Browsing by Author "Tessema, Kefyalew"

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    Society and State in the Balé Lowlands: Interplay of Divergent Interests in Center- Periphery Interrelations in Southeastern Ethiopia, 1891-1991
    (Addis Ababa University, 2020-07) Tessema, Kefyalew; Bizuneh (Phd), Belete
    For much of its scant history, Bali was known as the southern borderland of the Christian Highland Kingdom, where the latter stationed frontier guards and Muslim sultanates sent waves of raiding parties up to the 16th century. Bali’s relation with these states was thus characterized by the latter’s efforts to subdue it and Bali’s effort to maintain its autonomy. Its social landscape was diversified by the process of fusion and fission. This dissertation investigates dynamics, local narratives, regional complexities and minorities’ role in society-state relation in the period 1891 -1991. My findings show that since the conquest of the region in the 1880s, state-society relations were shaped by several dynamics with the scramble of colonialists for the region, whose legacies polarized interest of the lowlanders, changed patterns of local interactions and their collective relation with the Ethiopian state. These dynamics had accentuated both cooperation and competition in center-periphery relations by interplaying interest of agents of the center on the periphery and vice versa. The study argues against writing of the history of pastoralists for peasants, a distant view of the periphery as a homogeneous entity and silence on the audible role of riverine cultivators in the regional history. This history shows administration of the vast lowlands from distant garrisons that changed the pre-existing local power relations using its agents was unable to deliver immediate social justice and therefore the region remained socio-economiacally and politically little incorporated into the vi center. Despite the growth of public grievances into localized protest before the Italian interlude, which gave it ethnic and religious catalysts imbedded in the ideology and technology of violence, the restored regime that was incognizant of these emerging dynamics had pursued coercive rule. Consequently, the Oromo and Somali pastoralists, who had conflicting interests, created strategic alliance rallying shared Islamic faith, pastoral livelihood, history of domination and lowland ecosystem. They waged the jagahir, dhombur and sowra wars against the imperial and Därg regimes respectively in which some governors cooperated with them and loyalists among them served the state, which enjoyed also the partnership of some riverine societies. Somalia, backed by long foreign hands, had intervened in arming and training the insurgents and worsened the violent state-society relations since 1960. These resistances therefore contributed a lot for the 1974 and 1991 revolutions but brought little reform on the periphery. In the 1990s, politicization of ethnicity brought new trends in identity competitions though unable to pacify the Balé lowlands. Consequently, instability, famine, insurgency and underdevelopment have dominated its history.