Introduction^{Footnote 1}

The northern Zanj were a group of Africans whose distinct civilization interested Arab writers from the ninth century onward but whose identity and location remained elusive. Three unique aspects of the northern Zanj attracted Arab writers, namely the institution of elected kings, the oratory of the king’s officials in addressing the public as part of decision making, and the king’s duty to rule with justice lest he and his descendants be permanently disqualified from office.^{Footnote 2} The famous Arab writer-philosopher Uthman Amr ibn Bahr al-Jahiz (776–868)^{Footnote 3} relied on this distinct African civilization to write the first book presenting racial equality between blacks and whites in the ninth-century Arab-Islamic Empire. He used the reported eloquence of the Africans as evidence to counter prevailing Arab attitudes that cast Africans as feeble-minded and ignorant. al-Jahiz credited as the most eloquent orators on earth the hinterland Zanj, as he called them, who addressed the multitude from sunrise to sunset in the presence of their kings. al-Jahiz posited that in every society the elites have excelled in knowledge acquisition and that Arabs of his time should study not the poor enslaved Africans in Baghdad, but the northern Zanj, to learn their wisdom. Criticizing the Islamic prohibition of racial intermarriage, al-Jahiz praised the equality of the pre-Islam period and showed that blacks in pre-Islamic Arabia were free to marry Arab brides.^{Footnote 4} About half a century later, Abul Hasan Ali al-Masudi (890–956) reported about the oratory of the officials and added that the elected king of the Zanj ed-Damadim went by title waklimi. al-Masudi noted that the king of Zanj ed-Damadim was one of two black kings in antiquity, the other having reigned in India.^{Footnote 5} Commenting on al-Jahiz’s work, Bernard Lewis remarked that al-Jahiz succeeded in arguing the case for the equality of blacks with whites,^{Footnote 6} although no-one has yet identified the particular Africans that al-Jahiz used to argue for racial equality and the institutional setting for the oratory and al-Masudi’s elected Zanj king.

To identify the Africans and their institution of the elected Zanj king or Zanj-Ahabish or Zanj ed-Damadim we must first recast Zanj as a broadly inclusive designation. Despite the diversity of populations included in the Zanj category,^{Footnote 7} twentieth-century scholars progressively identified Zanj with Bantu speakers inhabiting coastal east Africa. That tendency elided ethnographic data about Zanj diversity found in references to Damadim or Zanj-Ahabish and the title of the elected king as waklimi or mfalme, rendered as “Son of the Great Lord” in Arabic.^{Footnote 8} John Middleton attributed the problem to the vague references in the Arabic primary sources to kings, sultans, and other African titles such as ufalme, meaning “royalty.”^{Footnote 9} Sharpening that view, Mark Horton and John Middleton indicated two problems, first the layer of “Islamic interpretation” and then the challenge of interpreting al-Masudi’s “fullest descriptions.”^{Footnote 10} al-Masudi’s accounts defied scholarly interpretations because Zanj came to be limited to coastal east Africa and Habasha or Ahabish had been confined to the northern Horn, despite Christopher Ehret’s suggestion about the past shared history and geography between east and northeast Africans.^{Footnote 11} The tendency to limit the Zanj to coastal east Africans mainly originated in the late nineteenth century with Louis Marcel Devic, whose reviews of Arabic sources for northeast Africa assigned Zanj to coastal east Africa. Devic even declared that the vast groups of Africans between the northern Horn and east African coast were without history.^{Footnote 12} Manfred Kropp’s review of Arab topographic data on the Horn of Africa clarified Ptolemaic geographic information, but that source had confused the Blue Nile and Wabbe-Jubba Rivers and Arab writers had simply reproduced the error.^{Footnote 13} Therefore, to understand al-Masudi’s descriptions the first step must be to reveal the identity of Zanj-Ahabish or the northern Zanj.

The Zanj-Ahabish remained mysterious because Ahabish or Habasha was discursively confined to Ethiopia’s northern Horn. That perspective was rooted in post-sixteenth-century European scholars’ narrow interpretation of Habasha to mean Orthodox Christians in the northern Horn, Abyssinia, or the region north of the Blue Nile-Awash Rivers. That interpretation was itself partly based on the now-discredited “migration theory” which suggested South Arabian immigrant ancestors for the Abyssinians who came as bearers of “a superior civilization.”^{Footnote 14} Scholars now frame the question as an “Afro-Arabian circuit of contact” with multiple migrations in both directions.^{Footnote 15} Included in the trans-Red Sea contact metaphor is David Phillipson’s hypothesis of a brief South Arabian presence in parts of the northern Horn with a visible legacy in architecture and literacy.^{Footnote 16} The “circuit of contact” included the Horn and present-day central and southern Ethiopia.^{Footnote 17} The ancient trans-Red Sea contact broadly included east and northeast Africa, but by contrast the twentieth-century units of analysis remained mutually exclusive as either the northern Horn (Habasha) or coastal east Africa (Zanj).

Certain scholars have recently initiated a rectifying trend. Jonathan Miran’s Red Sea Citizens outlined themes analogous to Swahili history. Miran referred to elites who claimed an external origin, a society rooted in a networked culture and trade that tied together Massawa, the adjacent Ethio-Eritrean highland, Cairo, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and coastal east Africa.^{Footnote 18} Stuart Munro-Hay states that the Ahabish (Abyssinians) included groups such as the Zanj. ^{Footnote 19} New researches have altered the assumptions of early scholars that the east African coast had always been “seaward-looking” and lacked contact with inland areas to the north. It is now clear that the east African “Tana river basin acted as a corridor to the interior.”^{Footnote 20} James de Vere Allen broke new ground by indicating that Zanj interaction extended further into present day Ethiopia and by associating the election of kings with the northern Zanj. While de Vere Allen’s work certainly contains gaps, other east African scholars have suggested that the inhabitants of the northern hinterland worked in partnership with coastal east Africans. They in fact contributed to significant developments previously attributed to Arabs and Indians.^{Footnote 21} Gufu Oba’s monograph has pushed back to a far earlier time the presence, interaction, and integration of the Oromo into coastal east Africa. Oba makes clear that in fact they were there long before the sixteenth century, as confirmed by earlier findings of pottery identified with the Oromo.^{Footnote 22}

Uncovering the older meanings of Zanj-related key concepts reveals a layer of history and helps us identify the variously named elusive groups, the northern Zanj, Zanj-Ahabish, and Zanj ed-Damadim and their institution of elected kings. I would argue that the term Zanj included diverse northeast African groups who extended further north to present-day Ethiopia and that the concept of Habash or Ahabish applied to people who spread as far as coastal east Africa. The ethnographic data overlooked in the primary sources indicate that the northern Zanj or Zanj-ed-Damadim, Zanj-Ahabish were sections of the Oromo, the largest linguistic group in Ethiopia. Some of them extended as far as into modern Kenya and Somalia, where they were known for their institution of the Gadaa system that elected leaders every eight years.^{Footnote 23} In broad terms, the first section of this article deals with the diversity of the Zanj by recasting the terms Zanj and Ahabish (Habasha) to identify the elusive Zanj ed-Damdam, Zanj-Ahabish or Yamjam as Jamjam, a section of the ancient Oromo who moved into coastal east Africa. The second identifies the context of oratory in the Butaa institution of the Oromo Gadaa system.

