Ethiopia Rural Society
Peasant from Bale.
Courtesy United Nations (John Issac)
Grandmother carrying child in Borana.
Courtesy United Nations
(Ray Witlin)
Political scientist John Markakis has observed, "The social
structure of traditional Amhara-Tigray society [represented]
the classic trinity of noble, priest, and peasant. These
groups [were] distinguished not only through the division of
labor, distinct social status, and a clear awareness of such
distinctions expressed and justified in ideological terms,
but also through differences in their relationships to the
only means of production: land." In the northern highlands,
land was usually held by the kin group, the state, and the
church and, through each of these, by individuals. Private
ownership in the Western sense came later and was abolished
in 1975.
Anthropologist Allan Hoben is considered to have made the
most thorough analysis of Amhara land tenure and its
relation to social structure. According to his findings, the
cognatic descent group (see Glossary), comprising men and
women believed to be descended from a common ancestor
through both males and females, ultimately held a block of
land. As in cognatic descent systems elsewhere, men and
women could belong to several such landholding groups. The
descent group and each of its segments had a representative
who looked after its collective interests. This agent, the
respected elders, and politically influential members of the
group or its segments acted in disputes over rights to land.
The land was called
rist
(see Glossary) land, and the rights
held or claimed in it were rist rights. An Amhara had claims
not to a specific piece of land but to a portion of it
administered by the descent group or a segment of this
group. The person holding such rights was called ristegna.
In principle, rist rights guaranteed security of tenure.
Litigation over such rights was common, however. Most
northern highland peasants held at least some rist land, but
some members of pariah groups and others were tenants.
Peasants were subject to claims for taxes and labor from
those above them, including the church. The common term for
peasant, derived from the word for tribute, was gebbar.
Taxes and fees were comprehensive, multiple, and burdensome.
In addition, the peasant had to provide labor to a hierarchy
of officials for a variety of tasks. It was only after World
War II that administrative and fiscal reforms ended many of
these exactions.
The state exercised another set of rights over land,
including land held in rist. The emperor was the ultimate
and often immediate arbiter of such rights, called
gult
(see
Glossary) rights, and the recipient was called gultegna.
There was considerable variation in the content and duration
of the gult rights bestowed on any person.
Gult rights were the typical form of compensation for an
official until the government instituted salaries in the
period after World War II. Many gult grants were for life,
or were hereditary, and did not depend on the performance of
official duties. The grants served to bind members of noble
families and the local gentry to the emperor.
The emperor also granted hereditary possession (rist gult)
of state land to members of the higher nobility or the royal
family. Peasants on such land became tenants of the grantee
and paid rent in addition to the usual taxes and fees.
Lieutenants who shared in the tribute represented the
absentee landlords.
Those who benefited from the allocation of gult rights
included members of the royal family (masafint, or princes),
the nobility (makuannent), the local gentry, low-level
administrators, and persons with local influence. Until the
twentieth century, the chief duties of the makuannent were
administrative and military. Membership in the makuannent
was not fixed, and local gentry who proved able and loyal
often assumed higher office and were elevated to the
nobility. It was possible for a commoner to become a noble
and for the son of a noble--even one with a hereditary
title--to lose status and wealth unless he demonstrated
military or other capabilities. Although there was a gap in
living standards between peasant and noble, cultural
differences were not profound. Consequently, the Amhara and
Tigray lacked the notion of a hereditary class of nobles.
Although it is possible to divide the Amhara and Tigray
populations of the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth
centuries in terms of rank, social status, power, and
wealth, those who fell into various categories did not
necessarily constitute distinct strata.
The pattern of land allocation in the southern territories
incorporated into the empire by Menelik II differed in
important ways from the pattern in the north. Moreover, the
consequences of allocation and the administrative regime
imposed by Menelik II and Haile Selassie varied, depending
on the way in which particular ethnic groups or regions
became subject to Ethiopian rule, on the nature of the
preexisting sociopolitical structure, and on the territory's
economic appeal.
Supposedly, the government divided conquered land in the
south on the one-third (siso) principle, by which two-thirds
went to the state and the remainder to the indigenous
population. In fact, the proportion of the land taken by the
state ranged from virtually none to more than two-thirds. In
areas such as Jima, which had capitulated to Menelik II
without resistance, the state took no occupied land,
although it later took over unoccupied land and granted much
of it to leading imperial officials. Other northerners,
attracted by the coffee-growing potential of the Jima area,
bought land in that region. In areas inhabited by nomads,
all the land was state land, little was granted, and the
pastoralists used it as before.
