The self-trained chewa started out as qualified and socially supported individual warriors. They received social support for their alert and disciplined preparedness and political acumen, essentially to defend local society and to assert the right to control access to and distribution of communal lands. They supported the state, but also frequently clashed with the monarchs who claimed ownership of all land. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘kings of kings’ brought them together to form a national government army under one monarch, but even then foreigners saw them as only a melange of warriors who fought en masse. However, at least one such eyewitness, who used the European term for the country, was a little more perceptive: he wrote of the army as ‘the Abyssinian people with its distinctive characteristics – independence and a critical attitude to everything’.

The word chewa (in Amharic) or tsewa (in Ge'ez), has been defined as ‘captives’ or ‘prisoners’, and, elaborating this further, as one ‘who has left his country, a refugee, and one who lives by roving or wandering about’. A historian has asserted that the earliest soldiers were war captives. By the early nineteenth century the meaning of chewa had altered radically. Far from being ‘captive’ to a king, the word designated an urbane and sophisticated population of soldiers milling around the courts of the powerful. Engrossed from childhood in the art of warriorhood and politics, and receiving encouragement to explore the ecological features away from their rural roots, the chewa cultivated qualifications of assertiveness in ways that transcended social, familial, political and other groupings. They learned their direction in life while growing up, characteristically recognizing their duty to their local communities. Their basic organization revolved around a local leader recognized as yegobez aleqa, ‘leader of the brave’, who rallied those who had political and military ambitions to engage in accepting or rejecting the agents of the state. Their lifestyles and practices made them accountable to rural society, and their traditions significantly influenced Ethiopian state political processes.

THE MAIN CHEWA WARRIOR CATEGORY

While personal expressions of their beliefs, commitments, organizational principles and operational strategies brought them to work with the grassroots, these ordinary soldiers who defined and defended local lands and the Ethiopian territory were not ‘volunteer’ soldiers. They were generated, supported and commended by their communities.