The scholarly literature on Ethiopia has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, a remarkable achievement given the constraints imposed by successive political regimes in Addis Ababa. Much of this output has focused on Ethiopia?s past, and increasingly on its social and economic history. As a result, there has now emerged a rich historiography, much of it focused on the twentieth century, but also reaching back to the centuries before 1900. [1] However, there remain in Ethiopian social history two significant gaps, and potential areas for further research. The first is the role of women and gender, the second, the institution of slavery and its life-blood, the slave trade. In focusing on the role of women in slavery in nineteenth century Ethiopia, this paper is intended to address both lacunae, and to tap a lode which elucidates servile women?s experiences in terms of power relations, gender relations between the sexes, and as these articulate with such other factors as ethnicity, culture, religion, community and family.
There is still no single book concerning women in Ethiopia as a whole. Moreover, it is only relatively recently that social scientists have started to consider issues raised by feminist scholars, and to inform analysis with theory associated with the concept of gender. [2] Yet the last forty years have seen exciting developments, slowly at first, but at an increasing pace, with scholarship on the legal and social condition of women in Ethiopia, their role in education and training, on gender issues in health care, and in the media and rural development. [3] In the latter field, Helen Pankhurst?s work on Amhara women in Menz has moved our focus well beyond conventional development studies and the role of women in economic production. [4] Indeed, as scholars have explored how different groups within Ethiopia, including women, have tried to preserve their cultures and history, they have focused increasingly on the historical origins, the perceptions, and the politics of identity. [5] Stressing that the perception of women in Ethiopian society and history rests in large part on cultural context and their ?self-involvement?, Almaz in particular has talked in terms of scholarship and development aimed at ?restoring women?s identity?. [6] Helen Pankhurst, for her part, has pioneered analysis of how local custom and household dynamics, tradition, folklore, religious and spirit beliefs, have reflected, moulded, and reinforced feminine identities in rural Ethiopian society. [7]
For all the promise of this new literature, there are still very few notable treatments of women in Ethiopia?s past, and little commitment by historians of women and gender. Richard Pankhurst has looked generally at the role of Ethiopian women from the medieval period to the mid-1800s, and specifically at the history of prostitution. [8] His examination of dynastic marriage and alliance in this period complements that of Bairu Tafla for the early twentieth century. [9] Prouty has illuminated the lives of leading women of Ethiopia?s ?time of troubles?, the Zamana Masafent, and the career of the Empress Taytu Betul, wife of Emperor Menilek (r. 1889-1913), and de facto ruler of Ethiopia for two years after his health failed in 1908. [10] Finally, Crummey has demonstrated how far in the historic heartland of Christian Abyssinia women of the nobility and gentry enjoyed formal rights to land (gult) and how far they actually controlled it. [11] In extending this analysis in his recent monograph, Crummey has shed new light on how land transfers can inform our understanding of the role and status of women in an imperial state and society governed by, or gendered to, a hegemonic masculinity. Through his close examination of the formidable Empress Mentewab (r. 1830-1869) he has also disclosed how in a state in which the Solomonic heritage was a male domain, women might rule, and even reign. [12]
Unfortunately most of these studies have tended to focus on the women of Ethiopia?s ruling families, nobility and gentry, who were both privileged and a minority, and hardly representative of their sex. As I have remarked previously, a significant problem of the limited historiography of Ethiopian women is that it is skewed towards those of royal and noble ancestry. [13] History still needs to enfranchise the majority of women who belonged to the labouring classes, by far the largest part peasant women, but also including thousands of female slaves. More generally, Almaz has reminded us that women constitute over half the Ethiopian population, have ?figured prominently? in the development of Ethiopian society, and require closer academic scrutiny. The lack of previous studies of Ethiopian women, particularly in historical and cultural context, reflects, in her view, an ?absence of previous concern? both with women and especially with gender issues. [14] Hence, the aims of this paper are to both redress the balance away from the elite toward the plebeian by looking at the female slave in nineteenth century Ethiopia, and to apply the approaches of gender history to shed light on their role and condition.
If historians have barely examined the place of the majority of women in past Ethiopian societies, and have only just begun to work with the concept of gender, they have done rather better by the Ethiopian slave trade, slavery, and the causes of slavery?s ultimate demise. Nevertheless, as for women, there is still no single book embracing these themes. Pioneered as a subject by Richard Pankhurst and Abir, contextualised locally by Tekalign, Guluma and Abdussamad, and interpreted, particularly in its decline, by Marcus, Edwards, McClellan, McCann and Miers, Ethiopian slavery still deserves much scholarship, not least on its scale, nature and role as a social institution, and on its economic importance. [15] Hence, this paper picks up the lead set by Hassan, Darkwah and Ege, who in general works have considered slavery in the nineteenth century Oromo states of the Gibe and Dedesa river valleys and in the kingdom of Shawa. [16]
Four distinct perspectives frame the following analysis of women in Ethiopian slavery: geographical, chronological, thematic and interpretive. Thus, the regional focus lies with the largely Amharic and Tegrenya-speaking heartland of Christian Abyssinia - the historic provinces of Bagemder, Shawa, Gojjam, Lasta and Tegre (including the Eritrean districts of Hamasen and Akala-Guzay). However, it also embraces the vast southern part of Ethiopia incorporated into the modern state after 1870 by the Emperor Menilek II. Lying to the south of the Abay (Blue Nile) gorge and the Shawan plateau, the frontiers of the historic Abyssinian state, these southern territories include the post-1942 provinces of Wallagga, Illubabor, Kaffa, Gamu Gofa, Arsi, Sidamo, Bale and Harar, and large areas of Shawa to the south and west of Addis Ababa which were among Menilek's earliest southern conquests. The rationale behind looking at both historic Abyssinia and the formerly independent peoples of southern Ethiopia, particularly those of the centralized Oromo and Omotic polities of the southwest, is primarily comparative. Yet it also acknowledges that any discussion of the institution of slavery, and of the trade nexus which upheld the expansion of the slave trade in the Ethiopian region in the nineteenth century, necessarily encompasses both northern and southern Ethiopia.
