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648 SADAMA
between ensete production and cattle. The banana-like ensete is a durable droughtresistant
plant which provides a starchy grain eaten as a porridge mixed with
vegetables or made into a pancake to be eaten with vegetables. Cattle dung is
necessary for continuous cultivation on the small garden plots, which are seldom
larger than two or three acres. Productivity centers around this relationship in
the sense that the household is nearly always to be found on the edge of the
garden, convenient for the transport of dung from the cattle byre on one side of
the house to the garden. The households of a Sidamo community are generally
adjacent to a large communal pasture where the cattle graze. Women and girls
are responsible for all household tasks such as removal of animal dung from
household to garden and the preparation of the raw ensete into food, while men
and boys take care of the heavy tasks of gardening by preparing and weeding
the land, as well as maintaining the usually small herd of cattle.
Men have virtually complete authority over this production process as they
control the land and animals, which are transmitted to their sons through patrilineal
descent. Their daughters, who usually marry out of the community, since
exogamy is the rule, help provide the bridewealth, which in turn supports the
marriage of their brothers and the continuous reproduction of the system. In
recent years male authority and production have been enhanced through cash
cropping in coffee, though traditional subsistence practices and control of land
remain largely unchanged. The cash economy has provided new opportunities
for trade, has increased considerably the value and scarcity of land and has
provided new opportunities for improving individual wealth and prestige for
men.
In the past there were no urban marketing centers in Sidamo land, but trade
and markets were, and continue to be, of importance. For example, the four
days of the week are named for the principal marketing centers, providing people
with knowledge of where trading will be occurring at any given time. In addition
to trading markets, there are several Sidamo towns which serve as administrative
centers. As cash cropping has expanded, so have the towns and the variety of
merchants from other parts of Ethiopia and beyond. It is in such centers that
one observes the most obvious symbols of Islamic penetration such as small
mosques, men with the characteristic turbans and skull caps, special burial places
and trade in cash rather than barter.
The elders (cimessa) are the sanctioning body for authority at the community
(kaca) and neighborhood (olaun) levels and within the descent system, which
consists of patricians (gurri) linked by an elaborate generational class system
(lua) crosscutting descent group boundaries. A man is promoted to elderhood
not on the basis of chronological age but when he is initiated into his lua class,
which in turn is related to the promotion of his father's class to elderhood. So
important is this latter event that, unlike most of the world's societies, which
utilize bodily mutilation and elaborate ritual for puberty rites, the Sadama reserve
these practices for the transition from maturity to an estate of wisdom and
circumspection associated with elderhood. It is these men, who may or may not