Children of Hope, The Odyssey of the Oromo Slave from Ethiopia to South Africa (review) 2019 by Shama Books Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 334pp Price. 340 ETB

In Children of Hope, Zimbabwean-born Sandra Rowoldt Shell traces the lives of sixty-four children, most of them belonging to the Oromo ethnic group, who were enslaved in different parts of Ethiopia during 1888 and 1889. While the children were heading to Arabia on vessels, we learn that they were liberated by the British warship in Tadjoura, taken to the harbor of Aden in Yemen, and ultimately sent to thousands of kilometers away in South Africa. There in Eastern Cape, they were handed over to Lovedale Missionary Institution, a mission church, and school who made willing converts among them.

In this historical reference, the academic librarian and archivist Shell, based at South Africa’s Rhodes University, details the experiences of the captives tracing the traumatic experience caused by forcible removal from their homelands, the many hardships of a dependent life in an alien land, the story of struggle for survival and their quest to forge a path towards their future. Comparing the children by age, sex, ethnic group, method of capture and the details of their enslavement and transfer, the author enables a sobering look at a grave history that has been absent from national narratives for too long. The author does not refrain from making general and sweeping statements about the politics, the actors and the process involved in the event, which often came as provocative and partisan.

The Structure of the Book

The book’s eleven chapters are divided into five parts. Her « Introductory Ruminations » sets the context and goals of the book. In 1972, she began working for Rhodes University’s Cory Library for Historical Research in the Eastern Cape and came across several entries reading « Galla Slaves, » in the various card catalogue. That piqued her curiosity to discover who they were and what their link to Eastern Cape was. As she puts it, «The flame of what would prove to be a lifetime interest in and fascination with these Oromo children-their origins and their outcomes-was ignited within me there in the Cory Library over forty years ago. » However, it was only in 2013 that she came to write her Ph.D. thesis entitled « From Slavery to Freedom: the Oromo slave Children of Lovedale, » presented to the University of Cape Town.

The existence of « a rare and immediate collection of first passage narratives », transcribed and edited by the missionaries have served as the basis for the thesis and book.  (No wonder most part of the book reads like a doctoral thesis.) In analyzing the interview transcripts, the author provides considerable information about the children’s places of origin, orphanhood, family composition. Shell reveals how the children were enslaved by members of their families or neighbours and how the high rate of orphanhood contributed to their enslavement. We learn that, a total of 12.8 percent of the slave children were full orphans, 17.4 percent were paternal orphans, and 1.2 percent were maternal orphans. A solid 15.1 percent of the children were pawned sold by members of their families or by neighbors for example, with the death or absence of parents and their tender years being a key factor affecting their vulnerability. 

The second part recounts the story of the moment and modes of capture, the identity of those who kidnapped the children, whether the children were sold for money or bartered for food or goods. A graph is used to show the range of ethnicities and places of origin of the captors, under a quarter of the children (23.3 percent) identifying the Sidama as the raiders who enslaved them. « Almost one-tenth of the captors were from Sayo, an Oromo kingdom ; a further 8.1 percent of the captors came from Kaffa ; 4.7 percent were from Leka (Now a part of modern Oromia). » The author acknowledges that there is a degree of ambiguity surrounding the term « Sidama ». « The word means “Abyssinian” in Afaan Oromoo. There is also a small ethnic group situated farther south named the Sidama, … », she explains. The inclusion of the narratives and graph indicating the length of time the children spent on the road, from the slaves’ home to the coastal entrepots and changing hands « up to ten times. » is an important part of this part.

The third part, which has four chapters, is the heart of the book. It narrates the children’s interception to Aden, soujourn in the desert and the onward voyage, by sea and land to Lovedale and education at Lovedale. What emerges is during the 6 years the children spent at Lovedale most of them proved to be good students, achieving « higher class positions than could have been anticipated, » and on good terms with their South African mates. Fifty-one were baptized into the Free Church of Scotland  and thirteen were admitted to full membership of the church between 1891 and 1895, we learn on page  150. Here, the book pulls togheter insights from the previous sections. Four in five survived and left the school as young adults in seeking out job opportunities. One-third of the twenty-three settling in the diamond-rich area of Kimberley, six in Port Elizabeth and four in Cape Town, embarking on different walks of life. 

The final chapter includes reflections and appenidces, that sums up the aims of the author – to uncover the reasons for the purchase of slave children; and to illustrate their experiences and the narratives that the Scotland mission recorded about the lives of the sixty-four individuals.