The Zanj, the Northern Zanj, and Zanj-Ahabish

That the name Zanj was infused with Arab racial prejudice has been clearly stated.^{Footnote 24} On the subject of race and slavery, Bernard Lewis indicated that the Arabs of the Islamic empire considered the Zanj “distorted creature[s],” the African group they “least respected.”^{Footnote 25} However, while in the Middle East the term Zanj connoted slavery and inferior status, for east Africans it referred to free people.^{Footnote 26} In the Arab reports on northeastern Africa, free African groups remained largely unidentified. In the tenth century Ibn Hauqal stated that the Zanj-land was the largest country of the black peoples, larger than medieval Christian Abyssinia and Nubia.^{Footnote 27} Some of the Africans whom Ibn Hauqal designated as Zanj were Maassai in the south, Bantu in the central regions, and Cushitic in the northern hinterland.^{Footnote 28} In the late nineteenth century Devic noted that the Arabic sources on Zanj included population groups ranging from Zanzibar to the medieval Abyssinian frontier. However, he discarded the relevant ethnographic data to address the matter at hand.^{Footnote 29} Although Arab writings on the Zanj suggested the diversity of African groups, in fact the term Zanj was used to emphasize racial ideas. The present work attempts to reveal the layer of history related to racial ideas by recasting the Zanj into a diverse group of east Africans who were busy making their own history.

Consequently, the territorial extent of the term Zanj, its regional population diversity, and its inclusion of populations in what is now central and southern Ethiopia continued to be overlooked. That perspective is indeed evident from statements by major Arab writers about the northern limit of Zanj land. In the second half of the ninth century the geographer al-Fazari included the Zanj as the largest nation in east Africa, indeed of all Africa as it was then known.^{Footnote 30} A century later Ibn Hauqal and al-Masudi provided specific geographic information that the Blue Nile flowed through “the region of the Zendjs” before reaching Nubia and Egypt.^{Footnote 31} al-Masudi wrote that the Zanj country began on the upper bank of the Nile and stretched as far as Sofala.^{Footnote 32} However, since Arab geographers confused the “Nile of Mogadishu” and the “Nile of Egypt,” that statement cannot be taken seriously. But Istakhiri’s writings in the mid-tenth century explicitly framed the Zanj settlement as reaching medieval Abyssinia in the north.^{Footnote 33} Ibn Hauqal wrote in about 988 that the Zanj country comes after the land of the medieval Abyssinians.^{Footnote 34} Zakkariyya Kazwini (d. 1283) wrote that Zanj was bounded in the north by the Abyssinia state.^{Footnote 35} al-Yakubi (in 891) and Ibn Said al-Maghribi (1213–1286) wrote that the Zanj sub-groups extended from coastal Manbasa to the southern limit of thirteenth-century Christian Abyssinia.^{Footnote 36} Statements from al-Masudi and Ibn Said suggested that the Zanj and the medieval Christian state shared frontiers and inhabitants.^{Footnote 37} Persian sources added that “the boundaries of [the] Zanj adjoin[ed]” the medieval Abyssinian state.^{Footnote 38} Manfred Kropp cited Arab sources that placed Zanj to the southeast of the post-sixteenth-century “Ethiopian empire.” He replaced Ahabish with modern Ethiopia and left aside al-Masudi’s category of Zanj-Ahabish.^{Footnote 39} Without limiting Zanj to coastal east Africa, those early sources charted Zanj land further up into northeastern Africa, to share a frontier with pre-thirteenth-century Abyssinia. Even coastal east Africa had a diverse population as indicated in al-Idrisi’s twelfth-century map listing six Zanj sub-regions, including the Cushitic and the Bantu. Christopher Ehret wrote that lowland east Cushitic speakers inhabited the region east of Zayla and northeast of Mogadisho.^{Footnote 40} Implicit in that territorial extent was the diversity of the Zanj population, to include Cushitic, Semitic, and Bantu groups.

The ancient Arab writings provide us with three profitable subjects for consideration. The first is that Zanj’s northern limit reached medieval Abyssinian frontiers with the possibility of partial population overlap. Second, we can see the Arab writers’ vagueness about the southern reach of medieval Abyssinian kings. Twentieth-century monographs on modern Ethiopia show the decline and collapse of Aksum, and the slow rise of the Zagwe dynasty in north-central Abyssinia.^{Footnote 41} Only with the fourteenth-century military expansion of the Emperor Amde-Seyon (1314–1344) do historical sources attest to the medieval Abyssinian state’s radius of authority as being solidly established further to the south of the Awash River. This suggests that the Zanj frontier mentioned in Arabic sources extended at least as far as today’s Awash-Blue Nile ridge, suggesting Zanj-Ahabish as the overlapping population. al-Umari’s report between 1342 and 1349, cited above, is clear evidence for the overlap of geographic descriptions of the Zanj and Habasha.

The third point of interest here is that the category of northern or hinterland Zanj was a sub-division of the whole Zanj. From the reports cited above it is clear that “northern Zanj” referred to the entire Zanj land, which was vast. It is plausible to assume that al-Jahiz in the ninth century and al-Masudi who visited coastal Zanj twice in 916 and 945 applied labels such as Zanj-Ahabish, Ahabish, and Damadim in reference to the same group. While admitting the diversity of the Zanj and their extension further north, Devic narrowed the term to mean exclusively those Africans on the Indian Ocean coast. Devic’s justification was that those people of the Zanj hinterland were without history except for their occasional conflicts with the medieval Christian Abyssinian state to the north.^{Footnote 42} Following Devic, late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century European scholars framed their research work in mutually exclusive regional units of analysis such as East Africa and Northeast Africa. In doing so they effectively marginalized the interactions of the pre-thirteenth-century Zanj regional population. On independence from recent colonial rule, the intention was to create national history, which therefore justified the emphasis on Bantu studies in relation to the Zanj, with only occasional reference to Eastern or Southern Cushite. One upshot of that approach was the de-emphasis on Zanj diversity, especially the category of northern Zanj and the related Ahabish, Damadam, and Zanj-ed Damadam.

In an attempt to break down the components of the Zanj population, Marina Tolmacheva defined Zanj as for the most part an ethnonym or sometimes a toponym.^{Footnote 43} Arab geographic designations for the Zanj extended from today’s Bab-el Mandab to Sofala, modern Mozambique. The tendency to see that area as extending into the interior depended on the knowledge of the particular writer, although some Arab writers took it as far as West Africa.^{Footnote 44} Arab ethnonyms for the Zanj included different African groups, and their knowledge increased progressively from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. al-Jahiz, for example, referred to “Zanj hinterland,” as well as to “Zanj” and “Habash,” while al-Masudi’s ethnonyms for the tenth-century Zanj included Barbara, northern Zanj, Ahabish, Zanj al-Habash, and Dendema. ^{Footnote 45} al-Masudi also made a distinction between the Berbers of North Africa and those of the Horn.^{Footnote 46} Some scholars have recognized Barbara as Somali and Bossaaso as the Mosyllum of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. ^{Footnote 47} By the thirteenth century Ibn-Said (1213–1286) had added Damadim, and then in the fourteenth-century Shams al-Din al-Dimashqi (1256–1327) associated the same people with the land and river of the Damadam, or the “Nile of Mogadisho.”^{Footnote 48}