Chronologically, a long nineteenth century starts in the late 1700s, and extends to the death of Menilek II (r. king of Shawa from 1865, emperor 1889-1913) and the brief reign of his dissolute successor, Lej Iyasu (r. 1913-1916). However, attention is directed primarily to the period between circa 1800 and the 1880s when southern Ethiopia still lay for the most part beyond the borders of the imperial state. As with the geographical division depicted above, this chronological focus once again permits close analytical comparison between the northern Christian kingdom and the southern Oromo and Omotic state complex of the Dedesa, Gibe and Gojab river basins. By the last decades of the nineteenth century the Ethiopian empire had grown to include both the latter and the slave-producing regions of the far south and southwest. Even though Menilek?s initial commitment to end slaving was restricted by the very process of conquest, which produced thousands of profitable captives, by his reliance on duties on slaves in transit through his kingdom of Shawa, and by his need at times to pay heavy imperial tribute, from the 1890s his government attempted to end commercial slaving. [17] Henceforth, the institution of slavery, left largely untouched by Menilek?s edicts against the slave trade, persisted within an expanded empire. Though differences remained between slavery in the north and south, the logic and utility of comparative analysis between historic Abyssinia and the now newly incorporated territories is less compelling for the period after 1890.
Thematically, and interpretively, this paper pursues its analysis through a range of issues. After touching on the insights that gender history can bring to the history of the female slave in Ethiopia, it looks at how gender articulates with language, ethnicity and culture as one of a number of other ?socio-cultural relations?. [18] It proceeds to explore substantively a range of issues: gender, slavery, and social mobility; the need for, role, and condition of slave women in palace, household and family contexts; the numbers of female slaves, and the relative proportions of female to male slaves in slavery; slave women as agricultural labourers and in craft industries; the legal status of female slaves, their treatment and manumission; and finally, and relatively briefly, the traffic in female slaves, analysing such themes as the scale of the trade, proportions and ages of female slaves, their treatment in transit, prices and profitability. Amidst this detailed analysis, which also compares female slavery in northern and southern Ethiopia, the intent is not simply to add slave women to Ethiopian history, but to explore Ethiopian slave women?s history. Yet in acknowledging that this history of slave women is distinct, but not separate from the history of men, the essay nonetheless rejects a reduction view that renders analysis gender-neutral. Rather it affirms that society, economy, and gender, and not forgetting human agency, interact to create historical experience, and to define identity, politics, and relations of power, including those between the sexes. [19] Hence, this analysis of Ethiopian women in slavery is grounded in context, and set in relation to the experiences of male slaves, and the opportunities afforded to them.
As Seifu Metaferia, Richard Pankhurst, and most recently Teshale Tibebu have observed the very term for slave in Amharic and Tegrenya is loaded with meaning, mostly negative, and largely reflective of the historic power relations between the core of Christian Ethiopia and the ethnic groups on its peripheries. Thus the word slavery was not only the general term for the slave, but also applied also to a specific ethnic group, and to the widely held perception within Ethiopia of a distinct phenotype. [20] Historically, it derived from the longstanding interaction between Abyssinians and the Barya and Kunama of northwest Ethiopia and Eritrea. The Barya were so heavily raided for captives that their very name came to mean slave. [21] Linguistically recorded in Amharic at the latest by the late seventeenth century, but possibly entering the Semitic languages of Ethiopia even in antiquity, the Barya also figured in Christian traditions recorded in Eritrea as the descendants of ?the slaves of Leah?. [22]
Hence, the term slavery came to depict a person different in language, religion, ethnicity and appearance, and in time, as the Christian state raided across its western frontiers for slaves, as inherently inferior and servile. The highland Ethiopian spoke Amharic or Tegrenya, was an Orthodox Christian, and was of relatively light skin colour red. The lowland Barya, Kunama, Berta, Gumuz, Khoma, and other peoples of the western Ethiopian periphery, were none of these. They were held in low regard precisely because they spoke languages other than Amharic, were ?pagan?, and because they were dark skinned and had different facial features. [23] Equally burdened with meaning and inference was the term shanqella, which two major dictionaries define as ?Negro?, and which was commonly used simply to describe the ?blacks?, or the Nilo-Saharan peoples of Ethiopia?s western frontiers. Militarily vulnerable to repeated slave raids from the Abyssinian core, ethnic groups described as shanqella were, as Donham has argued ?essentially, reservoir populations of potential slaves, seen almost as part of the natural environment of the Abyssinian state?. Thus, shanqella had a strong ?secondary meaning? of slavery. Put more simply by Teshale, the terms slavery and shanqella both became ?common terms for slaves?. [24]
Like the depiction of the widely dispersed Oromo, the largest ethnic group in the Horn of Africa, as ?Galla?, both the appellations, slavery and shanqella, were clearly pejorative. [25] Whether, as Donham has argued, to Christian Amhara the primary meaning of ?Galla? focused ?not on race?, but on their religion and culture (they were ?pagan? and ?uncivilised?), colour and racial features clearly set the slavery and shanqella apart. [26] As prejudiced as Abyssinians were historically against the Oromo, fearfully regarded as savage invaders from outside Ethiopia, as ?barbarian hordes?, even as ?animals?, the latter were physically no different from the former. Though many Oromo were enslaved in centuries of contact with Christian Ethiopia, Yajju Oromo princes came to determine the destiny of the Gondarine state in the early 1800s, and ?tens of thousands? of Oromo peasants and pastoralists integrated into the ?host society? through intermarriage, baptism, by learning Amharic, and by gaining claims to those inalienable rights to land (vested in a cognatic descent group from a legendary first holder, the wanna abbat - usually a noble, soldier or priest), known as rest. [27] Indeed, as Crummey has argued, Ethiopian society defined ?Galla? by the apparent degree of divergence from the prevailing Abyssinian culture of the Christian kingdom, not essentially by descent. [28] By contrast, and though their slave descendants could also integrate themselves into Abyssinian society, a shanqella was stigmatized from the outset by race and colour.
