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Power and its Discontents in Ethiopia’s Western Periphery
Anywaa’s Reactions to the Consolidation of the Ethiopian State in the Gambella Region
(1941 – 1991)
Dereje Feyissa
Addis Ababa University, College of Law and Governance
Abstract
This paper chronicles and analyses how peoples of the periphery engaged the Ethiopian state
as it sought to expand and consolidate its power at its margins. It does that through a case
study of Anywaa’s modes of resistance in the Gambella region against two political regimes:
the imperial and the socialist states. Anywaa’s determined resistance is very intriguing given
their smaller demographic size and the huge gap in military capability between the
contenders. Anywaa resistance against hegemonic and exclusionary practices of the Ethiopian
state is discussed as it was animated by a self-esteem that draws on cherished autonomy and
the code of reciprocity that promptly reacts against hegemonic projects as well as a political
sensibility embedded in a deeply rooted code o territoriality and particularistic configuration
of an ethnic identity. Anywaa resistance is also examined in its trans-national dimension; how
they made use of their cross-border settlement along the Ethio-Sudanese border as a political
resource. The empirical base of the contribution is the data obtained from archival sources;
complemented by interviews with some of the key political actors at various times. The
contribution seeks to broaden the empirical base of the ‘power and protest’ literature in
Ethiopia hitherto dominated by the ‘typical’ examples from northern and southern regions by
bringing to light how peoples of the western periphery negotiated, critiqued, contested and
resisted hegemonic projects such as the centralising thrust in the process of state formation in
Ethiopia; a process which involved violent conquest; de-humanization; de-historicization, and
cultural uprooting of local communities.
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Introduction
The modern Ethiopian state came into existence in the late nineteenth century after king
Menilik of Shewa in the central highlands successfully embarked on the twin task of unifying
the historic Christian kingdom of the northern highlands (popularly known as Abyssinia) and
a dramatic territorial expansion into present-day southern, eastern and western regions of
Ethiopia. How local communities responded to this momentous politico-military process has
not received as much attention as the achievements of the empire builders did, perhaps with
the single exception of the seminal edited volume by Wendy James and Donald Donham,
“Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia”. This is one of the gaps which this contribution
seeks to bridge through a case study of imperial conquest of the Gambella region and how
local communities had responded to, not necessarily always in the form of resistance but also
using the advent of the Ethiopian state as a political resource to renegotiate local power
relations. When imperial rule became heavy-handed and marginalising, local communities
also mustered different types of resources, including their historical consciousness of being a
distinct community, to build political agency to contain imperial encroachment into local
autonomy and cultural identity or cross border settlements.
Consolidating and effectively governing the Ethiopian empire was a task shouldered by
Menilik’s successors, particularly emperor Haile Selassie who sought to institute a centralised
imperial political order from the 1930s until his demise by the 1974 revolution. Imperial rule
under Haile Selassie and the contradictions that it had generated has received greater
academic attention (Lewis 1956; Clapham 1984). Various works have also examined local
forms of protest against imperial rule characterized by a rigid form of centralisation (Schwab
1970; Gebru 1984 and 1990). The Woyane revolt in the northern province of Tigray in 1943;
the rebellion in the south eastern province of Bale throughout the 1960s, and the peasant
rebellion in the north western province of Gojam in 1967 have for long remained the
paradigmatic cases of ‘power and protest’ in imperial Ethiopia. Of these the Woyane revolt
has received the greatest attention. Popularized by the works of Gebru Tareqe the three cases
have been considered typical cases of inconclusive agrarian revolts with an inchoate peasant
consciousness articulated with local identities (distinct life styles), and in the case of the Bale
rebellion, with a cross-border dimension (links with the Greater Somali political project). The
case study in this contribution – the various forms of Anywaa resistance against imperial rule
and its centralising thrust is less informed by a ‘class consciousness’ than a collective local
response to the hegemonic projects of a state which undermined its national integrative
capacity; a process of state formation which could be better made intelligible within the
framework of centre-periphery relations. The failure of the Ethiopian revolution to articulate
with local discontents in class terms, evidenced by the Jor rebellion, further shows the terms
of contestation between peoples of the periphery and the Ethiopian state.
The discussion is organised in four sections. Section one provides a historical background to
the Gambella region and some notes on the social organisation of the Anywaa. Section two
discusses the advent of the Ethiopian state in the Gambella region and Anywaa response to it.
Section three examines Anywaa forms of resistance against imperial rule in three different
phases: Anywaa response to the imperial conquest of the 1930s; centralisation of the 1940s
and 1950s, and the transnational dimension of Anywaa resistance in the 1960s. Section four
discusses two types of Anywaa resistance against the socialist state in the 1970s and 1980s.
The last section concludes with an exposition of the recurrent themes and contentious issues
between the Anywaa and the Ethiopian state.
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Some notes on the Gambella region and it inhabitants
The Gambella region, which is also known as the Baro salient, is located in present-day
western Ethiopia. Two features stand out in defining Gambella, not only as a physical space
but also as a socio-political unit. First, Gambella is one of the hottest lowlands in the country,
having an average temperature of 37 degrees Celsius at an altitude of only 500 metres above
sea level – in contrast to the neighbouring highland regions, which rise as high as 3,000
metres. Second, Gambella is a peripheral region 34,063 square kilometres wide, situated
along Ethiopia’s long international border with the Sudan. These two features explain in part
Gambella’s socio-economic marginality and political sensitivity. Gambella is one of
Ethiopia’s poorest regions in terms of infrastructure and social services. Because of its location along the border with the Sudan, Gambella is also susceptible to wider geopolitical
processes. In fact, identification processes in the region are intimately related to the civil wars
in southern Sudan.
The population of Gambella has been variously estimated. The results of the 1994 national
census indicated that it had at that time 181,862 inhabitants, more than eighty-five per cent of
whom lived in rural areas. According to the 2007 the population of the Gambella region is
estimated to be 307,000. Aside from recent arrivals from elsewhere in Ethiopia, members of
five ethnic groups – currently referred to, officially, as ‘national minorities’ – coexist in
Gambella: the Anywaa, the Nuer, the Majangir, the Opo and the Komo. The Nuer constitute
46 per cent; the Anywaa 21 per cent; the Majangir 4 per cent, and the Opo and Komo 1 per
cent each of Gambella’s population. The Anywaa and the Nuer speak languages belonging to
the Nilotic language family, whereas the languages of the Majangir, the Opo and the Komo
belong to the Koman language group within the Nilo-Saharan language family (Bender et al.
1976). Since the arrival of the Ethiopian state in the late nineteenth century, but more so since
the last five decades, these populations have been supplemented by internal migrants from the
Ethiopian highlands and by refugees from the Sudanese civil wars. The internal migrants refer
to themselves collectively with the generic term, degegna (Highlanders), indicating their
places of origin, or with the more prestigious term, habesha, a cultural identity associated
with the Ethiopian state and the Orthodox Church. The majority of the Highlanders came to
the Gambella region in the mid-1980s as part of the government’s policy of resettling famineaffected people from the northern and southern highlands to the western lowlands. Most are
ethnic Amhara, Oromo or Tigreans, but they also include a variety of ethnic groups from
southern Ethiopia.
The various groups of people in Gambella pursue different livelihood strategies: the Anywaa,
the Opo and the Komo are predominantly cultivators; the Nuer are agro pastoralists; and the
Majangir combine hunting and gathering with shifting cultivation (Stauder 1971). In the
villages, the Highlanders make a living as cultivators, and in the towns they comprise the
majority of the traders and civil servants. Patterns of religious affiliation also seem to
reinforce social boundaries between groups. Thus, most of the Highlanders are followers of
the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, while the Anywaa and the Nuer are members of various
Protestant denominations, principally the Presbyterian Church, or they are traditional
believers. The relationship between the Highlanders and the other inhabitants of Gambella,
including especially the Anywaa and the Nuer, is multidimensional. Most commonly, the
boundary between these two categories is constructed in terms both of regional origins and
skin colour: the ‘black’ Anywaa, Nuer, Majangir, Opo and Komo are contrasted with the ‘red’
Highlanders. The category of Highlander is socially elastic insofar as all non-Nilotic and non-
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Koman people with brown skin pigmentation (‘red’ in local parlance), no matter where they come from, are classified as Highlanders. Thus, the term makes sense only in the context of
Ethiopia’s borderlands such as in Gambella. The term ‘Highlanders’ signifies not only a diverse group of newcomers from other parts of Ethiopia but also and especially the Ethiopian
state itself. Ever since its first representatives arrived in the Gambella region at the end of the
nineteenth century, the Ethiopian state has been introduced through, represented by and
identified with the Highlanders. It is for this reason that the Anywaa and the Nuer use the
same word – gaala or buny, respectively – to refer both to the Highlanders as people and to
the Ethiopian state.
The Anywaa, also spelled as Anuak, are one of the major ethnic groups that live in the
Gambella region and the adjacent South Sudan areas, made famous in Evans-Pritchard’s book on The Anuak Nobles (1940) and in Godfrey Lienhardt’s articles on the Anywaa village headmen (1957, 1958). In Gambella, the majority of the Anywaa live along the major
tributaries of the Sobat River: the Baro, the Gilo, the Akobo, the Alwero and the Pibor. The
Anywaa have many distinguishing features as a community not only in relation to the
highlanders but also among their closer neighbours. Unlike their pastoralist neighbours, such
as the Nuer, the Dinka or the Murle, the Anywaa are primarily agrarian and as such do not
ascribe a crucial role to cattle in creating and maintaining social relationships. In traditional
Anywaa society, fundamental social relationships between leader and commoner, elder and
junior or husband and wife were created through the medium of beads. The traditional
Anywaa bride wealth is not cattle but the blue glass beads called dimui. The social
significance of the beads is so fundamental that Evans-Pritchard called the Anywaa the ‘beads people’ (1940b: 20). The origins of dimui are obscure. In their oral traditions, the Anywaa say
that the ancestors brought the beads with them in ancient times. According to other
statements, dimui were brought to the Sudan from Egypt by Ottoman traders. Be that as it
may, dimui is for the Anywaa the scarce good par excellence. There is a finite supply of
dimui, which cannot be replenished and which are transferred from one kin-based group to
another in the form of bride wealth, blood wealth, ransom or other kinds of payment.
Traditionally, the number of dimui one possessed determined one’s status. The beads possessed by a family formed a kind of heritage, which was controlled by elders and which,
therefore, gave them tremendous power over juniors. Men were also dependent on their
sisters, inasmuch as they could usually only gain access to dimui through the bride wealth that
they received when their sisters married. With the beginning of wage labour in the 1950s,
especially in coffee plantations in the neighbouring highlands, and with the beginning of
salaried jobs and gold mining, it became possible for men who lacked sisters or daughters to
buy dimui; but because of its fundamental scarcity, it always eluded commercialization.
Besides serving as a medium of exchange among the Anywaa, the dimui are a marker of
Anywaa identity in the eyes of the Anywaa themselves and in the eyes of their neighbours.
Territoriality is one of the basic principles of social organisation among the Anywaa.
