Founded in Memory of the ‘Good Old Times’: The Clan Assembly of Hiddii, in Eastern Shewa, Ethiopia

Abstract

Dealing with questions of the transmittance and transformation of social institutions and organisational patterns throughout history, this article describes an Ethiopian clan assembly which was founded in 1992 in eastern Shewa by members of the Oromo ethnic group, in response to ongoing changes in the ethno-political arena that went along with previous government changes in Ethiopia. The notion of ‘nostalgia’ is introduced as an analytical tool to explain the foundation and growth of this institution. Nostalgia, in this context, is understood as a non-derogative, dynamic concept, and recognised as a powerful motivating force for social action with at times direct effects on social structure. The article shows that, although the official designation of the assembly was to re-install old, traditional patterns of Oromo social organisation and to establish a counter-force to Amhara dominance in the region, the Oromo clan assembly relied to a significant degree on organisational patterns and ‘know-how’ deriving from modern-day contexts and spheres of interaction with the Amhara, such as jointly-run burial associations, NGO capital-raising, and market-oriented projects. The question about the relationship between a possible recognition of ‘tradition’, or continuity on the one hand, and innovation, or ‘invented tradition’ on the other, is thus raised.

Introduction

Questions of the transmittance and transformation of social institutions and organisational patterns through time constitute a primary concern of anthropological thought. History, in this context, provides a key to the understanding of ‘the relations between events in the realm of ideas, values, and action over time’.1 But, wherever history is key, memory becomes a matter of concern, too. Memory, here, can be viewed as a socially constructed way of reflecting on the past from the point of view of the present. The term has been conceptualised as ‘collective memory’,2 or ‘systematic remembering’ on the one hand, and ‘structural amnesia’ on the other3 thus pointing to the double nature of the mnemonic process. In this respect, Evans-Pritchard's work on the Nuer has been focused upon by scholars since it demonstrates how the selective remembering of certain ancestors and the subsequent placing of the lines of their descendants can affect a whole group's political structure, or how the political relations between lineages influence the remembering of common ancestors.4 As Middleton and Edwards put it, remembering and forgetting are ‘inherently social activities’, and not just a private matter.5

Pointing to Halbwachs’ work, Cole stresses that ‘memory work was simultaneously political and moral’.6 This is an important point. The idea of morality not only implies a selectiveness in terms of what is to be remembered, but more than that, suggests the weighting of, and judgement on, the selected. It is this implication of the moral that leads to the notion of nostalgia.7 Nostalgia is a selective and typically positively oriented or transfigured kind of memory that can be inter-personally agreed upon. It refers, by definition, to a state assumed to have existed in the past that no longer exists. Thus, the idea of a disruption in continuity is central to the concept of nostalgia. Still, the term is mostly used to describe personal reflections or, if acknowledged as collective, is seen as representing a primarily passive perception. But van Dijk rightly calls for the consideration of the ‘political implications of the absence or presence of nostalgia’ and suggests the need to refer to it as a ‘dynamic, purposeful reconstruction’8 rather than as ‘romantic nativism’.

This paper will show that local institutions that have their roots in the past can be considerably influenced by the events of ‘big history’, i.e. changes in government and their specific ideological and administrative consequences. The argument, however, goes beyond this. It establishes an analytical connection between history, the role of individual and group memories, and the persistence, abolition or foundation of institutions. Nostalgia, therefore, is recognised as a potential motivating force for social action with an often powerful impact on social structure. This establishes at least one link between human beings and their culture, between the take-over of social ‘givens’ and the introduction of the new. It puts the question of the relation between a possible recognition of ‘tradition’ on the one hand,9 and the conception of innovation, or ‘invention’ on the other.10

The eastern Shewa area of central Ethiopia, known for its plough cultivation of tef, is inhabited mainly by members of the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups, who live in common settlements and share many cultural characteristics and social institutions. Their living together, however, has not always been peaceful.11 The historical sources for the area considered here mostly describe changes in power relations between the two groups, resulting in alternating Oromo and Amhara dominance. Processes of integration and exchange seem to have been strong, however.12 Typically, Oromo dominance is associated with the rule of the gadaa age and generation system, which was introduced into the area in the sixteenth century by northwards-migrating Borana-Oromo.13 The gadaa system prescribes that every eight years a new generation set assumes power, whereby ritual and judicial tasks pass to the next group of office holders. Clan and lineage organisation plays an important role in the functioning of gadaa. Amharic dominance, on the other hand, is marked by the exercise of power through the Shewan kings who, after a period of ‘insular’ existence in settlement clusters surrounded by Oromo territory, expanded their domains from the beginning of the eighteenth century, starting from the Manz area in northern Shewa.14 Through successive military campaigns, they gained control of the area relevant to this paper in the nineteenth century.15 The successors of the earlier Shewan kings became the rulers of Ethiopia. The more recent history of the Ethiopian state has seen several changes in government, namely: Menelik II (1889–1913), Iyasu (1913–16), Zewditu (1916–30), Haile Selassie (1930–74), interrupted by the brief Italian occupation of 1936–41, and the socialist Dergue (1974–91).16 Then, in 1991, a new government (Ehadiq) took power in Ethiopia, and divided the country into ethnic regions. Eastern Shewa became part of Oromiya region, which was allocated to the Oromo. A new awareness of ethnic belonging was felt in the local political arena. It was at that time that a group of Oromo lineage elders decided to re-enact the past of Oromo rule. In 1992, in Hiddii, a village in the Ada'a district, they founded a clan assembly, the walgayii gosaa. The assembly was assigned the task of teaching traditional Oromo law, of settling conflicts among the people of the surrounding area, of calling troublemakers to order, and of securing the locality's growth and prosperity. Moreover, it was involved in the collection of money among its members which would be used for blood-fee payments in cases of homicide.