Such arrogant and denigrating Abyssinian attitudes towards the tsalim slave (the dark slave) and the shanqella, which were shared by many Oromo, tell us much about the power relations, and the process of assimilation, between the historic Abyssinian state and its peripheries. [29] However, analysis so far has addressed neither the female slave, nor how gender articulated with language and ethnicity, in a number of metaphorical and material ways. Yet these are often as revealing of Ethiopian perspectives and prejudices towards the female, as they are towards the female slave. They reflect an Ethiopian society, which Almaz and Hanna Kebede, among others, have described as patriarchal, in which women were regarded as subordinate and inferior, often as impure, licentious and contaminating. Reinforced in Christian Ethiopia by the church?s view of women?s blood as unclean, this degrading view of women as ?polluted and polluting? was particularly associated with female sexuality, menstruation and childbirth. [30] Nor were these negative views of women, often as idle, deceitful or untrustworthy, confined to historic Abyssinia. As Levine has argued, many Ethiopian peoples emphasised manhood and masculinity, and denigrated women, their femininity, and their ?alleged female attributes?. If the Amhara commonly expressed demeaning views in such idioms as ?women?s work? and ?women?s talk?, and in derisory proverbs like ?women and donkeys need the stick?, many of the cultures of ?Greater Ethiopia? also portrayed women in an unfavourable light, alternatively or in combination as lazy, unstable, unreliable, shrewish, treacherous, and even as hyenas. [31] The low regard in which they were held meant that all women were widely expected to be reserved, modest, and submissive, but for peasant women it ensured that the daily round was long and arduous, that they bore the primary responsibility for processing crops, preparing food, carrying water and gathering fuel. [32]
As I have observed elsewhere, scholars need to be careful in assessing these pejorative views of women. [33] First, they were not held ?generically? by all the peoples of Ethiopia. By contrast with other ethnic groups, for example, the non-Muslim Oromo, have a ?relatively benign view of women? and may have a somewhat different view of female sexuality. [34] Indeed, a recent survey of eleven major national groups suggests that the Oromo lie at one end of a spectrum in according women high social status, Afar and Anuak low status at the other, and the Amhara somewhere between. [35] Secondly, within each ethnic group views of women, their role and status, were not held equally between the sexes. Thus the same recent survey suggests that men and women differed markedly in their assessment of their roles as the family?s breadwinners, a conclusion, which it would seem reasonable to project into the past. [36] Thirdly, commonly held views depreciating the place and status of women may disguise their political significance historically, their substantive legal rights (particularly over claims to land, in marriage contracts, and to initiate divorce), and their important role in making weighty decisions involving their households and all domestic transactions. [37] Finally, even where men dominated politically, ideologically and legally, women questioned and challenged their authority, and occasionally emerged to enjoy pre-eminence and political sway. [38]
Nonetheless, negative attitudes towards women were often amplified when they were applied to female slaves. Metaphorically indeed, the combination of derogatory views of women, other ethnic groups, and slaves often assumed in derision or hostile aspersion more than the sum of their parts. Very often this focused on behaviour, morality, virginity, sexuality, suitability for marriage, and generational descent. Thus it was no coincidence that while women in many Ethiopian societies, from Abyssinia to the southern kingdom of Kafa, might be deprecated as lazy, untrustworthy and immoral, these attributes were also held typical of slave behaviour (yabarya tabay). [39] Referring directly to the latter characteristic, the term for slave dangal, slave virgin, entered the Amharic vernacular as a form of sarcasm. As Seifu and Teshale have explained, it referred to ?something that is hardly possible?, that is ?finding virgins among slave women?. Even more pervasively among a number of Ethiopian peoples, the projection onto women of an often-fearful sexual allure and appetite, reinforced by several times the commonly held image, for both sexes, of the ?immense sexual prowess? of the slave or slavery. [40] The harsh reality was that masters controlled the sexual and reproductive capacities of female slaves, enjoyed power over them, and rights of sexual access to them. [41] Yet the image of sexual vigour and licence is difficult to shake from the woman slavery. One can only conjecture how far locally held views of women helped influence slave merchants, and buyers of female slaves. In Gurage, Kafa and Konso, women were regarded respectively as ?inherently immoral?, dangerous because of their ?avid sexual desires?, and to be feared because through sexual activity they might sap men of their vitality. [42] If reputations alleged for sexual prowess, and attractiveness, contributed to stimulate demand from specific areas, it may help explain why these three regions were such important sources of Ethiopian slaves in the nineteenth century. However, and as much of the latter part of this essay demonstrates, a broad range of other factors was clearly also at work, not least other assumed attributes of the slaves in question (notably diligence and loyalty), local political stability, the extent of support and cooperation for slave traders by local political elites, and proximity to trade routes, or to slave-using or slave-exporting states. [43]
Images of the woman slavery may have incorporated prejudices held about women generally, very likely made the more fantastic by the vulnerability of the female slave as sexual object, but sex and ethnicity also converged in metaphor and materially. An Oromo might be rapidly integrated through baptism, marriage, acquisition of land rights, and linguistic assimilation. The stigma attached to a shanqella, viewed within Abyssinian society by default and definition as slave, was more powerful than that associated with a ?Galla?, and of greater longevity. Not least, as Teshale argues, this was because Abyssinians historically described themselves as both red and free where the shanqella was black and slave. Thus, he contends that saba ?literally meant man or human, implying, as in all forms of slavery, that non-slave is human while the slave is not fully human?. [44]
Despite these considerations, and the low regard in which they were generally held, unions between Christian Ethiopians and shanqella occurred frequently. However, in the Christian heartland shanqella ?were not thought to be proper marriage partners for Abyssinians?. [45] Moreover, as Richard Pankhurst observed twenty-five years ago, ?slave or racial descent?was a matter of great consequence?, the taint of which extended to the seventh generation of an Abyssinian-shanqella union. Pankhurst?s oft-cited hierarchy of terms for each generation of such descendants, from those of half slave admixture to one hundred and twenty eighth part descent, indicates how far discrimination against the shanqella slave might reach. Defined in declining relation though each generation to the slave forebear, these terms and their degrees of slave affinity were: wullaj (half slave), qanaj (quarter slave), fenaj (eighth slave), manbete (one sixty fourth slave), and darababete (one hundred and twenty eighth slave). [46]
Materially this discrimination extended into the market place for servile labour. Indeed, as subsequent data indicate, sex and ethnicity articulated to determine both demand for slaves and their prices. Sex was a significant factor in that demand for attractive women and girls was higher than for any other group, save eunuchs, where sexual distinction (and cost of production) was also a critical determinant of value. Yet perceptions of ethnicity and place of origin, like age, helped define which female slaves were attractive and useful, and which were not.
