6 - Peasant Insurgency without Peasants

Summary

The chapter takes a critical look at the interpretation of the Bale insurgency as a peasant rebellion. It provides an evaluation of available empirical data, revisits earlier arguments, and forwards new suggestions on the questions of land alienation, taxation, and socioeconomic changes in Bale in the period from Emperor Menelik’s conquest until the outbreak of the insurgency in the 1960s. The chapter’s main point is to determine how relevant these issues are for an accurate understanding of the insurgency – as well as for the prevailing antagonism felt by the different peoples in the south toward the Amhara and the state. The chapter amply demonstrates that there is little evidence of any widespread land alienation, subsequently transforming the peasants into landless tenants. Similarly important, it makes the point that it is hard to categorize the people in Bale as peasants; a pastoralist economy continued to be relevant for most of the postwar period. While concluding that there was no direct correlation between land alienation and the insurgency, the chapter underscores that rather than the highlanders, the insurgents were overwhelmingly pastoralist lowlanders, and the theater of fighting was concentrated in the eastern and southern lowlands of Bale.