The Power of Nostalgia

Such an act of foundation requires considerable effort, and effort is required to keep an assembly of this kind going. Neither its successful establishment nor its continuation can be taken for granted. This, then, raises the question of the motivation behind such a project. Pragmatic reasons, such as the desire to establish an insurance system in cases of human loss, or an instrument for conflict resolution, can partly explain the urge to establish this clan institution, but only partly: killings do not occur frequently in the area, and few people really think they would ever be in a situation where they would have to pay money for blood themselves. Also, the procedures for elders’ mediation are well established in the area, and there would have been no need for a distinct institution for keeping the peace. Rather, nostalgic activism was the driving force behind the founding of the clan assembly.

Previous Ethiopian governments had pursued different ethnic and socio-economic policies which were by no means universally welcomed. Under the socialist Dergue in particular, land reforms, taxation systems, political propaganda, military obligations and market restrictions had brought many peasants into opposition to the state, although such opposition was seldom expressed openly. For the Oromo, other factors were important, too. Their language, for example, had a lower status than Amharic, and some of their beliefs and rituals became, following accusations of ‘backwardness’, marginalised or even forbidden by the state. More important still, and dating back to the imperial era, the Oromo political system, the gadaa, had been deprived of its authority. Gadaa meetings were prohibited, and the traditional law of the assembly was superseded by state law. These developments gave rise to the popular perception and interpretation of the period between the end of Oromo supremacy in the nineteenth century and the political change in 1991 (known as the ‘coming of democracy’) as one of deep and deliberate damage to traditional Oromo law, perpetrated by the Amhara in general, and the ‘emperors’ and ‘socialists’ in particular. These ruled when instead the Oromo should have. The following is the introductory passage of the assembly's foundation paper, translated from Amharic:

For a long time, the Oromo people reigned according to its own laws and rules. Then, at the time of the emperor, the government brought problems for the Oromo people: it wanted them to forget the laws and rules and to abandon them. Thus was the problem; they had been suppressed; their law that had ruled before became forbidden, and they were forced to live according to the laws and rules of another ethnic/national group.17 Their customs and their language, all this and similar things became forbidden, so that they should no longer be used. They lived in that way until eight years before today, 100 years long, like in a nightmare.Then, a few years later, democracy came, and our property, our rules and customs became respected. Our forgotten customs were re-enacted. It was permitted that our ethnic group/nation once again used its rules and laws. Now that our customs and laws ruled again, there came together in the year of 1985 of the Ethiopian calendar [1992], according to the law of the Macca and the Tulama [Oromo groups in central Ethiopia], the young and the old Oromo of the surroundings of Hiddii, of the lineage of Illuu and others, and they founded an association in order to teach our rules, laws and customs.In order to strengthen the rules and laws in our area even more, and in order to allow the customs grow and develop, we started the association and laid down some points, as given below, in order to strengthen our ruling law.18

After the collapse of various successive systems and the ideologies associated with them, people sought a binding element other than party memberships. There was a need for the constant and morally permanent: in other words, governments come and go, but kinship and the clan remain. Moreover, there was move toward exclusivity: the assembly's founders decided that Amhara could only become members of the association if they were adopted by Oromo, and thereby become Oromo themselves. The elders were thus referring to a traditional Oromo law of adoption which allowed the incorporation of strangers into the ethnic group; this was widely practised during the former periods of Oromo dominance in the area. It had, however, seldom been applied in recent decades since, particularly under the Dergue, there had not been much need for it, largely because ‘ethnic belonging’ had little significance in the multi-ethnic villages of eastern Shewa. The decision to now make the assembly an explicitly Oromo affair in itself represented a particular interpretation of history, the nostalgic memory of a time when the Oromo lived either without the Amhara, or as their adopting leaders.