Before dwelling on Ahabish or Zanj-Ahabish, it is worth unpacking the category of Habasha.^{Footnote 49} The earliest mention of Habashat reportedly referred to “two tribes” from South Arabia which settled around 1000 BCE in the northern Horn, today’s Eritrea and northern Ethiopia. Despite serious factual scholarly challenges to the link between Habasha and Habashat, the term Habasha is supposedly derived from Habashat. However, the name Hebsty predated the Sabean advent^{Footnote 50} and there was no tribe called Habashat or Habasha in southern Arabia. Moreover, recent research has dated inscriptions referring to Habasha in south Arabia to only later than the third century, and they are in reference to the Aksumite occupation of Himyar.^{Footnote 51} Arab writers including al-Masudi, Herodotus of Arabia, and al-Ya’qubi classified Abasha as descendants of the Cush people,^{Footnote 52} not south Arabians. Yet conceptualized as “migration theory” the South Arabian migrants were considered the initiators of northern Ethiopian civilization, while Tigreans and the Amhara (Abyssinians) were perceived as the descendants of those earlier immigrants and their intermarriage with local Cushite women. Carlo Conti-Rossini was the leading proponent of that theory and his work underpinned subsequent scholarly work which further propelled Ethiopian studies along that trajectory.^{Footnote 53} However, due to lack of supporting evidence that migration theory has been debunked.^{Footnote 54} Africans and Arabs had been crossing and re-crossing the Red Sea into each other’s territories since pre-historic times and by some point between the third and second millennia BCE contact between the Horn and South Arabia had evolved into exchange of goods. Trading then duly expanded into the hinterland of the Horn, the Rift Valley, and into today’s southern Ethiopia.^{Footnote 55}

Beeston’s recent etymological study of Ahabish, Habasha, and Habashat adds a new perspective. ^{Footnote 56} According to him, before the tenth century and especially during the early days of Islam, Ahabish meant “bands of miscellaneous origins” or people of differing origins.^{Footnote 57} That meaning contradicts the view that Habasha or Ahabish were people of “mixed race,” or descendants of miscegenation. Archeologists and linguistic scholars have posited that the Sabeans, as a “distinct population,” remained during their brief presence a “small minority” who were “settled in enclaves.” The indigenous majority then “rapidly assimilated” their descendants.^{Footnote 58} That would have therefore precluded the rise of a mulatto demographic group. Furthermore, physical anthropologists now believe that the “narrow face and nose profile” predated the Arab arrival in the Horn.^{Footnote 59} Thus, the wider meaning of Habasha or Ahabish referred to co-existence in diversity, not to mulattoes, an essential point made very clearly by Job Ludolf at the beginning of European academic interest in the region.^{Footnote 60} The noted philologist Getatchew Haile anticipated the new interpretation more than thirty years ago and concluded, albeit in passing, that the Habashat had lived in today’s Ethiopian region “since time immemorial.”^{Footnote 61}

Indeed the leading scholars currently working in the field have eschewed Habasha as a conceptual tool. For instance, there is no reference to “Habasha” nor “Abyssinia” in the works of archeologists like Rodolfo Fattovich or David Phillipson, while the historian Stuart Munro-Hay called the term “outdated,” while linguist Rainer Voigt dismissed it as “obsolete.”^{Footnote 62} Ahabish or Habasha, meaning peoples of varied origins, signified distinct regional population groups. Phillipson emphasized “physical diversity” due to the “inter-regional challenges of communication” and the subsequent evolution and survival of “distinct cultural traditions” within short distances.^{Footnote 63} The big picture here is that the “clines in skin color” hair texture and related types are features of Afro-Asiatic speakers.^{Footnote 64}

The notion of distinct groups of people occupying present day northern and eastern Sudan and Ethiopia and the Horn is also supported by archeological evidence suggesting regional population stability or “great antiquity of residence,” since at least 3000 BCE. Such studies confirm that Nilo-Saharan, the Khoisan, and Cushitic or Cushito-Omotic people have inhabited the region since antiquity.^{Footnote 65} According to Ibn Khaldun’s synthesis of Arab racial classification, the Abyssinian category was not derived from real or even assumed miscegenation but from “physical mark.”^{Footnote 66} Ibn Khaldun’s statement discounts claims that “Caucasian” features in the Horn were due to Arab blood.^{Footnote 67} Without endorsing physiognomic racial classifications, this work attempts to tease out a layer of history attached to those former divisions. Greenberg’s linguistic classification in the 1960s and the latest debates on the origins of Afro-Asiatic languages provide the best classifications.^{Footnote 68} Yet the old Arab-racial idea based on distinct physical features with dark skin color, steatopygia, brownish, or red-brown complexion underpinned the idea of Habasha or Ahabish as peoples of different origins inhabiting the same region. But a misleading notion of Habasha or Ahabish, as descendants of “mixed race” but sharing a culture, has been the foundational idea that limited Habasha to the population of the “northern Horn.”^{Footnote 69}

al-Masudi’s tenth-century reference to the inhabitants of the east African coast as Ahabish was not in fact an aberration but a standard contemporary approach. He was tapping into a tradition of informed Arab writers, as can be verified from an Arab “nautical directory” compiled from “generations of Arab sailors” that referred to the areas east of Zayla as “northeastern Abyssinia” and the coast between Barawa and Manbasa as “southeastern Abyssinia.”^{Footnote 70} According to al-Masudi, of the five seas of inhabited and cultivated lands known to Arab geographers, the “first is the Abyssinian sea.”^{Footnote 71} al-Masudi, attributing his information to the Greek geographer Ptolemy, listed the islands off the east African coast as an “archipelago in the Abyssinian Sea.”^{Footnote 72} Persian geographers in antiquity named large bodies of water after their adjacent inhabitants,^{Footnote 73} so that between the ninth and thirteenth centuries Arab writers recognized what is now called the western Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden as the Zanj or Abyssinian Seas.^{Footnote 74} That therefore suggests that the inhabitants of that coast were known to the Arabs not only as Habash or Ahabish but also as Zanj Ahabish. al-Masudi went so far as to say that the Abyssinians comprised “different nations.”^{Footnote 75} Ibn Khaldun’s analysis of Arab writings classified “Ahabish” or Abyssinians into two groups, those facing Mecca across the Red Sea and those facing Aden, across today’s Gulf of Aden. Ibn Khaldun neither claimed nor even suggested that Habashas were descendants of south Arabians.^{Footnote 76} al-Idrisi wrote that the Horn of Africa was partly under the Berbers (Somali) and partly under the Habash. ^{Footnote 77} Ibn Battuta’s 1331 description of the unique rainfall pattern on the Horn of Africa as a “downpour” and coming “every afternoon” referred to the region as Abyssinia.^{Footnote 78} One Somali scholar concluded that Arabic sources categorized most inhabitants of the Horn of Africa as Habash.^{Footnote 79}

The Arab physiognomic classification had reached Europe some time before the sixteenth century and as a result early Portuguese explorers and writers believed that coastal east Africa as far as Sofala was ruled by medieval Abyssinia. When the Portuguese entered Southeastern Africa for the first time and reached present day coastal Mozambique in 1497–1499, Vasco da Gama in his diary recorded rumors that the many trading cities along the coasts of south and east Africa belonged to the Emperor of Abyssinia, who was known as Prester John.^{Footnote 80} Based on that information, maps produced as late as the eighteenth century depicted Habasha as extending first into South Africa and later into East Africa.^{Footnote 81} Merid criticized as an exaggeration the pre-seventeenth-century European sources that extended Habasha, or Ethiopia, into south-east Africa, although he did not link the reports to Arab sources. Nor did he comment on the sources then available that showed an Oromo presence on the east African coast before the sixteenth century.^{Footnote 82} For many Arab writers “Zanj and Habasha [were] (…) geographically inseparable names” sometimes placed all over eastern, northern, and western Africa. However, at some time between 1342 and 1349 al-Umari divided them into those from “south of Egypt to the southern limits of the known parts Africa” and those of West Africa.^{Footnote 83} It is fair to assume that at least until the fifteenth century the designation Habasha was applied to diverse African groups, known to the Arabs as Zanj-Ahabish and who inhabited parts of the Horn up to and including coastal east Africa. The restriction of the term to Christians in the northern Horn is a largely post-sixteenth-century interpretive framework derived slowly from the fourteenth century internal wars and external definitions.

