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A Dura Revolution and Frontier Agriculture in Northwest Ethiopia, 1898–19201

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

James C. McCann
James C. McCann
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Extract

This article describes the rapid growth and decline of the production of dura (Sorghum vulgare) in the frontier region adjoining the border of northwest Ethiopia, Sudan's Kassala Province, and the southwest frontier of Italian Eritrea between c. 1900 and the 1920s. This short-lived agricultural revolution resulted less from the slow, incremental adaptation of local agriculture than from a conjuncture of events, including the presence of a fertile but depopulated vertisol plain (the Mazega), the rise of a major food market in Eritrea, the availability of archaic forms of labour, the presence of entrepreneurial managers, and the immature state of colonial/imperial interests in the region. The precipitous decline of food production in the region in the early 1920s resulted from the dissolution of this historical conjuncture. The article concludes by suggesting that African history in general and agricultural history in particular has tended to be ‘Whiggish’, emphasizing progressive change at the expense of conjunctural and often short-lived episodes.

Type
New Perspectives on Ethiopia
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 121 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

2 Baker, Samuel W., The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia (London, 1874), 322.Google Scholar

3 Ibid. 305.

4 Ibid. 305, 314–15. Baker's account does not refer to Beni Amer; it may be that they moved south into the Mazega only after the Mahdist period: Green, David A. G., Ethiopia: An Economic Analysis of Technological Change in Four Agricultural Production Systems (East Lansing, 1974), 9–13.Google Scholar See also Voll, Sarah P., ‘Cotton in Kassala: the other scheme’, African Studies, II (1978), 214–15.Google Scholar

5 See Ellero, Giovanni, ‘Il Uolcait’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici, VI–VII (1948), 99–100.Google Scholar

6 See Dumbell, ‘Report on the Kafta caravan’, Central Records Office, Khartoum (hereafter CRO), 3/1/9, May 1907. The area, however, remained a major transshipment point for the Sudanese slave trade through Tokar to the Red Sea. F. R. Wingate's report on the slave trade in Eastern Sudan claimed that the slave trade accounted for about 1,000 slaves annually. CRO:CAIRINT, 3/3/46, May 1891.

7 Holt, P. M., The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881–1898 (Oxford, 1970), 239Google Scholar; Sudan Intelligence Report, Sudan Library, University of Khartoum (hereafter SIR) 88, Nov. 1901 and 94, 05 1902.Google Scholar

8 SIR 89, Dec. 1901.

9 Branston Report in SIR 256, Nov. 1915. For general Eritrean policy, see Taddia, Irma, L'Eritrea-Colonia: Paesaggi, strutture, uomini del colonialismo (Milan, 1986), 279–328.Google Scholar

10 Eritrean population: 1905, 275,000; 1911, 333,000; 1917, 367,000; 1921, 407,000; 1927, 519,000; 1931, 596,000 (Negash, Tekeste, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 149).Google Scholar

11 SIR 123, Oct. 1904.

12 Negash, Tekeste, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea: Policies, Praxis, and Impact (Uppsala, 1987), 51.Google Scholar For recruitment figures see Campbell, telegram to Foreign Office, FO 371/79730; for a description of the recruitment process see McCann, James, From Poverty to Famine in Northeast Ethiopia: a rural history 1900–1935 (Philadelphia, 1987), 189–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Martini, Ferdinando, Il diario Eritreo di Ferdinando Martini (Florence, 1946), III, 480.Google Scholar A summary of Italian policy for penetrating northern Ethiopia is found in a memorandum of 18 Feb. 1931 in Archivo Storico delle Ministero Africana Italiana, 54/36 147. For subsidies see SIR 250, May 1915; Dumbell, ‘Report on Kafta, April 1907’, CAIRINT, 3/1/9, CRO, Khartoum; and Postewaite memo, 11 Jan. 1916 Intel 2/20/170.

