The Armed Periphery : Guns, State, and Inter-ethnic relations in southern Ethiopia

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, many anthropologists have focused on studies of inter-ethnic relations including warfare in southern and southwestern Ethiopia. One of the most influential approaches is the ethno-system approach that views these relations, which situationally move between peace and war, as an autonomous system embedded in culture. This approach contributes to discovering the nature of these relationships and to answering what warfare means for human society. On the other hand, however, it is inevitable to criticize the ethno-system approach as it presumes the relationships as a closed circle separated from the outer world. In fact, no inter-ethnic relations can be isolated from the influence of the State (Ethiopia) and the global situation during the twentieth century. This perspective, which is called the "center-periphery paradigm", was introduced in the late 1980s. This article will try to connect the ethno-system approach to the center-periphery paradigm through an analysis of the usage of guns among the Banna in southern Ethiopia. While guns are, first of all, instruments of violence, they represent a material culture dressed in political attributes. By tracing the history of guns among the Banna, scholars can discover the visible linkage from the global center to the peripheries in a material phase. Most of the guns that have been used by the Banna were acquired by purchase from merchants or capture from the Ethiopian and Italian armies, so that the historical lineup of those guns reflects the then political situation of the world and Ethiopian foreign relationships. For example a series of Kalashnikov (AK) assault rifles, which used to be a central weapon of the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, have become the most popular guns among the Banna since the late 1980s because AKs were introduced in the socialist Ethiopia (1974-1991) and fell into civilian hands after the collapse of the socialist regime. Warfare in southern Ethiopia should be examined in two phases : warfare between center and periphery, and inter-ethnic warface. For the peripheral peoples like the Banna, warfare against the Amhara-centred government and colonial Italy have been experiences of defeat. Since the Amhara domination in the 1890s, the Banna has long fought against those dominant powers, firstly with spears, and then with guns, all of which were acquired from the enemy. The acquisition of guns led the Banna to be militarized ; however, militarization does not mean that the Banna military system became westernized but that they attacked the police and government officials by hit-and-run or ambush. Although the government forcibly confiscated guns quite often, it tolerated their possession by the Banna. As the wide material gap between the Banna and the government shows, the government positioned the Banna as peripheral both militarily and politically. As the peripheral people gained larger and larger quantities of guns, inter-ethnic warfare changed from spear-and-shield fighting to mass killing with guns. Different from the violence against the government, warfare with neighboring people is not murder through ambush, but rather organized into an age system that the Banna introduced from the Bume (Nyangatom), an ethnic group living on the west bank of the Omo river and recognized as an enemy by the Banna. In the warfare with the Mursi and the Bodi which occurred in 1950s and 1960s was a kind of full scale attack with gruesome results, since each side was heavily armed rifles and ammunition. Different from the fight with gmovernment, the military balance was almost equal in such inter-ethnic warfare, although the population balance was unequal. This difference of offensive style corresponds to differences in relationships. On the one hand, although the introduction of guns changed the scene on the battlefield, friend-foe relation-ships with neighboring groups have not changed. On the other hand, the government forced the Banna to be subordinated and dominated by Amhara (northerners) control and the modern army. Guns were and are accepted among the Banna, not only as tools for attack, but also as symbols of their particular sense of value-expression of masculinity. Moreover guns are a historical symbol that reflects economic relations and political supremacy-inferiority relations with the Ethiopian government. In this sense, material culture, not only indigenous but industrial, should be focused on for symbolism of historical experience, and the guns taken up in this article present a good topic for consideration when we try to view some violent phenomena from a global perspective to a local one.