Suffice it to say, at this juncture, that ?red? slaves from the Oromo and Omotic regions, and from lacustrine groups like the Gurage and Konso, were more highly valued than pastoral shanqella from the Sudanic frontiers (Barya, Kunama, peoples of the western fringes of Dambya and Damot). Thus Charles Beke, English doctor and geographer, at the great Yajube slave market in Basso district of Gojjam in 1842, observed how the ?Galla? boys and girls of ?reddish-brown complexion? were held apart. Designated by specific names (wasef and gurbe for teenage girls and boys respectively), they were clearly differentiated from Beke?s ?negroes? from the western borderlands, who were simply called slave or ?slaves?. [47] Seeking slaves of beauty and light colour for the harems of Egypt, Turkey, the Hejaz and the Yeman, the Persian Gulf, and even India, Arab merchants at Ethiopia?s ports and frontiers also prized slaves from the Oromo or ?Galla? kingdoms of the southwest, particularly from Limmu-Enarya, and the ?red Ethiopians? from Gurage. [48]
In reality, the designations ?Enarean? or ?Galla? probably embraced most slaves, many non-Oromo, who passed through Limmu-Enarya?s main market at Saqa; on leaving Red Sea or Gulf of Aden ports they were known in Egypt and the Middle East ?by the yet more incorrect denominations of ?Abessinians?? or Habashi, and as such were highly prized. [49] According to Beke, and the Italian geographer, Antonio Cecchi, in Limmu-Enarya in 1878, ?Galla? slaves included many from the Omotic states of Janjero, Kaffa, Konta and Kucha. [50] ?Gurage? slaves for, which Berbera was the ?renowned? entrepot on the Gulf of Aden, likely included Gurage, and many from other lacustrine groups in and around the Rift Valley. [51]
Indeed, Teshale has suggested that in addition to their appeal to Arab buyers, one reason why so many of these Oromo and Gurage slaves were destined for export, was that they shared ?phenotypical similarities? with the Amhara and Tegrayans. In his view, shanqella with ?features?distinct from the non-slave population of northern, central and southern Ethiopia? were retained for internal use in the Christian highlands (and in the Oromo and Omotic states of the southwest) precisely because they were physically different from other Ethiopians. [52] How far Teshale?s basic assertion can be tested remains an open question, and indeed the assumptions behind it will require a breakdown, if feasible, by ethnic group of the relative numbers of slave exported and retained in Ethiopia. [53] It may simply not be quite as clear-cut as he suggests. Within northern Ethiopia and in the kingdom of Shawa, the royal and noble also reserved pretty, and costly, young women from the Oromo, Omotic and lacustrine regions for the harem, purchasing the cheaper shanqella of both sexes for the drudgery of domestic labour and fieldwork. [54]
Such concerns about the need for female slaves and their role in the different societies of nineteenth century Ethiopia lead analytically into the second part of this essay. This latter section focuses primarily on the function and condition of women in slavery and the slave trade, but is informed interpretively by two reflections on women in Ethiopia?s past. First, it considers Richard Pankhurst?s premise that women were important in the Ethiopian past. In his view, they played ?a major role in the country?s economic, social and cultural life?; they were ?not only wives, mothers and housewives, but also rulers and land-owners, servants and slaves...? (my italics). [55] Secondly, it is guided by Almaz?s suggestion that the historic ?profile? of most Ethiopian women was framed by ?arduous and exacting chores?, that they suffered privation, poverty and pestilence, and lack of access to the resources enjoyed by men. [56]
Little demonstrates the political hegemony of men in both highland Abyssinia and the Omotic and Oromo states of southwest Ethiopia in the nineteenth century more clearly than the potential of slaves to rise high in office and status. Noble women could rise to the highest posts, and at times exercise power, in the Solomonic state, as the careers of the fifteenth century ?princess? Elleni, and of empresses Mentewab, Taytu (r. 1883-1910) and Zawditu (r. 1916-30) demonstrate. So too could male advisors and soldiers of slave origin. Thus Walter Plowden, British Consul to Abyssinia (1847-1860), observed how Empress Manan Liban, her powerful son, Ras Ali Alulu of Bagemder (de facto ruler of Ethiopia, 1834-1854), and his rival, Dajazmach Webe Hayla Maryam (governor, Semen and Tegre, 1830/31-55) staffed their governments and treasuries with trusted eunuchs. [57] On the southern fringe of the Christian highlands, Shawan advisors of slave origin like Abogaz Bazabeh and Azaj Walda Tsadeq also rose to political pre-eminence, the former rising through appointment as one of Emperor Tewodros? governors of Shawa, to become in rebellion against him negus of Shawa (1863-5) until dislodged by the legitimate heir and future emperor, Menilek, and ending his career pardoned as one of the new king?s district governors in Tegulet. The latter, a Gurage war captive, rose to become one of Menilek?s most valued advisors by the mid-1880s, responsible for much of the civil and commercial administration of Shawa, and governor of Ankobar and Ifat. [58] Another former war prisoner, who had narrowly escaped sale as a slave as a youth, but not emasculation, was Dajazmach Balcha Safo who served Menilek II, Lej Iyasu (r. 1913-1916) and Ras Tafari Makonnen (heir and ?regent? 1916-1930, Emperor Haile Sellassie I, 1930-74), in turn as both governor of Sidamo and Harar. [59]
Male slaves could also rise to rank, office and power in the nineteenth century states of the Gib�-Gojab complex. In Gera favoured royal slaves gained office at court as masters of the household, of ceremonies, or of the several thousand slaves of the massera (royal residence); in Jimma loyal slaves of King Abba Jifar II (r. 1878-1932) worked with other officials from the king?s family or his nobility. Abba Garo Guma, Abba Jifar?s chief treasurer, was originally a slave from Guma; Abba Goddu Sadecha, his ?chief criminal investigator? and gaoler was another high-ranking slave. [60] Abba Melr�, maternal uncle of the king of Janjero, and Abba Jifar?s war prisoner and slave, soon rose to become his new ruler?s governor (abba qoro) of the border province of Hereto. [61]
Only a few male slaves ever gained such rank and office. Yet the evidence is that no female slave ever rose so high politically. At best they might be favoured and enjoy influence with their masters, be they kings, nobles or lesser men, or the confidence of queens and noblewomen. At the royal court of Shawa in the 1840s such favoured slaves of emperor (r. 1813-1847) were ?decked out like the first ladies of the land?; their ?flowing garments resplendent with crimson stripes?, their elaborate wigs, silver earrings, pewter bracelets, and make-up were ?calculated to strike respect into the heart of the most indifferent beholder?. Yet the attendant eunuch was a reminder that these slaves could not ?roam at pleasure?. Nor was the ?demure? Wulgeta Giyorgis, one of the queen?s ?confidential slaves?, any less exalted, but her status was no greater than her ?charms irresistible?, and the royal favour she enjoyed. [62]
Not that this is altogether surprising. The societies of nineteenth century Ethiopia, Abyssinian, Omotic and Oromo, and others, rested on gendered conceptions of political authority, occupational boundaries and social status. Elite women may occasionally have enjoyed rank and privilege, even real clout, but political process was geared to ensure that men were visible and empowered. Men controlled the resources and the benefits of the state, its capacity to exercise power and patronage. Both the discourse and the dynamic of power relations guaranteed that women were largely excluded from politics. In such contexts, male slaves might just rise high politically, but the female slave stood little chance at all. Her political influence would remain hidden, subaltern, and difficult if not impossible for the historian to discern.
