Bahir Dar and the lake Tana basin. History of an urbanshed

Abstract

James McCann provides here a template regarding Ethiopia’s rural modernization in four distinct periods of demographic and spatial change that transformed the physical landscape of Lake Tana at Blue Nile river’s headwaters and its effect on the region’s hinterland on a local, national and international level that would form the “urbanscape” of the city of Bahir Dar in early twenty first century. Lake Tana and its surrounding ecologies is the font of the Blue Nile’s waters, sitting at 1800 meters above sea level from where it frames much of the watershed’s political and cultural ecology.The Blue Nile basin, its geology and its geographies simultaneously shaped the cultures of several distinctive peoples. The ethnographic landscape included Christian highland farmers and aristocrats, Cushitic-speaking Agaw farmers, Muslim traders (who spoke Amharic), and Omotic-speaking Shinasha. These cultures traded places and bodies of knowledge on the local ecologies over time, resulting in a cereal-based agro-economy that supported livestock and small farms that managed them. In the early 1980s political changes at the national level brought a transformation in Ethiopia’s agrarian econ­omy and agro-ecological balance. A major component was the arrival of modern maize seed and national agri­cultural markets after 1980, and the construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam, beginning a new phase of Ethiopia’s rural modernization.