Bisho was captured in the middle of May 1889, when the “cruel days” (referred to by the Oromo as the bara beelaa or bâraa balliyyaa) of famine and the onset of human diseases had begun to creep in on the coattails of drought and failing crops. As early as 1888, starvation, bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid, smallpox, dysentery, and a host of other diseases had begun to make inroads. Bisho’s parents succumbed to one of these.3
As indicated in the excerpt from her narrative cited above, Bisho also alluded to the rinderpest, introduced into Ethiopia in November 1887. Some reports posit that by the time the disease had run its course, as many as 90–95 percent of the Ethiopian cattle population had succumbed to the disease (see discussion on page 27). Cattle were central to the lives and livelihood of the Oromo farmers. They were their primary source of meat and milk, oxen were essential for pulling their plows, and the size of their herds constituted an important indicator of wealth and status. Bulls in particular represented wealth and feature prominently in Oromo memorial grave art depicting the principal accomplishments of the deceased.4
Bisho was sent with a man to buy food in a neighboring county called Gobu, today the administrative center of the Goba administrative region renowned for its thriving marketplace. No sooner had they arrived than she was told that she was to be sold for corn. Given the severity of the drought, the value of all food, including corn, was hugely inflated. People were starving throughout the land. Bartering children for food became a desperate means of survival.
Family, Kinship, and Slavery
Suzanne Miers, a historian, and Igor Kopytoff, an anthropologist, suggest that Western notions of slavery—that the slave was “first and foremost a commodity, to be bought and sold and inherited”—were, at best, questionable in the context of traditional African societies. They contend that in the common “Western” image, the slave was simply chattel possessed totally by another, with no control over his own life or destiny. This chattel status allowed the slave to be inherited, transferred, or sold at will. Ill-treatment, even to the point of death, was legal. Slave status was intergenerational; slaves occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder and stayed there.5 Miers and Kopytoff emphasize the need to consider the influence of “rights-in-persons” within African social and kinship relationships. These rights, which Miers and Kopytoff aver are “usually mutual but seldom equal,” are present in virtually every social relationship. In terms of these rights, children can expect to be cared for and protected by their parents, husbands have certain rights over their wives, and parents have rights over their children.6 Transactions in terms of these rights-in-persons, say Miers and Kopytoff, are fundamental to African kinship and marriage systems and distinguish African from other slave systems.
The analyses of the data documenting the composition of the children’s families and the conditions of their enslavement suggest a reexamination of the concepts of kinship and slavery in the context of this study. Paul Bohannan, an anthropologist, suggests that in precolonial Africa, slave owners exchanged slaves for other slaves, never for money. In his article on the Tiv people of Nigeria, Bohannan emphasizes the unique exchangeable values of rights in human beings, particularly of dependent women and children, expressed in terms of kinship and marriage.7 This notion is consistent with the Africanist suggestion that owners did not buy slaves in precolonial Africa for money, but rather incorporated them into their families. On the other hand, Ned Alpers, a historian focusing on the political economy of the Indian Ocean slave trade, alludes to Yao male relatives selling their children “for what was very likely the simple acquisition of trading goods.”8 According to Richard Allen, a historian of the slave trade of the Indian Ocean, the sale of children by their parents or relatives was a “common mechanism” in southern Asia. The catalyst for such sales was often indigence or want in the wake of droughts, floods, and other natural calamities. “Human life,” Allen writes, “became exceedingly cheap during these periods of severe economic hardship.”9 Families selling their children is neither a new nor an uncommon phenomenon.
Within kin groups, where “rights-in-persons” prevail across a range of relationships, the acquisition or absorption of kin could be used to increase the size of a kin group and thereby to augment a kin group’s influence, wealth, and power.10 Miers and Kopytoff describe the concept of the “slavery-to-kinship” continuum wherein the status of slave and kin member merge and where neat definitions become blurred and slavery itself becomes ambiguous. Kin, in Africa, whether adopted, dependent, client, or slave, stood side by side and could meld and merge in the way that tenants, serfs, and slaves did in feudal Europe.11 The most marginalized in African societies could occupy a form of chattel status, but the chattel nonetheless remained along a “continuum of marginality whose progressive reduction led in the direction of quasi kinship and, finally, kinship.” The overlap and blending of slavery and kinship, in the view of Miers and Kopytoff, occurs in the latter portion of the continuum, “and it is here that the redefinitions of relationships we have described took place.”12 They believe that the singular stamp of African “slavery” is the existence of this slavery-to-kinship continuum.
Much of what Miers and Kopytoff address applies to the Oromo family structure. For example, the Oromo have a long-established tradition of adoption, or guddifachaa. Mekuria Bulcha, in dealing with the centrality of the Oromo kinship system to Oromo history and sociology, confirms what Miers and Kopytoff claim, explaining the guddifachaa as a system through which the Oromo could adopt individuals who would thereafter be regarded as members of the household’s putative descent group, or gosa. Further, through gosa membership, they were integrated into the larger collective of the community and, ultimately, of the nation.13 Guddifachaa not only accords with Miers and Kopytoff’s concept, but the practice goes further, penetrating the realm of the wider Oromo society.
Ayalew Duressa, a social anthropologist, observes that most scholars have ascribed the practice of guddifachaa among the Oromo to their love of children, maintenance of the family line, and as a means of acquiring labor power and access to an economic resource at both household and community levels. He notes further that some historians consider it a mechanism used by the Oromo people to incorporate (or assimilate) non-Oromo ethnic groups in the vicinity or as a means of alliance creation. However, few such studies have taken into account the influences of kinship, the economy of the people, family size, and household structure on its practice—nor, conversely, the impact that guddifachaa might have had on these issues.14 One such study is that of Dessalegn Negeri, an Oromo social work scholar, who has also explored the societal impact of the guddifachaa system among the Oromo, noting, inter alia, its role in the creation of social bonds and building up resources where additional children were regarded as potential material assets.15 The Oromo sociocultural system of guddifachaa has its roots in the Oromo gadaa system of democratic governance and, as such, both endorses and transcends the individual Oromo family structure, impacting and shaping Oromo society at community and national levels.
Evidence emerging from the narratives of the Oromo children suggests substantive deviations from the kinship continuum model as well as from either the Bohannan or the Africanist notion of internal African slavery as outlined above. Nor can the guddifachaa system incorporate the diverse experiences of many if not most of the children in the group.
These considerations of family incorporation are key as we explore the age and family structure of the Oromo children.
Age Structure
As with the differential in the sex ratio between the Atlantic and the Horn of Africa slave trade,16 age is particularly significant in any study of the local slave trade (see the full discussion of the sex ratio of the Oromo children on page 209–210). Unlike the Atlantic trade from West Africa to the North American, Brazilian, or Caribbean territories, the most sought-after slaves were not young men intended directly for the plantation. Mekuria Bulcha, alluding to the reports of nineteenth-century travelers, maintains that the majority of captives