Indeed, it was those occupational boundaries and the status they accorded, as well as their talent and the favour they enjoyed, that made it possible for a very few male slaves to reach the highest posts in the state, and prevented female slaves from following similar paths. In states which required talented men to staff their administrations, trusted them to run their treasuries, male slaves could make their careers, and gain rank, office, power and freedom. Similarly in Ethiopian societies which set store by military skills and bravery, in which free men fought and women were camp-followers, male slaves had the potential to rise as warriors and military leaders, where their female counterparts had none.
There certainly were opportunities for the male slave to make his military mark. Most Ethiopian rulers and nobles, in Christian Abyssinia and the Oromo and Omotic south, employed slaves as soldiers and guards. Historically, the Gondarine state had drawn on slave troops as palace guards (the walajoch). [63] In the nineteenth century Ras Ali and leading nobles used slave soldiers and guards on military campaigns (shanqella were ?the best shots?), while the British mission to Negus Sahla Sellase of Shawa in 1841-1843 estimated the king?s bodyguard at approximately 1,000 men armed with muskets. Most were slaves born in the king?s service. By the 1880s Menilek?s royal troops in Shawa were ?composed almost entirely of war captives and fresher recruits?, and most garrisons were manned if not officered by Oromo soldiers. [64] To the southwest of Shawa eunuch slaves guarded the gates and perimeters of the royal massera of Limmu-Enarya, Gera, Jimma, and Kafa. [65] In these circumstances those slaves who stood out for their loyalty, intelligence and militarily skills had the chance to prove their worth, even their generalship. Such was clearly the case with Dajazmach Balcha, whose acquired expertise with firearms and artillery as Menilek?s bajirond (?keeper of the storehouse?, including the armory), allowed him to make his name at the Battle of Adwa. [66] Likewise Abba Melre?s rise to be Abba Jifar II?s governor of Hereto occurred both because he was loyal and because he had distinguished himself by his bravery in the Oromo king?s service. Captured by Amno, king of Janjero in 1888, Abba Melre was executed as a traitor to his original homeland. [67]
Such administrative and military avenues of upward political and social mobility were not open to female slaves. They, like the majority of bondsmen, were intended to provide labour, to perform the myriad menial tasks and tedious work, which maintained the palaces and households of Ethiopian elites. Moreover, and as previously indicated, female slaves were subject to two further requirements. First, their masters had access to them specifically as sexual objects, for sexual services, very often as concubines. Secondly, those masters might also exploit their female slaves? reproductive capacities to either father children upon them, or through unions with other male slaves, to contribute to the breeding of a further generation of servile labour. The latter was the case in Kafa, where the king confined slave couples to the royal compound at Bonga and assigned royal lands for them to work when they produced children. Female slaves who failed to have offspring within a year risk sale. [68] Yet in household, harem or on a king?s holdings, and however one defines the need for the female slave, in practice that need invariably upheld their subordination, both as chattel and as woman.
Thus female slaves clearly played an important role in nineteenth century Ethiopia, but it was a role neither of their choice, nor one, with rare exceptions, from which there was any realistic prospect of escape or elevation. Numerically, socially and economically, female slaves were conspicuous. Indeed, within a palace and household setting female slaves outnumbered their male counterparts, reflecting the nature of the demand for slaves in northern Ethiopia and the Gulf of Aden. At least two thirds of the slaves were female, most destined to house or harem, and of these many were still children. [69] In the 1840s the majority of slaves at Sahla Sellase?s court in Shawa were young girls or women, retained in domestic service at each of the royal palaces at Ankobar, Angolala, Dabra Berhan and Kunde. Recognising that figures might be skewed because each slave might well perform more than one set of duties, European sources, who include the German missionaries, Isenberg and Krapf, nevertheless suggest that at Ankobar there were over a thousand female slaves, with 300 engaged to grind flour, 200 cooks, and several hundred who prepared hydromel and beer for the royal household. At Dabra Berhan there were up to 600 spinners, some 200 producing the fine thread used by royal weavers for the royal household, others spinning the coarser yarn used for clothing the royal bodyguard. Guarded by several eunuchs and held in seclusion, the former were also depicted as royal concubines. [70]
Female slaves also predominated at the courts of the Gibe-Gojab states. In Limmu-Enarya the royal masseras held thousands of slaves, mostly female. [71] In Garruqe in 1859, Cardinal Massaja, first Catholic bishop to the Oromo, observed the separate quarters of the several hundred royal concubines of King Abba Bagibo (r. 1825-61); far larger numbers of domestic servants worked in the inner courtyards of the royal compound. [72] In the massera at Challa, capital of Gera, many slaves, for the most part women, came with the dowries of the king?s wives, whom they attended at court. [73]
Absolute numbers of female slaves are difficult to assess. Estimates for the entire slave population of Ethiopia, male and female, range between two and four million for the early twentieth century, out of a 1900 total population of about 11 million. [74] Yet these, like the estimates of Ethiopia?s total population, are informed guesses. Estimates of slave population for the nineteenth century are largely conjecture, not least because there were clear differences in the institution of bondage between northern Ethiopia and Shawa on one side, and in the Gibe-Dedesa and Omotic states on the other. The proportion of the servile to total populations in the latter was clearly higher than in the former. Thus, contemporary European estimates for the southwestern states of Gera, Jimma, Janjero, Kafa, Kucha and Walamo suggest that slaves constituted perhaps between one third and two thirds of the total population, high figures, which are matched in a few instances elsewhere in Africa, but not in the Horn. [75]
Yet amidst the general, at times casual, estimates for percentages of slaves relative to total populations, there are a few absolute figures, which can tantalise us to tentative conclusions. First, according to Cecchi, in Gera the 3,000 slaves at the royal massera of Challa represented one fifth of the kingdom?s total population of between 15,000 and 16,000 in 1880. [76] Taking the commonly assumed ratio of one male slave to every two female, this suggests that the number of women in slavery in Gera at that time was not less than 2,000 or around 13% of the total population of this Oromo kingdom. In Kafa, a much larger state, one contemporary estimate posits 80,000 slaves in Kafa in 1897. Another estimate, by a Nagadras Dasta, with access to the ?official Abyssinian register?, concluded that in the 1890s the population of Kafa was approximately 250,000. [77] Again assuming a ratio of one male slave to every two female, this points to a female slave population for Kafa of not less than 53,000, or just above 21% of the total population. If we apply the same methodology to the figures for slaves and total population for the whole of imperial Ethiopia (assuming total population for 1900 at 11 million, slave population at 3 million), then the female slaves may have numbered not less than 2 million, and have constituted just over 18% of the population.
