The Beginnings of Minority Segregation

Fasiladas' son Yohannis I named “The Just” (1667-1682) made no attempts to pursue his father's foreign policy in relation to Muslims. In fact, he had many religious questions in mind (13). As a result, he called a council at Gondar. The promulgation of decisions of the Church Council at Gondar in 1668 affected all religious minorities and brought about the policy of “segregation of the Franks, Muslims, Turks and also of the Falasha, called Kayla, who are of the Jewish religion, so that they do not live with the Christians” (14). Emperor Yohannis I also commanded the Muslims of Gondar to eat flesh killed by the Christians (15). By custom, however, Muslims of Gondar like other Muslims in the Christian highlands, did not eat flesh killed by the Christians.

Yohannis I maintained the supremacy of the Orthodox Christians and encouraged their separation from the Muslims as well as the Falasha. The Franks (descendants of the Portuguese) who came to support Galawdewos in the sixteenth Century in his wars with Imam Ahmad Ibn Ibrahim Grañ (1529-1543) were asked to leave or else to profess the local monophysite Christianity. The Falasha minority was also subject to territorial segregation and inferior status (16).

The first decree does not seem to have been effective. Ten years later in 1678, Yohannis I reissued a proclamation which in effect separated the Muslims and the Falasha from the Christians (17). The Muslims were assigned to live in the territorially segregated lower quarter of the town on the banks of the Qaha river. This Muslims quarter, situated at the foot of the mountain, was called Islamge er Bet al-Islam (18). Yohannis's policy of segregation was partly due to his own idiosyncrasies and partly due to his objective of exploiting religion for political purposes as the social interaction among Christians, Muslims and Falashas was increasing as a result of the wider urbanization of the imperial capital. It is important to note also that the 1678 decree of segregation penalized and debarred Muslims and Falashas from owning land in the town (19). Muslims of Gondar were also instructed not to marry or hire Christians (20).

From 1678 to 1699, twenty-one years elapsed before we gain fresh information on Gondarine Muslims. In 1699, the French physician Charles Jacques Poncet visited Gondar and wrote about the mercantile activity of the Muslims (21). He observed that the Muslims resided in the lower part of the town in a separate quarter and that Christians avoided eating with them. When a Christian met a Muslim in the streets of Gondar, he saluted him with the left hand which was undoubtedly a mark of contempt. Moreover, Poncet noted that the king in Gondar treated the Muslims as slaves (22). In the main, the general Christian populace despised Muslims and the other non-Christian groups. For example, Christians ranked the non-Christian groups of Gondar behind them in the following order: Muslims, Qimant, Falasha, Wayto and the Gumuz slaves (23).

Seventy years after Poncet's visit, another external observer, the Scottish traveller James Bruce, reached Gondar by way of Massawa in 1769. Bruce estimated that there were about three thousand Muslim houses there, some of which were spacious and good (24). The declining power of the emperor at Gondar and the political dissension among the local nobility in the late eighteenth Century brought theological controversies in which both the rulers and the people were involved (25). Both the theological controversies within the Orthodox Church and the general revival of trade in the 1830s helped the spread of Islam (26). In the 1840s, Muslim merchants of Gondar along with their co-religionists from Adwa in Tigray, Darita in Bagemdir and Basso in Gojjam spread Islam to areas south of the Blue Nile (27).

By the end of the Gondarine era, most of the merchants, weavers and tailors of Gondar town were Muslims (28). Muslim merchants of Gondar dominated the trade in gold and slaves from Gondar to Sennar in Sudan. They brought slaves from the Sidama and Oromo lands to the south of the Blue Nile and marketed them at Gallabat. They took gold from Ras el Fil in the Sudan which lay on the caravan route from Sennar to Gondar (29). In the 1830s, the British traveller, G.A. Hoskins, reported that merchants of Gondar sold their slaves and coffee at Shendy in Sudan (30). In 1860, the German Protestant missionary, J. Lewis Krapf, gave an eyewitness account of the slave traffic at Matamma which was conducted by the Muslims of Gondar (31). In 1862, Henry Dufton passed through Egypt and the Sudan and noted that Gondar merchants took cotton from Gallabat to Gondar (32). Some twenty years earlier, in the 1840s, the French travellers E. Combes and M. Tamisier reported that weavers of Gondar produced especially fine types of cloth, one of which was known as margaf (33). Some Muslims who transported cotton from Gallabat to Gondar became weavers as an extension of their role as merchants (34).

In 1862, Henry A.Stern, who came as a missionary to the Falasha village in Gondar, noted that the merchants of Gondar were wealthy and next to the aristocracy and clergy. He wrote that there were no shops in Gondar as merchants did not want to expose their merchandise to public inspection (35). Furthermore, Stern observed that Gondar, like everywhere else in the Ethiopian highlands, had been subject to the destruction caused by the rival chiefs of the Zamana Masafint (Period of the Judges, 1769-1855) (36). Trade was affected by the vicissitudes of Gondar's political and economic position. In time of peace, weekly markets were held. In time of war, merchants had to travel by night. The economic fortunes of the merchants declined because of the depredations of the wars of the Zamana Masafint (37).