Indeed, the very fact of the institution's establishment can be understood as the people's comment on, and reaction to, Ethiopian history in general and its local implications in particular. For many people, the past represented a time when ‘things were still in order’. The value of the old proved its strength in contrast to the present. These moral projections on a past state of rectitude and order had serious implications. They suggested that should formerly abandoned institutions be reinstalled, and imbued with the same authority as before, the ‘evil’ would disappear. The logic of this thought necessitated action. An ‘assembly of the clan’ was founded since in popular memory it was the clan which formerly had strictly applied the laws of gadaa and exercised control over people at the local level, for the benefit of the community. Nostalgia was no longer simply an abstract notion.

The Clan Assembly

At the beginning, they were a group of just seven men, in their fifties or sixties, who all came from the village of Hiddii and who were all members of the Illuu lineage. Their names have a senior place in the list of members, and are always the first to be called out for payment during the assembly meetings. Over time, these men managed to attract more people, first from their neighbourhood in Hiddii itself, and then from the surrounding villages. Their secretary, then a comparatively young man but one of the few people in the village who could write fluently, had been recruited after being addressed thus by the elders: ‘Aren't you, too, an Oromo!’ He agreed to serve them. Today, the assembly has around 80 members from ten villages in the area.19

The assembly meets once in a month on the outskirts of the village of Hiddii, in the shadowy woods over the graveyard around the local Orthodox church. At these meetings, the members’ monthly fees are collected.20 At the assembly, any problem that touches the wider public interest in the area21 can be formally introduced to the audience, all of whom will be drinking beer. Speakers on a particular problem will follow one another individually, addressing themselves to the seated crowd. Serious problems do not so often arise to provide topics for discussion at monthly meetings; thus, minor meetings, too, can be made a matter of public interest.22 In the case of conflict or killing, however, discussions become most serious, and their outcome can affect the lives of many people. It has to be noted that some of the men who gather here are respected elders within their villages. In the case of emergencies – such as a sudden and dramatic occurrence like homicide – the assembly can be called together at any time, outside the regular meetings.

If someone has killed another person, he and his close relatives immediately leave their homesteads and take refuge at places beyond the reach of the vengeful relatives of the deceased. As soon as they can, they contact elders who can mediate for them. For only if the reconciliation procedure has been formally initiated by the gathered ‘elders of the country’, are they protected by traditional law. Many attempts have to be made by the elders before the family of the deceased agree to holding a reconciliation meeting, at which both parties’ elders discuss the amount of the blood-fee and other means of solving the conflict which has arisen. Often, the killer's family desperately needs to make peace, since they have abandoned their fields, their basic source of income, and sometimes even their cattle is left unattended. Fearing revenge, they cannot return home, and often have to live on the goodwill of wider relatives. Only by paying the blood-fee to the dead man's family can they bring this situation to an end. Although the blood-fee is fixed by the law of the gadaa at 150 Birr, the amount which is eventually agreed upon is in most cases much higher, usually several thousand Birr, since the relatives of the deceased can claim repayment for any expenses incurred, including the hospital, burial, the police, and so on. Very few individuals would be able to raise such amounts of money without the help of others. That is why the clan assembly financially supports the families of killers.

In terms of such financial support, the assembly only helps its members, and no one else. Paying the monthly fees gives an entitlement to assistance during times of need. But who is entitled to become a member? The assembly's foundation paper contains a passage stating that everyone who is Oromo can participate,23 ‘irrespective of his or her age or sex’. This formulation is an invocation of the political rhetoric of the time, of those people who were involved in the process of ‘writing the assembly down’. They had formal education, and were used to political slogans. In fact, there is no single female member of the assembly, and most members, who were within the forty-seventy year old age bracket at the time of its foundation, are today between fifty and eighty and therefore belong to the category of elders.

Links to the Past

Waaqni nagaan nu bulche, nagaan nu yaa oolchu!

(God has let us spend the night in peace, may he [also] let us spend the day in peace!)

Yaa oolchu!

(May he let us spend the day in peace!)

Dogoggorraa nu yaa oolchu!

(May he preserve us from mistakes!)

Yaa oolchu!

(May he preserve us [from that]!)

Waaldaan keenya nu yaa bal'atu!

(May our association get wider!)

Yaa bal'atu!

(May it get wider!)

Usually, a meeting of the clan assembly begins with a set of blessings or prayers. Three old men, one after the other, recite a sequence of mostly fixed formulae which, nevertheless, can be modified slightly according to the specific circumstances of the meeting. Each passage of their prayer is collectively answered by all the gathered men. They emphatically repeat the last part of the elder's recitation, thereby invoking God's blessing. This kind of communal praying can be described as a typical feature of Oromo elders’ social practice. It not only invokes a sense of community among those gathered at a certain event, but also builds a direct link between past and present mechanisms of Oromo identity-formation. Not everyone may bless as he wishes to. The most senior lineage always gives the blessings and offers the prayers before the ‘younger’. The order of blessings and prayers thus represents a social order that refers to Oromo genealogical categories.