According to Evans-Prichard (1940b: 37), for example, ‘the Anuak are strongly attached to the sites where their ancestors lived and often tenaciously occupied them in the face of
extermination.’ As such, the village is the principal unit of social identification among the Anywaa. A village is identified with a dominant lineage but, despite a strong preference to
stay in one’s own lineage village, there are always strangers. The exclusivity of an Anywaa
village is expressed in an anthem known as agwaga. Each Anywaa village as a territory has
boundaries (kew), known to both its own inhabitants and those of other villages. According to
Perner (1997: 180–81), ‘each village in fact does have its territory with boundaries, well known by everybody […] the borders of a village’s territories were outlined by runners who went to circumscribe the limits of a site, fixing certain points (such as trees, mouths of rivers,
5
etc.) as boundary posts. The clear demarcation of a territory is extremely important as it helps
to avoid conflicts between people of different territories’. The Anywaa’s strong emotional ties to their own territory contrasts with apathy towards other people’s ‘territory’. The Anywaa notion of territoriality is different from the notion of autochthony as applied, for instance, in
West African cases, where groups claim to have originated from a particular territory or
where some lands could assume a sacred status (Lentz 2000). The Anywaa have no such holy
places. Some parts of a territory, such as nobles’ graves, streams and extraordinary rocks, assume a spiritual dimension and are believed to be inhabited by a supernatural being, Jwok.
However, these abodes of Jwok in ‘human territory’ are not revered, but avoided.
Anywaa territoriality also finds expression in characteristic forms of political organization.
The relatively centralized ‘village state’, which has been described in detail by EvansPritchard (1940b) and Lienhardt (1957/58), contrasts sharply with the political organization of
their pastoralist neighbours such as the Nuer, whose decentralized political system has been
described by anthropologists as ‘ordered anarchy’ and which is more contemptuously referred
to by the Anywaa as ‘chaotic’. There were two kinds of political communities in traditional
Anywaa society: the ji-nyiye (people of the nobles) and the jikwaari (people of the headmen).
Despite some differences in their political status, both the nyiye and the kwaari were attached
to specific villages, and they rarely embarked on missions of territorial expansion. While
intervillage warfare was rife among the Anywaa (Evans-Pritchard 1940b; Shumet 1986), none
of these intervillage fights resulted in territorial encroachments. The object of the struggle
between the various nyiye and kwaari was not territory but royal emblems or emblems of
authority. Traditional Anywaa politics is noted for its rituals. The insignia of the offices of
headmanship and kingship consisted especially in additional forms of precious beads; in
particular, a string of beads called the abudho for the kwaaro and a necklace called the uchuok
for the nyiya. Unlike the dimui of the common people, the abudho and uchuok cannot be
obtained by exchange; they must be inherited within ruling lineages. In addition to the
uchuok, there is a second royal emblem, the walo (the royal stool). The Tooth Drum, three
spears and iron fork are also regarded as royal emblems. The nyiya who controls the uchuok
and the walo is called the nyinya. The nobles were largely found in the east and south-east
part of the Anywaa land and that of the headmen in the rest of the country (Evans-Pritchard
1940b: 38). By the mid1920s the nyiya of the Adongo region in south Sudan emerged as the
de facto custodian of the royal emblems, thus attaining prominence in Aywaa politics at the
regional level.
Anywaa Response to the Advent of the Ethiopian State in the Gambella
Region
The Gambella region, where the majority of the Anywaa live, was incorporated into the
Ethiopian state at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1898, Emperor Menilik of Ethiopia
pre-empted British colonial interest in the region by extending his dominion as far west as the
Sobat basin in the Upper Nile region in present-day southern Sudan in connivance with the
French, who were simultaneously advancing into the region (Jal 1987: 183–84). Imperial
Ethiopia had two major stakes in the Gambella and Upper Nile regions. Diplomatically, it
sought to out-compete British colonial establishment in the Sudan with a desire to expand to
the western highlands. Economically, it was interested in safeguarding the lucrative ivory and
cattle trade of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Johnson 1986: 222–24). The
main sources of this merchandise were the newly conquered regions in the south, west and
east of present-day Ethiopia. In fact, it was control of the trade routes that enabled King
Menilik to turn his small Shewan kingdom in central Ethiopia into an empire that became the
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modern Ethiopian state (Bahru 1976: 24). Gambella was one of the main sources of ivory and
cattle for imperial Ethiopia. Ivory was obtained both in the form of tribute and through trade
with the Anywaa and Nuer leaders (Johnson 1986: 224–30). The quest for ivory led to a
flourishing gun-for-ivory exchange, as more guns were needed to hunt more elephants. This
economic interest brought imperial Ethiopia into strong competition with the British, who had
a wider political, economic and strategic interest in the region.
The overriding British strategic interest in Gambella was their preoccupation with
safeguarding the waters of the Nile (Collins 1971). One of the main tributaries of the White
Nile, the Sobat, is also fed by major tributaries, the Baro, Gilo, Akobo and Alwero Rivers,
that descend from the western Ethiopian highlands and flow through the plains of Gambella.
The British also had an ambitious economic scheme. They aspired to tap the natural
resources, coffee and rubber, of the western Ethiopian highlands, and for that they needed a
commercial enclave linking these regions with the Sudan (Bahru 1987: 80–81). Additionally
they were in competition with the French, who had forged close diplomatic and economic ties
with Emperor Menilik, evident in the construction of the railway that connected Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, with the French colony of Djibouti. In order to undermine the growing
French political and economic influence in Ethiopia, the British negotiated with the Ethiopian
government to establish a trading station in Gambella on the Baro River, the only navigable
river in Ethiopia. According to Article IV of the subsequent 1902 Anglo-Ethiopian Boundary
Agreement, the British were allowed to establish a trading post on the Baro River, in the
western part of Gambella town, which came to be known as the Gambella enclave. The
political economy of the enclave is one of the defining features of Anywaa’s response to the advent and expansion of the Ethiopian state.
On the basis of the agreement, Gambella town emerged as an important economic center in
the first three decades of the twentieth century, handling seventy per cent of Ethiopian foreign
trade with and via the Sudan (Bahru 1987: 77). British sovereignty over the enclave, however,
was conditional on their rule over the Sudan, and thus ended in 1956 when the Sudan became
independent. For the preceding half century though, Gambella, with a parceled sovereignty,
occupied a unique status as somewhat of a political anomaly in the context of independent
Ethiopia. In addition to British attentions, the enclave was highly favored by Menilik as an
inlet for salt and cloth imported from Port Sudan and an outlet for coffee, hides and beeswax
from the newly conquered western highlands (Bahru 1987: 82–83). The 1902 Boundary
Agreement also defined the national identities of the Anywaa and the Nuer, two of the major
ethnic groups in the Gambella region. Except for a section of the Jikany Nuer, the majority of
the Nuer were placed within the Sudan and except for the Adongo and Akobo Anywaa, the
majority of the Anywaa were placed within Ethiopia This cross border settlement isone of the
defining features of the trans-national dimension of state formation in Ethiopia’s western periphery;; for Anywaa’s resistance against the exclusionary practices of the Ethiopian state in
the 1950s and 1960s was partly made possible by the cross-border political mobilization. The
Anywaa interacted with the Ethiopian state earlier than their neighbors such as the Nuer
because of their proximity to the highlands and their new nationality as ‘Ethiopians’. The Anywaa village states were initially better connected with the local representatives of the
Ethiopian state. The nyiye and kwaari responded to the new political opportunities, which
above all ensured them earlier access to firearms than the Nuer, a new form of dominance that
decisively changed the balance of power in Anywaa-Nuer relations in the former’s favor
(Bahru 1976; Johnson 1986).
The balance of power during the early decades of the twentieth century contrasted sharply
with the Anywaa-Nuer power relations during the second half of the nineteenth century.
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Various travellers and historians reported that by the end of the nineteenth century the
Anywaa were said to be on the verge of extinction after waves of displacement by the Nuer.
Jessen (1905: 5) wrote: ‘There is no doubt that these people, who, sad to say, are gradually becoming extinct, are greatly influenced by their surroundings and the peculiar circumstances
in which they are placed. Shut in on one side by the giant Abyssinian Mountains and on the
other by the warlike and ever-aggressive Nuer tribes, their existence is not much better than
that of the flying fish’. Collins (1971: 203) concurred: ‘They [the Nuer] left the Anuak shattered. Many had died opposing the Nuer advance. Others had perished from the famine
which followed, and all suffered the loss of cattle. At the end of the century, the Anywaa
appeared near extinction. They were saved by a technological revolution’. This ‘technological revolution’ that ‘saved’ the Anywaa was the acquisition of firearms through the ivory trade
with imperial Ethiopia. As Bahru (1976: 112) noted, ‘about 1911, the total number of rifles in
Anywaa possession was estimated at between 10,000 and 25,000’. Three powerful nyiye
emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century: Udiel, Ulimi, and Akwei of, respectively,
the Abobo, Akobo and Adongo regions. In 1911, the Anywaa, led by nyiya Akwei of the
Adongo region, launched their famous raids against the Nuer in the Akobo region. With
access to firearms and a new form of political centralization that went beyond the traditional
village constituency, the Anywaa took the offensive and, in the first three decades of the
twentieth century, had the upper hand over their one-time powerful pastoralist neighbors.
The rise of Anywaa military power however was not welcomed by the British colonial and
imperial Ethiopian states. The rise of Anywaa power threatened the British and Ethiopian
state interests in the region, particularly because the safety of the commercial enclave could
only be secured either through the cooperation of the Anywaa or their military defeat. The
British were the first to try to contain the Anywaa. With vital strategic interests to protect and
an imagined economic Eldorado to pursue, the British were increasingly nervous about the
rise of Anywaa military power. ‘Disarm the Anywaa’ was the British political preoccupation
in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1912, the British carried out a military campaign against the
Anywaa of the Adongo region. Although the Anywaa were no match for the British in
conventional battles, their guerrilla war inflicted heavy damage on the British military. In the
confrontation with nyiya Akwei, the British lost four commissioned and thirty-seven
noncommissioned officers (Bahru 1976: 120). The Anywaa also captured firearms from the
British (Zerai 1971: 9). Embittered by the humiliating defeat, the British determined to
resolve ‘the Anywaa problem’. To that end, they launched a diplomatic offensive to corner
the Anywaa by arguing for a joint military operation with the Ethiopian government. The plan
did not materialize except for a reconnaissance trip along the Gilo River1.
Imperial Ethiopia was initially hesitant to curb Anywaa military power. It preferred to pursue
a no confrontational approach towards the Anywaa in order to create a buffer between itself
and the British, but more importantly it had a stake in the ivory–gun trade. As Bahru (1976:
131) noted, ‘a vigorous policy of disarming the Anywaa would have been tantamount to
financial suicide’. However, as the political influence and military muscle of the Anywaa
leaders grew, political measures were taken against the Anywaa by imperial Ethiopia. Both
nyiya Udiel and nyiya Akwei were imprisoned briefly to curb their growing military power
and political influence (Bahru 1976: 111; Johnson 1986: 226). In 1913, the Anywaa
demonstrated their political insubordination by killing Lij Kasa, the imperial agent of
Gambella (Zerai 1971: 24). The death of Lij Kasa provoked a strong punitive campaign by the
1
The Anywaa problem assumed such a high political profile that it provoked a parliamentary debate in London
on whether the Anywaa country was worth the trouble (Bahru 1976: 128).
