Country: Ethiopia

Group: Sidamo

Date Finalized: 11/13/2020

Team: Maya Shrikant (lead), Colleen Clauss, Natasha Chandra, Michael Demangone

Content Warning: slavery, violence, sexual violence

Approximate Time Period: 1800-1942

            There is strong evidence that the members of the Sidamo ethnic group were subject to forced labor throughout the history of the Ethiopian Empire.

            The Sidama ethnic group of Ethiopia comprises 4.1% of the total population (Central Intelligence Agency, n.d.). Agriculture plays a big role in the lives of the Sidama and they are currently the 5th largest ethnic group in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Highlands is where the largest slave trade took place in the Horn of Africa (Bradley, 2011). In the first half of the 19th century, Sidamo rulers raided their own neighborhoods and enslaved other Sidamo’s for minor crimes (Marcus, 1994). During the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century, Sidamo peoples were forced into the Arab slave trade. Slaves mostly acted as domestic servants, agricultural laborers and town keepers. Prized men worked as bodyguards or business managers for rich merchants, even being allowed to keep slaves of their own (Campbell, 2004). Young women were sold as concubines (Smith, 1989). In comparison to other Ethiopian slaves, Sidamo slaves had a much higher value and were divided into occupational and age castes (Mordechai, 1968). There were efforts to abolish slavery and destroy the slave trade since the 1850s. But slavery was only fully abolished in the 1940s after the signing of the Convention of St. Germain and the appointment of the Temporary Slavery Commission in 1924 (Mekonnen, 2013). The data quality is rated a 2, because there was consistent evidence about instances of forced labor across academic sources.

Sources

  1. Africa :: Ethiopia — The World Factbook – Central Intelligence Agency. (n.d.). Retrieved November 11, 2020, from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/et.html
  2. Bradley, Keith (2011).  The Cambridge world history of slavery (1st ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 71. ISBN 0521840686.
  3. Campbell, Gwyn (2004). Abolition and Its Aftermath in the Indian Ocean Africa and Asia. Psychology Press. p. 121. ISBN 0203493028.
  4. Clarence-Smith, edited by William Gervase (1989). The Economics of the Indian Ocean slave trade in the nineteenth century (1. publ. in Great Britain. ed.). London, England: Frank Cass. ISBN 0714633593.
  5. Mekonnen, Yohannes K. (2013) . Ethiopia: the land, its people, history and culture. [S.l.]: New Africa Press. ISBN 9987160247.
  6. Harold G. Marcus A History of Ethiopia. University of California Press (1994) pp. 55
  7. Hinks, Peter (2006). John McKivigan; R. Owen Williams (eds.). Encyclopedia of antislavery and abolition: Greenwood milestones in African American history. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. p. 246. ISBN 0313331421.
  8. Abir, Mordechai (1968). Ethiopia: the era of the princes: the challenge of Islam and re-unification of the Christian Empire, 1769-1855. Praeger. p. 57