14 Donahue, Roy L., Ethiopia: Taxonomy, Cartography and Ecology of Soils (East Lansing, 1972), 12–13;Google ScholarNeate, Paul, ‘Animal traction and vertisol cropping’, ILCA Newsletter (International Livestock Centre for Africa, Addis Ababa), VI (1987), 1–2.Google Scholar

15 The ineffectiveness of the highland plough system was pointed out to me by John Dalton, an agricultural economist who worked on the Mazega in the 1960s; see also Neate, ‘Vertisol’, I. Baker described the local tool as a ‘Dutch hoe’: Baker, , Nile Tributaries, 53.Google Scholar

16 See Voll, , ‘Cotton in Kassala’, 206Google Scholar, and Sudan Monthly Report, Sudan Library, University of Khartoum [hereafter SMR] 18, June-July 1930. Hadendowa and Beni Amer semi-pastoralists also overcame the unreliability of the rains and locust threats by their mixed economy and the distribution of risk across their rigid class hierarchy. Beni Amer, like the Tuareg of the Sahel, maintained a rigid caste system which included a subject class (nabtab) which provided labour for an élite class (diglal), a system gradually eroded by wage labour and the expansion of colonial irrigation schemes in the 1920s and 1930s. See Taddia, , L'Eritrea-Colonia, 54–5Google Scholar, and Tekeste, , Italian Colonialism, 6–8.Google Scholar

17 For description of climate and cropping cycle see Green, , Economic Analysis, 51Google Scholar and Donahue, Ethiopia: Taxonomy, Cartography, and Ecology of Soils, 9. For demography, see Baker, ; Nile Tributaries, 101, 283.Google Scholar

18 See, for example, Dumbell, , ‘Report on the Kafta caravan, May 1907’, CRO:CAIRINT, 3/1/9 and Ellero, ‘Il Uolcait’, 110.Google Scholar

19 Tancredi, Alfonso, ‘La missione delle Societa Geografica Italiana in Etiopia setten-trionale’, Bollettino della Societá Geografica Italiana, XLV (1908), 1209.Google Scholar For the nineteenth century see Baker, , Nile Tributaries, 187–8Google Scholar: Baker purchased a ‘Galla’ slave at Gedaref as a maidservant. See also Dumbell, ‘Report’; slave villages were described in passing in many Sudan official communications. For analysis of other Ethiopian slavery systems see Mariam, Tekalign Wolde, ‘Slavery and the slave trade in the Kingdom of Jimma (c. 1800–1935)’ (M.A. thesis, Addis Ababa University, 1984);Google Scholar and McCann, James, ‘Children of the house’, in Miers, Suzanne and Roberts, Richard (eds.), The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1988), 332–56.Google Scholar

20 Baker, , Nile Tributaries, 346–7.Google Scholar

21 In 1915 Sudan government reports indicated that Fallata made up a large portion of El Imam's villagers. See Tancredi, ‘La missione’, 1208 and CRO:INTEL, 2/20/170, Home to Governor, Kassala, 4 Nov. 1915.

22 This transformation is described in Ellero, ‘Il Uolcait’, 108–9. Dan Bauer has discussed similar changes in land claims as a result of demographic pressure, though from the opposite direction, i.e. residence-based to risti as a result of population growth. See Bauer, Dan F., ‘Land, leadership, and legitimacy in Enderta, Tigre’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1972), 218.Google Scholar Dumbell reported the use of highland household slaves on the Mazega in 1907; see note 19.

23 The best source for these local politics is the Sudan Intelligence Reports for the years 1906–17. Events in Addis are described in Prouty, Chris, Empress Taytu and Menilek II (London, 1986), 305–48.Google Scholar

24 Tancredi, , ‘La missione’, 1208–9.Google Scholar

25 Though the evidence is not conclusive, it appears that slaves may have cultivated under the same terms as the Fallata. Tancredi (Ibid.) describes slave villages as unguarded.

26 Peter Garretson has argued from Sudanese sources that Walda Giyorgis encouraged the expansion of dura-producing slave villages to areas even outside the Mazega (‘Shaykh Imam’, citing CRO: INTEL, El Imam Abdallahi to H.E. Ras Waldo Giyorgis, 7 Dec. 1911, 2/21/173).

