Mother Earth is for us all: the discontent of Oromo pottery-making women at land dispossession in Southwest Oromia, Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the effects of changes in land tenure on female potters in the southern highlands of Ethiopia. Communal land has historically played an important role in the livelihoods of pottery-making women, who rely on the non-agricultural use of this land. Data was gathered through interviews and observations, and the resulting evidence was organized and analyzed to address the research objectives and contextualize the findings within a broader empirical framework. Recent changes to Ethiopia’s communal land tenure system have disproportionally affected the socio-economy of the pottery-making women in comparison to their non-pottery-making counterparts by constraining their access to clay mining sites. Meanwhile, globalization and the free-market economy have facilitated the unrestricted import and distribution of plastic and metal objects, significantly reducing the need for pottery objects, and further impacting the potters’ livelihoods and social status. The fact that globalization and government changes to the communal land tenure system have disproportionally affected artisan women in Ethiopia resonates with the need for academia to pay more attention to intersectionality when studying gender bias, given that the situation has created an additional level of discrimination for socially marginalized women.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender inequality
• intersectionality
• land tenure change
• development
• women

Acknowledgments

My deepest thanks go to Oromo potters in Wallaga. I am genuinely grateful to them for sharing their experience with me without reservation and regardless of their busy schedules. I would also like to thank Dajene Dandana, Abebe Dinega, and Ayana Getahun. Many thanks also go to West Wollega Zone Culture and Tourism Bureau. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their encouraging and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Agarwal, “Gender and Command Over Property”; Wayessa, “Whose Development?”

2 Bartels, Oromo Religion; Jaenen, “The Galla or Oromo of East Africa.”

3 Wayessa, “Toward a History of the Oromo of Wallaga in Southwestern Ethiopia”

4 Wayessa, “Whose Development?”

5 Wayessa, “Toward a History of the Oromo of Wallaga.”

6 Wayessa, “Prepared in Pots, Served in Plastics.”

7 Bartels, Oromo religion; Jaenen, “The Galla or Oromo of East Africa”; Hultin, “Kinship and Property in Oromo Culture.”

8 Wayessa, “Toward a History of the Oromo of Wallaga.”

9 Planel, “A View of a Bureaucratic Developmental State.”

10 Askale, Research Report 4 Land Registration and Women’s Land Rights in Amhara Region; Ayano, “Rural Land Registration in Ethiopia.”

11 Dokken, “Allocation of Land Tenure Rights in Tigray”; Lavers, “Patterns of agrarian transformation in Ethiopia.”

12 Terminski, Development-Induced Displacement and Resettlement, 13.

13 Chigbu et al., “Differentiations in Women’s Land Tenure Experiences”, 1.

14 Ibid.

15 Wayessa, “Whose Development?”

16 Ibid.

17 Pankhurst, “Introduction: Dimensions and Conceptions of Marginalization”; Tsehai, “Gender and Occupational Potters in Wolayta”; Wayessa, “Toward a History of the Oromo of Wallaga.”

18 Dea, Rural Livelihoods and Social Stratification among the Dawro, Southern Ethiopia; Freeman and Pankhurst, Peripheral People; Pankhurst, “‘Caste’ in Africa.”

19 Regassa et al., “‘Civilizing’ the Pastoral Frontier.”

20 Wayessa, “No One Remains Living in the Past”; Wayessa, “Prepared in Pots, Served In plastics.”

21 Sultana, “Suffering for Water, Suffering from Water.”

22 Barca, “Labour and the ecological crisis”; Rai et al “Depletion: The cost of social Reproduction.”

23 Cote and Nightingale, “Resilience Thinking Meets Social Theory”; Nightingale, “Bounding Difference”; Sato and Alarcón, “Toward a Postcapitalist Feminist Political Ecology.”

24 Shiva and Mies, Ecofeminism.

25 Bhandar, “Possession, Occupation and Registration.”

26 Manji, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa.

27 Fernandes, Producing workers.

28 Ibid., 6

29 Jayasinghe, “Dynamic Trends in Household Poverty and Inequality in Sri Lanka.”

30 Chant, “Women-Headed Households,” 26.

31 Manji, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa; Ossome, “Land in Transition.”

32 Wayessa, “Toward a History of the Oromo of Wallaga.”; Wayessa, “Whose Development?”; Wayessa, “Prepared in Pots, Served in Plastics.”