Whatever their numbers, the primary function of slaves was service. As servile labourers, life for the women slaves, as for the men, was menial and monotonous. Long lines of court slaves, male and female, leading oxen and sheep, and bearing wine, milk, teff (xafi), peppers and honey, were a familiar sight at the court of Emperor Yohannes (r. 1872-1889). Similar slave trains served prepared food and beverages at the royal table. [78] At the royal court of Shawa, most male slaves laboured as craftsmen, porters and woodcutters; their female counterparts, as noted, served in the palace harem, as spinners and weavers, in the royal bakeries and breweries, and as cooks, cup, plate and water-bearers and cowherds. [79] In Limmu-Enarya female servants at the court at Garruqe performed similar tasks. They ground flour, prepared and baked the royal bread, fetched water and carried wood. [80] Of the 3,000 slaves, many women and girls, whom Cecchi estimated to reside at the court of Gera at Challa the majorities performed their duties within the royal household. [81] At the much larger court of Jimma at Jiren the royal wives maintained large slave retinues of their own. [82] In Kafa the king?s mother, or another senior lady of the court, supervised the domestic duties of the palace slaves at Bonga. [83]
Household slaves were no royal prerogative. Leading Abyssinian nobles and officials replicated the imperial retinue on a diminished scale. In northern Ethiopia these included, for example, Dajazmach Walda Sellase, ruler of Tegre (c. 1800-1816), Ras Berru of Tegre (c. 1873) and Dajazmach Tasamma Engeda, one of Emperor Yohannes? troop commanders in the mid-1880s. All three, like most other leading nobles, possessed hundreds of slaves, who demonstrated visibly their masters? power and wealth, and performed the laborious domestic tasks. In the latter decade even a district governor, Dajazmach Takla Haymanot of Tamben, possessed scores of household slaves. [84] To be sure, in these northern provinces all but the poorest households used servile labour. As always, the ?drudgery? was ?usually performed by slave women? [85]
Further south, in Shawa, the king?s governors also ?possessed many slaves?, but here too, as W.C. Harris observed (as he led the British Mission to Negus Sahla Sellase in 1841-1843), ?from the governor to the humblest peasant, every house in Shoa possesses slaves of both sexes, in proportion to the wealth of the proprietor??. [86] The British traveller, Charles Johnston, also in Shawa in these years, encountered domestic slaves mostly slave girls, in a number of homes. He noted that, ?they usually live in the same manner as their owners?. [87] In Limmu-Enarya and Jimma, slaves attended the regional governors, the abba qoro, in large numbers. Indeed, throughout the southwestern states, the noble and the wealthy coveted slaves and valued them highly. [88] In Gudru, most northerly of the Oromo monarchies, the rich employed slaves for their daily needs, and rarely travelled without a slave entourage. In Gera slaves were a symbol of wealth and were indispensable as house guards, porters and servants. In Gera an eldest son received his father?s bondsmen as part of his inheritance, while the dowry of a wealthy woman usually included slaves. [89]
By no means all slaves worked in the household, or as part of their masters? retinues. The existence of a relatively large slave sector in southwest Ethiopia may have reflected an expanded role for servile labour in the Oromo and Omotic kingdoms. [90] As I have argued elsewhere, the extensive use of slaves in agricultural and industrial production further distinguishes southern slavery from its northern counterpart in the nineteenth century. [91] While male slaves were used as field hands in Christian Abyssinia, as they were by smallholders, there are no references, for instance for Shawa, to the mass use of slaves in agriculture. Ege has argued that slave plantation agriculture failed to develop in Shawa because the plough reduced labour needs, plots of land were too small to be worked efficiently by slave teams, and alternative forms of family or marginal labour were often more efficient. [92] By contrast slaves in the Oromo and Omotic polities of the southwest were heavily engaged in agricultural production, initially important perhaps for the laborious task of clearing dense forest to grow cereal crops. [93] In Kaffa, male and female slaves worked royal and nobles estates, while favoured subjects were often given slaves for agricultural labour. [94] In the Gibe states slaves of both sexes worked royal and noble estates. [95] In Limmu-Enarya they watched and tended the king?s ?woods of coffee?, picked the berries, and carried and guarded the harvest; in Jimma they worked, with free tenants, on coffee plantations, and on estates producing food for the court at Jiren. [96]
In the Omotic and Gibe states slaves of both sexes also contributed substantially to output from craft industries, much of it focused on royal compounds. In Kafa and Kullo female slaves made handwoven textiles, where male slaves were engaged in metalwork. [97] Both the royal masseras at Jiren in Jimma, and at Garruqe in Limmu-Enarya, were industrial centres, and here too women slaves worked as spinners. At Jiren King Abba Jifar II set aside quarters for female slaves who, under instruction from Amhara women from northern Ethiopia, served as spinners. Royal weavers and tailors, invariably men, took their thread and turned the spun cotton into clothes for the court, for export, or for gifts in diplomatic exchanges. [98]
Whether they worked in palace or household, in agricultural production or craft industry, or a combination of these, across Ethiopia male and female slaves received a limited measure of state protection. In northern Ethiopia and Shawa the medieval legal code, the Fetha Nagast, theoretically dictated that masters who mistreated their slaves might lose their property, be imprisoned, or, in the case of the premeditated murder of a slave, face the death penalty; a badly beaten slave might recover his freedom. [99] However, the Fetha Nagast also notionally forbade marriage or sexual relations between a free man and a free woman, and a slave, prohibited concubine, and offered the same protection against rape for both free women and female slaves. [100] Extant data offer little insight into how far these injunctions were ever enforced, but the evidence is that by the nineteenth century in Ethiopia they were largely honoured in the breach. In the Gibe-Dedesa states, as elsewhere in Ethiopia, male and female slaves had neither legal identity, nor claim to property, nor rights of redress against brutality. However, excessive cruelty was much at odds with custom. In Gudru it was considered unacceptable for a master to disfigure or murder a slave in domestic service; in Gera slaves of both sexes could appeal openly against injustice or poor treatment, and the slaveholder could be punished. Nevertheless, the reality of power relations in Gudru ensured that a brutal slaveholder was a ?complete master of his slaves?, and could mutilate and kill them with relative impunity. In cases of homicide in Gera and Limmu, where a free man killed a slave, the compensation to the owner was merely another slave, or five head of cattle. [101]
