The rise and rise of agricultural wage labour: evidence from Ethiopia's south, c.1950–2000

Abstract

AbstractThis article seeks to examine the dynamic transformation in the system of labour mobilization and the consequent intermingling of peoples of diverse cultural background in northern Sidama, Ethiopia. It investigates the different labour recruitment strategies deployed in the study area at different times, ranging from traditional to hired labour. In the former case, the household plays a major role in the recruitment and supply of agricultural labour, whereas in the latter case, ‘trans-locality’ reinforced by migration becomes central to the labour history of the region. In the 1940s and 1950s, Emperor Haile Selassie I granted large estates of land in the study area to absentee landowners who started schemes of commercial coffee farming. The subsequent expansion of commercialized coffee farming in a locality called Wondo Gänät (northern Sidama) from the 1950s onwards was responsible for the introduction of agricultural wage labour into the wider region. There was no local surplus labour to satisfy the labour needs of the new coffee farms. This void was later filled by Kembata, Hadiya and Wolayita migrant labourers who flocked into the study area from regions widely noted for their scarcity of arable land. This translocal movement of workers paved the way for the beginning of wage employment and eventually the commodification of farm labour in line with capitalist agriculture. Although commercial coffee plantations provided the initial stimulus for labour commodification in the study area, sugar cane-based cash cropping has helped it flourish even further. I argue in this article that the imperial land grants of the late 1940s and 1950s were an important milestone both for the agricultural history of the study area and for the organization of farm labour. Most importantly, I also argue that some of the social tensions and conflicts that often haunt contemporary northern Sidama are legacies inherited from the labour migrations of the 1950s and 1960s and the demographic heterogeneity that ensued.