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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
2011 speech. “Now we have started working on big infrastructural development."
This stance is reinforced by pro-government media such as the
Walta Information Center, which, in a
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
Human Rights Watch and
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.
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."
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