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Ethiopian state. Four thousand spearmen and one thousand riflemen were sent under the
command of fitawrari (Commander of the Vanguard) Solomon, the son of dejazmach
(Commander of the Gate) Jote Tulu, governor of Sayyo, western Wellega. Fitawrari Solomon
lost more than one hundred of his followers, further boosting the spirit of Anywaa resistance
(Zerai 1971: 25). Subsequent to their military victory, the forces of Akwei Cham managed to
take control over the trade routes along the banks of the Baro and Akobo Rivers, as far as
Gambella town, Bure and Dembidolo in the highland, taxing all commercial goods that were
coming through these areas (Zerai 1971: 10). The British officials in the enclave appealed to
the Ethiopian government. Nyiya Akwei gave an ultimatum to the Highlanders in Gambella to
be confined to an area within a kilometer of the town.
In 1914, the ambitious qenyazmach (Commander of the Right) Majid Abud, a Druze Syrian in
the service of the imperial Ethiopian government, was sent to force the Anywaa into
submission. In 1916, qenyazmach Majid launched a major military offensive against the
Anywaa in what came to be known as the Battle of Itang. The Anywaa put up strong
resistance but ultimately succumbed to the forces of qenyazmach Majid – they lost five
hundred and thirty-two men, and five hundred men were castrated (Zerai 1971: 26). As Bahru
(1976: 142) described it, ‘in a sordid feat of carnage, he [Majid] asserted [Ethiopian]
government authority’. The Anywaa nevertheless continued their resistance to the British
colonial state and the Ethiopian government, as well as their counter-offensives against their
one-time powerful pastoralist neighbours, the Nuer and the Murle. In 1931 the Anywaa once
again raided the Gaat-Jak Nuer, and in 1932 they launched two extensive raids on the Murle
in the Akobo area. The Anywaa killed twenty-seven Murle and captured eighty women and
children and eight hundred head of cattle (Bahru 1976: 156). The Anywaa escaped British
reprisals by crossing the international boundary into Ethiopia. These Anywaa raids provoked
a major diplomatic crisis. The British demanded the Ethiopian state govern the Anywaa and
also pay compensation for the losses. As a result, qenyazmach Majid undertook two major
campaigns against the Anywaa in the Akobo region during 1932–34 in order to reassert
Ethiopian government authority. The Anywaa call these campaigns laegnmajid, the wars of
Majid (Ojullu 1987: 42). They tenaciously resisted Majid, and in 1934 his forces were
annihilated by the Openo Anywaa in Pol village, and Majid himself sustained serious injury
(Zerai 1971: 32). After a series of subsequent military campaigns, however, the Anywaa were
finally subdued, and entered into a long military and political decline. The corollary to
imperial Ethiopia’s campaigns against the Anywaa was the commencement of the slave trade,
which left a permanent stigma on the peoples of the borderland who were negatively
integrated into the Ethiopian state. The genesis of the pejorative term bariya (slave) is related
to the borderland people’s experience of slavery2. Shortly after a vigorous policy of
centralization imperial Ethiopia succumbed to the Italian colonial design in 1936, when the
empire was restructured, albeit briefly, with the aim of deconstructing ‘Amhara hegemony’ backed by the Orthodox Church by promoting the country’s minorities. Italian presence in the
Gambella region, however, was dominated by the project of mobilizing the demographically
larger Nuer against British establishments in the Sudan. After mere five years interlude Italian
occupation of Ethiopia came to an end when they ventured to antagonize the Allied powers in
1941 during the Second World War, provoking the British to support the Ethiopian empire.
2
Gambella was one of the main sources of slaves in south-western Ethiopia. B.H. Jessen, a British traveller who
visited south-western Ethiopia in 1904, described the plight of the Anywaa as follows: ‘The Abyssinians [Highlanders], though officially their protectors, make yearly raids on them, ostensibly to collect their tribute,
but incidentally taking away boys or women for slaves … The Nuer on the other side make inroads on their land, in order to gain larger pasture-grounds for their cattle’ (Jessen 1905: 163).
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The “Pukumu disturbance” – Anywaa response to imperial centralization in
post-liberation period
The imperial government in post-liberation period anxiously sought to reconstitute its
authority with a stronger centralizing thrust, to which the Anywaa once again vigorously
responded. Like elsewhere in the country the imperial government had embarked on various
schemes aimed at reconstituting and expanding its authority in the early years of the postliberation period. Police stations were established and tributes in kind were changed into
monetary tax. As dimui was their traditional currency, Anywaa could not meet the monetary
demand. Some Anywaa responded to the demand through seasonal wage labor on the coffee
farms of the neighboring highlands, particularly in western Wellega. Others resorted to
military resistance. During 1951 – 1958 some kwari and nyiye raided the newly established
police stations in Gog, Itang and Pokumu districts. Pukumu village, led by kwaro Atong
Abula, was at the centre of the resistance. In 1956 kwaro Atong, with the support of kwaro
Udol of Filmela village, raided the police station; killing policemen and capturing arms
including automatic weapons. Furthermore he blocked the road between Itang and Jikaw
districts.
These raids posed a serious threat to imperial Ethiopia’s grip over the Gambella region, as they did to the British commercial establishment there. The following excerpt from a
representative of the enclave indicates the level of concern the British had in what came to be
known as the ‘Pukumu disturbance’: This disturbance was first caused by the Yambo tribe [Anywaa] of Pokumu in 1947, and this is the
second time that they have repeated it twice consecutively in 1951 and 1952. Generally speaking, this
trouble is not yet finished and cannot be assumed as having been finished unless the government takes
action quickly to get hold of these offenders and try to investigate certain causes that incite or
encourage these primitive people to rise against the government. Their reasons of thus behaving might
be due to backwardness which bars them from appreciating the legal and modern society that the
government has provided for them; or as this is a border region, there might be certain reasons that
indirectly influenced them politically. For instance, during the disturbance that occurred in the Sudan,
one of the consolable was a Yambo. Although this consolable was caught and hung, yet some of the
Yambo consolable who were with him escaped to Gambeila, and are scattered amongst their people.
These might be the ones who might encourage them. In 1947 Pukumu inhabitants were the only people
who fought against the government and were not given any support by other neighbours. In June 1951,
the Pokumu succeeded to convince few other Yambo to support them. And finally in 1952 they
succeeded to convince more of their neighbours which were about four different villages. Three days
after the fight got stopped more than 300 people came from Jor country to give support to the Pokumu
people. The Anuak along the bank of the Baro River starting from Gambeila up to their end with the
Nuers and the Anuaks in Jior take no notice of the real existence of the government other than its
weakness, except some chiefs that have gone further from Gambeila to Gore or Addis Ababa. In fact,
Jior inhabitants consider the government to be a verbal government without strength which is due to
backwardness and complete uncivilization which leads them to disregard the legal, modern, profound
and social community that this imperial government wants them to follow. I urge the imperial
government to take a prompt action, as the situation is very dangerous for the overall peace and security
of the border area (Daniel Gatwec Dei, 2nd LT, ‘Security in Gambeila’, report written to the governor of Gambeila district, Gambeila, 13th of June, 1952).
This is certainly an alarmist call from the British side who sought to agitate the imperial
government to take a ‘prompt action’ against the ‘Pukumu disturbance’, as Anywaa resistance against imperial centralisation came to be known. However, the state of rebellion lasted until
1960, when it was finally quelled by a police force sent from Gore, the capital of Illubabur
10
province within which the Gambella awraja (district) was situated. Pukumu village was
burned to the ground and it was renamed Birhaneselam, which in the Amharic language
means ‘light of peace’. The terms of the contestation between the Anywaa and the imperial
government ranged from the new tax regime which is not compatible with Anywaa’s nonmonetary local economy, to loss of political economy. Anywaa leaders lost their cherished
village autonomy and were reduced into mere balabats, a generic term for local imperial
officials. Some of them managed to acquire a more substantial imperial title such as
qegnazmach, grazmach or balambaras but real political power was exercised by the gaala;
highlanders.
Table 1 Local authorities in Gambella decorated with imperial titles in 1964
Wereda
Gambella
Itang
Jikaw
Akobo
Jor-Gog
Abobo
Total
Main
balabat
7
12
13
9
16
7
64
Vice
balabat
3
9
1
13
Qoro
Titled
77
39
116
Qegnazmach
Balambaras
3
1
1
5
Grazmach
2
1
2
1
6
1
1
2
2
6
In fact, the people of Gambella were referred to as lemma, named after the imperial governor
of Gambella in the 1960s, colonel Lemma Gebrehiwot, as if they did not exist before the
arrival of the colonel. The appointment of colonel Lemma as the governor of Gambella was
characteristic of the way the Ethiopian state related to its periphery. Most imperial governors
of the peripheral regions were sent there as a form of ‘exile’; a fact which was even
recognized by imperial governors of Gambella, as the following excerpt from the annual
report by colonel Lemma sent in 1963 to his imperial superiors in Addis indicate:
Sudanese local authorities receive a monthly salary of 400 – 600 USD. They are also provided with
cloth and even cars. Their Ethiopian counterparts are accorded with only an imperial title and less than
20 % from the revenue they collect. It is the same for the government officials in Gambella. Whereas
the Sudanese government spend lots of resources to maintain their political influence and spy on us my
political budget is only 35 USD. The problem in Gambella is further complicated by government
attitude towards Gambella. Most of government workers are sent to Gambella as a form of exile. They
are mostly either people with bad behaviour or offenders. It is no wonder that the employees regard
their presence as a form of punishment. As a border region the government should have been more
cautious by sending more able personnel
Colonel Lemma himself came to Gambella because of his participation in the failed 1960
coup against Emperor Haile Selassie. The choice of Gambella for his governorate served as a
dual vendetta against him. On a personal level, the colonel had problems with the governor of
Illubabor province, Enquselassie, and his assignment as governor of Gambella thus placed
him under the authority of a rival. On a symbolic level, the colonel was subjected to a
different form of slight. Though he was an ethnic Amhara, he fell on the black side of the
color spectrum. In the Ethiopia of the day, when the discourse about ‘purity of race’ played a prominent role in national identification, associating him with the ‘black’ Anywaa and Nuer was intended as symbolic violence against him.
11
There were also economic grievances that fuelled Anywaa resistance to imperial rule. Before
the arrival of the Ethiopian state there had been reciprocal socio-economic exchanges between
the Anywaa and the Oromo of the neighboring highlands. The main trading items were cotton
from the Anywaa side and beads and grain from the Oromo (Kurimoto 1992: 14). The
masculine ritual of buffalo killing by Oromo men in the lowlands of Gambella also introduced
a nascent form of positive social integration. The Oromo and the Anywaa hunted the buffalo
together, the former taking the horns and the skin, the latter taking the meat. With the
establishment of the enclave, cotton, one of the main Anywaa export items to the highlands,
became redundant. Cotton goods constituted the most important import item from the Sudan,
amounting to 15,029 out of a total of 27,962 pounds sterling in 1911 (Bahru 1976: 253). The
military campaigns also caused the farmlands to be left unattended; as a result, the Anywaa
started buying grain from the highlands, a trend which ultimately led to the change in their
position in the regional economy from subsistence producers to consumers of highland
products.
