Literacy in an oral society: the case of Ethiopian land records

Abstract

Christian Ethiopia is a culture profoundly animated by the spoken word. Its highest art is poetry, a literary form produced for performance. Verbal facility is widely diffused among different social classes. Ambiguity is prized: as is nuance and subtlety. Yet Ethiopia is unique among sub-saharan African societies in possessing an indigenous literacy, which dates back over two thousand years and which has generated its own script. Written texts in Ethiopia fall into a number of distinct genres, many of them narrative, others non-narrative. Narrative sources make clear that Ethiopian rulers kept administrative records. Of these, little has survived from before 1900 beyond the numerous notes, which litter the margins and end-papers of church service books, notes which deal pre-eminently with issues concerning land. The writing of these notes was clearly important to those who wrote them. What purpose did they serve; and what meaning did their authors attribute to them? Beyond that, what was the relationship between orality and literacy in historic Ethiopia? To be sure, literacy served the purpose of mystifying the power of state, ruling class and church vis à vis the overwhelming mass of illiterate subjects of the state. But how did literacy function in relationships within the ruling class and among the literate? This paper explores the relationship between orality and literacy on the basis of a documentary tradition, the richest legacy of which dates to the 18th century, but which has origins datable to the 13th century, and which, most probably, stems from far earlier still. It concludes that orality and literacy were interdependent.