade in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa
Tue 2 Oct, Room06 (IPHC Hall 1st floor)
Convenors: Alexander Meckelburg (HLCES), Giulia Bonacci (CNRS)
Paper presenters:
Sophie KÜSPERT-RAKOTONDRAINY; Roy LOVE; FESSEHA Berhe Gebregergis; Hagar SALAMON;
Lacy N. FEIGH; Jonathan MIRAN; Giulia BONACCI; Alexander MECKELBURG; BAHRU Zewde;
YAREGAL Desalegn
Slavery and the slave trade have been a feature of the Horn of Africa region for millennia. Consecutive regional polities, whether Christian or Muslim, executed slave raids into their respective hinterland well into the 20th century. The internal Ethiopian slave trade connected the political centres of Ethiopia with its peripheries and the trade in slaves connected Ethiopia with the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean world. Despite the diversity of various forms of human bondage, slavery and serfdom, as well as the trade in slaves, and its relatively rich documentation, slavery has received little attention in the field of Ethiopia’s social, cultural and economic
history. This panel is part of an ongoing attempt of a scholarly network to focus on slavery in the Ethiopian region and provide evidence of the various forms of human bondage, in order to come to a more holistic understanding of what actually constituted slavery in Ethiopia, and what its legacies are today. We invite papers that look at patterns of, and the relation between, slavery, labour and social status; as well as papers that focus on the emergence of sub-altern identities as a result of slavery and the slave trade, both domestically (within the wider region of the Horn) or globally.
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EXPERIENCES OF SLAVERY FROM THE SUBALTERN PERSPECTIVE OF THE MAO OF WESTERN ETHIOPIA – PAST MEMORIES AND CONTEMPORARY PERCEPTIONS [Abstract ID: 0507-02]
Sophie KÜSPERT-RAKOTONDRAINY, NMS Ethiopia
This presentation will focus on how slavery is remembered and perceived by the Mao people living in Western Wollega and how the experiences are incorporated into the contemporary Mao society. The Mao people were subject of slavery until the end of imperial times and a stigma of social marginalisation based on slave descent is still felt today. Thus, the collective memory of slavery, still at the forefront of their social narratives, is linked to contemporary social events and traditions. The Mao see a relationship between slavery and historical and current existence of domestic labour for families belonging to other people groups, for example through foster relations. Furthermore, foster relations between the Mao and other, majority groups have resulted in a substantial degree of cultural alienation. Consequently, a social class of “black Oromo” who don’t speak any Mao language has emerged, being perceived as descendants of domestic workers or slaves – two phenomena often is seen in close association with each other. The presentation is based on an exploratory field research involving single in-depth interviews and group discussions with people of all ages and genders in the Mao communities, mainly living in Kondala Woreda of Western Wollega. For the historical accounts of slavery, knowledgeable elders have been consulted, but also the perceptions of young people on the experiences of slavery are considered.
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FROM SLAVE TRADING TO HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND 'MODERN SLAVERY' IN ETHIOPIA [Abstract ID: 0507-08]
Roy LOVE, University of York, Britain
Ethiopia’s position in the Horn of Africa, its proximity to the Red Sea, Gulf of Arabia and Indian Ocean, and history of fluctuating highland kingdoms, has meant that over the centuries there has been a continuous flow of people, as merchants, migrants and slaves. This paper concerns the last named of these: slavery and the slave trade in Ethiopia, its conceptual link with human trafficking today and the frequently used term ‘modern slavery’. Only in 1942 was slave ownership legally abolished in Ethiopia, following a number of ineffective earlier proclamations. During the decades which followed, a series of structural economic changes left large sections of the population behind, which, when combined with rapid population growth, generated a massive reservoir of impoverished, mainly rural, labour, many of whom migrated in hope of employment to the growing urban centres. At the same time, the expansion of oil-based wealth in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States created a new regional demand for labour. These phenomena together provided a classic context for agents and traffickers of commodified labour to flourish in what is often (though disputably) termed ‘modern slavery’, drawing today from across Ethiopia rather than the mainly southern regions of the past. Just as the formal abolition of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade by the colonial powers, and the post-bellum abolition in the USA in the 19th century, did not mean the end of forced labour, facilitated today in global human trafficking, so too in Ethiopia has the entrapment of labour continued. This ‘modern slavery’, as with the old, will only be finally eradicated not by legislation, policing and prosecution alone but essentially at the source of the supply chain, through widespread continuous education and enhanced economic opportunities, particularly for women and all those responsible for children.