Exhibiting the typical features of the centre-periphery axis, the cultures of the people of the
periphery were denigrated and their cultural achievements were subjected to ‘reform’ or ‘eradication’. As such a corollary to the expansion of the Ethiopian state in the Gambella
region was the so-called campaign against ‘backward’ or ‘harmful’ cultural practices. Anywaa cultural practices such as the use of beads (dimui) for socio-economic transactions or
initiation rites were condemned in the strongest possible terms, followed by a call for
assimilation into a ‘national’ culture as the remedy. The following letter (in fact a plea) written by colonel Lemma to his imperial superiors in Addis Ababa suggests that:
The only way of improving this embarrassing culture [in Amharic asafari bahil] such as the use of
dimui or naak [dental revulsion] or gar [Nuer male initiation rite] is through education. Unfortunately,
even the new generation would still revert to the old culture as long as their parents continue to practice
it. I repeatedly told the Anywaa and the Nuer in public places such as in the markets how embarrassing
their culture is for us Ethiopians and for the foreigners. If it is difficult to force them directly to abandon
their culture, it should still be part of the law, the violation of which should entail punishment, primarily
of their leaders who failed to change their respective people.
The means to abolish the ‘backward’ culture was indicated in the same letter to be through modern education as well as the adoption of the Orthodox Christian (Highlander’) culture:
In order to bring the people of Gambella into civilization [siltane] we need to establish modern schools
3
and bring religious teachers from the Orthodox Church .
The discourse of “harmful” or “backward” cultural practices is modernist with the assumption
of a staged cultural evolution. In the Ethiopian context, as is the case elsewhere, the discourse
was applied selectively by the dominant highland society to ‘primitivise’ peoples of the periphery and disparage their cultural achievements. As such it was invoked to justify
particular relations of dominance. While initiation rites of the peoples of the periphery were
condemned, what might appear equally ‘backward’ cultural practices in modernist terms such as early marriage or circumcision of women, widely practiced among highland societies, were
greeted with silence. However, people of Gambella, who otherwise strongly reject women
circumcision, were not presented as more ‘modern’ than highland societies. Instead, their complex cultural practices were dismissed as though being a Nuer or an Anywaa meant no
3
Colonel Lemma Gebrehiwot, Governor of Gambella, letter written to Dejazmach Girmachew Teklehawariyat,
Illubabor Province Enderase, Gore Archive, dated 1587/47, 1964, Author’s translation from Amharic.
12
more than their initiation rites which were selectively used to justify the label ‘backward people’ with an ‘embarrassing’ culture. The Shiftas - Articulation between Anywaa discontent and the politics of
liberation in South Sudan in the 1960s
Anywaa resistance against imperial rule was rekindled by the politics of liberation movement
in South Sudan in the 1960s; a trans-national political network which was made possible by
their cross-border settlement pattern. Postcolonial Sudan had been plagued by civil wars
because of contentious issues related to imbalances in regional development, to the narrow
social base from which of the ruling elite is recruited, to an exclusive nation-building process,
and to greed of the ruling elite in monopolizing the strategic resources of the country
(Hutchinson 1996; Johnson 2003; J. Young 2007a). Most members of the ruling elite in
postcolonial Sudan, coming from the riverine areas of central Sudan, ‘favoured the interests of those from the riverine core, and that in turn fostered dissent in the peripheries’ (J. Young 2007b: 6). The various political regimes in the Sudan attempted to overcome their narrow
power base by imposing Arabism and Islam in a country that is marked by high cultural and
religious diversity (Deng 1995). Political power had been exercised by these ruling elites
within racial and religious frameworks. This has enabled them to conceal structures of
inequality and cultural differences in the western and eastern parts of the country which,
together with the central riverine lands, make up the so-called ‘Islamic and Arabic North’ as opposed to the ‘Christian and African South’. Until recently, the contradictions within the
Sudanese state resulted in protracted armed resistance, coming predominantly from the
southern part of the country, where none of the rhetoric of the ruling elites has local
resonance.
The various southern Sudanese armed struggles were waged from bases along the EthiopianSudanese border. The first civil war produced a liberation movement called Anyanya (snake
venom), which waged a guerrilla war against the Sudanese state and its practices of religious
discrimination and political exclusion from 1957 until 1972 (Nyaba 2001; Johnson 2003). The
Anyanya was active in cross-border Anywaa and Nuer communities, for which integration
into the Ethiopian polity largely meant loss of political autonomy, economic marginalization
and social discrimination. Ethiopian Anywaa and Nuer community leaders worked closely
with the Anyanya leadership; in fact, during the initial stage of the rebellion, the conflict was
framed by the Anywaa and the Nuer in Gambella in racial terms: the ‘black’ against the ‘red’
people. The objective of the rebellion was said to be the creation of a new state – jenubi – that
would include all ‘black’ people in the Sudan and in Ethiopia in contrast to the ‘red Muslims’ (the northern Sudanese Arabs) and ‘red Christians’ (Ethiopian Highlanders). This new
identity discourse created political excitement among Ethiopia’s borderland population. As
such, the imperial government of Ethiopia, identified with the Highlanders and, thus,
perceived to be on the ‘red’ side of the colour spectrum, initially defined the Anyanya rebels
operating along the border as a national security threat, defining Anyanya fighter shiftas,
Amharic term for bandits or outlaws4.
4
Letter written to the Ministry of the Interior by the Governor of Gore, 15 July 1967, obtained from the
Gore Archives.
13
The first instance of political activity by the Anyanya in Ethiopia was led by a group of
southern Sudanese students who had gone to Ethiopia in 1962 ostensibly to pursue their
education in institutions of higher education. Under the auspices of Nuer and Anywaa local
leaders, these students established military bases at various places in Gambella. Disgruntled
Anywaa and Nuer leaders in Gambella positively responded to “the jenubi project”. The first
to do so were in fact kwaro Otong and kwaro Adule, two major actors behind the ‘Pukumu disturbance’;; followed by the balabat Agule Akway of Jor-Gog district. Besides, the balabats
organised the youth in their respective villages into an effective fighting force which came to
be known as bura. The bura was also active in the cross-border cattle raids. When the
Ethiopian government took notice of this clandestine transborder political network, the South
Sudanese students left Gambella for other African countries for their own safety. A section of
them however went back to southern Sudan. Those who still operated at the border areas were
led by Colonel Samuel Gach Tut (a Nuer) and General Nyigori Ujulu (an Anywaa). The
combined forces of Anyanya I units and the bura, now glossed as ‘the shiftas’ formed a formidable military power that challenged imperial rule over Gambella. The ‘coalition’ of the shiftas not only established a parallel administrative structure settling disputes with a taxing
power over the population under its control but also poised to take over Gambella town itself,
with a military base a mere ten kilometres away from the regional capital. In 1962, the
Ethiopian and Sudanese governments signed a treaty of mutual extradition of ‘criminals’,
which in effect was a pact to contain the threat posed by the shiftas, as the following excerpts
from letters written by imperial officials from Gambella indicate:
The major security problem in Gambella started when educated south Sudanese rebelled against their
government and came to our region. As educated people they have indoctrinated the local population.
This has very much undermined their sense of belonging to Ethiopian national identity. Nothing
illustrates the magnitude of the problem more than the fact that the shiftas are camped at a 10 km radius
from Gambella town. They not only loot the local people but they even brag that they will soon launch
an attack on Gambella town itself (Colonel Haylu Gebru’s opinion, Gambella police commissioner,
Debriefing to the Gambella study group’s first meeting, November 1964).
Registered tax payers in the weredas does not exceed 5,000 but as the Abigar [Nuer] elders reported to
me more than 3,000 youth joined the shifta; all armed. The objective of the shiftas is annexing all the
territory up to Baro Qela (the junction between Baro and Birbir River) to South Sudan and establishes a
black government. The main camps of the shiftas are in Akobo and Itang. The mobilisation has already
reached a point where we cannot handle it through persuasion or negotiation but through a counter
offense (Ato Demisse Zewdu, governor of Jikaw Wereda, November 28, 1964).
The territorial limit of the imagined Jenubi state “up to Baro Qela” has three referents. First, it
refers to the colour border; as Baro Qela is the last settlement of the “black people”
represented by the most easterly Anywaa villages. Baro Qela also has a topographical
referent; as it is the junction between the Baro River and one of its tributaries, Birbir River, at
the foot of the western highlands. As such, it is a place where the lowland ends and the
highlands begin. Thirdly, it has a historical referent. The idea of incorporating Gambella into
Southern Sudan was first entertained by the British colonial establishment in the Sudan as part
of securing the waters of the Nile, for the major tributary rivers to the Sobat River, itself a
14
tributary to the White Nile, pass through Gambela5. The very idea of a commercial enclave
and a trading post along the Baro River was also envisaged in order to draw western Ethiopia
into the economic orbits of colonial Sudan (Bahru, 1982). Although the agreement restricted
the lease exclusively for commercial purposes, the British kept a high political profile and the
enclave was administrated as part of the Upper Nile Region governorate and used as a site for
diplomatic subversion to check the growing Ethiopian sphere of influence along the frontier
(Collins, 1982).
Cross-border political mobilisation also enclosed within itself the temptations of the loot with
which the bura was intimately connected, as the following description by a local balabat
indicates:
Since the shiftas came to the region and blended with the local communities the latter started defying
government authority. In fact, the balabats organised the youth into a fighting force called bura. When
asked the balabats say the bura is for self-defence but we have enough evidence that the bura
cooperates closely with shiftas. The bura was also used by the bandits and the balabats to raid cattle
across the border. In his own admission Grazmach Umed Ukir of Pinkiyo village is behind the cattle
raids and a main broker of selling the stolen cattle. Similarly, Grazmach Ray Khun of Lare raided the
Sudanese government camp at Ureng. Impressed by his military exploits the shiftas nominated him to
be their leader (Major Mulugeta Waka)
Some local leaders were anxious to de-link themselves from the shiftas and the project of
Jenubi, while ‘reprimanding’ the Ethiopian government for failing to positively integrate them
into the state system:
The country is in trouble. The problem is not initiated by us but by people who came from South Sudan,
particularly from nasra district. They are from Anuak, Shilluk, Gaajak [Nuer], Lou [Nuer] and Ajuba
[Murle]. They came through Kuatgar and were hosted by Balambaras Uruta of Edeni. The governor and
I met them at Teyluth village. We asked them what they are after. They replied, “all they want is to go
to Yambo [Anuak] country and buy bullets”. I warned them should they try to raid cattle from our
people I would attack them. But their real intention is first to fight the Sudan government and then fight
against the Ethiopian government. I told them that the king of Abigar is only Janhoy [Haile Selassie].
They agitate the people to rally them behind the idea of establishing a government of the black people. I
think they regretted that they started attacking Jikaw before they defeat the Sudan. Because the bandits
attack Sudan from Ethiopia the Sudan government also attacks us indiscriminately. Those who have
suffered from the attacks by the government of the Sudan are saying unless the government of Ethiopia
provides them with protection they would join the shiftas (Grazmach Thiang Jote, balabat of Lare,
Gambella Security Study Report, pp.12 – 16).
The ‘administrative problems’ of the local balabats which led them collaborate with the
‘Sudanese shiftas’” are mentioned in the Gambella Security Study Report, summarising their
grievances, as follows:
5
British surveyors and cartographers envisaged in their proposals a neat ethnic division, giving all the Anywaa
to Ethiopia and the Nuer to the Sudan but at the last instance the second proposal, based on topographical
considerations sealed the international boundary by taking two of the major rivers, Baro and Akobo as the
natural divide between the two dominions (Bahru, 1976:98).
