Children of Hope: The Odyssey of the Oromo Slaves from Ethiopia and South Africa by Sandra Rowoldt Shell (review)

Children of Hope: The Odyssey of the Oromo Slaves from Ethiopia and South Africa is a prosopography, compiling sixty-four oral histories from Oromo children who were enslaved and taken from Ethiopia during the late nineteenth century. While en route to the Arabian slave markets, the Royal Navy intercepted the slave traders and Oromo children and sent the children to Lovedale Missionary Institute in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Through the use of documented oral histories, missionary newspapers, formal reports, telegrams, photographs, and other documents, Shell dutifully describes the children's capture, their first and middle passage to South Africa, and their daily lives while at Lovedale. The individual accounts detail the nature of the Oromo children's kinship systems, the vulnerability of children when families experience economic insolvency, and the parental (or other guardians') participation in selling children. This text offers detailed descriptions of the children's living conditions, wealth in property and in livestock, as well as the gendered division of labor prior to arriving at Lovedale.

Often, child slave histories focus on capture, sale, forms of labor performed, and legal processes through which children eventually attain their freedom (or not). The Oromo stories provide the reader with a longer, collective story of a group of children who landed at a missionary school that later shaped their adult lives. The text is broken up into five parts. Part I maps out Ethiopia's geography, family and kinship systems, various levels of wealth held by each of the Oromo children's families, and their ethnic affiliations. Moreover, the author outlines how and why certain areas were more prone to slave raiding than others. For instance, in using Emmanuel Wallerstein's world systems theory and its three-level hierarchy, Shell applies the core-periphery dynamic by highlighting the immense strength of the Menelik empire in Abyssinia in contrast to southern Ethiopia's regional infighting, which led weakened social groups, thereby creating the conditions wherein slave raiding occurred.

Part II focuses on the slave captors, both local and external inhabitants, who captured, seized, and purchased the child slaves. The chapters describe where the slaving took place and the reasons captors targeted specific areas. The use of sophisticated graphs and charts illustrate the "places of origin" of the captors, slavers, and children, as well as the captors' gender and their occupations. In reference to the oft-cited middle passage of the transatlantic slave trade, Shell describes the children's initial capture and travel through the desert as the "first passage," detailing the rough terrain, weather, frequency of illness, and abuse. The level of description included in the narratives offers a unique perspective into what the children endured en route to their next buyer(s) and the eventual British interception.

Part III describes the children's middle passage to Aden, where children recovered from their injuries and lack of nourishment in the care of Scottish missionaries at Sheikh Othman. While in Aden, sources such as letters, reports, and telegrams document the fragility of the children's health. Pestered by malaria and other diseases, numerous Oromo children died; this spurred new conversations between officials and missionaries, who decided that the Lovedale Institution would be the children's last destination. With a brief stop in East London, South Africa, Shell explains how the children began their new lives in the missionary school.

Parts IV and V offer meticulous descriptions about Lovedale's curriculum, details about the teachers, the children's academic progress, the differences in experiences based on gender, as well as the life trajectories into adulthood for many of the Oromo children. The children took English, isiXhosa, mathematics, drawing classes, and religious courses. It is clear that the Oromo children scored at the top of their classes, but other aspects of some children's lives suffered. Shell notes that the girls' behavior "marked every aspect of the children's...