Abolition and manumission in the Beherawi and Betasabawi realms in early 20th century Ethiopia

Abstract

This article examines how older ideas about manumission came into contact with newer international approaches to abolition in Ethiopia in the early 20th century. It shows that older normative attitudes toward manumission, which were compatible with legal slave ownership, did not disappear when international pressure to abolish slavery stimulated the development of anti-slavery policies and legal reforms. Rather, the rationale of manumission was coopted to serve a new abolitionist agenda that expanded the already plural abolitionist praxis in the region. The argument is developed in two steps. First, the article distinguishes between the suppression of domestic slavery and the suppression of the slave trade, which was a political practice deeply integrated into the functioning of the state. The Feteha nagast (or Law of the Kings) had for centuries exhorted slave owners to manumit those enslaved in their households. This traditional approach to manumission did not entail severing relationships between the free and the freed, as freed slaves were expected to remain subservient to their former masters in the hierarchical structure of the household. When, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ethiopian state had to align itself with international abolitionist norms or face colonial occupation, Ethiopia’s political and intellectual elites embarked on a campaign to mobilize support for new anti-slavery measures. The second part of the article focuses on this campaign. It argues that Ethiopian abolitionists appealed to nationalist sentiments by claiming that the freedom, survival, and sovereignty of the modern state of Ethiopia was dependent on the liberation of household slaves. Manumissions at the household level were promoted as a means of preserving the country’s freedom from foreign domination. While Ethiopia’s emperors passed increasingly stringent laws to prohibit the slave trade and suppress slavery, continued reliance on the old logic of manumission meant that pre-abolitionist social hierarchies did not disappear. Although slavery was abolished and the social conditions that sustained slavery were transformed, steep hierarchies continued to structure social relations at least until the 1970s.The research in this article is based on a critical reading of a medieval legal source, the Law of the Kings, and the abolitionist decree of 1924. It also closely examines the writings of Ethiopian activists and intellectuals who contributed texts on slavery and abolition to the Berhanenna Salam newspaper in the 1920s and early 1930s. These authors were members and sympathizers of the national antislavery NGO Love and Service Association, which was founded during this period to campaign in favor of abolition and the manumission of domestic slaves. I analyze these newspaper debates and explore the strategic realignment of manumission within the new abolitionist discursive framework. In conclusion, I argue that abolition in the Ethiopian political context took its own peculiar path. First, international abolitionist ideas had to be negotiated with premodern modes of freeing slaves. This was also meant to advance civilization and protect the country’s independence from foreign domination. In the process of negotiating abolitionism, the slave trade and slave raiding were declared aberrations and crimes, while household slaveholding was allowed to continue as long as masters agreed to progressively manumit their slaves and rely on other forms of servitude. This conservative approach to the abolition of domestic slavery not only made the process gradual, but also encouraged the silencing of slavery and its legacies in official discourse.