33 Agarwal, “Gender and Command Over Property”; Muchomba, “Women's Land Tenure Security and Household Human Capital.”

34 World Economic Forum.

35 Dokken, “Allocation of Land Tenure Rights in Tigray”; Holden et al., “Tenure Insecurity, Gender, Low-cost Land Certification and Land Rental Market Participation in Ethiopia.”

36 FAO, National Gender Profile of Agriculture and Rural Livelihoods – Ethiopia.

37 USAID, Gender Equality and women’s empowerment.

38 Cohen, “Ethiopia after Haile Selassie: The Government Land Factor.”

39 Makki, “Power and Property.”

40 Donham, “Old Abyssinia and the New Ethiopian Empire”; Garretson, “Vicious Cycles: Ivory, Slaves, and Arms on the New Maji frontier”; Rahmato, The peasant and the state.

41 Bartels, Oromo Religion; Jaenen, “The Galla or Oromo of East Africa”; Wayessa, “Toward a History of the Oromo of Wallaga”.

42 Yemane-ab, “‘Land to the Tiller’: Unrealized Agenda of the Revolution.”

43 Ibid.

44 Ege, “Land Tenure Insecurity in Post-Certification Amhara”; Holden et al “Tenure Insecurity, Gender, Low-cost Land Certification and Land Rental Market Participation in Ethiopia.” Rahmato, The peasant and the state.

45 Holden et al., “Tenure Insecurity, Gender, Low-Cost Land Certification and Land Rental Market Participation in Ethiopia.”

46 Askale, Research Report 4 Land Registration and Women’s Land Rights in Amhara Region.

47 Wayessa, “Prepared in Pots, Served in Plastics”; Wayessa, “Toward a History of the Oromo of Wallaga.”

48 Planel, “A View of a Bureaucratic Developmental State.”

49 Pankhurst, “Decline, Survival and Development of Crafts”; Wayessa, “Prepared in Pots, Served in Plastics.”

50 World Economic Forum.

51 Wayessa, “Whose Development?”

52 Kiok et al., Challenging Patriarchy.

53 Interview with a potter named Adde A Biratu.

54 Interview with a potter named Adde Hawwii

55 Wayessa, “Whose Development?”

56 Wayessa, “My Meals are in the pots.”

57 Keller, “The Revolutionary Transformation of Ethiopia's Twentieth-Century Bureaucratic Empire”; Regassa et al., “‘Civilizing’ the Pastoral Frontier.”

58 Many potters and non-potter women discussed this issue during the fieldwork

59 Behzadi, “Women Miners’ Exclusion and Muslim Masculinities in Tajikistan”; Feldman, “Shame and honour.”

60 Barca, “Labour and the Ecological Crisis”; Fernandes, Producing Workers, Hoskyns and Rai “Recasting the International Political Economy”; Rai et al., “Depletion: The Cost of Social Reproduction”.

61 Dokken, “Allocation of Land Tenure Rights in Tigray.”

62 Ibid., Lavers, “Patterns of agrarian transformation in Ethiopia”; Peterson, “Unequal sustainabilities.”

63 Dokken, “Allocation of Land Tenure Rights in Tigray”; Muchomba, “Women's Land Tenure Security and Household Human Capital.”

64 Manji, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa; Ossome, “Land in Transition.”

65 Fernandes, Producing workers.

66 Wayessa, “Toward a History of the Oromo of Wallaga.”

67 Manji, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa.

68 De Schutter, “How Not to Think of Land-Grabbing”, 175.

69 Bhandar, “Possession, Occupation and Registration.”

70 Lang and Mokrani, Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America.

71 Crewett et al., Land Tenure in Ethiopia; Wayessa, “Prepared in Pots, Served in Plastics.”

72 Manji, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa.

73 Hoskyns and Rai, “Recasting the International Political Economy”, 300; Barca, “Labour and the Ecological Crisis”; Rai et al., “Depletion: The Cost of Social Reproduction”.

74 Bhandar, “Possession, Occupation and Registration”; Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership.

75 Fernandes, Producing Workers; Terminski, Development-Induced Displacement and Resettlement.

76 Chigbu et al., “Differentiations in Women’s Land Tenure Experiences”.

77 Regassa et al., “‘Civilizing’ the Pastoral Frontier”; Wayessa, “Whose Development?”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Geographic Society under [grant number W239-12] and [grant number 9846-16], and the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP) – British Museum – under [grant number 2020SG11].