When the missionaries and their Afaan Oromoo–speaking colleagues interviewed the Oromo children at Sheikh Othman, not all of the children were able to tell the missionaries their date of birth. Instead, the missionaries had to rely on visual observation, physical attributes (including height and developmental level), and the knowledge and assumptions of the children and their peers. The missionaries accordingly assigned each child an approximate age at the time of their interviews in 1890.
The following box and whisker plots (graph 2.1) show the different age ranges of the boys and girls. The chart demonstrates that the boys were generally younger than the girls with an age range of 10 to 18 years, a mean age of 14.33 years, and a median of 14 years. Ten-year-old Katshi Wolamo was the youngest in the group. Six boys were age 18 when interviewed.
The girls, on the other hand, were overall about a year older than the boys. Their ages ranged from 11 to 19 years, with a slightly higher average age of 14.73 years and a median age of 15 years.
GRAPH 2.1. Ages of boys and girls when interviewed (source: Sandra Rowoldt Shell).
The children’s narratives both confirm the general consensus on the youthfulness of the slave trade in the Horn of Africa and provide the sort of specific age detail not found elsewhere. To know what the children experienced in respect to the family-slavery continuum, we must first know more about the family structure.
The Oromo children were well documented in photographs. From this view of the children at the mission house in Sheikh Othman (see fig. 2.1), there can be no doubt as to their young ages. Half the girls (pictured on the upper floor) can barely peek over a standard balcony railing. Below them, the majority of the boys range from waist to shoulder height of the adult accompanying them—a portrait of mass vulnerability.
Family Composition
The travelers’ accounts of this area and era indicate that youth characterizes the export slave trade of the Red Sea region. This was primarily a trade in children—and of Oromo children in particular. This meant that the tender years of this group of Oromo children undoubtedly contributed to their vulnerability. But there were other factors impinging on their personal security as well. For example, Fred Morton, in his exploration of the narratives of thirty-nine East African slave children, found that most had been separated from their parents by the time they were taken captive.19 How does this compare with the Oromo families in the present study? Did the Oromo child have the protection of a secure family environment?
FIGURE 2.1. Oromo children shortly after their arrival at the Keith-Falconer Mission (source: Acc. 10023/417 [packet 3], Foreign Mission Records of the Church of Scotland, World Mission, National Library of Scotland).
A solid 15.1 percent of the Oromo children were sold into slavery by members of their families or by neighbors. Of these, slightly more than half (53.8 percent) were paternal, maternal, or full orphans. As has been evident from the experiences recounted above, the children’s narratives reflect that when one or both parents of a child or children died, it was not uncommon for an uncle or other relative to step in to take over the late parent’s (or parents’) children and property as part of the guddifachaa system. Despite this initial gesture of kinship solidarity and sense of familial responsibility, these relatives often sold the child to a slave trader. Timothy Fernyhough, an economic historian, suggests some mitigating factors. Extreme poverty and crime, suggests Fernyhough, could result in a drop in social status to servitude, while natural disasters like drought and famine led to tougher times for those who lived off the land (see graph 2.2). This in turn led to an increase in enslavement as families found they could no longer survive independently. In these circumstances, wrote Fernyhough, “the famished offered their offspring to merchants who would feed them.”20
It would be natural to assume from this that the pressures on parents, relatives, and neighbors to sell the children entrusted to their care for gain would have increased incrementally as the effects of what is known as Ethiopia’s great drought and famine began to take hold in the southwestern regions after the summer rains failed in 1887.21
Fernyhough confirms the peak period of the famine as being 1890–1891, a year or two after the liberation of the Oromo children. Further, a cross-tabulation of the instances where a relative or neighbor sold a child indicates that more than two-thirds (69.2 percent) of the children who were sold were among those rescued off the Osprey in September 1888 when the drought and famine had begun to take their toll but had not yet peaked.
GRAPH 2.2. Years of capture showing onset of drought, famine, and rinderpest (source: Sandra Rowoldt Shell).
Only 30.8 percent of the children were from the later dhows. This second tranche of children were rescued and liberated in the summer of 1889, by which time the drought and famine had the territories to the south and southwest of Ethiopia firmly in its grip. The chart above (see graph 2.2) depicts the years in which the children were enslaved, the dates of their liberation, and the relative concurrence of external factors such as the drought, famine, and rinderpest. The bulk of the kinship sales, then, were in the early days of the drought and famine and cannot have been a precipitating cause for any reversal of the Oromo adoption system.
For example, Hawe Sukute was one of the children who had been rescued and liberated aboard the HMS Osprey. When her parents both died, she and her two brothers went to stay with their maternal uncle. However, another uncle, this time on her father’s side, “claimed them as his property and took them to his house where they worked for him” (appendix B; narrative 56). As Miers and Kopytoff point out, it was not simply a matter of a relative taking initial responsibility for the children—effectively adopting them—when they were orphaned or when the family had fallen on hard times. What happened thereafter was significant, shifting the focus away from the mode of kin acquisition to mundane and pecuniary outcomes.22 Hawe reported that her paternal uncle was in debt to the Garjeja king, so he sold her to pay the debt. Here, familial solidarity did not hold sway.
Other Osprey children experienced the profound trauma of being “disposed of” by relatives, sometimes by their own fathers. Liban Bultum’s (see appendix B; narrative 27) father was clearly wealthy, owning a large piece of land, a number of oxen, sheep, and goats, and two horses. So Liban was perplexed and distressed to discover that when a group of Sidama came to collect their tribute money, his father inexplicably refused to pay what he owed. Instead, his father, Bultum, stood by while the Sidama seized his son in lieu of the tribute debt, carrying