The Book’s project and Weakness

One of the shortcomings of Shell’s book is that her own comments about the Oromo people, their ways and those of today’s society that are packed with a trove of ideological assumptions and one-sided reflection.  The 64 children who had been enslaved in ther lands located to the south, southwest, and southeast of Ethiopia belonged to different ethnic groups, Oromo, Kafficho, Shankella, Gurage, Yambo and others, as the author herself indicated.  But a good part of the book, including the title, gives the impression that Oromos were the only people enslaved.

As with a number of Oromo scholars and activists (the influence of Professor Mekuria Bulcha, whom she thanked in the acknowledgment  for his elucidations about the Oromo people, is obvious), Shell delivers a devastating indictment of Menelik’s atrocities and his active « expansion » of the slave trade during the latter decades of the nineteetnh century. Shell says little, if anything, about how the Gibe and Kaffa kings enslaved and sold the children of parents too poor to pay their taxes, even though this was recorded on numerous slavery histography. Abba Jiffar II, the Sultan of Jimma at the time of the Menelik’s invasion, was reputed even to have paid his medical fees in slaves.

Dirk Bustorf of Hamburg university in an entry in Encyclopedia Aethiopica wrote that « in their history, most ethnic groups in southwestern and southern Ethiopia were exposed to enslavement but often also enslaved war captives for domestic usage and trade. The Nuer enslaved the Komo, the Majangir were raided by Anwaa, and highlanders, the so-called Gimira groups, Mer, Seko, Nayi, Cara) were victims of Oromo raiders as well as campaigns of the Hinnario and Kafa kings. The large requirement of the Kaffa kingdom in slaves were supported by captives of war from its vassal states of Konta, Dawro, and Kunca,» he quipped. Donald Levine in Greater Ethiopia wrote that a large part of the increased slave trade in the first half of the nineteenth century consisted of Oromo captives being sold by other Oromos.

Shell’s narrative attempts to rewrite the historical record to serve the purpose of politics. She, for example, suggests that the Oromos have populated the Ethiopian highland plateau for millennia against the historical assertion they have entered and settled during the seventeenth century.  But there is disappointingly little evidence for her argument except for her citation of the Oromo scholar Mohammed Hassen’s The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History who in turn cited the British army officer and colonial administrator, Sir Darrel Bates. The Oromo « were a very ancient race, the indigenous stock, perhaps, on which most other peoples in this part of eastern Africa had been grafted, »  goes Batte’s quote. A more probing attitude to the claim, though, would have strengthened her book. In his review of Mohammed Hassen’s The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History, Harold Marcus asks why make such sweeping claims on the bases of tenous material. « The answer lies in the politics of ethnic competitions in Ethiopia. If the Oromo inhabited the country’s central highlands before their historic invasions of the seventeenth century, then current politicians characterize Semitic speakers, who have long dominated modern Ethiopia, as colonialists,» Marcus quipped.

Such loose rhetorical and extravagant claims do not help make that vital point but distract from it. This point was not lost on another foreign reviewer, Sandra E. Greene who reviewed Shell’s book for the American Historical Review, December 2019. « Shell’s analysis of the political conditions in the region, both in the nineteenth century and today, as well as her description of the Oromo communities from which the majority of the children came are also colored by her own political sentiments. She speaks forcefully in support of the political interests of the Oromo people, past and present and can, at times, romanticize the Oromo as a whole by noting how all « live in harmony with nature »(162), » she wrote.

Rather hard-to-explain omissions are the failure to use the study of Timothy Fernythough’s « Slavery and slave trade in Southen Ethiopia in the 19th Century », in Clarence Smith 1989, « Revisiting Slavery and the Slave Trade in Ethiopia » by Giulia Bonacci and Alexander Meckelburg, published in North East African Studies Vol, 17 Nov 2, 2017, and the entries in Encyclopedia Aethiopica, under the titles, Slave trade from ancient times to the 19th century written by Richard Pankhurst, Red Sea slave trade in the 19th century, written by Jonathan Miran, slave raiding in the 19th century, by Dirk Bustorf, domestic and court slavery by Dirk Bustorf, Wolbert Smidt’s 2010 ‘Slavery and politics’.

By Way of Conclusion

This shortcoming does not, however, affect the quality of the book’s overall merit in bringing to light a story ignored from the Ethiopian stage. This will surely open a conversation about childhood enslavement and the practice of slave trading that will lead to further discussion.

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