The administrative boundaries of Ada'a district embrace a territory that belongs to the Oromo sub-group of Ada'a, which is placed in the descent system of the Shewa Oromo in the line of one of the descendants of the apical ancestor Tulama. The Ada'a themselves are subdivided into three smaller units, Handha, Illuu and Dhakkuu, and these are collectively called ‘the three of Ada'a’. They are ranked according to their seniority in the above order, i.e. Handha being the most senior, Illuu the second and Dhakkuu the ‘youngest’. Viewed in this light, it is no coincidence that the locality of Hiddii was chosen for the assembly of 1992. The area around Hiddii is described in oral tradition as the land of the sub-lineage of Illuu. All foundation members in 1992 were Illuu, and still nowadays – when the assembly has grown considerably in membership – the vast majority of its people belong to the Illuu. The assembly currently meets under or near by a tree under which Boxora Adii, a famous ancestor of the Illuu, is buried.24 Boxora Adii's direct heir seems to have been a driving force behind the foundation of the new assembly in 1992. The odaa tree on the grave of Boxtora is situated at the foot of a holy mountain (the Tulluu Hiddii), where once a year local Oromo elders make sacrificial offerings during the tulluu kadhachuu ceremony, and next to a holy lake (the Hora Kiloolee) where, at another time of the year, the equally important irreecha ritual is held, which is also connected to local Oromo descent lines. Still today, people who ‘have a heritage’ – i.e., who keep a ritually important object in their home which proves them to be traditional Oromo title holders – enjoy particular respect in the clan assembly of Hiddii, another pointer into the Oromo past.

When, at the beginning, the members of the assembly met each other three times a year, the place of the meeting changed regularly. In the Ethiopian month of tiqimt, on the 27th day, they met in the village of Hora; in the month of yakkatit, again on the 27th day, in the village of Hiddii; and in the month of sane, on the 27th, in the village of Borora. The 27th day of the month, chosen by the association's founders for their meetings, was the Orthodox Christian holy day madhane alem (‘saviour of the world’).25 Wherever the meeting was held, a tent was erected in the village. The ‘hosts’ of the event slaughtered cattle for their guests in the morning, in order to serve them with meat later that day. The slaughter of cattle and feasts involving the consumption of meat and beer had been integral parts of any gadaa, lineage or other communal event or ritual. This is especially true during the gadaa succession rituals, when one generation hands power over to the next, and particular groups of people host others according to a rota. The principle of ‘cyclical reciprocity’ is as important in this context as the ‘cattle complex’ ideology said to be so typical of Oromo societies. In the cases of both the gadaa succession and the Hiddii clan assembly, a certain individual's homestead was chosen as the place for feasting, in contrast to the preference for a public space shown in other social gatherings.

There is also a direct link between the current blood-fee payments and the activities of former lineage and clan seniors. At their meetings, in which gadaa officials often participated, discussions about blood-fee payments had been a primary concern. There existed (and there exists still) a corpus of law, called seera, which was to be followed in the decision-making process, and which contained, among other prescriptions, detailed regulations about the level of blood-fees. The most striking evidence that the clan assembly of Hiddii was no sudden invention is, however, the fact that the sub-lineage of Handha, being senior to the Illuu, also runs such a clan assembly at a different location on Ada'a territory. Other Oromo sub-groups are said to have similar assemblies. In the eyes of its founders, then, the assembly of Hiddii was no invention. The law they wanted to follow was the law of their ancestors. Their forebears had practised the assembly of the clan or lineage that reconciled conflicting parties and held discussions about blood-fee payments. Although they ‘founded’ the assembly, it clearly had existed previously; for the founders, it was simply a matter of bridging the temporal gap between past and present.

The Break in Continuity

Traditional blood-fee payment, however, had been made in cattle, not in money, and very likely had not been collected by fellow lineage members in advance to build a stock for future need, but rather only after a specific case of homicide had occurred. While the killer himself had to immediately flee from the area, his relatives, at risk from retaliation, would beg for help from the extended family and lineage members in order to raise the cattle needed for the family of the deceased. Monthly collections of money, for example, are not at all connected with former clan activities, despite all the supposed links with the past noted above. Nor did the oral society of Oromo herders, of course, rely on books or registers.

Moreover, the originally much more narrowly defined category of people entitled to become members of the clan assembly was broadened in order to increase the number of possible participants. Formerly run by members of the Illuu lineage only, the association was opened to members of other lineages, people who, as is commonly said, ‘lived among us’.26 Participation is further widened by the fact that every Oromo can be admitted to the clan assembly, even if he does not actually know which clan or lineage he belongs to. In oral communication, the association is referred to as an assembly (walgayii) of the clan (gosa), and not, for example, as an assembly of the lineage (balbala). It has to be noted here that both terms, gosa and balbala, are subject to changes in meaning and significance over time, from generation to generation; new sub-groups emerge and segmentations take place, and different levels of inclusiveness exist in different contexts. Some people, when asked for their gosa, give the ethnic group, ‘Oromo’, as an answer.

Ambiguity can also be found at another level. The very same association that excluded Amhara from their assembly as members of another ethnic group depends completely on the Amharic script and language for any kind of book-keeping or writing, including receipts and petitions of individual members.27 Although the only oral language of communication within the association is Oromo, none of its members would be able to write the newly introduced Oromo Roman alphabet. Those who had learnt to read and write had learned to do it in Amharic. But written and oral language each has its own rules of expression. It thus happened that the assembly's title, in Oromo walgayii gosaa, ‘assembly of the clan’, was transformed in Amharic into ya hiddi akkababi oromo shimagillewoch mahbar, or ‘association of the Oromo elders of the surroundings of Hiddii’.

There is, then, historical discontinuity, as people themselves realise. It is not clear when it was that the Oromo ceased the original clan and lineage assemblies. Some say they still existed in the time of Haile Selassie, and ended with the socialist revolution in 1974; others assume that they had already disappeared long before this. In any case, the break in continuity between that time and the re-foundation in 1992 had important consequences. Knowledge and remembering are key factors in the re-enactment of the past, but they certainly cannot be taken for granted. The elders of 1992 had been children or at least ‘youthful’ during the imperial era. None had seen an original clan assembly with their own eyes, but relied on what the then-elders reported to them. In this way, they reconstructed what they could, copied what still existed, filled in creatively what was missing, and added what seemed to them to be fruitful. The result was the creation of an institution that, while based on an extant model of organisation, was not based on the ancient clan meetings. Rather, the new assembly adopted the organisational structure of a form of burial association called iddir which is common in the area among both Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups. Although the iddir is sometimes described by local people as originating among the Amhara, it may actually be of urban Gurage origin.28

Borrowing

An iddir is a voluntary association of household heads within a given neighbourhood or settlement. Its aim is to provide support to members of the community in the case of loss of human life; thus the iddir organises the burial and pays the bereaved a certain amount of money, drawn from the monthly fees paid by members. It is organised through written accounts, and has a fixed order of members in the register, a committee with specialised duties, and monthly open-air meetings which are held in the settlement's public space. The meetings are nourished by members’ rotational contributions of local beer, bread and roasted grain. In the case of the death of a member or one of his close relatives, all members of the iddir are obliged to attend the funeral.

When in 1992 the Oromo clan assembly was initiated, it was modelled on the institution of iddir. Every month, the assembly's members meet over beer, bread and grain, pay their monthly fee, and discuss the day's agenda. On these occasions, the committee submits to the general assembly an account of income and expenditure. As is also the case in meetings of a burial association, such accounts are often the subject of long and heated debates about the proper, or improper, use of assembly funds. Again, the food and drink consumed during the day are provided, rotationally, by certain members of the assembly; the order follows the list of names in the secretary's book (i.e., one month it is the turn of four people in the list, the next month the next four people, and so on). This method of supplying refreshments is also to be found in the iddir.

Committing data to written form in the register is essential to ensuring the continued functioning of the association. The secretary is responsible for the truthful content of the book, and is expected to be highly conscientious. He takes note of all the members’ monthly fee payments, keeps letters of requests for support in it, calculates payments on the pages, and permits people to sign for receipt of money from the association. Without the book, the assembly could hardly keep track of its complex financial activities; the writings within the book ensure order and control. The book-keeping of the clan assembly, again, bears a striking resemblance to that of the burial association, even down to the very layout of the pages. Each year, the secretary opens a new page of the book, writing the names of all those who are still members of the assembly, alongside the amount of money they have paid. Over time, of course, the list of names alters slightly: new people join, others leave. Names which disappear denote those who have died, or those who no longer wish to participate. Nonetheless continuity is ensured by the fact that, even if a member of the assembly dies, his son (or indeed his wife) can ‘inherit’ the place on the list. The ranking of names in the list according to seniority is similar to that used in most burial associations.