For slaves, male and female, and demonstrating a rare gender-neutrality, the wide range of penalties for their crimes underlined the subordination of their lives and persons. These penalties included corporal punishment or imprisonment in chains in Shawa to incarceration, blinding and even brutal execution in the Gibe states. [102] Indeed in Gera, Cecchi was an unwilling observer of the awful fate of a woman slave held responsible for the illness of one of the king?s sons. Publicly beaten and severely mutilated, and chained up in the heat of the day, she soon resembled ?a frightening mummy?. [103] Runaway slaves also faced harsh penalties. In Jimma slaves were beaten and held in chains; in Limmu-Enarya, as in Jimma, they ended up at the gindo (state prison), where they ?were as good as dead?. The gindo depicted not merely the great tree to which each prisoner was chained, but also the heavy wooden log, held attached by a crossbar to one foot, which effectively served as a set of stocks. With leg immobilized, and soon cut by the sharp edges of the wood, ankle and foot became swollen and gangrenous. [104]
Nevertheless, and despite their general oppression, overt cruelty towards valuable and familiar household slaves was rare. Thus Europeans recorded that slaves in Bagemder during Tewodros? reign were ?very kindly treated? as members of their masters? families; in Shawa, where most slaves also lived with their masters, they were usually treated with ?lenience - even indulgence?. [105] In Gudru and the Gibe kingdoms, slaves often had their own houses, land and property, which legally reverted to their masters at death, but in practice often passed to their children. [106] In both Shawa and the Gibe-Gojab states slaves could thus clearly enjoy benevolent treatment, but in these highly patriarchal societies only male slaves might achieve power and prestige as they administered their masters? affairs, or fought in their wars. [107]
The sources offer specific examples of kindly treatment. Johnston recorded that in Shawa, domestic slaves were ?invariably? regarded as family, treated as often as not as ?near relations?, even as ?foster children?. At one family supper, he observed how the hostess ended the meal by personally distributing choice morsels of chicken rolled in enjera to each guest in turn, giving her slave girl, ?attendant and companion?, who had dined with the assembled family, a larger portion than anyone else. [108] En route to Lagamara Cardinal Massaja was taken by how two slave converts, a young man and woman, were ?loved as brother and sister? by their master and mistress. All four had grown up together, and the former now looked to the latter to act as their godparents. [109] In Jimma a quarter of a century later Borelli acknowledged that there were bad masters, but among the many slaves who lived with their owners? families cruelty was rare. [110]
Kindly treatment could never disguise the fact that most slaves, not least women in domestic service, faced the daily round of labour, reminders of their servile status, and little prospect of freedom while they were still young enough to enjoy it. Though other household servants might perform comparable labour, in Shawa slaves were ?socially inferior? and a distinct rung down the social ladder; in Kafa slaves had to approach their masters prostrate and could not address them directly. [111] Chances of manumission were limited, and late in a slave?s life, if freed without material resources, could be a mixed blessing.
In the Gibe states, such as Gomma, where slaves might rarely buy their liberty or be adopted into their masters? families, the spread of Islam increased the number emancipated, mostly slaves in their mid-thirties to mid-fifties. [112] In Christian Ethiopia, the Fetha Nagast defined diverse grounds for manumission, which mostly reaffirmed the Church?s low regard for women, and their perceived inferiority in Abyssinian society generally. Thus, the child of a slave woman by her free master was, at least in theory to be freed; the child of a free woman by a slave was the property of the slave?s master. [113] However, Ege has stressed that in reality in Shawa young, healthy, slaves were rarely freed, and that most of the manumitted were elderly. Despite injunctions in the Fetha Nagast against the freeing of slaves who lacked the means to support themselves, the discharge of these may have denied them food and shelter. The drawbacks of manumission undermine any analytical assumption that it indicated benevolent treatment generally. [114]
Nor should we take the kind treatment of slaves by Ethiopian merchants as much more than a concern for their valuable investment. In the hands of the afcala, dynamic Oromo small traders, of the jabarti, Muslim caravan merchants from northern Ethiopia, and of Afar and Sudanese traders, slaves in transit faced considerable hardships. If at times they were well fed and rested, and travelled unfettered and in good spirits, at others they endured forced marches, especially north to Sennar and east to Tajurah, through harsh terrain, in unfamiliar and often hostile climates, and under threat of shifta attacks. [115] As previously noted, two thirds, perhaps three quarters, of the transit slave trade and the bulk of exports were women and young girls. Not all of these survived the rigours of the route. [116]
Equally we should not read too much into accounts of how some jabarti cared especially for the young women and girls. A number of merchants gave these wasef only light duties in the caravan, took their meals with them, even married the prettiest. Yet many teenage girls, like the boys in the caravan, were deeply distressed and frightened, their emotions still raw from an often abrupt and violent separation from their families. [117] Moreover, the merchants often made concubines of the most attractive female captives, or allowed their servants to employ them as such, even though the young women then, as Abir puts it, ?automatically depreciated in value, having lost their virginity?. [118] Other merchants, other contexts, made for yet more difficult circumstances. Thus Pellegrino Matteucci, leader of an Italian commercial expedition to Ethiopia in 1878-1879, described the very severe treatment meted out to slaves en route north from Kafa, as did the British ?traveller of means?, De Cosson, for the route north from Gondar to the Sudan five years before. [119] Indeed, the caravan road to Khartoum was long reputed for its high slave mortality. [120] Conditions at major slave markets, like Abdel Rassul in Shawa, or Qallbat on the northwest frontier, were often little better. Beyond the humiliation of the intimate inspection to which newly arrived slaves were subjected, there was often more physical hardship. [121] At Saqa in Limmu-Enarya, young girls were held hungry and weak in dirty huts; at Basso and Ifag, en route north to Gondar, even elderly slaves and young women lay for days bound in filth and squalor. [122] At Qallabat, where merchants kept their slaves in ?stifling? booths, insufficient food and lowland diseases began to take their toll. However, the slave merchants resolutely refused to acknowledge sickness among their captives, fearing reduced sale prices. [123]
Examination of women as commodities in the slave trade turns us away from the focus of women within the institution of Ethiopian slavery. Yet this final transition also returns us to gender, and its intersection with a range of factors like ethnicity and age, but now specifically in relation to slave demand, recruitment, slave numbers and prices. All these I have addressed in some depth elsewhere, so analysis here is focused, where feasible, particularly on women in the domestic and export slave trades, informed by considerations of gender. [124] Initially, as previous discussion has affirmed, sex and ethnicity were very important in determining demand. After eunuchs, light-skinned ?Galla? or ?Gurage? young teenage girls made the most valuable slaves, followed by teenage boys.