15
We are not paid our salaries for the last three years. There are also no marketing facilities in our areas. As
such, our people are forced to sell their produce in the Sudan at unfavourable price. As we use Sudanese
pounds we find it difficult to pay tax to the Ethiopian authorities. We prepared air stripes hoping that this
would ease our market problems but all in vain. The Sudan balabats mock us – ‘why are you so poor while
the Ethiopian government is great and rich’. They ask us how much we earn. When we told them we are not
paid yet they wonder why on earth we still wear the kaba (Ethiopian cloth worn by government officials).
We feel we are humiliated. We have repeatedly petitioned the government to improve the situation but no
result to date. Unlike us who get nothing from the Ethiopian government, even a dog gets a bone when it
stands by the gate without asking for it! We have got nothing – no medicine, no transport, no markets etc.
p.27.
Imperial officials in Gambella however put greater emphasis on the trans-border political
imagination with the project of ultimately carving out a ‘black state (Jenubi) from the Sudan, controlled by the Muslim Arabs, and Ethiopia, controlled by the ‘Christian Arabs’, in reference to the salience of the color border that puts northern Sudanese and highland
Ethiopians into the same category, as the following letter written by colonel Lemma suggests:
The political mobilisation of the peoples of Gambella by the South Sudanese shiftas is causing a major
security challenge to Gambella. Inspired by and imitating the shiftas who started their struggle by
raiding police stations in South Sudan the Ethiopians have started doing the same. They even tell the
Sudanese shiftas that, “as we helped you in the fight against North Sudanese Arabs, you should also
support us in our fight against the Christian Arabs! Luckily the South Sudanese shiftas are not
responding to their call as they say, “we cannot afford antagonising Ethiopia at this point in time. First
we need to finish the fight against the Northern Arabs. We will deal with the Ethiopian issue
afterwards”. However, some units of the shiftas cooperate with our shiftas. In July 1963, for instance,
the two of them established a military camp only 30 kms from Gambella town at a place called Mejid
Gara near the American mission (Colonel Lemma, 194).
The shifta phenomena in Gambella of the 1960s were further complicated by the missionary
factor, who themselves had a cross-border presence, particularly the American Presbyterian
Church. Missionaries had a presence in South Sudan since the mid-19th century and in the
Gambella region in the 1950s. The first Christian church, the American Presbyterian Mission,
was established among the Anywaa in Akedo village in 1952 from its base in South Sudan.
Post-colonial Sudan had embarked on the ill-fated nation-building project through the use of
Arabic and the Islamic faith in a pluralist country. Already in 1957, a year after its
independence, the government of the Sudan intensified campaign to marginalise foreign
missionaries and spread Islam and the Arabic language in the South, which was either
Christian or followers of traditional beliefs. Subsequently missionary schools and health
services were nationalised and the activities of foreign missionaries and their very access to
the South were increasingly restricted. The missionaries were ultimately expelled from South
Sudan in 1964. In contrast, the government of Haile Selassie adopted a more pragmatic
approach towards foreign missionaries, though at times evangelical Christianity was
considered as a threat to the status of Orthodox Christianity as the established religion of the
empire. When the missionaries were expelled from the Sudan in the 1960s many of them were
relocated in the Gambella region opening additional stations among the Nuer. These
missionaries were initially welcomed by Emperor Haile Selassie who sought to tap into their
modernizing capabilities, particularly in the peripheral regions where it ‘outsourced’ social service delivery to the missionaries, regions which were regarded as ‘pagans’ not worth direct
commitment by the imperial government. It was the Presbyterian Church which opened one
of the early modern schools, established the first clinic in Gambella and charted a plane from
16
the Sudan to bring in modern goods necessary for the evangelization program. As such
service delivery created an effective basis of political legitimacy for the missionaries, much
more than the imperial government. As the missionaries’ popularity grew the regional
imperial government officials as well as some of the local balabats who forged stronger ties
with imperial Ethiopia became apprehensive, more so when it became apparent that the
missionaries were not only sympathetic to the shiftas but also gave logistic support,
particularly the mission station at Kuatgar and the greater involvement of its leader Charles
Gordon in the ‘shifta affairs’. The following observations by the regional and local
government officials indicate:
The shiftas are Anuak, Dinka, Shilluk, Nuer and Komo of the Sudan. They are the one who brought
insecurity to the Gambella region. I am very much offended by the Ethiopian government, though. Why
did it allow the missionaries to establish camps in our areas? It is they who support the shiftas. It is they
who advise the shiftas to claim all the land up to Baro Qella. The missionaries have no relationship with
us. When they were evicted by the government of the Sudan they came to our areas with their Sudanese
servants. We do not want the ferenjis [white people]. The government can send us teachers and hakims
[health workers]. Once the shiftas start fighting the government of the Sudan they will also extend their
fight against the Ethiopian government. The problem is that we tell you the impending danger; you take
note of it, and you sleep over it (Qegnyazmach Chuol Kid, Kuatgar Kebele, Gambella security Study
Report, p. 34).
The annual report by colonel Lemma also depicts the growing concern by the regional
imperial officials regarding the missionary factor in the Gambella region and the need to
counter evangelical Christianity by reinforcing the position of the Orthodox Church as an
effective strategy of ‘nation-building’:
Three fourth of the Gambella awraja borders south Sudan. Half of its population are Heathens and one
third is Protestant. Thanks to the civil war and the indiscriminate violence by the Northern Sudanese,
peoples of the South have deep hostility towards Islam. They are instead attracted to Christianity. As
the peoples of Gambella are the same with the south Sudanese in terms of language, tribe and culture
they have the same sentiment. This has created conducive environment for us to do politics and spread
Christianity. With greater political investment and with the help of the Orthodox Church we can
establish government authority relatively easily. We planted St Michael Church 500 meters from the
border in Jikaw district in 1963. We managed to convert 600 upon the consecration of the Church and
additional 800 a year later. The same year we also planted another Church, St, Saviour in Itang wereda.
Although there is many missions in the region this is also the best time for us to institute the Orthodox
Church in the region. The Church needs to be more vigorous in proselytization, though. Lest we might
not be able to get the same chance in the future, Gambella to be lost either to the Protestants or to Islam.
The political stirrings along the Ethio-Sudanese border in the 1960s otherwise derided as “the
shifta movement” were part of the waves of regional protests against imperial rule in many
parts of Ethiopia, based on an ethnonationalist or class platform or both (Addis 1975; Gebru
1991). The Eritrean Liberation Front was established in 1960; the Bale rebellion was raging;
peasants in Gojjam challenged the intrusive imperial rule, and the postcolonial Somali state
advanced an irredentist project claiming the Somali-inhabited region of the Ogaden. The
Gambella Study Group report captures the political resonance among these regional protests.
Aware of the gravity of the cross-border political mobilization it recommended a
comprehensive approach to thwart the regional security challenge, and ultimately the very
legitimacy of imperial rule itself. This ranges from decisive military campaign, to
development packages and to a religious project:
17
In all over the world we find trouble spots when people of the border area mobilize on the basis of
ethnic origin, linguistic affinity and culture start challenging lawful governments. We have seen similar
troubles in the Ogaden Before a second Ogaden is created in Western Ethiopia we should nip the
political developments on the Gambela region in the bud. This entails various mechanisms. For one, the
armed force in the region needs to be strengthened (from the current 404 to 797 people); development
activities need to be carried out such as health facilities; schools, roads, motor boats, occasional flights
(to Tiergol). In order to ensure the loyalty of the balabats, they need to be salaried, like their fellow
officials in the Sudan, and occasional visits should be organized to bring them to Addis Ababa and
show them some big factories in order to impress them by the grandeurs of imperial power. Besides, to
make them similar with the Ethiopian people, evangelists and teachers from the Orthodox Church
should be sent, and the activities of the missionaries [the American Presbyterians] should be regulated
or they should be relocated from the border areas (Author’s translation from Amharic, The Gambela Security Study Group Report, 1963: 8-13).
The support of the Sudanese government to the Eritrean secessionist struggle against the
Ethiopian state in the late 1960s on ideological grounds (“pan-Arabism”), however, alienated
the Ethiopian imperial government, which reciprocated by supporting the rebel movements in
Southern Sudan. In 1969 Anynya had developed foreign contacts to obtain weapons and
supplies. Israel, for instance, trained their recruits and shipped weapons via Ethiopia and
Uganda to the rebels. With a new backer, Anyanya I delocalized its social base and became
increasingly predatory towards the people of Gambella, who readily responded to the call for
the ‘black state’ on the basis of ethnic solidarity and as a political resource to renegotiate their
marginality within the imperial political order. In 1972 Ethiopia brokered a peace agreement
between the Sudanese government and the Anyanya rebels, popularly known as the Addis
Ababa Peace agreement. Losing its cross-border base of support Anywaa resistance against
imperial rule in the 1960s had come to an end until the mid 1970 when the region witnessed a
geopolitical twist in the alignment of forces when the Sudanese government showed interest
in advancing its long standing interest in the Gambella region through Anywaa proxies, and
more so when the revolutionary ferment in Addis Ababa sent a shock wave to the
conservative regimes in Khartoum.
Socialist centralisation and its discontent
In September 1974, the imperial regime was overthrown by a popular uprising and replaced
by a ‘socialist’ regime that lasted until 1991. The socialist regime, popularly known as the
Derg, was characterized as ‘garrison socialism’ (Markakis 1987: 202), denoting its military
background and Marxist ideological orientation. Clapham defined the nature of the Derg
regime as ‘Jacobin’, including a project which he refers to as encadrement: ‘It amounted to a
project of encadrement, or incorporation into structures of control, which was pursued with
remarkable speed and ruthlessness. It sought to intensify the longstanding trajectory of
centralized state formation by removing the perceived sources of peripheral discontent and
espousing an ideal of nation-statehood in which citizens would equally be associated with,
and subjected to an omnipotent state’ (Clapham 2002: 14). In a centralized one-party system,
the Derg sought to ‘remap’ Ethiopia along modernist lines (James et al. 2002). The process of
encadrement was pursued in earnest in social, economic, political and cultural fields. Above
all, the Derg carried out social engineering in the context of a ‘high modernist’ project (Scott 1998:4), known in Ethiopia as zemecha (‘Development through Cooperation Campaign’). Under this campaign, students from urban centres were sent to revolutionize the countryside
by liberating the rural masses not only from the yoke of the ancien régime but also from the
‘tyranny’ of local tradition (Donham 1999: 29–35). This was to be achieved through the
Ethiopian version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Economically, encadrement took the
18
form of attempts to gain total control of the peasantry through villagization and resettlement
programmes. Fourteen million peasants were forced to settle in new villages (Tadesse 2002:
117), and another half a million peasants were resettled (Pankhurst 2002: 133) – classic
examples of a state’s attempt to ‘capture’ the peasantry in order to promote national
development (Hyden 1980). In the political arena, the project of encadrement meant not only
a one-party system but also a violent repression of other modes of governance, through the
elimination of opposition parties and the abolition of traditional authorities. Various groups of
people experienced this project of encadrement at differing levels. Among the Anywaa the
revolutionary experience engendered two different types of protest; first the Jor rebellion of
the 1970s led by the traditional elites, and second the establishment of a liberation movement
in the 1980s led by the educated elites. Both forms of protest had trans-national dimensions.
