Tana Orma

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Orma village in Kenya

The Tana Orma (also called Warra Daaya , Warrdeh or Warday ) are a group of Oromo who live west of the Tana River in the Coast administrative region of Kenya . Their population is a few tens of thousands.

Terms and designations

Orma is generally the form of the word "Oromo" in the southern dialects of the Oromo language . The addition Tana serves to differentiate it from other southern Oromo such as the Borana .

Warra Daaya appears for the first time in an Arabic source from the 15th century and is used by the neighboring Somali as a name for the orma; the Orma only use it for returnees who have lived as slaves or their descendants in a state of dependency with the Somali. In the historical sense, it is generally used for Oromo in Kenya and Somalia, which do not belong to the Borana.

history

According to sources and traditions, Warra Daaya used to live in a wide area from the southern foothills of the Ethiopian highlands in the north to Mombasa in the south and from Marsabit in the west to the Juba River in what is now Somalia . Other peoples such as the Gabbra and Somali attribute to them the construction of several old graves and wells in the districts of Marsabit, Wajir and Mandera ; alternatively, these are attributed to the mythical ethnic group of the Madanle , and Warra Daaya and Madanle are also used by these peoples as interchangeable synonyms for a population living there before them.

In the 19th century there was a decline of the Warra Daaya, who were largely ousted by Somali from the Darod clan . The Somali had initially settled as addicts among the Warra Daaya, but as they gradually outnumbered them, they began to fight them. A smallpox epidemic that struck the Warra Daaya in Afmadow in what is now Somalia in 1865 is said to have played an important role . Numerous Orma were captured during the fighting and raids during this period. Enslaved Warday boys were highly sought after as cattle herders by the Somali nomads, women and girls as concubines. Men were often killed in the fighting. In 1909, the British colonial power in Kenya relocated the remaining Warra Daaya to its present-day area west of the Tana in order to protect it from further expansion of the Somali.

Most orma today live in the Tana River District in the coastal province, especially many in the Tana Delta. There are also some settlements in the Lamu district east of the Tana.

In the last few decades they have been harassed again by armed Somali, so-called Shiftas (see Shifta war ). In the 1970s they lost around 70% of their livestock due to drought. As a result, some of them became impoverished, and many went from nomads to semi-nomads and sedentary people who still keep some livestock (cattle, goats and sheep). In the 1980s there was another, almost as lossy drought.

Nevertheless, the economic situation of the Galole Orma - a subgroup named after a seasonally aquatic river - appears to have improved between 1980 and 1987. This is likely to be due to an increase in trade, with the prices that the Galole Orma could get for their cattle in particular also rose. Two new markets were opened where the shepherds could sell directly instead of through intermediaries, and their cattle were now also exported to the Arab region via Nairobi , which was probably helped by the devaluation of the Kenyan currency. This allowed more Galole Orma to participate in this trade. The income from this trade flowed into the local economy. In addition, state activities have created jobs for the Galole Orma, in construction work as well as - for the few who have a secondary education - as teachers and civil servants. A local quarry could provide material for government buildings as well as private businesses. The school enrollment rates increased in the period under study (1979–1987) from 26 to 50% for boys and from 4 to 30% for girls.

The Orma have repeatedly lost land to the establishment of irrigation projects, game reserves and commercial ranches . Today (2008) a Kenyan company is planning to set up plantations in the Tana Delta for the cultivation of sugar cane for bioethanol production . On the one hand, this should create jobs for the Orma and Pokomo who live there, on the other hand, there are conflicts with nature conservation and ecotourism, and the Orma would lose pastureland. The land they were offered to replace is contaminated with tsetse flies . While the rural Pokomo are more positive about this project, the semi-nomadic Orma tend to reject it.

Culture

The clans of the Tana Orma belong to two large subgroups ( moieties ), the Bareytuma and the Irdida ( Arsi-Oromo ), while the Oromo as a whole were divided into the Moieties Baraytuma and Borana according to the Ethiopian monk Bahrey in the 16th century . The names of the subclans of the Bareytuma among the Tana Orma largely correspond to the names of the Baraytuma clans after Bahrey. Günther Schlee concludes from this that the majority of the original Warra Daaya / Tana Orma came from the Baraytuma group, to which a second group made up of different elements was later added, since the Oromo division is important for traditional marriage rules. Oral traditions also clearly indicate that there was mutual immigration and emigration between the Warra Daaya and the Borana.

Most of the nomadic peoples of the region - the Borana and the Gabbra and Sakuye associated with them , the Somali and the Rendille - build their homes with the entrance to the west, probably because of the wind coming from the east. Accordingly, they refer to the north as "right" and south as "left". With the Orma this is exactly the opposite, which according to Schlee could represent an old ritual demarcation from the other subgroup, the Borana.

literature

Web links

Commons : Tana Orma  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Jean Ensminger and Andrew Rutten: The Political Economy of Changing Property Rights: Dismantling a Pastoral Commons , in: American Ethnologist , Vol. 18/4, 1991 (pp. 683–699)
  2. ↑ a b Marc Engelhardt: The sugar of progress. In: Berliner Zeitung . September 17, 2008, accessed September 4, 2015 .
  3. ^ A b Jean Ensminger: Structural Transformation and its Consequences for Orma Women Pastoralists , in: Structural adjustment and African women farmers , 1991, ISBN 9780813010632 (pp. 281-300)