I am profoundly grateful to my longtime friend Brian Willan for his constant encouragement over the years and for his ever-generous assistance in retrieving material and securing copies of significant documents for me at Kew and in the British Library. Similarly, I am grateful to Matthew Hopper, who was able to supply copies of material he had located for his own research among the India Office records that he believed might be of interest in relation to the Oromo children after landing at Aden. When all my appeals for travel and research funding were turned down time and again, I was gratified that so many professionals, scholars, and friends in distant parts were willing to help.
I am grateful to several medical doctors who advised on various illnesses and conditions the Oromo children experienced, in particular Dr. Andrew McKenzie, Dr. Stephen Craven, and Dr. Louis Botha for their observations on the illnesses assailing the Oromo children. Professor Chris van der Merwe helped with insights into trauma experienced by children through the course of history, and offered suggestions for further reading. Special thanks go to Professor Howard Phillips for his unfailing encouragement, which helped me through some of the darkest moments.
I am deeply indebted to Professor Mekuria Bulcha, a leading Oromo scholar and professor emeritus of Mälardalen University, Uppsala, Sweden. I thank him for his elucidations about the Oromo people and their past and for his constant support. I thank the many Oromo people in Oromia and in the diaspora for responding to a BBC web posting about my research, initiated by Martin Plaut in London—who has given generously of his steadfast support, advice, and friendship over the years—and three Voice of America broadcast interviews with Jalene Gemeda in Washington. Similarly, I have valued the unwavering encouragement and friendship of international journalist and author Bryan Rostron. I am indebted to each of these respected journalists for their interest in the Oromo children, for their enthusiasm and support, and for spreading the word. In response, e-mails and social media messages of support have flooded in from all over the world, from Cambodia to Canada. I thank, in particular, the descendants of one of the Oromo boys, Tolassa Wayessa: grandson Berouk Terefe in Canada, his niece Rediet Feleke Wiebel in England, and cousin Doe-e Berhanu in Ethiopia. I thank them and all the descendants of Tolassa Wayessa for sharing their memories, family documents, and genealogical tracings.
In particular, I wish to express my gratitude and to pay tribute to the late Dr. Neville Alexander, who, with patience and grace, gave many hours of his time to share his memories and family links back to his Oromo grandmother, Bisho Jarsa. I was privileged to have known him and to have had the opportunity for these interactions. We are the poorer for his death in August 2012.
Professor Christopher Saunders has been a skilled, intuitive reader and valued mentor for many years. I am supremely grateful for his knowledgeable, careful, and thoughtful reading of my texts, for his sage advice, and for his steadfast support and friendship across the decades.
Finally, my most profound thanks go to the late Robert Shell, my husband, soul mate, and life partner, who inducted me into the realms of African history and put my feet firmly on the quantitative path. He was simultaneously my most rigorous critic and my strongest supporter. My gratitude to him knows no bounds. Requiescat in pace.
Introductory Ruminations
In the summer of 2007, thirty-five years after I had come across an obscure reference to a group of liberated Oromo slave children at Lovedale Institution in the Eastern Cape, I sat spellbound in the University of Cape Town’s African Studies Library as Neville Alexander, the grandson of one of those children, recounted what he remembered of a woman named Bisho Jarsa and her remarkable story. The children had been enslaved in their lands located to the south, southwest, and southeast of Abyssinia (old Ethiopia) in the late 1880s.1 They were taken to the coast and crammed into dhows that were to ferry them across the Red Sea to further bondage in Arabia. British naval gunships intercepted the dhows, rescued and liberated the children, and took them to Aden in today’s Yemen, where a Free Church of Scotland mission station at a nearby oasis, Sheikh Othman, took them in. Eventually, a group of sixty-four of these Oromo children were transported thousands of kilometers away and entrusted to the care of Scottish missionaries at the Lovedale Institution in South Africa.
Dr. Neville Alexander was a man of towering intellect and firm convictions. He was also an intrepid campaigner for justice who had spent ten years as a political prisoner on Robben Island and subsequently became one of South Africa’s most distinguished educationalists. There we were, sitting side by side near the library window, bathed in late afternoon sunlight, as Neville recalled his frail, old Oromo grandmother, a former slave girl named Bisho Jarsa. Neville remembered Bisho when he was a young boy in Cradock, a small town in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. He remembered his grandmother murmuring to herself in an incomprehensible language. His younger siblings would run to their mother, Dimbiti, asking, “What’s wrong with Ma? Why is she talking in that strange language?” Dimbiti, Bisho’s daughter, would respond soothingly, “Don’t worry about Ma. She’s talking to God.”
But who were these Oromo children and why were they here in South Africa? In February 1972, I began working for Rhodes University’s Cory Library for Historical Research2 in the Eastern Cape. Within weeks, while familiarizing myself with the library’s manuscripts and the various card catalogs, I came across several entries reading “Galla slaves.”3
I was baffled. Who were these “Galla” slaves and what was their link with the Eastern Cape? As I asked questions of then head of the Cory Library Michael Berning and explored further, I discovered that the cards referred to a cluster of documents in the archives of Lovedale Institution relating to a group of sixty-four Oromo children who had been enslaved in the Horn of Africa during 1888 and 1889. These children had different experiences of enslavement, but all were eventually put aboard dhows headed for the Arabian slave markets on the opposite shores of the Red Sea. One set of dhows was intercepted and their cargoes of slave children liberated by a British warship in September 1888. However, as Bisho Jarsa’s story related, a further group of dhows was similarly intercepted by the Royal Navy, and a smaller group of Oromo slave children were liberated in August 1899. Both groups of children were transported to Aden in Yemen, where they were taken in by a Free Church of Scotland mission at Sheikh Othman, just north of the city. Two of the missionaries applied themselves to learning the children’s language, and, with the assistance of three fluent Afaan Oromoo speakers, they interviewed each child, asking for details of their experiences effectively from their earliest memories to the moment they reached the Red Sea coast.
It was soon obvious that the children, weakened by their experiences, had severely compromised immune systems and were therefore easy targets for disease. When a number of the children died within a short space of time, the missionaries decided to find a healthier institution for their care. After medical treatment and a further year of recuperation and elementary schooling, the missionaries shipped these sixty-four Oromo children to Lovedale Institution in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.
Despite the wealth of documentation on these children in the Cory Library and other South African libraries and archives, the story of the liberated Oromo children of Lovedale had lain virtually unexamined for more than a century. As I probed deeper, I felt a frisson of speculative anticipation. Here was evidence and documentation of an unprecedented nature. Here were potentially important personal narratives of slavery and the slave trade, overlooked for far too long. The flame of what would prove to be a lifetime interest in and fascination with