LORD, ZECA AND PEASANT: A STUDV OF PROPERTY AND AGRARIAN RELATIONS IN RURAL EASTERN GOJJAM

Abstract

The land tenure system constituted a useful social element for analyzing the socio-economic relationship between peasants and zegas and lords. The history of peasants and a highly impoverished and subordinate social class called zega is discussed in terms of their relationship with other classes in the social system. This study has focused on introducing the institution oizegenat and delineating its implication on class and the land tenure system. Zegenat provides a penetrating insight into the nature of the rural society of Eastern Gojjam. Apart from introducing zegenat into historical discourse on Ethiopia, this study has sought to review the literature on the agrarian history of the country. The institution has immense importance to offer judgment on the nature of the Ethiopian polity in the past and to determine whether or not private property existed. The study challenges the long prevailing notion that says gult was not property right to land. Contrary to previous assumptions, land including rest land, could be mortgaged, sold and willed. Any work which denies any material base in land for the Ethiopian ruling class is sustained by very flimsy evidence. The study has fundamentally departed from these orthodoxies. Gult did not simply represent the exploitative tributary relationship between lord and peasant which is most often assumed to be. Private and communal property rights in land did exist side-by-side for a considerable time in historic Ethiopia. The agrarian order of rural Eastern Gojjam was closely akin to the social formation called feudal in Marxist terminology. The ruling elites were in a stronger position to turn away permanently considerable land from peasants to the control of corporate institutions and powerful individuals as gult land. This study has also narrated the mechanism of property transfer. The ways and means by which land and rights to land were transferred took many forms. Lords holding land on behalf of churches exercised ownership rights including free disposal by sale. This land transferred into the hands of social elites was usually worked by the labor of the zega, though there was considerable number of peasants working their own land. If the problem of Ethiopia’s economic stagnation in the past is liked to be made comprehensible, zegenat, which flowered in the second half of the 18!h century, must be given a privileged position and historical past in the agrarian studies of the country. So far the recent agrarian history of the country has been studied in the context of the emergence of the modem Ethiopian state and in the framework of the political change in the country. However, this has so far proved an impediment to a clear formulation of how the state operated socioeconomically. The study contends that the property system was not an impediment to the economic growth of the country historically. Moreover, there is a body of empirical support to argue that the most efficient and effective method of achieving rural agrarian capitalism and introducing agroindustry is through encouraging private owners. The country has to open up for rural agrarian capitalism and it can not achieve development and food security by just multiplying the number of peasants and allowing unimpeded fragmentation. Private agrarian enterprises are naturally bound to be efficient unlike state and public controlled ones because the operation of the former is relatively free from bureaucracy. In other words the performance and efficacy of private enterprises is determined by the market place which bespeak that they would be subject to automatic control.