Saho (people)
The Saho are an ethnic group that mainly lives in Eritrea and the Tigray region in Ethiopia . They speak the East Cushitic language Saho , are mostly Muslim and live from nomadic livestock farming and agriculture.
Areas
They live mainly in the coastal plain on the Red Sea and on the edge of the highlands in today's Eritrean administrative regions of Semienawi Kayih Bahri and Debubawi Kayih Bahri , as well as in other parts of Eritrea (especially Gash-Barka ) and in northern Ethiopia in the regions of Tigray and Afar . Some Saho live in Djibouti as well .
The Saho are arguably the third largest ethnic group in Eritrea, but there has been no census since the colonial era , so their proportion of the population and their exact number are unknown. The Eritrean government estimates a share of around 5%, colonial statistics from the 1950s showed 8.25%. In Ethiopia, 33,372 people (0.05% of the total population) were registered as members of the Irob subgroup in the 2007 census , of which 30,517 were in Tigray (0.71% of the region's inhabitants); “Saho”, on the other hand, was not recorded as an ethnicity. In the 1994 census, 22,858 people (0.73% of the population) were counted as Saho in Tigray.
Society and culture
The language of Saho is the same Saho that the ostkuschitischen languages heard and the Afar is closely related. The self-name Saho is derived from Saa (cattle) and Hoo (watchdog) and means something like "nomad".
Most of them belong to Islam , but there are also some Christian Saho tribes.
The Saho are divided into eleven subgroups or lineages , the Minifere, Hazu, Asaworta, Tero'a, Debri-Mehla, Idda, Hassabat-Are, Assa-Bora, Baradotta, Malhema-Meamabara and Irob (the number is sometimes given differently, and there are different spellings of the names). The lineages are further divided into sub-tribes, each of which is divided into numerous kinship groups. The sub-tribes traditionally each had an elected leader, called redanto or shum , and the kinship groups were led by nabara .
The sub-tribes Minifere, Hazu, Debri-Mehla and Irob live (also or mostly) in northern Ethiopia, the other groups live in Eritrean territory. Some subgroups of the neighboring Tigrinya, such as the Tsen'adegle, are considered Saho, who settled as sedentary farmers and adopted the Tigrinya language and Christianity.
Most of the Saho clans, as agropastoralists , traditionally combine the keeping of cattle, sheep, goats and camels with agriculture to a limited extent. Land is considered the common property of the clans. They go on seasonal hikes with the cattle. Because of the overlapping of territories, there were repeated conflicts between the Saho clans and between the Saho and the Afar , the Tigre agropastoralists and the rural Tigrinya living in the highlands. Such conflicts were settled through traditional institutions.
history
The linguistically closely related Saho and Afar are likely to have common origins. Perhaps their forerunners were the first lowland Eastern Cushite group (before the Somali and Oromo ), which separated from the other Eastern Cushite-speaking groups in the southern Ethiopian highlands and moved into the lowlands. When this migration and the divergence between Afar and Saho took place remains unclear.
Italian and British sources from the colonial period describe the Saho mainly from the perspective of the Tigrinya, since Europeans were most likely to speak Tigrinya, but rarely the Saho language.
During the reign of Haile Selassie , land conflicts in the highlands between Saho and Tigrinya increased significantly, especially from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Ethiopian government supported the Tigrinya, because they were then - as an Ethiopian-Orthodox Habesha people - loyal to Ethiopia, while Muslim ethnic groups like the Saho were more in favor of Eritrea's independence from Ethiopia. As agropastoralists, the Saho were generally disadvantaged compared to sedentary farming groups. They therefore supported the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), which began the armed struggle for Eritrean independence in the 1960s.
After Eritrea's independence, Saho refugees who had lived in camps in Sudan because of the conflicts with the Tigrinya and the war of independence were able to return to Eritrean territory from 1995 onwards. A large number of these returnees had to settle outside their traditional area, in the western lowlands in the Gash-Barka region , because the Eritrean government preferred to settle in this area, which has a relatively large amount of land and water. She also feared a renewed outbreak of conflicts if the Saho had returned to the disputed areas between Saho and Tigrinya.
In 1998–2000 the Saho were affected by the Eritrea-Ethiopia war .
See also
Web links
- Homepage about the Saho created by Saho ( English, Arabic )
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Foreword by Abdulkader Saleh Mohammad: The Customary Law of the Akele Guzai Muslims (the Saho) , source edition, LIT Verlag, Münster 2010, ISBN 978-3-8258-1980-4
- ↑ (pp. 84, 87)
- ↑ Central Statistics Agency: 1994 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia: Results for Tigray Region, Vol. 1 (PDF; 87.4 MB), 1995 (p. 66)
- ↑ a b c d e f g Nicole Hirt and Abdulkader Saleh: Conflicts over land and resources in political change , in: Abdulkader Saleh, Nicole Hirt, Wolbert GC Smidt, Rainer Tetzlaff (eds.): Peace areas in Eritrea and Tigray under pressure: Identity construction, social cohesion and political stability , LIT Verlag, Münster 2008, ISBN 978-3-8258-1858-6 (pp. 141–164)
- ^ Herbert S. Lewis: The Origins of the Galla and Somali , in: The Journal of African History , Vol. 7, No. 1 (1966)