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FROM THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY TO THE INTEGRATION AND EMPOWERMENT OF FORMER SLAVES AND THEIR DESCENDANTS IN TƎGRAY, NORTHERN ETHIOPIA [Abstract ID: 0507-11]
FESSEHA Berhe Gebregergis, Mekelle University, Ethiopia / EHESS Paris, France / Research Centre Gotha of Erfurt University, Germany / Ethiomap project, Research Centre Gotha, Erfurt University, Germany
The practice of slavery has an ancient history in Ethiopia and echoes up to the most recent past. The Derg (a military junta which ruled Ethiopia between 1975 and 1991, following the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974) introduced radical reforms including land redistribution (in 1975) to former slaves and other groups who had been denied land right during the ancien régime. Indeed, these measures have played their part in the empowerment of former slaves and descend-ants of former slaves in Ethiopia and in particular in Tǝgray. In this talk I argue that it was the policies and reforms of the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF) which warranted ‘real’ integra-tion and empowerment of slaves and their descendants. Along this argument, this article critically examines the major reforms introduced by the TPLF (and concomitant developments) which have been crucial in providing real freedom to former slaves and descendants of former slaves in Tǝgray: 1) radical land redistribution schemes which guaranteed land ownership of the ‘freed’ and their descendants and 2) outlawing the act of discrimination of former slaves and their descendants in-cluding the use of derogatory terms/names such as Barya, Shanqǝlla. Concomitantly, descendants of former slaves started joining the armed struggle of the TPLF as comrades of the ‘freeborn’, and some even assumed important political and administrative positions. The policies and reforms of the TPLF gave the victims of slavery not only full economic and political rights but also “new op-portunities of independence and new social mobility.” Consequently, marginalization and stigmati-zation have been considerably reduced. For instance, marriage between the ‘freeborn’ and persons with slave-ancestry has become possible. In a nutshell, the reforms, albeit mainly top-bottom in approach, have made the integration of former slaves and their descendants in Tǝgray relatively ‘easy’ and ‘quick’ compared to other parts of Ethiopia.
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PROVERBS AS A MEDIATING FORM IN THE STUDY OF SLAVERY [Abstract ID: 0507-01]
Hagar SALAMON, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
The present paper focuses on the use of proverbs and sayings in the study of the sensitive subject of past time slavery. Based on fieldwork conducted both in Israel and in Ethiopia, the potency of the proverb as a mediating genre will be demonstrated. In this presentation I will present and discuss the richness of the interpretive scope, as well as issues related to the ethnographic space.
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PUNISHING SLAVERY: ENFORCING ABOLITION IN INTERWAR PERIOD ETHIOPIA [Abstract ID: 0507-06]
Lacy N. FEIGH, University of Pennsylvania, USA
In 1921 Emperor Haile Selassie’s government prepared a report for the League of Nations on the plan to abolish slavery within Ethiopia. Deeply concerned with the implications across the empire, this report included detailed plans and legal regulations establishing precedents for the process of abolition. According to this proclamation, enslaved individuals would have access to courts to petition for freedom and resources to establish themselves in communities, and even access to schools until the age of eighteen. Additionally, there were provisions assigning punishments to those caught engaging in the slave trade which ranged from a fine and imprisonment to a life sentence. This paper draws upon the formal report on the policies of abolition in light of local Ethiopian prison records documenting sentences levied against slavers and their petitions for royal pardon. These documents, located at the National Archives in Addis Ababa, provide information on how the process of abolition was carried out in specific localities. While the imperial government was concerned with presenting progress on abolition, these provincial records highlight the complex negotiations which local officials navigated in the process of abolition.
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REMAPPING NORTHEAST AFRICAN DIASPORAS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE INDIAN OCEAN WORLD [Abstract ID: 0507-03]
Jonathan MIRAN, Western Washington University, USA
Though estimates of the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trades are rudimentary and may entail a significant margin of error, a prominent scholar of slavery (M. Klein) estimated that between 1400 A.D. and 1900 A.D., approximately 1.5 million slaves were exported from the Ethiopian region. In the past two decades, research on the African diaspora has greatly expanded from its well-established focus on the northern Atlantic to Latin America, as well as the Islamic and Indian Ocean worlds. As a result, new studies on slavery and, more broadly, the African presence – past and present – in Turkey, Egypt, Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the Gulf, Iran and South Asia make it possible to shed greater light on those individuals who were forced out of northeastern Africa and dispersed across this large area of the world. Espousing a broad and flexible definition of the concept of diaspora, this paper proposes to selectively draw on this new scholarship to assess the state of our knowledge of the experiences of Northeast Africans in the eastern Mediterranean region, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran and South Asia. I will address such themes as demographic aspects, slave labor and occupations, the social lives of slaves, racial categorizations, strategies of integration, the development of diasporic identities and creole cultures, cultural practices and performance, and manumission and freedom. The paper adopts a comparative, transnational and global perspective on the study of slavery and post-slavery and is inscribed in new efforts to animate the study of this subject in the context of Northeast Africa and bring it into conversation with the historiographies of the Middle East and the Indian Ocean world.
