ABSTRACT
The traveller Henry Salt talked with various slaves at the court of a ras (high noble) at Chelicut in Tigre, northern Ethiopia, in 1810. Among them was Oma-zéna, who like the others was simply described as ‘Shangalla’ or ‘Shankalla’, a variant of an Amharic word applied to a whole range of peripheral peoples with the overtones of the American English ‘nigger’— and since 1974 banned in Ethiopia. The use of the term was formerly associated with theories of ‘natural slavery’ indigenous to old Ethiopian civilisation, which thus bracketed together the darker-skinned peoples fringing the plateau heartland of the country to the west and south-west. In itself it signifies no particular cultural or linguistic group. But from the linguistic information Salt collected we know that Oma-zéna was from the Gumuz-speaking people of the upper Blue Nile, and he himself named his section as Dizzela. He gave a somewhat lyrical account of his people, mentioning the lack of priests and rulers, the fact that all men were regarded as equals, and that hunting was a favourite and fruitful sport. Oma-zéna remembered also the delightful music of the lyre, and ‘seemed quite exhilarated at the bare recollection of its harmony’. However, his people were continually engaged in war with the highland Agow of the region, who ‘frequently invade the country for the express purpose of procuring slaves’. 2
