ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Gamo peoples of Southern Ethiopia. Gamo people are mountain cultivators and number over 750,000. Gamo and other Omotic areas such as Wolaita and Kore were part of an old Ethiopian Christian area. It gives accounts of the military organization of the expanding Oromo and the devastation that resulted from waves of migration. Bahrey lived in what is known as Birbira. The chapter shows how groups of Gamo who subscribe to different religious traditions with divergent histories share space and time and perpetuate themselves not so much by gains they have made but by giving meaning to losses they have suffered and by forging a new sense of being. Christianity has been practised in the Gamo Mountains for over five centuries. Bahrey’s manuscript written in Birbira is the main reference for such a claim but the assumption that Christianity might well have been professed much earlier can also argued for.
