Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 00:34:43 +0200
Ethiopia: When a Traditional Past Collides with an Irrigated Future
Are the government's large-scale developments in southern Ethiopia forcing
local populations to move with the times or just move out the way?
By <http://thinkafricapress.com/author/william-davison> William Davison
Article | 31 August 2013 - 11:11am |
Kangaton, Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region, Ethiopia:
A short stroll away from the bloated Omo River in Ethiopia's far south, a
new type of settlement is forming on the outskirts of Kangaton, a frontier
town occupied by Nyangatom people and highland migrants.
The empty domes are traditionally built: bent sticks lashed together with
strips of bark and insulated with straw. But instead of the typical handful
of huts ringed by protective thorn bushes, hundreds of new homes are
clustered on the desolate plain.
This is a site in the Ethiopian government's villagisation programme, part
of an attempt to effect radical economic and social change in the Lower Omo
Valley, an isolated swathe of spectacular ethnic diversity.
Agro-pastoralists such as the Nyangatom, Mursi and Hamer are being
encouraged to abandon their wandering, keep smaller and more productive
herds of animals, and grow sorghum and maize on irrigated plots with which
officials promise to provide them on the banks of the Omo.
The grass is greener
The government, now rapidly expanding its reach into territory only
incorporated into the state a little over a century ago, says it will
provide the services increasingly available to millions of other Ethiopians:
roads, schools, health posts, courts and police stations. But critics, such
as academic <http://www.africanstudies.ox.ac.uk/dr-david-turton> David
Turton, argue that this state-building is more akin to colonial exploitation
than an enlightened approach to the development of marginalised people.
Longoko Loktoy, a member of the Nyangatom people, says all he knows is
herding, as he carves a twig to clean his teeth, occasionally glancing
behind to check the movements of his sheep and goats. But, he adds, "our
educated boys under the government structure" have told him life in the
resettlement site will be better.
Longoko says his family straddles two worlds, with some of the children from
his two wives receiving education in regional cities and others raising
animals in the Omo. In line with his "educated boys", he says security and
services will improve in the commune, but wants to retain the option to move
to high land or to the Kibish River when the Omo runs low.
"I don't think the government will tell us not to move", he says, a
Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. Nearby, boys hunt doves by firing
metal-tipped arrows from wooden bows, while women, their necks swaddled in a
broad rainbow of beads, begin a long trudge back from the Omo with
jerry-cans perched on their heads.
Longoko is unaware of plans for the under-construction upstream
<http://www.gibe3.com.et/> Gibe III hydropower dam to control the flow of
the Omo River, ending the annual flood that leaves behind fertile soil for
locals to cultivate on when waters recede. The regulated flow will be used
for the country's largest irrigation project:
<http://www.etsugar.gov.et/en/projects/kuraz-sugar-development-project.html>
175,000 hectares of government sugar plantations, some of which will occupy
Nyangatom territory.
"Even though this area is known as backwards in terms of civilisation, it
will become an example of rapid development", was how former Prime Minister
Meles Zenawi
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/201221113415497603.html>
announced the scheme in 2011, heralding the final integration of the people
of the Lower Omo into the Ethiopian state.
"We are from the sovereign"
In 1896, Emperor Menelik II led Ethiopian fighters to a famous victory over
invading imperial Italian forces at the
<http://www.ethiopiancrown.org/adwa.htm> Battle of Adwa - the key moment in
the ancient kingdom's successful resistance to European colonialism. A year
later, it was Menelik's turn to <http://www.ethiopianhistory.com/menelik>
expand further, as he sent his generals out to conquer more of the lowlands
to the east, west and south. An account of the subjugation of the Lower Omo
area was provided by Russian cavalryman Alexander Bulatovich, who Menelik,
an Orthodox Christian like many Ethiopian rulers, invited to accompany his
general, Ras Wolda Giorgis, on the offensive.
The invading highlanders faced little resistance as they marched from the
recently-conquered Oromo kingdom of Kaffa, a place Ethiopians claim to be
the birth of coffee, according to an account of the trip translated by
Richard Seltzer in <http://www.samizdat.com/armies.html> Ethiopia Through
Russian Eyes by Alexander Bulatovich.
"If you don't surrender voluntarily, we will shoot at you with the fire of
our guns, we will take your livestock, your women and children. We are not
Guchumba (vagrants). We are from the sovereign of the Amhara (Abyssinians)
Menelik", the Ras told local chieftains when he arrived in an area slightly
to the south of Nyangatom territory where the Omo flows into its final
destination, Lake Turkana, which mostly lies in Kenya.
"A civilising mission"
Anthropologist David Turton from the African Studies Centre at Oxford
University has been visiting the Omo valley and particularly the Mursi
people since the 1960s. He sees the current approach of the ruling party to
development and state-building in the south, with its "civilising mission"
and "racist overtones", as similar to that of previous regimes, going back
to Menelik.
Schemes imposed from the centre that force people off their land are bound
to create resistance, he believes, although direct, violent forms of protest
are inconceivable given the overwhelming power of the state. In the past,
there was space for people like the Mursi to move out of the way of the
state. Today, he says, they know this is impossible.
