Kingdom of Wolaytta
The Kingdom of Wolaytta (also Welayta, Walayta ) was a kingdom founded in 1250 in the south of what is now Ethiopia . In 1896 the kingdom was dissolved and incorporated into Ethiopia, until 1974 the area still had an independence within Ethiopia.
The titular nation of the kingdom was the Wolaytta ethnic group , the official language of the kingdom was the Wolaytta of the same name .
The Wolaytta Kingdom can look back on a long and varied history. According to tradition, the Wolaytta kingdom came into contact with Christianity at the end of the 13th century , introduced by the intermediary of St. Tekle Haymanot .
However, the kingdom was conquered by the larger and expanding Empire of Abyssinia under Emperor Menelik II and was incorporated into the region south of the former Kingdom of Shewa in the early 1980s . The campaign of conquest is described as one of the bloodiest campaigns of the entire period of Ethiopia's expansion. According to the Wolaytta tradition, 118,000 soldiers from the Wolaytta kingdom and 90,000 Shewa soldiers perished in the fighting. Kawo (King) Tona , the last king of Wolaytta, was defeated, the kingdom finally conquered in 1896 and incorporated into the Ethiopian Empire.
Nevertheless, the Wolaytta area had a kind of autonomous status and was ruled by governors who were directly accountable to the former Wolaytta king until the fall of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. After 1974, the Derg military regime restructured the administrative structure of Ethiopia and classified the former kingdom of Wolaytta as part of the Sidamo province .
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- ↑ James S. Olson: The Peoples of Africa. An Ethnohistorical Dictionary. Greenwood Press, Westport CT et al. 1996, ISBN 0-313-27918-7 , p. 591.
- ^ Sarah Vaughan: Ethnicity and Power in Ethiopia. (University of Edinburgh: Ph.D. Thesis, 2003; PDF; 1.6 MB), p. 253.