Ethiopia: When a Traditional Past Collides with an Irrigated Future

August 22, 2013

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 Watchreport 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.