People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800-1990

People of the Plow

People of the Plow An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800-1990

James C. McCann

The University of Wisconsin Press

The University of Wisconsin Press 114 North Murray Street Madison, Wisconsin 53715 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright © 1995 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved

5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCann, James, 1950People of the plow: an agricultural history of Ethiopia, 1800-1990 I James C. Mc'Cann. 316p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. (00) and index. ISBN 0-299-14610-3 (cl).-ISBN 0-299-14614-6 (pbk.) 1. Agriculture- Ethiopia- History. I. Title. S473.E8M33 1995 306.3'49'096309143-dc20 93-37124

CONTENTS

vii

Illustrations Maps Tables Transliteration Preface

ix

xi xiii xv

Prologue: Fanus, Agriculture, and History

3

Part I. The Plow and the Land 1. The Salubrious Highlands: A Historical Setting

23

2. The Ox-Plow Complex: an Ecological Revolution

39

3. Fanus in the Agrarian Polity: Historical Trends in Population, Fanu Resources, and Specialized Agriculture, 1800-1916

84

Part II. The Plow and Ethiopian Historical Landscapes 4. From Royal Fields to Marginal Lands: Agriculture in Ankober, Shawa, 1840-1990

109

5. The Plow in the Forest: Agriculture, Population, and Maize Monoculture in Gera

147

6. Addis Ababa's Kitchen: Food, Forage, and Intensification in a Closed Ox-Plow Economy, Ada 1800-1990

191

7. Conclusion: People of the Plow, People of the City

239 v

vi

Contents

Epilogue

26

Appendix A: Crop Names Appendix B: Glossary ofAgricultural Terms Bibliography Index

267 269 271 292

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1.

A highland landscape (Lasta, Wallo), 1868

27

1.2.

A highland landscape (Lasta, Wallo), 1972

27

1.3.

The main rains, Blue Nile Falls, September, 1973

30

1.4.

The dry season, Blue Nile Falls, May, 1974

30

2.1.

Humpless oxen and long beam plow at Amba Focada (Eritrea), c. 500-1000 B.C.

41

2.2.

A northern setting for agriculture: Axum c. 1810

43

2.3.

A southern setting for agriculture: a white sorghum field, c. 1850

43

2.4.

Ensete cultivation and preparation, c. 1860

54

2.5.

Oromo granary, 1880

64

2.6.

Maize granary (Gera), 1990

65

2.7.

Gendered division of labor in ox-plow agriculture

76

3.1.

Ox-plow cultivation, c. 1860

86

3.2.

Ox-plow cultivation, 1974

86

4.1.

Ankober, c. 1840

110

4.2.

The royal table: interior of an elite house at Ankober, c. 1840

111

vii

viii 4.3.

Illustrations Nineteenth-century deforestation, view between Entoto and Ankober, 1888

120

4.4.

Faggot sellers, northern Shawa, 1880s

121

4.5.

Rural Shawan house, 1888

122

4.6.

Non-farm income: male Argobba weaver, c. 1840

123

4.7.

Elite Shawan women, c. 1840 (Amhara in foreground, Argobba in background)

124

4.8.

Gaye (soil burning), northern Shawa, 1982

132

4.9.

Ankober terraces, c. 1888

135

5.1.

The forest setting, c. 1880

155

5.2.

Clearing the forest for maize, 1991

155

5.3.

Chala masera (royal residence), Gera, c. 1860

165

5.4.

Chala royal residence site, 1991

165

5.5.

Afallo mission, c. 1880

169

5.6.

Afallo mission site, 1991

169

5.7.

Yalew Taffese, migrant coffee farmer (Gera)

172

6.1A. Oromo farmers, c. 1888

194

6.1B. Oromo farmers, c. 1888

195

6.2.

Italian tractor cultivation at Foka (Ada), c. 1939

212

6.3.

Ada landscape: teff straw forage, 1990

226

MAPS

1.1.