27 Martini, , Diario, III, 488.Google Scholar

28 Taddia, , L'Eritrea-Colonia, 329–39.Google Scholar

29 For an effective description of the highland tribute system see Donald Crummey, ‘Abyssinian feudalism’, Past and Present, LXXXIX (1980), 115–38.

30 Branston Report on visit to Eritrea in SIR 256 Nov. 1915; Taddia, , L'Eritrea-Colonia, 313.Google Scholar

31 Branston Report, SIR 256.

32 Sudan Central Economics Board, Secretary's Annual Report, IX (1915).Google Scholar

33 See CRO: INTEL 1/4/16 and 1/4/17 for Italian relations on the frontier.

34 Home to Governor, Kassala, CRO: INTEL, 2/20/170, 4 Nov. 1915.

35 Postewaite to Governor, Kassala, 11 Jan. 1916, CRO:INTEL, 2/20/170. PT = Piastres; £1 = 97.5 PT.

36 See SIR 256 Jan. 1916.

37 Italian purchases at Kassala had reached 300 quintals per day and dura prices had reached 45–60 PT per ardeb (a local volume measure equalling 198 litres) putting pressure on local labour costs. See Townshend to Governor-General, 1 March 1916, SIR 260, March 1916.

38 Central Economics Board, Secretary's Annual Report, X (1916).Google Scholar

39 Sudanese officials believed strongly from local sources that El Imam held large private stocks of grain. See Gedaref Intelligence Report, 22 Feb. and 1 April, 1917, CRO: INTEL, 2/20/170.

40 Sudan archival sources are weak on this topic since their primary concerns were rumours that the Italians were building a bridge over the Setit. Food markets, though related to Italian penetration, were a lower priority for frontier officials. See CRO:INTEL, 1/4/16 and 1/4/17.

41 Balfour to Governor, Kassala, 8 April 1917, CRO: INTEL, 2/20/170.

42 Governor-General Howell to Wingate, Oct. 1917, CRO: INTEL, 1/3/12, Garretson, ‘Shaykh Imam’, 24.

43 Central Economics Board, Secretary's Annual Report, XII (1918)Google Scholar; Hewins to Private Secretary, 6 Nov. 1919, CRO: INTEL, 1/3/12; Central Economics Board, Secretary's Annual Reports, 1919–30.Google Scholar

44 Cf. McCann, , Poverty to Famine, 128–43.Google Scholar

45 See Garretson, , ‘Shaykh Imam’, 25Google Scholar, and Abdel Hadi Report, Sofi, 10 March 1922 and Director of Intelligence to Legal Secretary, 27 March 1922, CRO:INTEL, 1/5/19.

46 Pankhurst, R., Economic History of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, 1968), 381, 389.Google Scholar

47 Gaitskell, Arthur, Gezira: A Story of Development in the Sudan (London, 1959);Google ScholarMcCann, James, ‘Britain, Ethiopia, and the Lake Tana Dam Project, 1922–35’, Int. J. Afr. Hist. Studies, XIV (1981), 667–99;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Voll, , ‘Cotton in Kassala’, 213.Google Scholar

48 Garretson, , ‘Shaykh Imam’, 24.Google Scholar Sudanese records indicate a substantial exodus of these workers to Eritrea by 1935. Certainly by the early 1920s there was a net inflow of labour from northern Ethiopia to Eritrea; see McCann, , From Poverty to Famine, 185–93.Google Scholar For end of slavery in Ethiopia see McCann, ‘Children’, and Edwards, Jon, ‘Slavery, the slave trade and the economic reorganization of Ethiopia, 1916–1935’, African Economic History, XI (1982), 3–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the general flight into Sudan, see Sudan Monthly Report 1929–35 (cf. n. 16).

49 Norden, Hermann, Africa's Last Empire: Through Abyssinia to Lake Tana and the Country of the Falasha (London, 1930), 140.Google Scholar

50 For a summary of those approaches see Tosh, John, ‘The cash-crop revolution in tropical Africa: an agricultural reappraisal’, African Affairs, LXXIX (1980), 78–84.Google Scholar The ‘Whiggish’ view of African agrarian and agricultural history is strongest in the nationalist and ‘roots of rural poverty’ schools.