By the fourteenth century, for some discerning Arab writers “there were Muslim Habasha states, Christian Habasha states, and pagan Habasha countries.”^{Footnote 84} In the same century, if not earlier, the history of the interior of the Horn was shaped by a series of regional conflicts between the southward expanding Christian state and conglomerates of Muslim sultanates which were linked to the port of Zayla and were pushing westward.^{Footnote 85} Certain scholars describe the initial relationship between the medieval Abyssinian Christian state and the Muslim sultanates as a “competitive symbiosis.”^{Footnote 86} The medieval Christian state and the Muslim sultanates periodically fought over the headwaters of the Awash and Waabe Rivers in a competition for access to trade resources and routes to the Zayla coast.^{Footnote 87} The Christianized or Islamized Semitic ruling elites aimed to homogenize the followers of African indigenous religions around one of the two monotheist religions. The wars by Semitic or Semitized elites ruling over Christian and Muslim states alike caused internal differentiations and mutual labeling that fueled religious intolerance.^{Footnote 88}

By the fifteenth century, the number of Muslims had risen everywhere in the region known broadly as Habasha and previously conquered by Christian kings of Abyssinia. Here one can discern a slow but recognizable change from the tenth century when al-Masudi described Muslim families paying tribute to local rulers.^{Footnote 89} Marking the spread of the Muslim faith, al-Maqrizi authored the History of the Islamic Kings in Abyssinia ^{Footnote 90} which recorded the evolving changes in the differentiation of Habasha/Ahabish from a physiognomic to a religious identity. The title of the book categorized Muslims as a group distinct from the diverse groupings collectively known as Habasha or Ahabish. al-Maqrizi’s components of medieval Abyssinia, as ethnonyms and names of places or regions, were Barya, Hamasen, Amhara, Shawa, Damot, Dawaro, Adal, Mora, Darab, and Hadya (see map 1). That designation corresponded to the pre-fourteenth-century Arabic category of Ahabish and with that connotation in mind we can see that the Ahabish spread from the Indian Ocean in the southeast to Takrur in the northwest. Yet in terms of religion, not all Habasha/Ahabish were either Muslim or Christian, for some were “very steadfast in their religion gathering up for public cult,”^{Footnote 91} a reference to traditional African religions. That broad classification of Habasha includes present-day categories of both Cushitic and Semitic speakers.

Map 1. The Juba and Tana Rivers, ancient passageway to coastal east Africa (Adapted from Turton, “Bantu, Galla and Somali Migrations in the Horn of Africa”).

Map 2. Approximate locations of medieval Christian and Muslim sultanates in today’s Ethiopian region. Map created by Peter Kimosop.

In the post-sixteenth-century definition which referred to religion, only the Semitic speaking Hamasen and Amhara fit the Abyssinian category. In that interpretive framework, in place since the sixteenth century, Damot, Dawaro, Adal, Mora, and Hadiya cannot be designated Habash or Ahabish. The pre-sixteenth-century Ahabish was a physiognomic category derived from what first the Persians and later the Europeans called the “aquiline nose” or “good facial features,” or “full-faced” people.^{Footnote 92} al-Maqrizi’s approach from the fifteenth century equated the Amhara with Christians as the enemies of Muslims, but that disregarded two historical facts.^{Footnote 93} First, there were and are Muslim Amhara, Argobba speakers. In that regard, Girma has remarked recently that the medieval wars between Christians and Muslims separated the Amhara into Amharic speaking Christians and Argobba-speaking Muslims – a significant theme not yet explored in detail.^{Footnote 94} The second thing ignored by al-Maqrizi was that, during the sixteenth-century religious wars, a jihadist participant documented that Muslim patrician-military commanders fought alongside the Christian king, Lebna-Dengil.^{Footnote 95} The simplistic religious marker of Christian-Amhara, transcribed from Muslim Argobba, was later expanded to become one of the pillars supporting the meaning of Abyssinia. Today, it designates mainly Christian Semitic-language speakers in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.^{Footnote 96} More recently, based on data gathered mainly from the Tigray region of Ethiopia and surrounding areas, Wolbert Smidt posited that Habasha served as an ethnic self-identification for Tigrinya speakers and to some extent for Amhara and other Ethiopian-Semitic groups.^{Footnote 97} In terms of modern Ethiopia, the post-sixteenth-century Abyssinia category appears narrow and exclusive, whereas the broader pre-fourteenth-century meaning of Habasha was inclusive despite its reliance on physiognomic features. Without justifying the physical parameters, this present work is an attempt to reclaim historical aspects linked to the pre-fourteenth-century concept of Zanj-Ahabash.

By the sixteenth century, regional conflicts had become a fully-fledged war between Christians and Muslims and had attracted foreign supporters. Inspired by external definitions, Arab jihadists crossed the Red Sea and fought alongside their co-religionists in northeast Africa.^{Footnote 98} A book written by one such Arab jihadist was Futuh al-Habasha, the Conquest of Abyssinia.^{Footnote 99} In that work the meaning of Abyssinia was equated with Christians, despite the fact that Muslims were fighting for the Christian Emperor.^{Footnote 100} When the war of conquest failed, most of the jihadists settled on what is now the Swahili coast, underscoring the present argument about regional connectedness.^{Footnote 101} Portuguese military support of the Christians in the Horn also generated a European external definition of Abyssinia as Christian, which in turn transformed the earlier diversity attached to the land of Prester John. That then became the second pillar supporting the definition of Abyssinia as Christian.^{Footnote 102} From then on Europeans categorized the erstwhile diverse Habasha groups as non-Christian, Muslim, or pagan enemies of the Abyssinians. On the same theme Andreu Martinez d’Alois-Moner concluded that “the intellectual and practical involvement of the Jesuits shaped the modern image of Ethiopia.”^{Footnote 103} Consequently, since the sixteenth century Habasha or Abyssinia became synonymous with Semitic-language speaking Christian Ethiopians, and excluded the Oromo.^{Footnote 104}

Before the fourteenth century Ahabish referred to most of the inhabitants of the Horn and its hinterland. Haggai Erlich’s definition of Habasha as “black natives of the Horn of Africa who joined Islam and lived under its sway”^{Footnote 105} is characteristic of the latter phase and does not apply to the earlier period described by al-Jahiz and al-Masudi. Evidence for that comes from al-Dimashqi’s designation of “pagan upper Habasha,”^{Footnote 106} contrasting with those other, Islamized, coastal groups. As Tolmacheva succinctly put it, “Zanj al-Habash referred to the non-Islamized and non-Christianized groups.”^{Footnote 107} John Hunwick concluded that the Arab designation Habasha “included peoples of diverse languages and cultures (…) with some predominance of Oromo.”^{Footnote 108} That interpretation fits the pre-fourteenth-century meaning of Habasha and helps to uncover a layer of history to help understand the identity of northern Zanj, Zanj-Ahabish, or Damdam.