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SOURCES, PATTERNS AND THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AND SLAVE TRADE IN ETHIOPIA [Abstract ID: 0507-07]
Giulia BONACCI, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)
Alexander MECKELBURG, Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA)
Slavery has been a persistent feature of Ethiopia’s cultural and economic history. Not only were Ethiopian slaves in high demand in the early modern world, also the Ethiopian kingdoms and consecutive states benefitted from slave labor and revenues from the slave trade. Despite its long history and wealth in documentation, slavery and the trade in slaves remains a topic off the record in Ethiopian studies. Against the backdrop of the neglect of slavery as a topic in the social history of Ethiopia, we argue, the starting point to launch a general debate on slavery in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa is to look at regional interconnections of the slave trade, overlapping and intertwined patterns of slavery in time and space against the domestic and international approaches to abolitionism, as well as modern day inter.ethnic, class and gender stratifications.
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THE ABOLITION OF CORVEE LABOUR IN ETHIOPIA [Abstract ID: 0507-10]
BAHRU Zewde, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia
In addition to the tribute that the Ethiopian peasant was customarily obliged to pay to the lord, he had to bear the more onerous burden of corvée labour. This assumed many forms, including working on the farm of the lord for a certain number of days, building his house and fence, herding cattle, loading pack animals during military campaigns, and carrying the pole for pitching tents. This onerous burden of the Ethiopian peasantry was the subject of many passionate and poignant writings by the reformist intellectuals of the early twentieth century. Many an article was devoted to portraying this situation in graphic detail in the weekly Berhanena Salam (“Light and Peace”), which had effectively evolved as the organ of the reformist intelligentsia.Probably inspired by the writings of the intellectuals, Ras Tafari (and later Emperor Haile Sellassie) issued three decrees that significantly eased the labour burden of the peasant. The first, issued in November 1928, gave the peasant the option of either working for only three days on hudad or giving an equivalent amount in grain. The lord was instructed to desist from asking the peasant to perform any other labour obligations. In May 1935, on the eve of the Fascist Italian invasion, the emperor promulgated another decree abolishing corvée labour and fixing the annual tax at 30 birr per gasha of land. These measures were further consolidated by a decree of October 1944. Progressive as they were, the measures did not abolish corvée labour in its entirety. Indeed, a subsequent decree of October 1950 amplified the 1944 provision by stating that the ban on corvée did not include work done for the Church out of a sense of spiritual obligation, including the building of churches. Moreover, tenants continued to be subjected to labour obligations in addition to the proportion of produce that they were contracted to pay. Equally significant is the persistence of what one could call the “corvéee culture” even after the formal abolition of the institution. The conscription of labour for a national cause became the prerogative of the state. This was particularly evident during the post-1974 military regime. Everyone was liable to be called to serve when the Revolution or the motherland was under threat. This labour service ranged from the preparation of provisions for soldiers fighting against foreign invasion or internal insurgency to the commandeering of civilian pilots to deliver arms and other supplies to the battlefield.
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THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE GUMUZ PEOPLE SINCE 1941 [Abstract ID: 0507-09]
YAREGAL Desalegn, University of Gondar,Ethiopia
Mandura was previously called Walamba by the Gumuz People. The name Walamba, according to the Gumuz tradition is “a place of fresh air”. The Gumuz of Mandura differ in minor cultural and linguistic ways from the Gumuz who inhabit other Wärädas, such as Dibate, Bullän, Wämbära, Dangur and Guba. The research employs a qualitative method of data collection. The primary and secondary sources have been cross-checked to ensure the relevance of the data. This study shows that the Gumuz of Mandura Wärädas suffered slave raiding both from the Christian highlands of Ethiopia and by the Muslims of Sudan, over a long period of time. The people were pushed out of their original homeland and forced to live in the inhospitable lowland areas, with unfavourable climate and prevalence of malaria.