Africa: highland zones

24

1.2.

Ethiopia: highland zones

25

4.1.

Ankober

112

5.1.

Gera

148

6.1.

Ada

192

ix

TABLES

2.1.

2.2.

3.1.

Effects of draft power on cereal yield (kglfann) in Ada 1978-85

81

Effects of oxen ownership on area cultivated (hectares/fann) in Ada, 1978-85

81

Household oxen distribution in the ox-plow highlands, 1980-86

95

3.2.

Average cost of production per hectare, 1968

101

4.1.

Principal grains from markets at Liche, Bolloworkie and Aliyu Amba

127

Antinori's estimates of yield per unit of seed in Ankober District, c. 1880

127

Percentage of oxen ownership on northern Shawa farms, 1985

131

5.1.

Coffee exports via Djibouti, 1910-1934

175

5.2.

Coffee exports from Ethiopia, 1943-1957

175

5.3.

Gera annual coffee production, 1980-90

183

5.4.

Percentage distribution of total annual crop production, 1986-1991

185

Gera Warada: effects of villagization on perennial and bi-annual food crops

188

4.2.

4.3.

5.5.

xi

xii

Tables

6.1.

Distribution of per-farm cattle holdings, 1969-80

219

6.2.

Averaged percentage of crops on cultivated land, 1969-71

221

6.3.

Crop trends in Ada, 1960-89

223

6.4.

Crop residue yield in Ada, 1985

227

6.5.

Land use in Ada, 1979-90

235

7.1.

Per capita cereal production, 1975-86

249

7.2.

Cereal production in Ethiopia by grain, 1938

257

7.3.

Regional percentage distribution of cereal production, 1938

257

Percentage distribution of cereal production by region, 1938

257

Total hectarage of cereals production in Ethiopia, by grain, 1938

258

Percentage distribution of rural cereal production in Ethiopia, by grain, 1961-84

258

Annual cereal consumption per capita (kg), 1966-83

258

7.4.

7.5.

7.6.

7.7.

TRANSLITERATION

Material presented in this book involves at least three languages of Ethiopia and Sudanese Arabic, though there is more use of Amharic names, place-names, and words than any other. The overriding principle of transliteration I have used is to render words without diacritics into Latin script in a manner which allows the reader to reproduce the pronounciation accurately. Inevitably there are inconsistencies. This system, for instance, creates some problems with vowels, especially in the first and fifth orders. Nonetheless, I have rendered vowels in the following manner: Order in Ethiopic script 1st order 2nd order 3rd order 4th order 5th order 6th order 7th order

Transcription a u a e e 0

Pronunciation as in "ever" as in "crude" as in "elite" as in "father" as in "bait" as in "fit" as in "vote"

In the transcription of consonants, q represents the ejective k, and the palatized n (as in "canyon") is written with ny. Double consonants (e.g., as in "Wallo") indicate gemination. Personal names create the greatest discrepancies in transliteration, because many Ethiopians have chosen to spell their own names in print or in everyday usage in Latin script in ways which do not conform to a single system (e.g., Taddese and Taddesse, Tsehay and Sehay). Where an individual has already used a preferred English spelling, I have used that. In cases where certain spellings are in common or official usage (e.g., Haile Selassie rather than Hayla Sellase), I have accepted those conventions for those individuals. In place-names I have followed the above transcription method (Dabra Zayt rather than Debre Zeit). In verbatim interview texts in Oromofa I have used as much as possible the new Latin transliteration scheme now in use in Ethiopia. Ethiopian names consist of a given (first) name and a father's name. In the text, the name used after the first occurrence is the given name. For bibliographic purposes I have also alphabetized Ethiopian names according to the first name.