Zanj-Ahabish or Damdam

After setting the historical contexts for certain key concepts, al-Masudi’s tenth-century description of Zanj-Ahabish becomes easier to identify. That the Zanj category included non-Bantu groups is not a new idea. While Edmund Turton had cast doubt about the automatic “identification of Zanj with Bantu-speaking peoples,” Trimingham had argued that “Zanj proper” were “Kushites.”^{Footnote 109} Second-century BCE Ptolemaic Greek explorers were the first who broadly categorized the inhabitants of the Red Sea coast as “aquiline-featured,” while Persian sources designated the Zanj as “full-faced” blacks.^{Footnote 110} Some Arabic sources referred to the Zanj as black or near black.^{Footnote 111} Of the above, the ethnonyms Zanj al-Habash, hinterland Zanj, northern Zanj, Ahabish, and Dandama or its variant Damadim referred to the Oromo of the interior of the Horn of Africa,^{Footnote 112} partly based on sources that elucidate al-Masudi’s reference to the elected King of Zanj and the oratory of his officials.^{Footnote 113}

Meanwhile, Carlo Conti-Rossini cited Arab sources and was the first to recognize that the Zanj-Ahabish extended as far as the east African coast.^{Footnote 114} Decoding Ahabish or Habasha into a vague “Ethiopic race,” Ulrich Braukamper proposed that during the thirteenth century Cushitic and Semitic speakers were inhabiting the areas between the Indian Ocean and today’s southern Ethiopia,^{Footnote 115} but de Vere Allen associated the Habash with the Boorana, Rendille, and other northeast African pastoralists with age-sets as a significant cultural trait.^{Footnote 116} De Vere Allen’s focus on age-set as a marker to identify the institution of elected Zanj king was astute. Although the Rendille and many others have used age-set, they are excluded based on key ethnographic data mentioned in the sources.^{Footnote 117} Age-set is a key institution related to election and power-transfer, for which the Boorana and Guji fit the bill for three reasons.^{Footnote 118} First, both are Oromo and still practice the Gadaa system to transfer power to a new generation every eight years, despite Menilek II (r. 1889–1913) banning pan-Oromo gatherings or weakening the institutions.^{Footnote 119} Gadaa is now understood to be very old.^{Footnote 120} Second, despite difference in time depth, the tenth- to twelfth-century ritual descriptions match nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarly studies. For instance, a recent study on requirements for candidacy indicated that certain groups are still “excluded from competition” for office due to past offences, confirming al-Masudi’s tenth-century report referring to proscription of the descendants of certain elected officials from themselves standing for elected office.^{Footnote 121} Third, the Boorana and Guji were probably descended from groups that had spread down the Juba valley before the tenth century. One scholar acquainted with east and northeast African primary sources computed Oromo subgroups at “over three figures” and as spreading from north-central Ethiopia to the Tana River basin in Kenya.^{Footnote 122}

In his writing on the Zanj, al-Masudi stated “the tribes of ‘Ahabish’ had established themselves as far as Sofala.”^{Footnote 123} al-Masudi, who had twice visited the east African coast, was most probably referring to the Oromo when writing of the Ahabish as a group of Abyssinian tribes. al-Masudi probably based his designation on the pre-sixteenth-century physiognomic definition, although he sometimes equated the Zanj with Ahabish and vice versa. For instance, he stated “like all Abyssinians the [Zanj] do not know snow,” and “the Zanj are the only Ahabish to have crossed the branch of the Nile River into the sea of Zanj [and] (…) settled in the area [stretching] as far as Sofala.”^{Footnote 124} He also added that the “Sofala, (…) district of the Zanj” was “the low country of the Demdemeh.”^{Footnote 125} De Vere Allen’s book on Swahili Origins delimited its research area as far as Sofala, mirroring Arab writings about the Ahabish settlement.^{Footnote 126} We shall return to the Damadam, Damadim, Yamyam, Dahdam, or Dendema below.

Four points can be gathered from al-Masudi’s writings cited above. The first is that Ahabish and northern Zanj were interchangeable names for one specific group of northeast Africans. The second is that Zanj was a broad term that suggested linguistic diversity. Third, al-Masudi’s claim that Demdemeh settlement extended to Sofala cannot be taken literally, for he never sailed beyond Pemba/Kanbalu.^{Footnote 127} al-Masudi’s statement cannot therefore have been referring to the regions beyond Kanbalu reportedly inhabited by Damadim – at least not accurately so. Others sources suggest al-Bayas or al-Banas, “the last place of the Zanj touching Sofala country.”^{Footnote 128} The relevance of that to this research is the association of the Zanj with Zanj-Ahabish or Damadam or Damadim in connection with the reported settlement.

The fourth point is related where the Damadim lived and the direction of their movement. al-Masudi described the southward spread of the northern Zanj or Damadim or Zanj-Ahabish as being along the right bank of the Nile.^{Footnote 129} Due to the influence of Ptolemy’s Geography on Arab writers, the “Nile” in the tenth century was what we now know as the Waabe-Shaballe-Juba River.^{Footnote 130} al-Masudi also added that Damadam land extended 700 parasangs into the interior.^{Footnote 131} Devic remarked that the figure was not a precise measurement but an estimate, although we do have another estimate for comparison, for al-Masudi too assessed the distance from Kanbalu (Pemba) to Oman as 700 parasangs.^{Footnote 132} al-Masudi had sailed over the Red Sea and wrote on contemporary northern Christian Abyssinia^{Footnote 133} so perhaps it was that experience that formed the basis for his comparative estimate of the distance from the east African coast into the interior Damadam land (see map 1). His estimate certainly seems reasonably accurate. al-Masudi described the landscape of the interior as “a country cut up into valleys, mountains, and stony deserts.”^{Footnote 134} The projected distance and specific geographic features of the landscape described by al-Masudi suggest today’s northern Kenya and southern-central Ethiopia. Therefore, al-Masudi’s distance estimate of their ancient domicile indirectly suggests the Damadam or northern Zanj were Oromo people who had relocated from the highland interior, which was the homeland of the other Oromo now living in present day Ethiopia. Other sources confirm an Oromo presence in that area.^{Footnote 135}

The Yam, Yamjam, Damdam: Ancient Domicile and Migration

al-Masudi referred to the Demadim interchangeably as the northern Zanj, and as Zanj-Ahabish, and listed Zanj ed-Damadam as one of the two black states of the ancient world, along with India.^{Footnote 136} However, for three reasons rooted in the “Arabic geographical legacy” in Africa their identity and location has remained a mystery until now.^{Footnote 137} First, Arab writers linked the Damdam, the Zanj, and the Nile and located the Damdam on the source or the course of the “Nile” and the Damdam “turn[ed] up wherever there is any Nile.” But Arab savants borrowed “Ptolemy’s theory of astronomical geography” that connected the source of the Nile to the mystical “Mountains of the Moon.”^{Footnote 138} Second, for Arab writers between the ninth and fourteenth centuries the Nile was either a conflation of the Nile and the Niger or an amalgam of the Senegal, Niger, and Waabe-Juba Rivers.^{Footnote 139} From such inexact geographical data the Zanj and Habasha also featured along the “Nile.” Damdam was either a generic name for followers of African traditional religions, or a reference to “distant peoples deep in Africa.”^{Footnote 140} Third, despite loosely marked geographical data from all over east to west Africa, scholars first considered Damdam to be an early West African state.^{Footnote 141} Now however, the latest scholarly interpretation in West Africa concurs that Damdam was an Islamic legal category of Africans sanctioned for enslavement.^{Footnote 142}

Certain Arab writers presented them also as Djentama, Hantama, Yamyam, Damadam (pl. Demadim), or its variant Dendema. ^{Footnote 143} A few mentioned the Demadim along with the Zanj and Habasha, in southern Egypt, usually in relation to a “River Nile” and later to “the Nile of Mogadisho.”^{Footnote 144} Damdam, Damadam, Yamjam, or Yamyam was a corruption of Jamjam, which is today a toponym for the Guji Oromo in southern Ethiopia. al-Masudi first identified the Damdam as Cushite descendants listed by the Prophet Jeremia alongside the Nubians and Beja. al-Masudi went on to indicate that the Damdam had spread south on the right bank of what we may presume was the Egyptian Nile.^{Footnote 145} Devic certainly wondered whether al-Masudi really meant the Egyptian Nile, or the “Nile of Mogadisho,” but coincidentally the Jamjam seem to have spread both on the right bank of the Nile in ancient Egypt and then the Waabe-Juba River on the southern Horn of coastal east Africa.^{Footnote 146} To his credit al-Masudi also stated that the “Nile” [Waab-Shaballe-Juba] rises “from the mountains of the Zanj,” ^{Footnote 147} implying the highland regions of today’s central-southern Ethiopia.

