Nilo-Ethiopian Studies No.18 (2013)

SAYURI YOSHIDA

• The Struggle against Social Discrimination: Petitions by the Manjo in the Kafa and Sheka Zones of Southwest Ethiopia

The drastic changes in Ethiopia during the twentieth century have altered the ways in which minority groups, including hunters and craft workers, earn their livelihood. Although the gap between the standards of living of minorities and majority groups has narrowed, minorities are still excluded from the mainstream of social life and are discriminated against by majority groups. Some minority groups have attempted to oppose this discrimination. Although the Constitution grants rights to ethnic groups, these minorities have not been regarded as ethnic groups and have become even more marginalized and deprived of access to economic and political resources. This article discusses the petitions sponsored by the Manjo in the Kafa and Sheka zones of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Regional State of Ethiopia. The
Manjo are former hunters who suffer discrimination at the hands of the Kafa. The petitions requested improvement in the social status of the Manjo in the form of official recognition as an ethnic group and an end to the discrimination perpetrated by the Kafa. This article examines how the Manjo developed these petitions, claiming a distinct ethnic identity, by describing the social and historical background of the Manjo.

Keywords: Kafa, Manjo, minority, social discrimination, petition

TAKESHI FUJIMOTO

• From Festive to Exchange Labor: Changing Cooperative Labor among the Malo, Southwestern Ethiopia

Cooperative labor is a common institutional practice found in agricultural societies around the world. This study focuses on cooperative labor among the Malo in southwestern Ethiopia, exploring its types and roles and discussing changes. The Malo are mountain farmers with a population of approximately 40,000-50,000. While they grow diverse crops in small home gardens using household labor, they cultivate cereals and pulses in large outlying fields often utilizing cooperative labor. Many agricultural tasks such as field preparation and weeding are performed during the rainy season from June to September and farmers have to cope with temporary labor scarcity during this time by holding cooperative labor parties. Three types of cooperative labor are known: dabo, kete, and zaje. Dabo is a type of festive labor in which prestigious host farmers would summon over 30 workers for help and reward them with lavish food and drinks. Prior to the Ethiopian revolution of 197 4-75, it played a major role in the redistribution of host farmers’ wealth as well as the enhancement of their prestige, but it has already disappeared. Kete is an intermediate type between festive labor and exchange labor. It flourished after the revolution but soon declined by the mid-1980s. Zaft is a type of exchange labor organized by a small number {less than 10} of neighboring farmers. A household opens a work party that rotates from household to household. Each household receives labor from other households and provides a modest lunch, after which the same amount of labor is later reciprocated. Although it was long unpopular due to it being the least enjoyable, this exchange labor has become dominant since around the mid-1980s. Thus, cooperative labor among the Malo has significantly changed from festive labor to exchange labor. Recently, however, even exchange labor is on the decline in the highlands where the population is becoming denser. In the neoliberal trend of economic differentiation since the 1990s, increasingly distressed farmers have asked newly wealthy farmers to employ them as wage laborers for farming. This type of wage labor, called abaale, is rapidly increasing and more or less eroding cooperative labor in the highlands. This gradual but fundamental change from cooperative to wage labor may be considered a sign of economic development. However, cooperative labor has various roles, such as fostering a sense of companionship and solidarity and the transmission of agricultural knowledge and skills from experienced farmers to young farmers by working together. Wage labor does not seem to take over these social roles, because it is only an economic contract. Although cooperative labor has been examined from economic viewpoints, it needs to be explored more from social perspectives.

Key words: cooperative labor, exchange labor, festive labor, reciprocity, wage labor

Research Report
ERI HASHIMOTO

• Prophets, Prophecies, and Inter-communal Conflict in Post-independence South Sudan

Keywords: prophet, inter-communal conflict, war experience, South Sudan

Book Reviews

• Book Reviews

Nilo-Ethiopian Studies No.17 (2012)

MORIE KANEKO

• Open Firing Techniques as Community-based Technology: The Case of the Ari Pottery Making in Southwestern Ethiopia

The objective is to redefine the overall practice of pottery making by Ari potters as one of their community-based technologies. In comparison with the firing method of Japanese kiln firing, Ari’s open firing was at first expected to cause an explosion or cracking of pots due to its abrupt rise of temperature. However, experiments on the ratio of contraction and water absorption of clay showed that they prevent the pots from exploding, even when the temperature of open-firing drastically goes up, by mixing plenty of ground-up broken pots with clay. They have achieved an effective way of making durable pots with minimum time and resources. In the analysis of Ari vocabularies for evaluating the traits of pots all through the process, specific folk categories, which were malki and aani, in evaluating the durability and quality were common to both makers and users. In addition, Ari potters explain the situation when pots are broken during open firing by using aani expression. Ari pottery making as a community-based technology was redefined that was influenced by the evaluation and social behavior are based on the various relationships, which are human-material relationships for making and classifying pots and human-human relationships for exchanging pots.

Keywords: Open firing, community-based technology, pots, Ari, southwestern Ethiopia

ITSUHIRO HAZAMA

• Daily Life as Poetry: The Meaning of the Pastoral Songs of the Karimojong in Northeastern Uganda

The Karimojong have two genres of songs: eete and emong. Emong is a kind of song that individuals other than the composer refrain from singing in public; these songs mention specific castrated animals owned and herded by the composer/singer. A consciousness grounded in the ideology ofidentification with a castrated animal has had a profound effect on the structural features of this creative endeavor. Nevertheless, references to oxen constitute only a small portion of the lyrics of these songs, which describe the life-worlds of singers as they engage in the daily subsistence activities of pastoralism. This paper describes gender divisions of the singing situation characterizing emong and eete songs as well as the ‘empirical’ features of emong and examines: (1) how singing emong enables the singer to satisfy personal needs; (2) how visual images of animal coats function as a metaphoric source; and (3) how visual experiences, the sources of the poetic imagination, are transformed into auditory illusions through the manipulation of color and visual perception.

Keywords: Eastern Nilotic pastoral people, imagination, memory, ox songs, visual perception

YASUAKI SATO

• Selection of Principal Starchy Food in a Livelihood System Based on Bananas: The Formation of Food Culture in Buganda, Central Uganda

In part of the Great Lakes Region of East Mrica, people make their livelihoods by intensively using bananas as a principal starchy food (PSF) as well as a wide variety of other crops. This study examines the selection of the PSF in terms of the cropping patterns and the food-use system among the Ganda people of Central Uganda. Data on their crops suggest that combining production of bananas and other crops is essential for a stable food supply. The ecological characteristics of bananas and the decisions of each household have great influence on cropping patterns. Regarding food use, descriptions reveal that delicate techniques and sensibilities in preparing banana meals are remarkably developed and are also applied to other crops. In this way, an analysis of neither a framework of people’s adaptations to external conditions nor one of food preferences is adequate to understand the complex people-nature relation in a study of food culture. Rather, it is crucial to use both frameworks in understanding the formation of food culture.

Keywords: agriculture, banana, food culture, Ganda, principal starchy food (PSF), Uganda