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13 Jean Doresse, Ethiopia. New York: 1959, p. 179; James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile. Edinburgh; 5 vols, 1790, vol.II, pp. 423-424.

14 Ignazio Guidi, (ed. and trans.) Annales Iohannis I, Iyasu I, Bakaffa, Corpus Scriptorium Christianorum Orientalium: Scriptores Aethiopia. 2 vols., ser altera 5 (Paris:1903), p.8; Bruce, pp.423-424.

15 James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, vol.II. Edinburgh 1790, pp. 423-24.

16 Charles Jacques Poncet, A Voyage to Ethiopia in the Red Sea and Adjacent Countries. London: 1709, p.61.
17 Guidi, p. 37.

18 Informants: Garima Taffara and Yussuf Ahmad, cited supra. See also Richard Pankhurst, Notes For the History of Gondar, Ethiopia Observer, vol.XII, n°.3, 1969, p.209; Simon D. Messing, The Abyssinian Market Town, in Paul Bohannan and George Dalton (editors), Markets in Africa. Northwestern University Press, 1962. p.391; referred to the Muslim quarter as "the Muslim ghetto". He also mentioned that its name at the time he wrote his article was Addis Alam (New World). Informants: Garima Taffara and Yussuf Ahmad, cited supra, attested that the Muslim quarter was renamed Addis Alam, but they did not know of the time that the name change was made.

19 J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia. London: Oxford University Press, 1952, p. 103. James Quirin, The Evolution of the Ethiopian Jews: A History of the Beta Israel (Falesha) to 1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992, p. 115; Grottanelli, p.152. Informants: Garima Taffara and Yussuf Ahmad, cited supra.

20 Quirin, p. 115. Informants: Garima Taffara and Yussuf Ahmad, cited supra.

21 Charles J. Poncet, A Voyage to Ethiopia in the Years 1698, 1699 and 1700, in William Foster (editor), The Red Sea and Adjacent Countries At the Close of the Seventeenth century. London: Hakluyt Society, 1949 p.110, also relates that the term Jabarti has some connection with the Ge'ez term Gäbir which means servant.

22 Ibid.

23 Quirin, p.110. For a cogent analysis that the Qimant and the Wayto survived into the present because they did not pose military threat to the all-powerful Amhara, see Frederikh C. Gamst, The Qemant Theocratic Chiefdom in the Abyssinian Feudal State in Taddese Beyene (editor), Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, vol.1, Frankfurt am main: 1969, pp.793-798 pp.793-798; idem, The Qemant:A Pagan-Hebraic Peasantry of Ethiopia. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988; idem, Wayto Ways: Change From Hunting to Peasant Life in Robert L. Hess (editor), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies. Chicago: 1979, pp.233-238.

24 Bruce, vol.III, p. 198.

25 Mordechai Abir, Ethiopia: The Era of the Princes, the Challenge of Islam and the re-unification of the Christian Empire 1769-1855. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd; 1968, pp. 39-40.

26 Abir, Trade and Politics in the Ethiopian Region 1830-1855, passim.

27 Mordechai Abir, The Emergence and Consolidation of the Monarchies of Enarea and Jimma in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, Journal of African History, vol. VI, 2 (1965), p. 207.

28 Informants: Garima Taffara and Yussuf Ahmad, cited supra; see also Quirin, p. 97-98.

29 John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia, London: Second Edition, John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1822, pp.276-77; see also Richard Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia 1800-1935, Addis Ababa: Haile Selassie I University Press, 1968, p. 74.

30 G.A. Hoskins, Travels in Ethiopia: Above the Second Cataract of the Nile. London: Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1835, p. 344.

31 J. Lewis Krapf, Travels, Researches, And Missionary Labours. London:Trubner And Co, Paternoster Row, 1860, pp. 466-470.

32 Henry Dufton, Narrative of a Journey Through Abyssinia in 1862-3, London: Chapman & Hall, 193, Piccadilly, 1867, p.43; see also Samuel W. Baker, The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia. London: Macmillan And Co. 1868, pp.478, 490-491; Walter C. Plowden, Travels in Abyssinia and The Galla Country, London: 1868, p. 126.

33 E. Combes and M. Tamisier, Voyage in Abyssinia, vol.IV, Paris: L. Passard Editeur, 1843, p.66.

34 Informants: Garima Tafara and Yussuf Ahmad, cited supra; see also Quirin, p.100

35 Henry A. Stern, Wanderings Among the Falashas in Abyssinia, London: Wertheim, Makintosh And Hunt, 1862. p.238; Plowden, p.43, mentioned that there were Nagadrases (chiefs of customs) at Gondar, Yajjube, Darita, Saqota,Dabarq and Adwa, p. 130.

36 Stern, p. 238. For the wars of the Zamana Masafint, see Abir, Ethiopia: The Era of the Princes.

37 Arnauld d'Abbadie, Douze Ans de Sejour dans la Haute-Ethiopie (Abyssinie), Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vatican, 1980, pp. 24, 262, 270.