In Egyptian sources the Damdam were widely known as the Yam or Yamjam, a term close to Yamyam, itself a variant of the term Damdam in Arabic sources. ^{Footnote 148} Egyptologists Mark Bush and Julien Cooper provided a rationale for the hieroglyphic transliteration of Yam and Yamjam while Cooper cited other Egyptologists who showed that Horn Cushitic groups were present in the ancient Middle Nile valley.^{Footnote 149} The Yam or Yamjam were the first known Africans to provide a southern “trade node or intermediary” for the pharaohs of the Old Kingdom.^{Footnote 150} A surviving biography of an Egyptian official recorded four trade missions to the land of Yam during the reigns of two Old Kingdom pharaohs from 2355–2261 BCE.^{Footnote 151} The Yamjam’s probable ancient location in southern Egypt and disappearance from hieroglyphic sources with the onset of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom have attracted scholarly research for over a century.^{Footnote 152} In explaining the Jamjam’s arrival on the Horn, Ibn Said drew a parallel with the Mongol conquest model and labeled the Demadim “the Mongols of Africa” claiming they had inflicted simultaneous devastation on Nubia and Christian Abyssinia in 1220.^{Footnote 153} That alleged Mongol style invasion date is obviously implausible since three centuries earlier in 916 and 945 al-Masudi had observed the Demdam/Jamjam on coastal east Africa. Additionally Richard Gray affirms that the Oromo had “held sway in this region since about 650.”^{Footnote 154} Gray’s conclusion placed the Oromo in coastal east Africa and established the context for their regional interaction.

Though evidence of any Mongol style conquest is lacking both from Nubian and Ethiopian sources, Ibn Said’s stated direction of movement confirms a migration of Yamjam or Jamjam southward from the Middle Nile Valley. Among scholars of the Horn, Christopher Ehret estimated southward migration of Cushitic people from today’s eastern Sudan “sometime in the eighth or seventh millennium BCE.”^{Footnote 155} However, the new sources identify the Jamjam, a specific Cushitic group, as having trekked to the Horn much later, during the third millennium BCE. Timothy Kendall postulated that Egyptian references to the Yamjam ended at some time after the decline of the Old Kingdom and at the rise of the Middle Kingdom.^{Footnote 156} For its part, Kendall’s timeline falls within Julien Cooper’s finding about the desiccation of the region which made the Yamite settlement area uninhabitable by about 2220 BCE.^{Footnote 157} Despite the absence of archeological or literary evidence, it is safe to assume that the Jamjam arrived in the Horn earlier than the first millennium BCE. Egyptologists have identified two ancient migration routes from the Middle Nile valley leading respectively to the western and eastern regions of the northern Horn highland, today’s Eritrea.^{Footnote 158} That migration route from north to south complemented al-Masudi’s literary and Ehret’s linguistic sources for directions of movement in Antiquity. Mirroring those ancient migration paths there was the inclusion of “the northern Horn (…) into Egyptian commercial sphere” during the third millennium BCE. A trade route, it linked “pre- and early-dynastic” Egypt with the “northern Rift Valley of Ethiopia” as a source of “prestige objects.” Additionally, archeological research has uncovered “late Middle Kingdom ceramics” suggesting a pattern of ancient population migration from lower Nubia/Upper Egypt into the Horn.^{Footnote 159} The dynamics have yet to be examined between trade and routes of population migration linking the Middle Nile valley and the Horn.^{Footnote 160}

On his thirteenth-century map Ibn Said placed the Yamjam within the vast tracts of both fertile and arid Damdam land of today’s southern Ethiopia as far as the east African coast, while al-Dimashqi referred to the “Nile of Mogadisho” as the Damdam River^{Footnote 161} (see map 3). Two centuries later Fra Mauro’s map, prepared for Prince Henry the Navigator, placed the Oromo along the same river albeit using the pejorative appellation “Galla,” a name imposed on them that all Oromo disliked and resisted.^{Footnote 162} Even earlier, the second-century Geography of Ptolemy located the Rapsi, Rausi, or Harusi, in the same region.^{Footnote 163} The Harusi or Rausi were probably the ancestors of today’s Arsi and other Oromo groups inhabiting the general area.^{Footnote 164} The Arsi, descendants of the ancient Harusi, and other contemporary Oromo use Jamjam as a name for Guji Oromo, who lack any memory of such a tradition. The Jamjam were probably the ancestors of some of the Oromo who today inhabit southern and southeastern Ethiopia. For instance, Oromo groups claiming an ancestral link to the Jamjam are found in the Harar administrative region, to the east of Guji land. Probably as a relic of Ptolemy’s ancient map and medieval Arab ones, today Jamjam is a toponym for the uplands of Guji Oromo.^{Footnote 165} All the varied sources just mentioned provide indisputable evidence that the Jamjam were identified as an offshoot of the ancient Oromo and had relocated south to coastal east Africa.

Map 3. Ancient Jamjam and ninth- to fifteenth-century extent of Habasha according to Arab sources. Map created by Peter Kimosop.

Two additional written sources prove beyond doubt that the reference to northern Zanj or Zanj ed-Demadim or Jamjam indicated the Oromo. The first of those sources is the internal indirect references to the composition of the Zanj. They were described in the tenth century as “the other Zanj” by al-Nadim and “the genius of the Zanj” by the Persian Ahmed Ibn Rusta. Other Arab writers characterized al-Jahiz’s orators as people who know the arts of rhetoric and wisdom.^{Footnote 166} The “other Zanj” or “genius of the Zanj” were terms used by Arab writers to distinguish the Zanj group which included intellectuals and orators, from groups without either. Such indirect references attributed oratory to a particular Zanj group.^{Footnote 167} al-Jahiz was the first to distinguish between the coastal Zanj and those in the hinterland. He remarked that contemporary Arabs would have changed their “standard of perfection” had they known the hinterland Zanj.^{Footnote 168} al-Masudi finessed the distinction as the “northern Zanj,” a division between the southern or coastal Zanj and those in the interior. He classified the group with orators as the northern Zanj, Zanj al-Habash, and as Zanj ed-Damadim, or “those with a beautiful language.”^{Footnote 169} Thus the combination of al-Masudi, al-Jahiz and other Arab writings specified the northern Zanj, while Zanj al-Habash and Damadam or Jamjam was the term used to refer to sections of the Oromo who had drifted south earlier than scholars had then recognized.