The Jor rebellion
Unlike imperial Ethiopia which sought to govern its periphery at least through a form of
indirect rule by co-opting traditional authorities, however tenuous that might be, the Derg
sought to institute a direct rule with a rigidly centralized form of governance, especially in the
early years of the revolution. As such, more than imperial Ethiopia, revolutionary Ethiopia
radically altered Anywaa society. The expansion of the state, already started by the imperial
administration, was pursued in earnest by the socialist regime, which strongly penetrated local
communities. The first political measure taken by revolutionary Ethiopia in the Gambela
region and in the country at large was to crush any alternative forms of power, from the
imperial kingdom to centralized indigenous political systems, to ritual leaders (Clapham,
1986). The Anywaa were politically visible because they had a relatively higher form of
centralized political system with their nobles and headmen. Both the nyieya and kwaaro were
labeled ‘reactionary’, ‘anti-revolutionary’ and ‘feudal’, as if they were imperial system writ
small. Anywaa traditional leaders certainly had privileges of the office but they hardly
qualified for the kind of strong authority which the term feudal connotes: They had exclusive
rights over some hunting trophies; they did not observe wudo (the customs of ceremonial
respect for various categories of affine relatives followed by ordinary men); nor appear bare
foot (because the removal of sandal is a sign of inferiority in status); and they were greeted
with gungi (the ceremonial low-bowing posture when approaching him or crossing his line of
vision). Nevertheless, as Lienhardt succinctly put it, “these courtesies are to the office, not to the incumbents, “it is the institution of headmanship, not the particular headman, which prompts the ceremonial behavior (1957:29). Commenting on the Anywaa nyieya, EvansPrichard made a similar remark and defined the Anywaa political system as a ritualized
kingship: “it is kingship, not kings, which is sacred”. More ominously the Derg forcefully
monetized Anywaa local economy. As already noted, fundamental social relations in
traditional Anywaa society were created and maintained through the medium of beads,
particularly through dimui. Dimui was also used as a mechanism of ethnic boundary
maintenance, for it made it difficult, if not impossible, for others to marry Anywaa, given its
scarcity. If imperial Ethiopia sought to circumvent Anywaa’s local economy based on dimui
Derg strove to eradicate it altogether. As part of Derg’s cultural revolution the Anywaa bride
wealth system and the traditional currency were forcefully monetized and labelled as
‘backward’ cultural practices. In fact the revolutionary zeal went as far as dumping a
significant amount of dimui into the Baro River.
The avant garde for the cultural revolution were the zemach, high school and university
students who were sent “like an army to reconquering the countryside…with knowledge, an 19
enlightened discourse and practice par excellence” (Donham, 1999:502)6. The zemach
campaigned against the balabats (generic term for imperial office holders). Both the Anywaa
and the Nuer had balabats but attacks on the Anywaa balabats sounded like an attack on
Anywaa culture because it was the kwaari and the nyieye who were converted into imperial
agents, while the Nuer balabat was largely self-made and was an individual project. Anywaa
kwaari and nyieye were deposed and were made irrelevant. Other core symbols of Anywaa
ethnic identity were also abolished, particularly initiation marks (naak), belief in witchcraft
(ci-Jwok) and other associated cultural practices.
The Derg regime took more dramatic measures and violently abolished Anywaa cultural
practices associated with their identity discourse through its modernist project by confiscating
traditional insignia of power, imposed a monetised bride wealth system (the price is now fixed
at 15000 birr), outlawed naak (the extraction of the lower teeth) and the juniors were
‘liberated’ from the elders by giving them more freedom of marriage. For all practical purposes, however, the cultural revolution had meant the articulation of a particular culture in
the name of progress. The Derg reinforced the cultural hegemony of the highlanders in
Gambela, for the state was still a gaala. Despite its initial restructuring of the foundations of
Ethiopian society, the Derg gradually slipped into the national fabric of the Ethiopian state.
As Donham described it, “here was little iconoclastic destruction of old political symbols at the center of Ethiopian politics. The revolutionary state drew on the cultural infrastructure of
the ancien regime and the monarch served as a model for power” (2002:20). Becoming ‘not backward’, therefore, entailed for the Anywaa to participate in a particular (highland) culture thinly disguised as progressive. Donham further noted, “there was a constant and disorienting slippage between symbol and referent. Culturally conservative movements were carried out
under the name of a ‘cultural revolution’.” (p.150). The Anywaa shouldered the brunt of the project as they were near the administrative centres and visible in their political system. An
Anywaa village along the Baro River, Nyikwo, was selected by REYA (Revolutionary Youth
Association) as a model village7.
The political, economic and cultural encroachments of the revolution into Anywaa society
pressed the traditional authorities’ political sensibility more than other sections of Anywaa
society. The material basis of the kingship and the headmen was dimui and the unbalanced
exchanges – receiving but not giving dimui as bride wealth. In fact they were centres of
redistribution. Anywaa political order centred on the dimui and monetization of the local
economy threatened its very foundation. Sometimes, perhaps often, men without sisters could
gain access to dimui, if only indirectly, by placing themselves in the service of a noble or a
headman, who then served as their patron. When the client had reached the age that entitled
him to marry and had rendered sufficient service to his patron, especially through agricultural
labour in his gardens, then the patron would assume responsibility for paying the bride
wealth. The nobles and headmen were able to accumulate dimui by means of imbalanced
reciprocity, to modify Sahlins’s famous term. While the nyiye and the kwaari received dimui
for their daughters’ marriages, they were not required to pay dimui for their sons’ marriages;;
rather, it was the sons’ maternal uncles who assumed responsibility for these payments. This
created a one-way flow of the resource on which power was based, filling the treasury of the
6
On the basis of this enlightenment project, 500 zemach were sent to the Gambela region, assigned to Gambela,
Itang, Abobo, Gog and Jikaw. The Jikaw post was cancelled because of security reasons and the Gog/Jor post
was also transferred to Abobo because of transportation problems, for which more than 400 students
demonstrated for being deprived of their right to participate in the modernist project. In the end only posts at
Gambela and Itang became operational.
7
Nyikowo village was visited by Hailu Tujuba, the chairman of REYA.
20
nyiye and the kwaari with one of the most desired cultural objects. At the same time, however,
the nobles’ and headmen’s dimui was considered to be public property, insofar as these
offices served as redistributive centres for dimui-poor families. In return for their crucial
support in helping poor people marry, the nyiye and the kwaari could build a constituency
based on their networks of clients.
As such, ‘revolutionary’ impositions provoked discontent, which ultimately led to a resistence
popularly known as the Jor rebellion as it was centred at the village of Uthol in Jor district.
The new ‘revolutionary’ socio-political order instituted by the Derg was referred to by the
nyiye and the kwaari as kwec gel, leadership legitimated by acquisition of money, in which
accountability is not to the people governed but to the ‘paymasters’, a reference to the salaries the new leaders received from the government. The new leaders elected by the Derg, the
liqemembers of the peasant associations, were contrasted with the kwaari and the nyiye, who
drew on tradition and patrimony to legitimize their power. The abolishment of dimui was
perceived as socially disruptive. In fact, the increasing incidence of divorce in the 1970s was
attributed to the sudden and forceful shift from dimui to a cash economy. The abolishment of
dimui gave a political capital for the Anywaa leaders who now fight not only to retain their
political power but also in defence of tradition. The rebellion was led by kwaaro Umed. In
1978 Umed chased the teachers from the adult education centre in Jor (all highlanders); burnt
the books and chased away the vice administrator who was sent to quell the situation. In 1979
ten revolutionary guards (as the armed Derg cadres were called) were killed and seven were
wounded. The rebellion spread into other areas. In 1980 three highland teachers were killed in
Cham village (Jikaw district) and the cooperative shop in Pukumu village was robbed and
more schools were burnt. The rebels took control over eight villages in Jor district8.
There was a trans-national dimension to the Jor rebellion, given the support it received from
the government of the Sudan. During the period between the signing of the Addis Ababa
Peace Agreement in 1972 and the outbreak of the second civil war in 1983, the Sudanese
government picked up the British territorial ambition over the Gambella region. According to
the 1902 boundary agreement the legal status of the Gambela enclave, the Baro salient as the
British would prefer to call it, was conditional “so long as the Sudan is under the AngloEgyptian government”. As per the agreement, Ethiopia fervently claimed the enclave as part
of its sovereign territory in 1956 when the Sudan became independent.9 The Sudan
government retained a consul in Gambela for diplomatic and commercial purposes and got
some hydraulic concession10. Sudanese interest over the Gambela region continued unabated
though. This ambition was translated into a political project when the Sudanese government
established a largely Anywaa based political organization called the Gambela Liberation
Front (GLF) in 1976. Anywaa leaders of the GLF include people who later on emerged as
prominent Anywaa politicians in Southern Sudanese politics of liberation such as Philip Udiel
(governor of the Upper Nile region), Paul Anade (MP in Southern Sudan regional council);
Simon Mori (a minister in Southern Sudan government); Agud Obong (General in the
Sudanese army) and Philip Akiyu (administrator of Pochala district). The GLF was
8
These villages were Ulawo, Gony, Angela, Amedho, Iranga, Pakang, Ulang and Ujalo.
According to the Gambela protocol in 1956 sovereignty over the enclave was officially transferred to the
Ethiopian government but the imperial Ethiopian government made available numerous houses for the services
of the Sudanese consul in Gambela with a twenty years rent free concessions (letter written by Ethiopian
Ministry of Foreign affairs to Embassy of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan, dated 2 June, 1971, No
13271/69/21, Metu archive.
10
According to the Gambela protocol, the Sudan government was allowed to continue measuring the height of
the Baro River until such time when Ethiopian hydraulic experts assume the task.
9
21
politically active in the late 1970s. It was actively engaged in recruiting the youth on both
sides of the international boundary in its military base at Galabal11.
The Sudanese government had also sought to reach out to the Jor rebels through niya Ageda
Akwei, the supreme traditional Anywaa authority based in the Adongo region of South Sudan
that border the Jor district.12 Emboldened by this external support, the rebels caused more
damage to government forces, killing twenty-nine and wounding thirty. In February 1982, the
Derg organized a large-scale military campaign to put down the Anywaa rebellion, and after a
fierce battle, the defence of ‘tradition’ was broken. The campaign ended in a symbolic act. One of the rebel leaders, kwaaro Batade Ulaw, was beheaded and the ‘political trophy’ taken to the district’s capital (Gog) for public display; thus symbolically reconstituting government
authority through state terror. A song was composed to commemorate the victory and two
terms were coined to warn the futility of further Anywaa resistance: nyegulaw (destruction of
Ulaw) and dimjor (submission of Jor).
On its part, the Derg was surprised to see Anywaa resistance. It expected an enthusiastic
support for the abolition of the ‘oppressive’ traditional political system. In order to ‘liberate’ the broad masses from yetesasate niqatehilina (in Amharic it means false consciousness)
highland peasants were ‘imported’ to create awareness among the Anywaa farmers to rise up
against their leaders as it is documented in one of the ‘revolutionary’ accounts of the ‘history of the broad masses’ as it is vividly described in the following document:
Although there was exploitation by indigenous balabats, the broad masses were not aware of its existence.
Besides, there were no mechanisms which could have served as an outlet to vent grievances. That was why
the peasants were struggling to restore the balabats into power.
