Browsing by Author "Meskela, Ketema"

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    The Evolution of Land .. Ownership and Tenancy in Highland Bale A Case Study of Goba, Sinana and Dodola to 1974
    (Addis Ababa University, 2001-06) Meskela, Ketema; Walde-Mariam, Tekalign (PhD)
    The evolution of land-ownership patterns in the peripheral regions had attracted little attention until recently. My study attempts to examine the extent to which local demographic and economic conditions in . hland B Ie interacted with political conditions in the aftermath of the conquest to determine access to agricultural land by local and newly arriving groups of people, and the extent to which peasant well-being was affected by these forms of access as they evolved over a period of nearly one century. The thesis starts by highlighting the pre-conquest socio-economic features in the region. The institutions that mediated the land regimes and the changes that were introduced to determine access to resources in the first half of the twentieth century are explored. The paper then shows how the previously prevailing lineage land-ownership patterns gradually gave way to private tenure. The discussion of the post-1941 history of land tenure in highland Bale focuses on the effects of the system of revenue extraction on the local people. The centralization of the fiscal system was attended by repeated land measurements that in many cases resulted in confiscation of land. Factors which threatened peasant property rights and reactions from the peasantry, therefore, occupies a great deal of space in this work. Finally, the work deals with one of the features of the imperial land tenure system in southern Ethiopia: the expansion of tenancy. The paper explores the evolution of tenancy and tenant insecurity in the region all the way to the 1974 Revolution when the entire system was abolished