If the above descriptions of the northern Zanj, Zanj al-Habash seem rosily admiring, in fact it is truer to say it was more the result of racist allusions that were the norm than of any great feeling of respect. Even al-Masudi’s reference to the “beautiful language” of the Damadim betrays a hint of racism, for there is no aesthetic yardstick for languages. al-Masudi listed the two known black countries in the tenth century as India and Zanj ed-Damadam, adding that the latter trailed in “intellect, philosophy, and government.” That was a direct sneer at al-Jahiz’s statement that enslaved Indians in Baghdad were as ignorant as Zanj slaves.^{Footnote 170} al-Masudi’s statement that the Zanj ed-Demadam lacked philosophy was meant as a ranking of Africans lower than Indians, and Ibn Rusta’s “genius of Zanj” implied a racial hierarchy among the Zanj. Reference to people “with the art of rhetoric and wisdom” suggested uneven endowment of peoples with such gifts. Rhetoric and racism aside, the Arab writers were impressed with the Zanj assemblies with their eloquent speakers – in fact they thought they were rather like Muslim Friday prayers. According to al-Marwazi, with the spread of Islam the Arabs came to value eloquence in preaching.^{Footnote 171} Arabs believed in a revealed monotheist religion as a benchmark of civilization, so that in their view the assembled multitudes listening to speakers proved that the eloquent Zanj people were a cut above the other regional Africans. That assumption is exposed below in another source, but here the unique contexts of the oration will be addressed.

Among the Oromo, eloquence is one of the personal qualities required for leadership,^{Footnote 172} although it may be supposed that all societies rely on some measure of oratory in the reaching of consensus and for collective action.^{Footnote 173} But the procedures of decision-making, accountability, and the uniquely pioneering system of institutional by-pass made the context of the Oromo’s reliance on oratory qualitatively different. Their style of decision-making and accountability in fact had five features. First, orators acquired eloquence after years of practice to “learn the techniques of oratory and rhetoric.” It might take sixteen years for a man to be able to deliver speeches during assemblies to use his oratory as part of the institutionalized public decision making process.^{Footnote 174} Second, trainees were separated from their families both to eliminate sectional favoritism and so that all would be represented in eventual service. Separation from family was recognized by one African scholar in colonial Kenya as a critical development for the Kikuyu age-grade there.^{Footnote 175} Third, based on the substance of their speeches orators either succeeded in swaying their audiences in making a public decision or for election to office – or they failed. Fourth, once elected, retention of office depended on obeying laws and observing customs, a kind of accountability absent from many societies that practiced oration. Fifth, participation in oration was not limited to trained speakers but was open to all the assembled participants. Reporting at the beginning of the twentieth century on the free elections held every eight years and on law-making, Atsme wistfully remarked “nobody knows from where [the Oromo] got the concept of liberty.”^{Footnote 176}

Asmarom Legesse postulated that such liberty was rooted in an inimitable “innovation of democracy in Africa.”^{Footnote 177} Philosophers say that freedom is the original condition of humanity,^{Footnote 178} but every free society has its own distinctive path to institutionalizing freedom.^{Footnote 179} The invention Asmarom Legesse described originated from a rare institutional bypass in the pre-modern world that removed the origins of law from the realm of religion and customs into legislation, sera tumma, the separation of the sources of power into the secular and the religious sphere.^{Footnote 180} While the timeline of that invention is still unclear, we may mention en passant that Oromo organic intellectuals both created and subsequently reformed and maintained the system until the present day. A distinguishing feature of their state structure is its centripetal unity instead of conquest-based centralization. It is an African form of federal system providing a horizontal union with minimum extraction or intervention from the center. With its diffuse governmental procedures such centripetal unity as a model of state formation was probably a unique African response to what Jeffrey Herbst described as environmental and ecological challenges.^{Footnote 181} The context of Oromo oratory therefore differs in its law-making procedure and its sidestepping of religion, in its centripetal unity, its accountability, and in its public institutions relating to all of them.

The second written source, from Sulayman “the merchant” as well as that of the geographer Abu Zaid al Hasan as-Sirafi (d. 979) indisputably prove that al-Jahiz’s “eloquent orators” were the Oromo. Gerald Tibbetts described Sulayman the merchant as “an early navigator.”^{Footnote 182} al-Masudi cited Abu Zaid’s writings and praised him as “a man of much information and intelligence.”^{Footnote 183} It is most likely that Sulayman the merchant recorded the event cited here and Abu Zaid subsequently included it with other stories. It is a source often overlooked but which describes how officials serving al-Masudi’s elected Zanj kings were installed and then how they were retired. Deploying the Zanj nomenclature, Abu Zaid described the occasion of “butha,” as it was pronounced in the Zanj language, as the gathering of crowds to listen to the Zanj orators, who “were not to be found among other peoples.” Sulayman and Abu Zaid defined “butha” as a Friday “homily to the Orthodox caliph,” and the speakers as preachers.^{Footnote 184} Others including al-Masudi testified that the Damadim were not Muslims, had no religious laws and were idolaters governed by their own customs.^{Footnote 185} Reference to the law of custom is significant because it confirmed Tolmacheva’s identification of the non-Islamized and non-Christianized Ahabish along with allusions to elected kings. al-Masudi had observed the presence of Muslims on Kanbalu Island, presumably a reference to modern-day Pemba.^{Footnote 186} Writing in the thirteenth century, al-Dimashqi (1256–1327) described the context of oratory among the northern Zanj’s as being during “reunion and holidays.”^{Footnote 187} Indeed the Buttaa ceremony did serve as an occasion for reunion between and within generations. Writing during the nineteenth century d’Abbadie characterized Buttaa among the Oromo as an occasion of “an African oratorical contest” distinguished by “natural dignity [and] decorum” absent from European parliaments.^{Footnote 188} Abu Zaid’s pinpointing of the Buttaa ceremony helps us to place al-Masudi’s descriptions in context alongside the institution of elected kings and the title.

Buttaa was a timeline in the Gadaa system and is still a cultural marker for the Oromo. Gadaa is a “system of classes (…) that succeed each other every eight years” to assume political, military, economic, and ritual responsibilities.^{Footnote 189} Each Gadaa class remained in power for eight years so that Buttaa was held at the beginning and end of Gadaa officials’ tenure. It was an interval intended for a “formal power transfer ceremony”^{Footnote 190} within a generation or between succeeding generations, in accordance with the Gadaa law of a “class system based on time.”^{Footnote 191} The Gadaa system used a combined lunar and solar calendar^{Footnote 192} that computed assembly and ritual dates in “mara” or “rounds of time”^{Footnote 193} and it was Beckingham who established the eight year cycles of power transfer.^{Footnote 194} In 1925, Chambard, Azais, and Potter identified the “five cycles of eight year each” later confirmed by Eike Haberland and referred to here as the quadragennial, or five series of cycles of eight years.^{Footnote 195} Gemetchu Megerssa’s dissertation advanced our knowledge by further identifying nine series of forty-year cycles or novem quadragennial. Each novem quadragennial era was associated with one Oromo section who would serve as custodians of unity for three-hundred and sixty years by providing elected kings.^{Footnote 196} For the purpose of this paper therefore, Buttaa is a timeline in the Gadaa system used for transferring power.