The assembly in Hiddii has elected an executive committee (koree hojii raawwachiiftu) whose members have special tasks and duties. It consists of a convenor (walitti-qabaa), a clerk (barreessaa), who is responsible for book-keeping, and five other general committee members (miseensa koree), one of whom is entrusted with the association's money. Another member takes care of the communal drinking cups, storing them at his own home. Again, this organisational structure – chairman, secretary, treasurer, and a fixed number of committee members with specific responsibilities – can be found in any iddir, with the minor difference that the clan assembly has no crier who announces deaths and meetings, typical of the burial associations. Furthermore, the two institutions function according to very similar sets of rules and laws. The grounds for, and size of, any payment to one of its members, for example, are strictly regulated in an iddir. The money to be paid for loss of life is a fixed sum, agreed upon by the association at its very foundation, and is dependent on the level of monthly fees and the number of participants. Most iddir rigidly restrict such payments to dependant relatives who still live in the household of the paying member.29 The same kind of rules, while adapted to meet the assembly's particular aims, can be found in Hiddii. Money is paid only in one or other of two carefully defined scenarios. Either a member or member's relative has killed another person, in which case the member is given a fixed amount of money (300 Birr) to help him pay the blood-fee;30 or, if a member of the association, or his wife, dies, the assembly pays a fixed, and much lower, amount of money (50 Birr) to the bereaved. In the latter scenario, the resemblance to a burial association is most striking. In both the iddir and the clan assembly, the basic rule applies that anyone who fails to pay his membership fee regularly loses his entitlement to assistance in times of need.

Doubtless, the iddir served as a model in many spheres of activity for the re-founded clan assembly. Borrowing from the iddir, however, also occurs in a much more literal sense; once, twice or three times a year the elders of the clan assembly borrow a tent from a local burial association for the rotational slaughtering of livestock and consequent feast. There is a close relationship between the elders and the various iddir of the surrounding villages; everyone in the clan assembly is also a member of a burial association in his village. This, clearly, explains the influence of iddir practical know-how on the newly designed assembly. The elders simply applied to the institution what they had already been practising, in a different context, for years.

New Aims, New Patterns

The organisational structure of the clan assembly, however, goes beyond that of a burial association. First, burial associations in the area are, depending on the demographic factors at work in their localities, usually multi-ethnic in membership. The explicit aim of creating a distinct platform for a single ethnic community necessarily involved different patterns of recruitment to the clan assembly. Second, the assembly's organisational shape tends to be more flexible than that of an iddir. At any time the assembly can, for instance, decide to raise or decrease the monthly fees to be paid by its members. This suits the needs of an agrarian society where there are seasonal differences in income generation. There are ‘rich’ months after harvest, when most people sell their crops at market and have some cash at their disposal; and there are ‘needy’ months, especially during the rainy season, when either the stock of grain is almost consumed or sowing has already taken place for next year's harvest. Many people run out of money at this time of year, or they have to spend it on additional grain for food. The assembly's membership fees vary according to these fluctuations.31 Individual circumstances were also recognised in the assembly's regulations. If a member is unable to pay his monthly fee, he can have it reduced temporarily or deferred. He is later required to pay the balance. This flexibility, it should be noted, does not exist for the iddir, where people show impatience toward individuals who do not pay on a regular basis.32

However, since the safeguarding of the association's income is one of the most demanding tasks within the assembly, patience with late- or non-payers also has its limits. It was agreed that after four instances of non-payment from a member, the latter should be regarded as having resigned his membership, and thus no longer entitled to assistance in times of need, as defined above. It is stated explicitly that this should be done without enquiring of the reason for the individual's non-payment. Asking people for a ‘reason’ in this context was seen as coercive, and the distress of forced participation – reminiscent of earlier state-organised bodies such as peasant associations, militias or political parties – was something which the clan assembly deliberately sought to avoid at its inception. The spirit of the time – the socialist government had just been overthrown and the country was under the emblem of ‘democracy’ – was against rigid regulations and obligations. Rather, other financial mechanisms ensured a certain continuity in membership.33

But other features also changed with time. This is particularly true of the institutional design of the assembly. In addition to the committee of the general assembly, the association runs three more sub-committees. One of these, the ‘law-teaching committee’ (koree seera barsiisuu) consists of three elders who have responsibility for teaching traditional Oromo law to people not fully acquainted with it. Whenever members of the assembly are involved in reconciliation procedures, and are not certain about how to proceed in a certain case, the elders were called in to advise.34 The need for such a committee indicates the extent to which traditional law is not, in fact, very well known among the population. It is a relatively recent development that discourses about a lost or hidden Oromo heritage occur in public, and hence the need to teach it in order to revive and preserve it.