The government allocated state-held land to a variety of
claimants. The emperor retained a substantial portion of the
most fertile land. Churches also received large amounts of
land in the south as northern governors implemented the
imperial policy of establishing Orthodox Christian churches
in conquered territory and as northern clergy came in
numbers to serve them. Each church received samon grants,
according to which the church held the rights to tribute in
perpetuity, and the tribute from those working the land went
solely to the support of the church (or local monastery). No
part of it went through the secular hierarchy to the
emperor. The nobility, including the leaders of Menelik's
conquering armies (many of whom became governors in the
south), received rist gult rights over large areas occupied
by peasants. Rist gult holders, secure in their rights,
allocated land rights of various kinds to kinsmen and
retainers. The government granted rist gult rights over
smaller parcels of land to officials at any level for loyal
service. Remaining land was divided between the indigenous
population and traditional leaders (
balabats
--see Glossary),
who acquired some of the best land. People who had been on
the land thus became tenants (gebbars).
Peasants from the north went south as soldiers and
settlers. If the soldiers and their heirs continued to
perform military or other service, they received land that
remained in the family. If they arrived as settlers, the
government gave them small parcels of land or allowed them
to buy land from the state at low cost. Such land,
unencumbered by the residual rights of a kin group but
requiring the payment of state taxes, was thus held in an
arrangement much like that applied to freehold land.
Generally, settlers were armed and were expected to support
local officials with force.
Most of the southern population consisted of indigenous
peoples, largely deprived of the rights they had held under
local systems. They, like Amhara and Tigray peasants, were
called gebbars, but they held no rist land and therefore had
little security of tenure. The situation of the southern
gebbars depended on the rights granted by the state over the
land on which they lived. Those working land granted to a
minor official paid tribute through him. If the land
reverted to state control, the gebbar became a tributary of
the state. As salaries for officials became the rule after
World War II, the land that formerly served as compensation
in lieu of salary was granted in permanent possession (in
effect, became freehold land) to those holding contingent
rights or to others. In these circumstances, the gebbars
became tenants.
The basis of southern social stratification was, as in the
north, the allocation of political office and rights in land
by the emperor. The method of allocating rights in land and
of appointing government officials in the south gave rise to
a structure of status, power, and wealth that differed from
the arrangement in the north and from the earlier forms of
sociopolitical organization in the area. Those appointed as
government officials in the south were northerners--mainly
Amhara, Tigray, and educated Oromo--virtually all of whom
were Orthodox Christians who spoke Amharic. This meant that
social stratification coincided with ethnicity. However, the
path to social mobility and higher status, as in the north,
was education and migration to urban areas.
In 1966, under growing domestic pressure for land reform,
the imperial government abolished rist gult in the north and
south and siso gult in the south. Under the new system, the
gultegna and the gebbar paid taxes to the state. In effect,
this established rights of private ownership. The abolition
of rist gult left the northern Amhara and Tigray peasant a
rist holder, still dependent on the cognatic descent group
to verify his rights to rist land. But at least he was
formally freed of obligations to the gult holder.
Typically, the landholders and many northern provincial
officials came from families with at least several
generations of status, wealth, and power in the province--
situations they owed not to Menelik II or to Haile Selassie
but to earlier emperors or to great provincial lords. These
nobles had some claim to the peasants' loyalty, inasmuch as
all belonged to the same ethnic group and shared the same
values. Peasants often saw attacks on the northern nobility
as challenges to the entire system of which they were a
part, including their right to rist land.
By contrast, whether or not they were descended from the
older nobility, southern landholders were more dependent on
the central government for their status and power. They were
confronted with an ethnically different peasantry and lacked
a base in the culture and society of the locality in which
they held land.
In 1975 the revolution succeeded in eliminating the
nobility and landlord classes. Those individual group
members who avoided being killed, exiled, or politically
isolated were able to do so because they had in some way
already modified or surrendered their rights and privileges.
Land reform affected huge numbers of people throughout
Ethiopia. However, there were regional differences in its
execution. Peasant associations carried out land
redistribution in the south, motivated not only by economic
need but also by their antipathy toward the landlords. In
the north, the government preserved rist tenure, and the
peasant associations concerned themselves mainly with
litigation over rist rights. Moreover, northern peasants
were not driven by the ethnic and class hatred
characteristic of southern peasants.
The 1975 Peasant Associations Organization and
Consolidation Proclamation granted local self-government to
peasant associations. Subsequently, peasant associations
established judicial tribunals to deal with certain criminal
and civil cases, including those involving violations of
association regulations. Armed units, known as peasant
defense squads, enforced decisions. Additionally, peasant
associations had economic powers, including the right to
establish service cooperatives as a prelude to collective
ownership (although there was little peasant enthusiasm for
the latter). The revolutionary government also established a
hierarchy of administrative and development committees in
districts, regions, and subregions to coordinate the work of
the bodies at each administrative level. The Workers' Party
of Ethiopia (WPE) later supplemented the work of these
committees. Only a few officials spoke for peasants at the
district and subregional levels, and rarely, if at all, were
peasants represented in regional organizations, where
civilians and military members of the central government
were in control (see
Peasant Associations, ch. 4).
Data as of 1991
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