xiii

PREFACE

This book has it origins in 1985, when Oxfam America a~ked me to spend a few weeks in a rural site in Ethiopia (Denki in the Ankober lowlands) to assess the likely effects of their program to distribute oxen, seed, and relief food to a rural population hit hard by two years of drought. I had at my disposal over a year of baseline data gathered by local Ethiopian staff of the International Livestock Centre for Africa (ILeA) and the chance to move freely-or however far my feet or a mule might carry me-around a remote rural site to talk to farmers and observe farm life. After the first week or so of gathering life histories and observing farm activity, it seemed clear to me that what I saw of the landscape and individual farmers' fields and what I heard from farmers about their lives provided a much richer and more complex story than what emerged from the meticulous social science data that my ILCA colleagues had collected in the field. In the end I was able to argue in my report (which became a beginning point for chapter 4) that local responses to the 1982-84 environmental crisis could and should be seen in a longer-term trajectory of social property, patterns in the local environment, and what I knew and had learned about highland farming systems. Trying to reconcile the social data gathered in the field with farmers' life histories and the stories etched in the landscape itself (abandoned terraces, bits of irrigation, remnants of primary forest, checkerboard distributions of farmers' fields) left me unsatisfied. It occurred to me that my role in the project, though fascinating and, I believe, helpful, had become primarily one of translating the intensely human and subjective stories I gathered from farmers into the "objective" language of social science-opportunity costs, gross margins, social property - most meaningful to my sponsors. In 1986 I returned for a month to follow the Oxfam project and catch up on another year of farmers' lives. Shortly thereafter I detennined to expand these opportunities for applied field study and resolution of short-term problems to try to form a larger more generative book-length wode of history. This book is an attempt to describe and explain change in an environmental, social, and technical process-the Ethiopian ox-plow agricultural system-over about 200 years. It has at once the task of telling a story, or a series of stories, and of presenting sufficient data to describe the system as a whole and offering a narrative which links the often disparate pieces of evidence. I therefore have attempted to merge the traditional strengths of history xv

xvi

Preface

in fashioning a narrative and the social sciences' ambition to construct generative models for explaining, if not forecasting, human action. In the Prologue I suggest that the narrative descriptions of agriculture taken from nineteenth-century travelers differ substantially in form and substance from twentieth-century empiricism which strives to quantify human action into the empirical precision of the natural sciences and sees agriculture fundamentally as an industrial process. My task in this book has been to reconcile these two descriptive methods into a narrative that incorporates every piece of evidence I can gather of past conditions. Whenever possible, I have attempted to give voice to these sources-travelers, farmers, statistical tables-and let them join my own narrative. The Prologue does not set out with a social science-style theoretical justification, but describes historical sources and how they shape our understanding of agriculture in the past. Unlike literary criticism's New Historicism of the late 1980s in which scholarship uses history to contextualize literary texts, for historians the past itself is the object for study. Sources are merely the lenses we use to view past events and processes, however murky those might prove to be. In this way, this book is almost as much an exploration of the methods and disciplinary bounds of history as an attempt to explain the shape of Ethiopia's a.,oricultural system in the late twentieth century. I also hope and expect that this book will provide some clarity and insight to those who must make policy decisions in the "fog" of development imperatives and donor expectations. The idea of conjuncture which I explore in this book speaks directly to many of their immediate interests in technology adoption, project design, and social impact. This book has emerged out of a long journey of over five years, spent in often obscure archives and agricultural school files, in libraries reading arcane accounts of exotic travel, in farmers' homes, at the edge of newly tilled fields and in stimulating conversation with academic colleagues in the field, in the city, and back home. For me, the pleasures of scholarship are often in the travel itself, in whom one meet" along the way, and with whom one travels and shares ideas, even if briefly. Looking back to recall and acknowledge those that pushed, nudged, or otherwise accompanied me along the way is a pleasant obligation. The memories of the road itself are not merely intellectual; they are also sensory and personal-the smells, sounds, and physical sensations of sipping spiced tea in a farmer's house or the complex smells of a highland market after a June rain. The hospitality and insights into rural life offered to me time and again by farmers and small-town folk in my research sites are among my most profound memories of the research for this book. It is therefore difficult to express my appreciation to those Ethiopians who took time to talk to me, take me to their fields, or guide me through a coffee forest to explain their lives and the physical setting because few of them are likely to read the book. I did not offer them direct rewards for their help, nor did they request any. But I hope by passing on their knowledge and understanding of their social and physical world to others I can in some way repay their