The particular Buttaa ceremony reported in 850/851 is significant to us in that it identifies five Gadaa rituals and provides a terminus post quem for the Gadaa first reported in the sixteenth-century sources for southern Christian Abyssinia.^{Footnote 197} al-Jahiz cited oratory and eloquence in the ninth century to prove to white people the intellectual equality of the blacks within the Arab Islamic empire, where blacks were generally considered feeble-minded. Additional Arab sources up to the thirteenth century provided more details about Gadaa rituals and assemblies. First, al-Idrisi reported on power transfer ritual where men in Barrawa, who resisted Islam, bowed before a stone anointed in fish oil.^{Footnote 198} That was probably a symbolic gesture, huluuqoo, to slip through, implying a promise to avoid misconduct in public performance or to escape the recurrence of past misfortunes.^{Footnote 199} The key meaning here lay in the ancient Oromo belief that an essential link existed between the symbolic act, slipping through, and the actor’s public service unblemished with malfeasance or misfortune. Fish oil and stone were substitutes for butter and a sacred tree^{Footnote 200} and symbolized the expectation of abundance during the tenure of the newly elected officials. Second, al-Idrisi denigrated al-Jahiz and al-Masudi’s celebrated orators as snake charmers, a caricature that might have originated from the presence of live snakes such as the cobra and puff adder, brought along for the purpose of a “self-adjurative oath” to be made during the swearing-in ceremony.^{Footnote 201}

Third, al-Idrisi reported that orators praised their ancestors during assemblies, a practice still current among the Boorana and Guji and used for self-promotion, invoking collective memory, and history.^{Footnote 202} Fourth, al-Idrisi also told of “traveling holy men (zihad),” or itinerant preachers, who came to visit the elected king. They were referred to in later sources as sectional delegates, jilaa, visiting the elected king eight-yearly for renewal of their mandates to deliver local justice, and to serve as a grass-roots check on power.^{Footnote 203} Arab writers portrayed them as “holy,” borrowing the metaphor from Abrahamic monotheism. Such critical details of Gadaa rites and practices, in sources from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, conclusively establish that the Gadaa system functioned on the east African coast with regular calendars within and between generations. The practice helped maintain rituals similar to present-day practices among the Boorana and Gujii Oromo.

Comparing the Pre- and Post-Sixteenth-Century Sources on Aspects of the Gadaa System

I must address here two relevant themes about the practices of the Gadaa system. The first is to compare the relative strength of the office of the elected king in the Gadaa system in coastal east Africa as reported in pre-thirteenth-century sources, and the post-sixteenth-century sources for southern Ethiopia. In the early sources the elected king bore the title “waklimi,” a transposed form of Ilma Waak, which corresponds to al-Masudi’s “son of the great Lord.”^{Footnote 204} The Ilma Waak wore a diadem as a distinguishing mark of his office. al-Masudi added that the Ilma Waak was one of the two black kings who reigned in antiquity, the other being an Indian king. Ilma Waak had three hundred thousand cavalry at his disposal; he presided over assemblies and saw that justice was dispensed in his realm. The Ilma Waak was himself required to rule justly and any elected king guilty of malfeasance would be deposed and his descendants permanently proscribed from office. Sectional delegates visited the elected king regularly, probably to receive blessings and renew their mandates to deliver justice locally and to supervise proper obedience to the laws.^{Footnote 205}

In the post-sixteenth-century sources the office of elected king declined in prestige and power for three reasons. There was first its historiographic representation, then the rise and spread of Abrahamic monotheism, and third the Oromo uncertainty about how much power the elected king should have. Based on the pre-thirteenth-century sources the Abba Muudaa held the successor-office to that of elected kings since he was considered Ilma Waaka Gudda, “son of the great Lord.” That was indeed the title al-Masudi recorded, because sectional delegates visited him octennially. First, all primary sources referred to Abba Muudaa as a religious leader with metaphors borrowed from Abrahamic monotheist religions^{Footnote 206} although that says more about the conceptual framework of the authors. The secular title, mooti, meaning king, was accorded to elected war leaders in nineteenth-century Gudru, or was claimed in twentieth-century Boorana by elected Abba Gadaa.^{Footnote 207} However, none of them exercised power, revealing the Oromo doubts about the wisdom of concentrating power in the hands of an elected king. Second, the eight-yearly renewals of their mandates by the jilaa, or sectional delegates were depicted as pilgrimages.^{Footnote 208} al-Jahiz and al-Masudi’s civic metaphors aptly related the role of the elected kings and the system they ran. Ironically, writers described a political system that bypassed religion and emphasized the secular origin of law with metaphors borrowed from Abrahamic monotheisms claiming to embody the laws for humans. Third, the rise and spread of Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam and Christianity, introduced rival competing values, frameworks of identity, loyalty, and perceptions about law. The doubts about concentration of power, the spread of monotheist religions and their relative claims as competing sources of law and identity were changed circumstance suggesting decline of the Gadaa system.

The second theme is the type of religion and its role, especially how aspects of religious rites reinforced the Gadaa system before the spread of Abrahamic monotheism. Traditional Oromo monotheist religion was a civil religion, “a body of beliefs, symbols and rituals which provides a religious dimension”^{Footnote 209} for the political, social, and cultural fabric of the Oromo. The divergence between Abrahamic monotheism and Oromo civil religion hinged on the former striving to provide salvation for the individual or for the religious group, and the latter aiming to preserve a whole society together with its political, cultural, and social fabric. The “religious dimension” is the solemnity of ritual and rhetoric; solemnity etched the political processes and public decisions into the collective memory. The standard scholarly interpretation refers to an interweaving of the religious and the secular, but in practice the process was concerned with solemnizing the non-religious processes, in other words political, social, and cultural activity. Solemnizing was not then and is not now limited to the religious sphere; clearly, civil religion’s solemnizing role enabled the pre-thirteenth-century Jamjam’s elected kings to preserve their socio-political and cultural fabric intact. Describing the Abba Muudaa using metaphors borrowed from monotheism seems to have originated in failure to understand the solemnizing process, a perspective which also contributed to the decline of the Gadaa system.

The decline of Gadaa can be seen both as post factum and a priori due to its cyclical dynamism. The post factum decline included, but was not limited to, d’Abbadie’s observation of “jury buying” in nineteenth-century Gudru, and was seen in the rise of “war leaders” who monopolized power and so rendered Gadaa assemblies ineffectual.^{Footnote 210} The a priori aspect is coded mnemonically in the Gadaa system by the Boorana and Guji Oromo in their use of the number nine.^{Footnote 211} Implied in that number is a sign that the Gadaa system had reached its twilight after the eighth forty-year cycle saddeetaa, so that internal reform and renewal became necessary. The novem quadragennial was both the time of phasing out of the preceding long epoch and the beginning of a new era of 360 years.^{Footnote 212} That conception of internal institutional decay corresponds to Montesquieu’s theory that every political system produces its own internal variables which eventually generate corruption and decay.^{Footnote 213} Such varied forms of decay were reflected in the rise of multiple Abba Muudaas, and regional Oromo monarchies.^{Footnote 214}

During the twentieth century two major external events affected the Gadaa system’s cyclical vitality. First, Menilek’s conquest of the Oromo regions during the second half of the nineteenth century was followed by the banning of Gadaa in most regions and abolition of the office of Abba Muudaa in 1900.^{Footnote 215} The Ethiopian government subsequently recognized the Qalluu as the religious leader among the Boorana, which caused the sidelining of the elected Gadaa leaders. Thereafter the Gadaa system remained in use mainly because of distance from the center of Ethiopian power. For their part, the unelected Qalluu increased their power by acting as electors and prompting scholarly comments about “functional redundancy.”^{Footnote 216} In their new role, the Qalluu became traditional intellectuals while the Boorana leaders who observed Gadaa laws maintained their organic intellectual status. The Boorana assembly debated Qalluu’s externally increased authority during three successive octennial assemblies, 1960–1968, 1968–1976, and 1976–1984. Eventually, almost two decades before the 360 year cycle of the expected novem quadragennial, the decision was taken to strip the religious leaders of their secular authority.^{Footnote 217} The second major external influence was growing awareness – under successive authoritarian rulers – among the educated Oromo in Ethiopia of the indigenous Gadaa system as being the embodiment of democratic ideals dating from long before modern times. Clear overlap with global ideals of democratic governance and new local awareness of Gadaa as an Oromo cultural heritage together inspired a revival of the Gadaa system among all the Oromo in Ethiopia. The system encourages public participation by young and old alike in demanding democratic political reforms.