"They know that they are practically finished", he explains. "Their way of
life, their livelihood, their culture, their identity, their values, their
religious beliefs - all this is being rubbished by a government which sees
them as 'backwards' and uncivilised. No human being could fail to feel
threatened by this, physically and morally."
At the core of Turton's dismay are the accumulated findings of research on
'development-forced displacement'. This shows, he says, that people who are
forced to move to make way for large-scale development projects always end
up worse off than they were before, unless concerted efforts are made to
prevent this.
"Ideally the government would have taken them into its confidence from the
start, given them full information well in advance, fully consulted them
about its plans, included them in the decision-making, and provided proper
compensation for the loss of their land and livelihoods" he says.
But instead, Turton claims, none of this has happened, and the result will
be increased poverty among the many ethnicities that populate the Omo
valley. That was the fate of Oromo and Afar pastoralists when Emperor Haile
Selassie applied a similar top-down method to Ethiopia's first major river
basin development on the Awash River in the 1960s, he explains.
For the greater good?
Marking a departure from the past, the ruling Ethiopian Peoples'
Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) argues that since it seized power in
<http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/Ethiopia919.pdf> 1991, it
has empowered rather than oppressed the over 80 ethnic groups that live in
the Horn of Africa nation. This is done through an innovative system of
ethnic-based federalism that enshrines the right of each group to govern
itself and protect its language and culture. Critics, however, counter that
centralised policymaking and the de facto one-party system that maintains
political control denies autonomy for regional actors. This tension can be
seen in attitudes to nomadic people: while Ethiopia's 1994
<http://www.eueom.eu/files/dmfile/ethiopian-constitution-1994_en.pdf>
constitution guarantees pastoralists the right to grazing land and not to be
displaced, previously in 1991, the EPRDF adopted a policy "to settle nomads
in settled agriculture", according to a Human Rights Watch
<http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/Ethiopia919.pdf> report from
that year.
In the official narrative, sugar plantations and the new communes in the Omo
are consistent with ethnic federalism, as they will reduce poverty and bring
some trappings of modernity to minority groups.
"In the previous backwards and biased government policy, there wasn't a
systematic plan and no meaningful work was done for the pastoralist areas",
Meles said in his <http://www.mursi.org/pdf/Meles%20Jinka%20speech.pdf>
2011 speech. "Now we have started working on big infrastructural
development."
This stance is reinforced by pro-government media such as the
<http://www.waltainfo.com/> Walta Information Center, which, in a
<http://www.ethpress.gov.et/herald/index.php/herald/national-news/3608-resid
ents-around-omo-kuraz-happy-with-sugar-dev-t-project-villagization-programme
> recent article, presented the projects as unanimously welcomed by local
people. "We had no strength when we have been living scattered. Now we have
got more power. We are learning. We are drinking clean water", Walta quotes
Duge Tati, a local in Village One, as saying. Another villager was said to
aspire to own a car.
However, reports from advocacy groups such as
<http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/06/18/what-will-happen-if-hunger-comes-0>
Human Rights Watch and
<http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/omovalley/gibedam> Survival
International present a starkly opposing view on recent development in Omo.
They contain countless accounts from locals detailing how they've been
coerced and beaten into accepting policies that steal their land and ruin
their livelihoods.
They are a-changing
The Nyangatom have historically been so peripheral to Ethiopia's highland
heart that in 1987 the Kenyan government bombed them with helicopter
gunships in the Kibish area after a particularly murderous bout of ethnic
clashes.
<http://thinkafricapress.com/Downloads/Col.%20Mengistu%20Haile%20Mariam,>
Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia's nationalist military dictator at
the time, allegedly assented to the operation.
Today, officials from Kangaton, the administrative capital, have to take a
boat across the Omo to attend meetings with regional bosses. Despite this
isolation, the impact of missionaries, traders and government is displayed
in aspirations for services and technology, and the adoption of
non-traditional dress and cuisine - at least among some people living in or
near Kangaton.
Lore Kakuta is a Nyangatom who became a Christian after attending school run
by missionaries. He is also the security and administration chief for the
Nyangatom-area government. Wearing a replica Ethiopian national football
team shirt and a head torch bought in Dubai, he sketches out the plans for
irrigated agriculture and a shift to cows that produce more milk.
Lore is uncertain about how much Nyangatom land will be lost to sugar
plantations. And he is clueless about the hundreds of thousands of migrant
workers that it is said will soon be attracted to the area, and the impact
they could have on his people's welfare and their
constitutionally-guaranteed rights. Nyangatom culture is strong enough to
withstand any influx, he says, weakly.
As a meal of goat stew mopped up with flat bread from the Tigrayan highlands
is served, he explains how the traditional culture has changed already,
mainly due to the influence of missionaries. So for Lore, the imminent
transformation is nothing to worry about.
"There is not anything that is going to have a negative effect", he says,
now garbed in a billowing traditional robe after dusk inside his compound.
"We are teaching people to modernise."
http://thinkafricapress.com/sites/default/files/styles/400xy/public/omo.JPG
Nyangatom people by the Omo River. Photograph by William Davison.
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