The document further described how difficult it was to convince the Anywaa to be
“revolutionary”:
Because the district was large and the people small, there was no shortage of land; The technique of
production was primitive and this did not create land shortage; Because their rulers were not capable or
interested in surplus production there was little economic exploitation of the scale we find in other parts of
the country; it was difficult to convince the benefits of the land proclamation act too. In order that they
become aware of the exploitation and take up arms against the balabats, ninety peasants were brought from
the highland. It took three years to prepare the people of Gambela to start the struggle (Author’s translation from a document entitled “Ye Gambela Awaraja Sefi Hizb Tarik”, History of the broad masses of the
Gambela District, 1983, p.18).
This depicts how The Derg lamented for the lack or lower degree of class consciousness
among Ethiopia’s massive peasantry;; so much so that it felt the need to induce the same where there was none. On the basis of the nature of its incorporation into the Ethiopian state
(the context of diplomatic rivalry and political competition between imperial Ethiopia and
colonial Britain) as well as the lack of economic incentives because of the unattractiveness of
the lowland plains for settlements for the Highlanders, the Gambela region was spared from
11
The two principal Ethiopian Anywaa actors in this project were Uguta and David. David was later on killed by
a police in the Sudan, while Uguta was imprisoned for failing to maintain order among his followers.
12
Interview with nyieya Adongo Ageda, Utalo village, April 2001.
22
land dispossession such as the one occurred in the newly conquered regions of the south
during the imperial territorial expansion. Towards the end of the 1960s, the Amhara local
governors appealed to the central government to obtain land as a gift and through purchase
and in early 1970s sixty noble families acquired land for large plantations but they were
overtaken by the revolution in 197413.
The GPLM – Towards an Anywaa Liberation Movement
The Ethiopian revolution had a mixed reception among the Anywaa. While the Anywaa who
had a stronger stake in tradition (the kwaari, nyiye and the elderly) felt threatened, others,
particularly the youth viewed the revolution as an opportunity, because the abolishment of the
ancien régime meant not only new political space but also positions of leadership in the new
government bureaucracy as opposed to the hereditary mode of governance. With the ban on
dimui, the youth felt ‘liberated’ from the elders as this allowed them more freedom of
marriage. In the mid-1970s, there were many sisterless bachelors (bouth) who were unable to
marry because of the scarcity of dimui. The plight of these bouth is recounted in a popular
song of the time: ‘If I do not have a sister, I go to Dambala’. Dambala is a gold mining centre
on the upper Akobo River, where many bouth went to earn enough to pay the requisite bride
wealth. Others went to the highlands as wage labourers to work on the coffee farms. The
youth therefore initially welcomed the revolution now that their social advancement was not
governed by either the scarcity of dimui or the authority of the elders. With the monetization
of bride wealth, it became possible for young Anywaa to hasten their social advancement as
long as they could afford to pay for their wives. As such, there was a fine line of articulation
between ‘the weak points’ of the Anywaa social system which generated internal sceptics and
the revolutionary message of “equality”. The revolution was also viewed as an opportunity by certain Anywaa to participate in
‘progress’. The Derg ideology of Ityopiya tikdem (‘Ethiopia first’) appealed to the first
generation of mission-educated Anywaa, who saw in the revolution an opportunity to take
their own people along this road. As Donald Donham noted in his seminal work, Marxist
Modern (1999) he introduced the concept of ‘catching up’ and urged scholars to engage with local projects of modernity: ‘Have anthropologists or historians yet appreciated the
consequences that flow from the apparently simple fact that some actors view their societies
as “behind” and therefore in need of a way to “catch up”’? (Baker 1990, quoted in Donham 1999: xv). A significant number of educated Anywaa joined the revolutionary camp informed
by this modernist thinking; many of them were sent to Addis Ababa and Eastern Europe for
political training. Anywaa elites actively campaigned against traditional dietary practices and
initiation rites, which they believed provided conspicuous ‘evidence’ of the backwardness of the Anywaa. An increasing number of Anywaa became culturally competent in the
Highlander culture. There was also a gender dimension in the Anywaa reaction to the
revolution. Anywaa women were more receptive to the revolutionary rhetoric of chiqona
(exploitation). Commenting on the spirit of the time, an Anywaa woman from Pijwo village
(Jikaw) proudly described the revolution in this way: ‘We [the women] deposed the kwaari and we can now talk freely in front of men.’ She refers here to the gender inequality in Anywaa society, still expressed in the code of honouring men, in which women approach
their husbands on their knees while serving them with food. The building of infrastructure,
particularly the construction of the highly prized Baro Bridge in Gambella town, the opening
of schools and the employment opportunities in government bureaucracy were received as a
13
Yegambela Sefi Hizb Tarik
23
welcome gesture by ordinary Anywaa men and women, who hitherto had experienced
incorporation into the Ethiopian state as a form of stigma characterized by political exclusion
and economic marginalization. Commenting on the prevailing Anywaa mood of the period,
Kurimoto (2005: 341–42) noted, ‘For the first time in history the Anywaa were fully integrated into the Ethiopian rule … Generally speaking the local people welcomed the development of infrastructure and education, appreciating the fact that they were enjoying
more opportunities than ever before’. For a brief period, at least, relations between the
Ethiopian state and one of its historic minorities were expressed positively in kinship terms.
The head of the Derg regime, Mengistu Hailemariam, was addressed as Wora Ariat, the son
of Ariat (Ariat the name given by the Anywaa to the firstborn daughter). This sense of kinship
with Mengistu echoed his self-portrayal as the black leader in the national public sphere.
Although Mengistu’s autobiography mentions his Amhara and Oromo ethnic origins, political resentment to his brutal military dictatorship was often framed by the general public in
‘racial’ terms. Like the Anywaa and the Nuer, therefore, he too fell on the black side of the colour spectrum in the discourse about Ethiopian national identity. To what extent Mengistu
played with such imagery is hard to ascertain, but for the Anywaa his frequent official visits
to the strategically important Gambella were proof of his ‘connections’ with the people of Gambella, instancing a periphery’s symbolic appropriation of the centre. By the mid-1980s
the political and economic processes had greatly disaffected the Anywaa, particularly the
educated youth, who otherwise positively responded to the revolution initially. This was
related to the regional power politics that rekindled the historic hegemonic struggles between
the Anywaa and the Nuer; the new alignment of forces during the second civil war in South
Sudan, and the controversial resettlement program that dramatically changed the demography
of the region.
Ever since the dramatic eastward expansion of the Nuer that culminated by the end of the
nineteenth century there has been hegemonic struggle between the Anywaa and the Nuer, now
manifested in the form of elite completion for political power in the context of politics
organised by the Ethiopian state. As it was already mentioned in the earlier sections Anywaa
elites were initially better connected, particularly with the Ethiopian state. In fact, as Johnson
(1986) noted, imperial Ethiopia outwitted colonial Britain along the Ethio-Sudanese frontier
by extending its sphere of economic and political influence through a flexible form of cooption of local leaders. Since the 1930s, however, imperial Ethiopia had increasingly resorted
to a form of direct rule, largely governing the Gambella region through Highlanders. The
political competition between the Anywaa and the Nuer elites commenced when the office of
the vice-administrator was created in 1978 as part of a positive gesture by the Derg to
accommodate the local elites. In fact, Derg’s populist rhetoric in the early years of the
revolution had resulted in a modest delegation of power to local elites. Local elite
accommodation was also justified on practical grounds; as the most feasible political strategy
to resolve the historic conflict between the Anywaa and the Nuer, particularly in the Jor
district. Drawing on their settlement history - longer residents of Gambella since at least the
17th century as compared with the Nuers most of whom reached Gambella in the early 20th
century - and relatively better competence in mainstream Ethiopian (highlander) culture, the
Anywaa had higher expectations in political advancement. As the two-tiered political power
configuration - Anywaa-Nuer vice administrators under highlanders’ administration gradually tilted in favour of the Nuer educated Anywaa elites found the political process
incomprehensible at best and a “conspiracy” at worst. Taken over by the ‘upstart’ Nuer, they
tried to undercut the growing influence of Nuer elites through personal political networks.
24
This resulted in the re-appointment of an Anywaa as a co-vice administrator14. Ultimate
power during the Derg period was nevertheless in the hands of the highlanders and the Nuer
politicians worked as their junior partners. Nuer dominance in regional politics became more
pronounced, however, after the Derg established WPE (Workers Party of Ethiopia) in 1984
when another Nuer, the vocal politician Thuwat Pal, was appointed as the party’s regional representative. In 1987 the Derg promulgated a new constitution that created administrative
and autonomous regions. Gambela was one of these autonomous administrative regions; a
significant promotion from being an awraja district within a province) district during the
imperial period. The Nuer vice-administrator was appointed as the administrator of the new
Administrative Region of Gambela. With the occupation of two of the most senior posts
(administration and party secretary) by the Nuer, the alienation of the educated Anywaa was
complete. By early 1980s they, too, took up arms against the Derg regime, mending their
differences with the ‘traditionalists’ whom they were busy de-constructing only years before.
With a rapprochement between the modernists and the traditionalists, Anywaa discontent
crystallised into a liberation movement known as the Gambella People Liberation Movement
(GPLM).
The genesis of GPLM goes back to the activities of the GLF, which was initially used as a
proxy for the government of the Sudan to advance its territorial ambitions over the Gambella
region. The outbreak of the second civil war in Southern Sudan greatly undermined the
political vitality of the GLF, some of which joined the newly formed south Sudanese
liberation movement, the Sudan People Liberation Army (SPLA) in 1983. Others joined the
Oromo Liberation front (OLF), which also operated from its base in the Sudan, while still
others retired from politics and asked for apology to the Ethiopian government15. One section
of the GLF which joined the OLF became a nucleus for the formation of the GPLM in 1980,
while at the same time was linked to the Jor rebellion. Other projects of control by the Derg
regime, particularly the resettlement program and Ethiopia’s increasing involvement in the civil war in southern Sudan, had pressed on Anywaa ethnic sensibilities, particularly their
stronger sense of territoriality which was provoked by the rapid demographic changes induced
by both events. In the wake of the 1986 famine, the Derg organised a controversial
resettlement scheme and planned to resettle more than a million people into so-called landabundant areas, particularly in western Ethiopia. The official explanation for the resettlement
programme was to combat the famine-affected population of northern and southern Ethiopia
by resettling them into more fertile areas and organise them into compact villages where it
would be easier to provide social services. Many scholars noted the political dimension of the
resettlement programme. Donham (2002) locates the so-called villagisation and resettlement
schemes within ‘the most expansive moments’ of the Derg regime. Drawing on Scott’s (1998) concept of modernist zeal, he defined high modernism as a kind of irrational faith in
rationality, an ideological use of science (2002:35). Pankhurst (2002) called the resettlement
scheme “one of the most extreme attempts at social engineering in the name of the Marxist ideals” (p.23). Some of the government’s documents also confirm the political dimensions,” one of the objectives of the resettlement is to contain internal and external anti-people
14
The Anywaa sent a delegate to the Prime Minister’s office to bring to the attention of the central government a
power sharing arrangement in the regional administration. This was done through the adopted son of
Fikreselassie Wogderes, who was an Anywaa. It was this personal network that was used by Anywaa elites to
connect with the centre in their competition for power with the Nuer. The delegate secretly left Gambela and
managed the reappointment of the Anywaa veterinarian, Dr David Uduru, as the new vice administrator after
Philip Opiu resigned.