Preface

xvii

kindness. Where their help and words contributed directly to my narrative I have acknowledged them by name in the chapters' notes. This work also owes debts to a great many people and institutions who supported it. In the beginning and throughout, my colleagues and the staff of the African Studies Center at Boston University have provided me with friendship and intellectual support. Joanne Hart and Karen Heybey of the ASC and Yvonne Barr at the Graduate School deserve special mention; they could always find a way to do whatever was needed. A number of international organizations have given me the means to spend time in rural areas in Ethiopia when that was a difficult if not impossible task for a foreign researcher. They also provided field staff colleagues, who became my friends and mentors. I only hope my work for them in small measure repaid what they offered me. These organizations are Oxfam America, Oxfam (United Kingdom), American Jewish World Service, the International Livestock Centre for Africa, the United Nations Environmental Program, and Norwegian Redd Barna. The special individuals who provided me with insights and logistical support are cited in each chapter's notes. Among these, however, I must single out my colleagues from the Highlands Programme at ILCA, whose wise advice and experience I sought before virtually every field visit. These include Abate Tedla, Abiye Astatke, Getachew Asarnenaw, Mohamed Saleem, and Samuel Jutzi. Degefe Birru more than any other shared his genius for rapport with farmers, knowledge of Oromofa and his intense curiosity to pursue my questions and shape new ones. At Addis Ababa University lowe much to the sustained support of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, its directors, Dr. Taddese Beyene and Bahru Zewde, and the wonderful staff. In the Department of History I have always found lively colleagues ready to challenge my assumptions and share their deep knowledge of Ethiopian history. Shiferaw Bekele in particular deserves special thanks for his talents as a historian, tireless iconoclast, and logistical force majeure. For translations, especially of interviews in Oromofa, I am indebted to Ato Zelalem Banti, Tekalign Wolde Mariam, and Shiferaw Bekele (who arranged it all). A good deal of the research for this book and a final stage of writing took place in Italy. There I am grateful for the help of Carla Ghezzi, Silvana Palma, and the staff of the Istituto ltalo-Africano in Rome. Their cooperation has been invaluable in providing access to their unique collection of publications, documents, and photographs; Dr. Maria Puccioni of the Istituto Agronornico per l' Oltremare in Florence provided access to that greatly underutilized resource on agriculture. For four weeks of writing in 1992 I enjoyed the rural panorama, hospitality, and cucina of fa jamiglia Scuderini at Chicco di Grano in Tuscany. None of my work in Italy could have succeeded or been so enjoyable without the diligent help, warm friendship, and hospitality of Inna Taddia of the Universita de Bologna (and the forbearance of Alberto Tassinari). Each of the chapters of the book has evolved in somewhat different circumstances, and I am indebted to many who have offered comments and sharpened my