Demand for these teenagers largely predetermined the proportions of slaves obtained through raids, tribute and kidnapping. Hence, Negus Sahla Sellase?s brutal expeditions into the Fenfeni valley and the contiguous plains south of Entoto (the area of modern Addis Ababa) yielded thousands of young women and girls in the 1840s. The men were ?indiscriminately slain?. [125] Between the 1870s and 1890s the ferocious pattern of Shawan and imperial expansion into the south was much the same. In varying degrees Gurage, Soddo and Lagamara, the Gibe states, Arsi, Walamo, Kaffa, and parts of the Ogaden suffered the same fate. As Menilek?s forces, and those of his leading chiefs, razed whole districts, and fires gutted each village, soldiers very often slaughtered the male defenders, and hunted and enslaved their women and children. [126] In the 1870s and 1880s thousands of these unfortunates passed through Shawan slave markets at Andodi, Rogge and Abdel Rassul, en route to the coast. [127] Menilek?s successor, Lej Iyasu, also seized thousands of slaves in expeditions into Kafa, Gemira and Anuak country, as ever mostly young women and children. [128]
An expansionist Shawa was not the only nineteenth state to acquire slaves in military expeditions and conflict, though it was the most successful. Annual expeditions mounted by King Abba Bagibo of Limmu-Enarya (r. 1825-61) penetrated into Janjero and Soddo in the 1830s, and into the territories of the Noonnu and Macha Oromo. In the process they carried away men, women and children. [129] Successive rulers of Jimma, Abba Gomol (r. 1862-1875) and Abba Jifar II, also acquired slaves in Nonno country, and in campaigns against Garo and Janjero. [130] In Kafa, ?the reservoir of slaves? for the Gibe region and northern Ethiopia, state expansion after 1800 yielded captives from Kullo and its eastern neighbours, and from newly subdued Gemira to the west. [131]
Young women and girls also figured prominently in four further modes of slave acquisition: tribute, kidnapping, deception, and ?voluntary? enslavement. They represented a primary constituent of tribute paid by Ethiopian rulers to each other, and by merchants to propitiate kings, provincial or district governors. Thus the kings of Konta and Kullo recognised Kafa?s hegemony by paying tribute in male and female slaves, while the king of Gera extracted slaves from jabarti travelling north from Kafa. [132] On the border of Gudru and Gojjam slave traders eased their passage into northern Ethiopia in the 1850s by delighting the district governor, Fitawrari Warqe Iyasu, with tribute of young girls. [133] Young women were also the target much of the kidnapping routinely described by European travellers in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia in the nineteenth century. [134] In southern Ethiopia the demand for young boys and girls fuelled a vigorous market for Gurage children, their parents often held by force as kidnappers broke into isolated houses by night. [135] In Arsi in the 1870s bandits seized and enslaved the unwary, often on the open roads, and ambushes of young girls were common elsewhere in southern Ethiopia. Once kidnapped, these girls passed in turn to local merchants, and then into the hands of the jabarti. [136]
Slave merchants also tricked and deceived young men and women into slavery, on occasion with false offers of employment, and notional trips to the Holy Places. In the 1830s a fraudulent priest enticed a whole group of pilgrims from Gojjam and Bagemder onto a ship leaving Massawa, but the destination was Jeddah, Arabia and slavery, not Jerusalem and the Holy Land. [137] A decade later a Christian girl from Tegre who had made several short trips within northern Ethiopia in the service of a Muslim trader, was suddenly sold by her patron to a slave merchant, who shipped her swiftly to Jeddah. Her family?s connections to the governor of Tegre, Dajazmach Webe, made her case a cause c�l�bre. [138] Yet from southern Ethiopia came whole families, lured into slavery by false promises and deceit. [139]
Perhaps the most tragic group of all were those forces by harvest failure, pestilence and taxation to sell themselves into slavery. In the wake of famine and cholera in Shawa in the early 1830s thousands threw themselves on the mercy, and royal granaries, of Negus Sahla Sellase. There is no evidence that any of these Shawan ?famine slaves? were ever sold, unlike the Tegrean victims of the Great Famine of 1890-91. Many of these starving Tegreans sold their children, at times themselves, to Muslim merchants. [140] In southern Ethiopia the Gibe kings enjoyed and exercised the right to enslave and sell the children of parents too impoverished to pay their taxes; rulers of Kucha allowed merchants to buy the poverty-stricken. [141] In Kaffa a father was legally entitled to sell his wife and children into slavery when times were hard, a striking example of patriarchy in action (though he might also have to sell himself). Even an unborn child could be sold in Kafa, in which case the mother was obliged to provide her milk to the new baby for two years before it passed to the buyer. [142] In hard times in Gurage and Janjero, and possibly when not so hard, relatives sold their women and children to slave merchants. Far to the east of Gurage the Danakil reputedly sold ?their own daughters?. [143]
That the demand for women, especially young women and girls, was strong and remained so into the twentieth century, is most clearly attested in two further ways. First, by the prices merchants paid and fetched for them. Secondly, by the scale of the trade. A detailed analysis of slave prices at each and every Ethiopian enter pot is beyond the scope of this essay, but gender was clearly a important factor in determining value. [144] Thus in the period 1830-1850 a male slave at Abdel Rassul (Aliyu Amba) in Shawa might cost 9-16 Maria Theresa dollars, or thalers; a female slave could be 12-25 thalers, but a beautiful wasef 25-30, perhaps even 50-80 thalers. [145] At the Gojjam� market of Basso in these years, a boy might cost 4-8 thalers, a man 10, and a young or adult woman 4-12 depending on age, but a beautiful teenage wasef fetched 16 thalers. [146] En route to and on the frontiers the respective average prices in thalers for male and female slaves at Harar were 30-50 and 33-150, at Gondar 10-25 and 150 (this latter price for a teenage girl), at Qallabat 25-70 and 100-150, and at Massawa 15-40 and 55-60. [147] These ratios were maintained, often accentuated, beyond Ethiopia?s borders, and also in terms of profitability. At Shendi, north.
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