The second sub-committee (koree bittuu midhaanii) is responsible for buying and selling grain, particularly tef, on behalf of the assembly. There are significant variations in the market price for grain in the course of the year. As time passes since the last harvest, crops become more expensive, since demand among needy families increases. Shortly after the harvest prices usually fall rapidly, when everyone tries to sell his harvest quickly in order to acquire cash. Those with the financial capacity to buy large amounts of cheap grain are able to store it and sell it at considerable profit in times of shortage. The committee's selling and buying activities in grain are aimed explicitly at making profit, taking advantage of the price differences at local markets in the course of the year. It is a capital investment which rather resembles the activities of private traders or certain NGOs in recent years.35 The three people on this committee are changed periodically, so that the people who bought the grain are not those in charge of selling it.36 This is mainly justified by the burden of work which the people involved would have to take upon themselves. Further, of course, this rule prevents people from cheating the assembly. Finally, the third sub-committee (koree to'annaa) is a control board that consists of three members who supervise the financial activities of the trading group just described.

In summary, then, the clan assembly is both old and new: it is clan at heart, iddir in shape, and supplemented by capital-raising entrepreneurship. It refers to the law of the ancestors, and at the same time fits perfectly with recent central government policies. Although official permission for the assembly was never obtained, a passage in the foundation paper states that the elders would support the present government when asked to do so, and in turn would appreciate the support of the government.

Conclusions

Too often, ‘nostalgia’ is used in a derogatory sense and confined to an everyday context. Used as an analytical category, however, it has great theoretical potential. As this example has shown, in Hiddii nostalgic memory was transformed from abstract discourse to positive action. It led to the foundation of a very real form of social aggregation, with the result that the institution came to play a central part in the socio-political and judicial arena of Ada'a. The very existence of the assembly is evidence of a ‘lived ideology’.

The actions of people, nonetheless, are not always in line with what they think they are doing, or what they themselves will admit to recognising. In order to explain the very nature of an institution, therefore, it proves necessary to consider not only the sole fact of its existence (or indeed non-existence), or its emblematic designation, but also its tangible organisational structure and design. Ethnographic details become particularly important in this respect. When looking at what people take from previous organisational patterns, what they leave aside, and what they introduce to them, two things become evident. First, goodwill is not enough. In order to preserve or re-install the old, it must first be known and memorised, and then be practicable under present conditions. Second, new plans and ideas often suggest new means, since they are subject to their own logic and requirements. This is how structural changes appear: the aim to invest money in the grain market was accompanied by a new set of regulations and the introduction of two new committees which would not otherwise have existed. It was, for example, the founders’ obvious mistrust of their fellow members’ honesty or ability in dealing with money that led to the introduction of the control board into the assembly's organisational structure.

The transmitters and inventors of any institution are human beings. The institution can only be as perfect or imperfect as the people who run it; and if they stop running it, the institution dies. The central point, therefore, is to recognise the ‘human factor’ in structure, the organisational aspect in institutions, and the diachronic dimension in human memory and experience.

Notes

1. Lewis, ed., History and Social Anthropology, ix.

2. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory.

3. Douglas, ‘How Institutions Think’, 70.

4. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, 119, 231–240, 246. Hutchinson speaks even more directly of ‘chains of memory’ that bind Nuer families together: Hutchinson, ‘Death, Memory’, 60.

5. Middleton and Edwards, eds, Collective Remembering, 1.

6. Cole, ‘The Uses of Defeat’, 105.

7. The term nostalgia has, in earlier works, been used to denote homesickness or a mental illness, but has since then undergone a fundamental transformation in meaning: it is now seen as basically a sociological phenomenon, and not a disease. See Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 2.

8. van Dijk, ‘Pentecostalism’, 160.

9. Boyer, Tradition as Truth.

10. Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition.

11. Tafla, ed., Asma Giyorgis; Asserate, Die Geschichte; Ege, Class, State and Power, 191ff.; Pankhurst, Ethiopian Borderlands, 279ff.

12. Salole, ‘Who are the Shoans?’; Asserate, Die Geschichte, 34ff.; Ege, Class, State and Power, 197ff.; Pankhurst, Ethiopian Borderlands, 316ff.

13. Bahrey, ‘History of the Galla’, 116ff.; Hassen, The Oromo of Ethiopia, 18ff.; Pankhurst, Ethiopian Borderlands, 279ff., 324ff.

14. Asserate, Die Geschichte, 23ff.; Tafla, ed., Asma Giyorgis, 491ff.; Ege, Class, State and Power, 18ff.

15. Ege, Class, State and Power, 192ff.

16. People in eastern Shewa, like historians, tend to subdivide history into reigns. Changes in government usually bring with them changes in political slogans, and certain policies can indeed intrude on the lives of ordinary people. Where not too much change has occurred, people tend to summarise governments that followed one another, or to leave out some of them, especially when a reign was short, or when it had no significant impact on their lives. Thus, the Shewan people conceive the recent historical order as one chiefly divided into the era of the Amharic emperors, and the socialist Dergue period that followed it.