xviii

Preface

arguments: David Anderson, Sara Berry, Donald Crummey, Dessalegn Rahmato, Stephen Frank, Mickey Glantz, Jane Guyer, Jean Hay, Allan Hoben, Harold Marcus, Tom Spear, Alan Taylor (chief publicist of the Agrarian Institute), and Yaqob Fisseha. Chris Geary taught me the value of imagery as narrative, though she may not have known it at the time. A lively group of graduate students in my seminar on East African environmental history at Boston University in 1991 kept me infonned about what I should have read: Thomas Johnson, Kirk Hoppe, Erik Gilbert, Jonathan Reynolds, Shawn Dennard, and Julie Livingston. During this book's gestation Barbara Cooper, and Julie Croston wrote creative, insightful dissertations that provided new ideas about narratives, women's history, and rural history. Tekalign Wolde Mariam, whose own work pushes Ethiopian history on to new ground, has offered many comments and insights from his own field data. Eliza McClennan drew the maps from an eclectic, to say the least, collection of base materials. Leslie Hartwell laid out the text, tables, and figures. Dean Dennis Berkey has provided consistent support for this project and my career. The final stage of research and writing for this book benefited from important support from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. With sabbatical support from Boston University in 1991-92 I had the good fortune to spend that academic year as a Delta Delta Delta fellow at the National Humanities Center where I drafted the major part of the book. It is difficult to imagine a more exciting and supportive intellectual environment. The opportunity to spend 10 months among 39 outstanding scholars of the humanities amid the North Carolina piedmont's dogwoods and loblolly pines shaped many of the ideas presented here. lowe very special thanks to the wonderful staff there and to my colleagues in the Land and People Seminar: Dick and Claudia Bushman, Neal Salisbury, Larry Silver, and Silvia Tomasch. The final shape of this work owes much to their lively inquiry and warm intellectual camaraderie. Though this book would not exist except for the support all of these friends and colleagues, its errors and shortcomings are solely my own. Emotional support and encouragement from friends and family are far more essential guideposts for leading one to a final goal than is apparent when planning and describing a project in a grant proposal. My friends and mentors Harold Marcus, Charlie McClellan, Steve Howard, and Angela Raven-Roberts have always offered deep and unswerving good cheer and advice. DorIeen Bradley's life and philosophy have long been my quiet and too-often-unacknowledged model. Libby and Martha don't quite know yet what has kept me away from home more than they would like, but I hope they will understand someday soon and know how much I have missed their smiles and laughter when on yet another "trip." More than anyone, my wife and friend, Sandi, knows about this work and how much she has contributed to its final outcome. It is with love that I dedicate this book to her. Arlington, Massachusetts September 1994

People of the Plow

Prologue: Farms, Agriculture, and History

A book on agricultural history, on Ethiopia's agricultural history, might well begin with a narrative prologue in which a fanner or local observer comments poignantly on changes in the farm landscape, providing a perspective from which to analyze historical change. Indeed, those foreign observers who moved their gaze away from the politics of the imperial court or self-interest in trade or hunting reported a richly diverse rural landscape, where cultivation with the ox-drawn plow was almost everywhere apparent. Among the earliest accounts, the Portuguese Jesuit Francisco Alvares in the 1520s argued, "It seems to me in all the world there is not so populous a country, and so abundant in com, and herds of innumerable cattle."! A century later his fellow Jesuit Jerome Lobo in 1626 noted: 'The climate is so temperate that at the same time I saw in some places ploughing and sowing, and in others the wheat already sprouting, while in others it was full-grown and mature, in others reaping, threshing, gathering, and again sowing, the land never tiring of continual production of its fruits or failing in this readiness to produce them."2 Two hundred years later Henry Salt described part of northern Ethiopia's highlands as "so rich in water and pasturage that Europeans could scarcely imagine its beauty," and an agricultural harvest which "must be considered in great measure as owing to the industry of the inhabitants .... "3 1. Francisco Alvares, The Prester 101m of the Indies: A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester Jolm, Being a Narrative of the Portuguese Emhas~y to Ethiopia in 1520, trans. C. W. Becldngham and G. W. B. Huntingford, 2 Yols., Hakluyt Society, Yols. 114-15 (Cambridge, 1961), Yol. 1, 131. 2. Donald Lockhart, trans., The Itinerario of Jeronimo Lobo, (London, 1984), 245. 3. Henry Salt, A Voyage to Abyssinia (QId Travels in the Interior ofThat Country (Philadelphia, 1816), 199.426.

3

4

Prologue

In the last half of the twentieth century, the external accounts of Ethiopia's rural landscape have changed dramatically: A culture is dying in Ethiopia A complete way of life, virtually unassailed for 3000 years, is coming to an end. The Abyssinian high plateau, known to the Greeks a