Reconstructing Haberland Reconstructing the Wolaitta: Writing the History and Society of a Former Ethiopian Kingdom

I

In this paper I take up the methodological issue of combining archived fieldwork notes and contemporary field data in the reconstruction of the recent history of Wolaitta, a former kingdom in southern Ethiopia.¹ The old fieldwork data, archived and little known since the 1960s, consist of the notes of the German Ethiopianist ethnologist Eike Haberland (1924-1992), while the field data are based on my intermittent fieldwork in Wolaitta since 2001.² In ongoing research on this subject, I intend to write an historical ethnography of Wolaitta, by combining a study of the methods and interpretive strategies of Haberland as ethnographer and product of his time, with new research. The effort may also allow us to see how his 'facts' and explanations fit with current concerns in anthropology and African studies. As the subject of this paper will eventually be elaborated into a book, I aim to be brief here and illustrate the value and challenge of such a reconstruction effort.

The study also is meant to contribute to understanding the dynamics of regional identity in today's Ethiopia, which has been struggling with a very problematic implementation of ethnicity-based federal policies since 1991.³ A study of a corpus of ethnography gathered in the heyday of German field ethnology (1950s-1960s), in conjunction with present-day research, may highlight processes of identity formation among the Wolaitta, who today in 2005 count some 1.5 million people, with perhaps an additional 80,000 living outside the Wolaitta borders elsewhere in Ethiopia, and having various shades of identification with their country and traditions of origin.⁴

One of my questions here is why Haberland, despite his large corpus of notes on Wolaitta, never succeeded in writing his monograph on this people, a work which he already in the late 1950s announced as "forthcoming." This delay is quite surprising because Haberland was an accomplished writer on Ethiopia with some formidable titles to his name.⁵ Moreover, he saw the Wolaitta case as very important in the wider cultural history of Ethiopia.⁶

Eike Haberland was a long-time director of the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt/Main and taught at University of Frankfurt. He studied at the universities of Tübingen, Mainz, and Frankfurt, where he received his doctorate in 1950. The same year, he was part of a German research team, carrying out more than two years of fieldwork in southern Ethiopia. He later also did research in New Guinea and in Burkina Faso. Haberland became an influential, sometimes controversial, figure in postwar German ethnology—professor of ethnology at Frankfurt University, an active organizer of scholarly meetings and conferences, and a supervisor of an important number of both German and African Ph.D. students. His work presented fundamentally new data and insights on southern Ethiopia and has inspired many scholars and generated critical debate. Haberland's international impact in Ethiopian and African studies was, however, limited partly by his specific ethnohistorical approach and by the fact that he published almost exclusively in German.

II

About 110 years ago, the kingdom of Wolaitta, a small but prosperous state with an independent royal tradition (sacral kingship), was conquered in a rather destructive campaign by the armed forces of the imperial Ethiopian state and politically incorporated.⁷ Its political structure was dismantled and its last king was exiled to Addis Ababa in 1894. But the region's identity, as expressed in language, political status, cultural traditions, memories of clan and family lines, and social hierarchy did not disappear. Wolaitta is still a distinct region in southern Ethiopia, currently with the status of an administrative "zone" within the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Regional National State.⁸ It is the most densely populated area of rural Ethiopia, in some rural parts reaching at least 664 people per square kilometer.⁹

Figure 1.

Map of Southern Ethiopia

Since 1991, when the Ethio-communist regime of military leader Mengistu Haile-Mariam, in power since 1977, was toppled by a coalition of ethnonationalist...