17. This is a reference to the Amhara.

18. This is a later version of the original text. When the first ‘record book’ was full, all necessary information, including the introductory passage, was copied into a new file, and the book-keeping was continued on the empty pages. The original could not be found at the time of my research. I am very grateful to Dessalegn Kebede for his help with the translation from Amharic and the transcription of several of the assembly meetings’ speeches in Oromo. During 2000–02 Dessalegn and Lamma Kebede accompanied me to meetings of the assembly and assisted in recording them.

19. This means many more people being integrated into the conciliation and payment system, since every member, usually advanced in years, is a family and household head who represents the more junior members of that family. The ten villages are: Hiddii, Hora, Karfee, Ofuu, Borora, Borora Xinnaa, Dhadhaa, Qaaxillaa, Siree Qaalluu and Qaallittii.

20. Initially they met three times a year. Each time, they had to pay 4 Birr. Later, it was decided to hold the meetings once a month, with a 1-Birr fee at each meeting. Either way, payments do not exceed 12 Birr per person per year. This is not an enormous sum, but for people who are accustomed to counting every Birr, neither is it insignificant.

21. This is referred to as rakkoo naanoo, a ‘problem of the surroundings’.

22. So, for instance, at one meeting a man complained about the lack of discipline in the discussion at the previous meeting, when people ‘just came to drink’, failing to formally request permission to stand and speak, instead simply sitting and talking amongst themselves. The case was formally discussed afterwards in the assembly.

23. Being ‘Oromo’ is paraphrased in the paper as anyone ‘having the Oromo law’.

24. The tree is situated in front of an Orthodox church compound dedicated to St. Giyorgis. Some say that Boxora Adii founded the church, which was claimed (in 2002) to be 168 years old. Others say that the tree was there long before the church.

25. Although the people of Shewa use an Orthodox Christian calendar – 30 days for each of 12 months and a 13th month of 5 days – the use of the 27th day of the month does not necessarily indicate deep Christian faith, but might in fact be interpreted as harking back to a long-vanished Oromo lunar calendar, in which a month ideally consisted of 27 days. Some sources indicate that at some point in the past Oromo lineage representatives gathered at the end of the lunar month, and, spending the night together, awaited the appearance of the new moon.

26. These ‘other people’ belong, for example, to the Galaan or to the Gumbichu. The Galaan, who share with the Illuu a wider group solidarity as descendants of the Tulama ancestor, are senior to the Illuu in the descent system.

27. Even the anti-Amhara polemics in the introductory passage of the assembly's foundation paper, cited above, was written in Amharic.

28. Iddir probably evolved in the twentieth century, or perhaps the late nineteenth, in Addis Ababa, where migrants had to cope with urbanisation and the monetarisation of the economy. It may have been developed by a group of Soddo Gurage traders. See Pankhurst, ‘The Role and Space for Iddirs’, 6, 8.

29. An adult son is expected to take out ‘insurance’ for himself, his wife and his children through his own iddir membership, even if he should still live in his father's compound. A daughter who is married and/or lives elsewhere is not, in the case of her own death or that of her children, usually taken into account for any payment to her father by his iddir.

30. The widening of entitlement to payment from sole household dependants to the broader category of relatives is explained by the fact that whole families are at risk from retaliation. Their interest in reconciliation is thus publicly recognised by the assembly.

31. The association can, for example, decide to fix membership payment at 2 Birr in the months after harvest, and to reduce it to 0.50 Birr for the duration of the rainy season. In the other months, a fee of 1 Birr can be levied, with the aim of maintaining the annual subscription at 12 Birr.

32. An individual who, due to personal misfortune, is unable to pay his membership fee to an iddir must write a letter of explanation; this is then read to the gathered members at the next meeting, when the individual must stand up and beg the crowd for understanding. Sometimes he is subject to verbal abuse, and in general only severe hardship is accepted as an excuse. The clan assembly is much more flexible in this context.

33. Every member is a shareholder of the assembly's common property. Whenever someone wants to join the association, the entire current assets of the group is calculated in monetary terms, and divided by the number of current members. The figure that comes out is the amount of money which the applicant must bring in as his share or investment. Conversely, however, when someone leaves, he is not paid his share; his investment stays with the group, and thus he makes a loss. Even a person whose membership lapsed, for whatever reason, has to pay a new deposit as with any newcomer. These regulations are quite successful in preventing a frequent coming and going among members.

34. Younger people constituted another ‘target audience’. However I did not observe any such teaching of the younger generation. Remarkably, some of the elders charged with teaching the law were not themselves wholly expert in it (there are only three elders in the committee altogether).

35. One NGO which is very active in the area supports exactly this kind of activity. In order to strengthen the economic position of women, the latter are given large amounts of credit to buy grain at times of low market prices. They store the crops and sell them when the price is high. Afterwards they must pay back the NGO but may keep the profits. During the socialist era this kind of activity was prohibited.

36. In the other committees, members are only changed after an individual failure has occurred.