Fayissi Gemo (see appendix B; narrative 52), who was a young girl approximately twelve years of age when captured, was the daughter of Gemo and Yarachi. Gemo, her father, had been a secure landowner in a village called Upa in the Kaffa country. He owned several oxen, sheep, and goats, but he had died before Fayissi was abducted. After her father’s death, Yarachi supported the family, employing laborers to plow the land. However, the family was no longer secure. While Yarachi was away visiting her homeland, the chief of their village of Upa took the opportunity to abduct Fayissi—and promptly sold her to some passing merchants, leaving her mother and sisters behind.
Jifari Roba (see appendix B; narrative 57) was a little Oromo girl of about eleven when she was sold into slavery. Her father, Roba, her mother, Dongoshe, and her three brothers and four sisters lived in Galani, a village in the Sayo country. When Roba died, Dongoshe sought work reaping for others in the fields. In what seemed to be a compassionate gesture, a neighbor offered to look after Jifari. Immediately after taking Jifari into her home, the woman sold her to a passing group of “Nagadi” (slave traders) for ten pieces of salt (amole).
The only maternal orphan, a young boy named Galgal Dikko, was very young when he left home but was nonetheless able to remember that his mother (Hudo) was dead and that he had five brothers and one sister. He recalled:
A party of men on horseback, with guns, coming down upon his village, and, after a fierce fight, carrying himself and one of his brothers away. He became very ill as they were taking him away, and he was left by them on the wayside, near a place called Gobbu. Here he was found by a man who took him to his house. The chief of the country hearing the circumstances of this man’s finding Galgal, claimed him as his property, and promised to allow him to return to his own country when he grew up. (appendix B; narrative 17)
However, during another battle the Sidama (Abyssinians) raided the village and seized all the guns they could find. Galgal thought he was safe, but the Sidama soon returned, this time seeking slaves rather than guns, and they carried him off to a place called Tibbe, in modern Oromia.
One family member selling another is widely regarded as repugnant. One of the most familiar instances is the biblical story of Joseph.34 This practice has a long history and universality. That it was practiced in Ethiopia should therefore come as no surprise.
Given the exceptionally high prevalence of orphanhood, the incidence of parental mortality seems to have played a role in leaving the children more vulnerable than if both parents had been alive and present at the time of enslavement. From the evidence of the children’s narratives, there is a sense that the loss of a parent was likely to trigger the intervention of relatives or neighbors. In terms of the assumption of family incorporation held by African historian Suzanne Miers and anthropologist Igor Kopytoff, this intervention should have led to a continuance of familial protection as a manifestation of the kinship continuum.35 The reality, regrettably, was that these children found themselves caught in the slave trade sweep to the Red Sea coast, often directly through the actions of their kin. Whatever it meant to some, familial incorporation did not protect all the children.
Only the broadest brushstrokes have depicted what is known about the slaves and their family backgrounds in the Red Sea slave trade. Contemporary accounts and later scholarly studies of the trade concur that this was a trade in children. The Oromo children’s narratives ipso facto support this interpretation but also provide much more intimate detail. Details of Oromo family structure and kinship patterns emerge that both partially align with and significantly depart from the concept of the slavery-to-kinship continuum espoused by Miers and Kopytoff. On the one hand, there were well-established Oromo traditions of familial solidarity, namely the Oromo adoption (or guddifachaa) system. In the Miers and Kopytoff model, kin would be expected to assume responsibility for a deceased relative’s children. One cannot know about the “good” relatives, who may have looked after their wards and kept them from the slave trade. However, on the other hand, we know from the children that relatives sold many of the Oromo children to slave traders. Such sales for monetary gain or barter diverged from that kinship model. Some of these sales may be regarded as distressed sales, resulting from the drought and famine of 1887–1892. But such sales also occurred before the “cruel days” had fully caught hold. Notable among the new information emanating from the narratives was the high proportion of orphans among children traded as slaves. Orphans were potentially easier targets than those embedded in secure, full family units. Paternal orphans were perhaps the most vulnerable. Orphans could be expected to be more docile and acquiescent slaves as they had a lower motivation for escape without a family to return to. One may also speculate that orphans made perfect candidates for what psychologists have termed the Stockholm syndrome. These new considerations suggest new avenues for exploration in this underresearched area of the African slave trade.
CHAPTER 3
Wealth and Status of the Oromo Captives’ Families
Scholars exploring the background and social status of the families of slave children in Ethiopia (and more broadly in Africa) have had to formulate their sometimes hazardous interpretations based on travelers’ and other third-person accounts. Records of captives, such as they are, document the experiences of slaves after capture or after manumission. This applies especially in Islamic societies, where there was no clearly defined slave class, and integration into general society was possible and even planned.1 In the case of the Oromo captivity narratives, there is direct information on their families’ wealth and social status. Their accounts, as well as the memoir of an Oromo child written at Lovedale (see appendix D) and letters by some of the Oromo repatriates after their return home,2 go some way toward answering the question and help define the range of social strata from which the Oromo children were drawn.
There are, of course, studies of the social structure of societies in which slave raiding occurred and where there was a culture of local enslavement. In his study of Senegambian society, for example, historian Philip Curtin positions slaves or captifs among the social strata, with the caveat that Senegambian slaves could not be considered as a social stratum in the Western sense. Instead, he distinguishes the social group of slaves as foreigners who were purchased or captured as spoils of war and integrated into Senegambian society.3 Curtin also examines two different types of enslavement. One, a “political” model, would constitute not an economic process but one where slaves were acquired as the spoils of a war waged for prestige and power rather