15
Contact between this group of the GLF and the Ethiopian government was made by Simon Morri through the
Ethiopian Embassy in Khartoum, and Simon himself asked asylum in Ethiopia and finally joined the SPLA.
25
forces”16.In the policy direction statement of the resettlement programme the political
objectives were stated as “to strengthen national unity, to defend the border regions and enhance the security arrangements”17. The political dimension becomes even more evident in
the following narrative by one of the cadres of the resettlement programme in the Gambela
region:
The people of Gambela are basically opportunistic [in Amharic welaway]. They stay when things are good
and leave during times of difficulties (in Amharic, simech yemimetu Sikefa ye mihedu). They are largely
refugees. They did not do anything for the country. As Gambela is a strategically important region, enemies
could easily overrun the highlands. With the safari [resettlers] political control could be easier and more
effective. The important reason for the resettlement project is to make the people of Gambela Ethiopian
(etiopiyawi lemadreg). About 90% of the locals had refugee cards. Hence, they do not relate themselves to
Ethiopia culturally or historically. They also admit that they are foreigners (Desalegn Hamito, interview,
September 16, 2000, Gambela town).
As part of the resettlement programme more than 60,000 peasants from northern and southern
Ethiopia were resettled in four sites in the Gambela region, dramatically swelling the
demographic size of the highlanders. Four resettlement sites were established in Ukuna, Tata
Zuria, Perpengo, Ubala and a mixed integrated resettlement scheme was launched along the
Baro River called the BARSP (Baro-Abol Rehabilitation and Support Program). The four
conventional resettlement sites were exclusively designed for the highlanders. The task of the
Anywaa was to cater to their needs, which above all meant the appropriation of some of their
lands and excessive corvee labour. In the BARSP the Anywaa were forced to join the
highlanders and were organised into five Peasant Associations18. All of these resettlement
sites were in Anywaa areas. Apart from losing part of their lands to the new-comers and the
ecological changes from the large-scale deforestation, the dramatic nature of the resettlement
has created a demographic anxiety on the side of the Anywaa, who saw themselves being
sandwiched between Nuer pastoral expansion and state-sponsored resettled highland
farmers19. The new demographic imbalance had a political connotation, for the Anywaa found
themselves being reduced to a minority in their own land. Besides, the resettlement
programme was attached to the state farms (particularly the Abobo state farm) whose
combined produce seriously depressed the price of Anywaa agricultural produce. As if this
were not enough, more grain was imported from another state farm (Angereb) from the
neighbouring highland region of Wollega. More fundamental and with a long term effect was
the social cost of the resettlement programme such as the spread of village alcoholism, which
had weakened productive labour and work ethics. Social peace was disrupted with the spread
of theft and migration to the towns, further depopulating the villages and making them more
vulnerable to land encroachment by the Nuer. This social decline is described by educated
Anywaa elites which they refer to by the acronym the “four Ks”: kac (hunger); kwac
(begging), kap (prostitution) and ku (theft). The 4-Ks were attributed to the arrival and
expansion of the Ethiopian state identified with and represented by the highlanders. Kurimoto
described an Anywaa narration on this process of social decline and economic marginalisation
intimately connected to the activities the Ethiopian state, particularly during the Derg period
as follows:
16
Resettlement in Post-revolution Ethiopia: Results, Problems and Future Prospect. Environmental Problems
and Management National Committee. April 1980 (Ethiopian calendar), p.3.
17
Resettlement in Post-revolution Ethiopia, p.12
18
The total population of the target area was 10,000, 30% Anywaa and 70% highlanders.
19
According to a 1999 UNICEF census of Abobo district, 64% of the district’s 31,700 population are highland resettlers (Abobo district Council, October, 2000).
26
[After the abolishment of dimui] people started to marry by money…Now those young people, why do they not multiply at all? It is because of beer. Those young boys who did not drink, they have now started
drinking. Now those young boys, they do not bear around ten children as their fathers did…Now people believe in gaba [market]. People go to the market and buy things and forget the work at home. Because of
the maize which is brought for welo [guests in reference to the highlanders and the refugees] people left
their work and think about the market (1996:5).
Anywaa disaffection was also situated within the context of geopolitics. The Gambella region
was one of the hotspots of the cold war. The Derg firmly positioned within the eastern camp
by the end of the 1970s the regimes in Khartoum sought alliance with western governments.
A corollary to the “mutual subversion” that the two states were engaged in, both of them
actively supporting each other’s liberation fronts. If the various regimes in Khartoum
ideologically and militarily supported the Eritrean liberation fronts so did the Derg give a
critical military and diplomatic support to the SPLA. In fact, the Derg was considered as a
defector ideological mentor to the SPLA, including discouraging its secessionist posture in
favor of a ‘united’, hopefully, socialist Sudan (Nyaba, 2001). By the late 1980s the Derg
regime was beleaguered by a proliferation of ethno and regional nationalist movements,
particularly in the northern part of the country where two rebel groups were gaining military
strength and diplomatic recognition: The EPLF (Eritrean People’s Liberation Front); the
TPLF (Tigrean People’s Liberation Front), the OLF as well as the GPLM. All these liberation
fronts were supported by the Sudanese government. The Derg responded by intensifying its
military support to the SPLA in return for which it also expected the SPLA to participate in its
war against the Sudanese-backed Ethiopia’s liberation fronts. It is within this complex geopolitical context and alignment of forces that the political competition between the
Anywaa and the Nuer educated elite needs to be situated. It was not by accident that the
“upstart” Nuer elites were progressively promoted in regional power politics, a political
process that the Anywaa educated elites deeply resented. It was rather because they could
provide a better and effective political service to the Derg by serving as the missing link with
the SPLA establishment, which after all had a stronger Nuer component than the Anywaa,
who on the other hand were prominent in the leadership of Anyanya I of the 1960s. This
alignment of forces had also a demographic implication. Regional politics dominated by the
Nuer, refugee’s influx from South Sudan to the Gambella region became a lot easier and
faster; more so because many of the refugees were ethnic Nuer. Pressed by Nuer refugee
influx from the west and resettled highland farmers from the east Anywaa demographic
anxiety sharply increased, fuelled by their historical memory of Nuer expansion and their loss
of large territories connected to that.
In addition to the external support by the Sudanese government the GPLM sought for internal
allies. By the late 1980s there were more than twenty ethnic-based and regional political
movements against the Derg regime (Tadesse, B, 2002:130). Of these the militarily strongest
were the EPLF, the TPLF and the OLF. The GPLM first sought alliance with the OLF.
Although the OLF initially gave military support to the GPLM, its hegemonic aspirations over
the Gambella region and its inhabitants did not seat well with GPLM’s political objective. OLF even sought to control GPLM as a satellite organisation to be used to extend its authority
over who it called the ‘black Oromo’ (peoples of the western borderlands) in post-Derg
Ethiopia (Young, 1999). As a result, GPLM instead contacted the TPLF, which in 1989
transformed itself into the EPRDF (Ethiopian People Revolutionary Democratic Front); an
ethnic coalition consisting of Tigrean, Amhara and Oromo based armed political
organizations. With the EPLF’s and EPRDF’s shift of military operations from northern to western Ethiopia, the GPLM appeared as an important political organisation and enjoyed a
27
higher political profile, with a declared political objective of freeing of the Anywaa
(Gambela) from highlander and Nuer domination and it undertook a series of raids on the
resettlement sites (Kurimoto, 1997).20
As the Derg got embroiled in the multiple wars against the opposition forces, it embarked on
large-scale forceful recruitment of the youth into the army. The national military service had
further alienated the Anywaa youth and pushed them into the GPLM camp. Near to the
administrative centres and defined ‘more’ Ethiopian than the Nuer, the Anywaa were targeted for conscription, as the SPLA focused on the Nuer, as if there was a tacit understanding
between the Derg and the SPLA on division of subjects with their respective consciptive right.
In 1986 GPLM launched military operations in Nyikwo and Pinykew villages in Gambela
district. In the conflict that ensued, 5 GPLM soldiers were killed and 3 captured in an attack
on the Baro-Abol resettlement site that killed 5 resettlers; destroyed a clinic and grain store. A
similar operation was carried out in Itang district and 6 ETCA (Ethiopian Transport and
Construction Authority) workers (all highlanders) were killed and 5 kidnapped. A severe
political repression by the Derg (then entirely represented by the Nuer) followed in which
more than eighty Anywaa were killed, while, dependent on the state and sharing its insecurity
in the politically fragile Gambella, the resettlers were armed by th Derg as a counterweight to
GPLM ‘militancy’. Early in 1991, shortly before his downfall in May 1991, President
Mengistu paid a visit to Gambela; a region that he thought would be the last bastion of “the
national war”. Instead he was confronted by Anywaa political grievances, including their
progressive decline in the regional power politics dominated by their Nuer contenders.
Anywaa political grievance also focused on the SPLA and its atrocities against the Anywaa
near the refugee camps. Anywaa’s anti-Nuer and anti-SPLA sentiment went straight to the
core issues of the geopolitical alignment of forces. It is no wonder then president Mengistu
construed Anywaa political grievances putting in danger the “national agenda”, i.e., the territorial integrity of the country in the context of advancing armed ethno-liberation fronts. In
fact he was so agitated that he could not contain his emotional outburst when he said “how
come that people who could not even feed themselves squabble over political offices?” After the tea break, president Mengistu asked for a public apology for being ‘insensitive’.
However, he still justified his sensitivity by making a parallel with ethno-national movements
elsewhere in the country: “that was how it started in the Ogaden and in Eritrea. I am troubled
that the same thing is brewing in the Gambela region”21, once again the Ogaden spectre in the
eastern periphery was raised by the Ethiopian state to make sense of the looming danger in its
western periphery, as Derg’s predecessor, the imperial government did in the 1960s!
While president Mengistu was seeking to renew the political legitimacy for his tottering
regime in the periphery the EPRDF coalition was poised to take over the centre. As it
transpired a few months later the Derg and the “garrison socialism” that it desperately sought
to institute and uphold crumbled. A new political order that fundamentally restructured the
Ethiopian state emerged in its wake built on an ethnic edifice. The GPLM, as part of the
victors, took over political power in the newly established Gambella regional state within the
ethnic federation of post-Derg Ethiopia. Once again the dawn of a new century appeared to
have brought a new field of political possibility for the Anywaa once again to exercise
meaningful autonomy, cultural rehabilitation and economic empowerment. The hope however
did not last long; as the GPLM had already have a fall out with EPRDF whose centralising
thrust in a federation generated fundamental contradiction within the new political order.
20
As a result the GPLM attended the EPRDF’s conference in the Sudan to build a common front against the Derg regime and 500 GPLM soldiers were sent to Mekele, the Tigrean capital in northern Ethiopia, for military
and political training
21
These statements were confirmed by my highlander, Nuer and Anywaa informants who participated in the
meeting.
28
Gambella rapidly changing as the epicentre of the recent global investment rush in large scale
commercial agriculture, dubbed land grabbing, on the other hand has pressed Anywaa
territorial sensibility, once again goading Anywaa liberation movements, this time with a
wider global reach than a mere cross-border dimension of a local protest. Thanks to its vocal
diaspora and a strong presence in the web the Anywaa have already managed to successfully
insert themselves within the global civil society as a ‘prominent human right’ case.