Fieldwork/ Dube Nationality, Balé Lowlands

Sous titre:

Identity and Interrelationships of Peoples and Polities in Balé Lowlands

Nom de carnet:

CFEE

Date de publication:

Lundi 25 Juin 2018 - 13:30

Publié ici :

25 Juin 2018

Mis à jour le :

05 Juillet 2018

Mots-clefs:

Bâle
Dube
History

Langue de publication:

Anglais

Zone géographique:

Afrique

by Kefyalew Tessema Semu

Kefyalew Tessema is lecturer at Madda Walabu University, Bale-Robe and a doctoral student in History at Addis Ababa University. His research focuses on an ethnic group from the Balé lowlands, the Dube. He presents here the results of his research conducted with the support of a CFEE field grant in 2017.

The social landscape of Balé has always been diversified with early settlement, late immigrations, social fusions and fissions. The Dube and Waata were among the earliest settlers of the Wabé-Shaballé and Gannalé Rivers of Ethiopia, while that last two lived along the same rivers in southern Somalia (Cerulli 1922: 206; Trimingham 1952: 5).

Balé, the former province between the Wabé-Shaballé and Gannalé Rivers, is a land of social heterogeneity, a hub of social interactions and endowed with natural resources. It was reincorporated into the Ethiopian Empire in 1892. But, existing studies on Balé, particularly studies by students, who wrote theses and dissertations on the post conquest period, have focused on themes like impacts of the conquest, urbanization, land tenure, modern social institutions focused on Balé highlands. The lowlands have remained the periphery of a peripheral region. Critics have attributed these features of literature on Balé to the limitations from which Ethiopian studies have suffered namely centralist discourse, elitist politics, misrepresentations, omissions and ethnocentric views (Truilzi, 1984; Clapham, 2002; Donham, 2002; Ezekiel, 2014). This could be ascribed among others to the limited number of scholars on the area, the challenge of harsh environment and scarcity of written sources. But, a big factor is also due to the historians’ orthodox fidelity to written sources and persistent downplaying of oral sources, which had left historical study for the borderlands at its infancy. Thus, most studies are carried out by other social scientists than by historians. Yet, Europeans such as Donaldson Smith (1897), Enrico Cerulli (1922) and Hudson Arnold (1927), who had visited and studied Balé, some of whom had mentioned the Dube Nationality.

Therefore, “Dube Nationality and their Neighbors…” is a dissertation envisaged as historical study of internal narratives of the Dube peripheral minorities in the hinterlands of comparative disadvantages by focusing on identities and interrelationships of societies and states. Toward this end, the collection of oral sources such as oral traditions, genealogical data, lived experiences and eyewitness accounts, observation of cultural events, settlement sites and various rituals as well surveying of written primary sources in various depositories have been the most important techniques and tools of data acquisitions. To seek answers to key questions regarding the origin of the Dube people, how they managed to sustain their ethnic and linguistic identities amidst their powerful neighbors and so on, intensive fieldwork in their settlements were vital. Moreover, it is in the priority of this historical study to incorporate the social memory of neighbors of the Dube regarding the whereabouts and the past of relations of the latter with them among others. This makes the research task both laborious and costly (Henige, 1982: 45; Vansina, 1985: 153).

Preliminary findings show that the Dube are riverine cultivators who inhabited dispersed pocket areas along the Wabe Shaballé River and few offshoots sites in the Oromia and Ethiopian Somali Regions. The Dube are endogamous communities of over a hundred thousand comprising four clans. They speak a language that resembles the Somali language but with significant percentage of lexicographical difference. They claim to be of Bantu origin from Western Africa many generations ago, due to population pressure and to have entered their present habitat one group through southern Somalia while the other might had taken the route from Blue Nile Valley across the south-central Ethiopia into the Wabe Shaballé Valley. Yet, the existing written sources converge to concluding the Dube origin from societies of slave descent, who either runaway from their masters form plantations along the Wabe Shaballé and Juba Rivers as well as from urban entrepreneurs in coastal towns of the Indian Ocean or from freed slave in the same region (Declich, 1995: 95).

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