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Archival Sources on the Yemeni Arabs in Urban Ethiopia: The Dessie Municipality1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Hussein Ahmed
Hussein Ahmed*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/Addis Ababa University
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Extract

During the summer of 1998 I undertook a preliminary survey of archival materials relating to the Yemeni Arab residents of Dessie kept in the town's municipality. Until 1969, when the Arab immigrants in the entire country were subjected to a state-orchestrated public call for their expulsion—a call which manifested itself in a wave of anti-Arab demonstrations triggered by a bomb explosion on an aircraft belonging to the national carrier at Frankfurt Airport in which the Syrian Front for the Liberation of Eritrea was implicated—Dessie was the home of a large, relatively prosperous, and conspicuous Yemeni community, whose members were concentrated in several distinct quarters, one of which is still popularly known as Arab Ganda. The other areas are Sharf Tara, Taqa Tara, and Mugad, near the main daily market of Arada.

The archive of the Municipality (or Town Council) of Dessie, capital of South Wallo administrative zone in northern Ethiopia, is perhaps unique among other town archives in the country, including that of the capital, Addis Ababa, in terms of the care and sense of duty that the office has shown towards preserving materials pertaining to expatriate residents. Until recently, the vast majority of these had been of Yemeni and Hadrami origin, although there were also some Hijazis and Libyans, and a significant number of non-Arabs: Italians, Greeks, Americans, Englishmen, Indians, and Czechs/Slovaks.

I consulted all but two of the existing registers entitled Yawuch Agar Zegoch Mazgab (Register of Foreign Nationals), which seem more likely to have been misplaced than lost altogether, perhaps during the move of the Municipality to its present premises.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 27 , January 2000 , pp. 31 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2000

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Footnotes

1

Funding for the fieldwork was obtained from the Ethio-Italian Universities' Cooperation Project. I am grateful to the coordinators, Alessandro Triulzi of the Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples, and Ato Shiferaw Bekele of the Department of History, Addis Ababa University) for their exemplary competence in facilitating the speedy release of funding and for their moral support. Thanks are also due to the keepers of the archive in Dessie for permission to consult the material.

References

2 On this, see The Ethiopian Herald (14 March 1969) and the subsequent issues covering the demonstrations staged by Ethiopians and Yemeni Arabs living in the country. The subject of the background to, and consequences of, the “anti-Arab” hysteria is much more complex than a reaction to an act of foreign subversion, and has a local dimension. It therefore deserves a separate study. For a rather sketchy treatment, see Hess, Robert L., Ethiopia: the Modernization of Autocracy (Ithaca/London), 188–91.Google Scholar

3 Guida dell'Africa Orientate Italiana (Milan, 1938)Google Scholar, map between 398 and 399 where the area is indicated as “quartiere arabo.”

4 For a longer treatment of the subject within a wider geographical context, see my “A Brief Note on the Yemeni Arabs in Ethiopia” in Fukui, Katsuyoshi, Kurimoto, Eisei, and Shigeta, Masayoshi, eds., Ethiopia in Broader Perspectives: Papers of the 13th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (3 vols.: Kyoto, 1997), 1:339–48.Google Scholar

5 The letter, addressed to the Municipality, called for the strict enforcement of control over the foreign residents of the town and the submission of reports on births and deaths within a period of five days.

6 Some names nre difficult to identify in view of the problem of transliterating Arabic names in Amharic. Many examples of this problem abound throughout the material: Amadi for ʿAmudi, Ba Jibà for Ba Jibaí, Zaqir for Saghir, Matana for Muthanna, etc.

7 Even more difficult, in some cases, is the rendering into Amharic of place names in the Yemen. The distinction between tribe, town, and village/district is often not clear.

8 One ʿAbd al-Rahman ʿUmar Mubarak and a certain Badriyya Muhammad (listed in another register) are described as having English nationality.

9 The description of physical identifying marks is rather interesting and sometimes amusing. Almost all had marks of one kind or another.

10 The vast majority of the Arabs signed with fingerprints, suggesting that they were illiterate.

11 Norberg noted that in the Immigration Office in Addis Ababa, the records of foreigners provide data on date of registration, serial number of identity card, origin, nationality, sex, occupation, and size of family: Norberg, Viveca Halldin, Swedes in Haile Selassie's Ethiopia, 1924-1952 (Uppsala, 1977), 87.Google Scholar

12 According to the register, among those who lived in Dessie and registered with the Municipality, the first to arrive in Ethiopia was Salih Nasir Hasan, who came in 1935/36.

13 Of the 74 Arabs (Yemenis, Hadramis, and Hijazis), 33 entered through Assab, 27 through Massawa, 5 through Djibouti, 2 through Asmara, and I each through Addis Ababa and Negele.

14 Hussein, , “Brief Note,” 342.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 341.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 342.

18 The standard practice was for the Yemenis, all of whom came unaccompanied by their womenfolk, to marry local girls from the surrounding countryside or the town itself. The former came to the so-called Arab shops to sell milk, eggs and other items for daily consumption on a regular basis, or were hired as domestic maidservants. Some were Christians who converted to Islam on marriage. This is analogous to the practice among the Arab emigrants in England.

19 On the economic activities of the Hadramis in Ethiopia and the Horn see Ewald, Janet and Clarence-Smith, W. G., “The Economic Role of the Hadhrami Diaspora in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden,1820s to 1930s” in Freitag, Ulrike and Clarence-Smith, W. G., eds., Hadhrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s-1960s (Leiden, 1997), 284–85.Google Scholar

20 This is a reflection of the contemporay political changes in Yemen, especially the emergence in 1967 of the then People's Republic of South Yemen

21 See note 5 above.

22 To name but a few: ʿAbdallah ʿAwad Ba Baqi, and Shaykh Muhammad Ba Zarà, who in 1890 had set himself up as a shipowner at Massawa (Pankhurst, Richard, “The Trade of Northern Ethiopia in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 2[1964], 98).Google Scholar

23 As was evident at the time of the field work.

24 For a study of the Yemeni migrants who returned home from Saudi Arabia beginning from late 1990, see Colton, Nora Ann, “Homeward Bound: Yemeni Return Migration,” International Migration Review 27(1993), 870–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed