Communities

The people of the Gamo Highlands live in communities called dere. These communities are small, autonomous political units and there is no overall Gamo polity that unites all the people of the highlands. As a result of the patterns of conquest and rebellion in the nineteenth century, most deres have a fractal-like internal structure so that large deres are made up of several smaller deres, which are in turn made up of yet smaller deres. Now that warfare has ceased, these federations are reasonably stable. And because even the smallest unit of dere governs its own matters to a very large extent, large federations can today remain nominally intact while the constituent deres look after most of their own affairs. The large federation of the K'ogota, just north of Doko, for example, includes the deres of Chencha, Doina, Birbira, Ezzo and several others. Each of these is about the size of Doko, and thus the K'ogota is one of the largest federations in the highlands. Although representatives from each dere meet every week or so at an assembly in Chencha, where they discuss certain ritual matters which unite the federation, for the most part these deres are fairly autonomous and there is a great deal of variation in their internal cultural practices.

The dere of Doko is itself a reasonably large dere in the present context of the Gamo Highlands, and has a population of about 20,000 people (Population and Housing Census 1994:314–15).