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WAYTO 853
source of the Blue Nile. A reliable little rainy season in March and April is
followed by the big rains from mid-June through September, in which about 80
percent of the annual precipitation of 40 to 52 inches falls. Vegetation of the
shore and islands varies from firm-soil grassland, to papyrus swamp, to deciduous
forest remnants.
Over the past 50 years or so, the Wayto have undergone an economic transition
from a life-way of hunters-fishers to one of cultivator-craftsmen-fishers. This
transition of material base of sustenance has profoundly affected most other
aspects of their culture. Wayto culture rested upon the hippopotamus, which
thickly populated the Tana shores through the beginning of the twentieth century.
At that time, the Wayto were contacted by the price-making market economy
of Europe, then spreading over the globe by the impetus of advanced industrial
technology. During the course of trade which included rifles for the hippo ivory,
the Wayto reduced the teaming herds of hippopotami in the Tana basin to just
a few survivors by 1940. Formerly, large-scale hunting was supplemented by
fishing, some gathering of plants and exchange of hippo by-products for food
and craft items not produced by the Wayto. For several decades now, the very
basis of Wayto society literally has been shot out from under it, just as the bison,
as the economic foundation of Plains Indians in North America, were destroyed
with rifles.
Currently, as in the past, the basic building block of Wayto society is the
patrilocal, patrilineal band. Each band contains several families, usually monogamous
and rarely polygynous, of a nuclear mode of organization which
sometimes develops into an extended mode. The band was and is sedentary with
several permanent hamlets of 3 to 5 houses and sometimes a larger settlement,
or village, of 10 or more houses. All are in the midst of a demarcated hunting
territory along the shore. Houses are a wattle-and-daub or reed-walled cylinder
topped with a thatched cone roof. The houses are similar to, but less substantial
than those of their non-Wayto neighbors, who are more prosperous. By the
1960s, many band members had dispersed from their home territories to cultivate
at places inland from the lake shore.
A band had an informal council of male elders, but this institution is now
almost entirely gone. In the past, they adjudicated disputes and also met with
councils of other bands to discuss territorial boundaries. Another Wayto wielder
of some political authority is the nagadras. He is appointed by the government
with the consent of the Wayto involved. The nagadras leads a band, or today
the remnants of more than one band, and generally keeps the peace and attempts
to settle local disputes. He also enforces Amhara feudal tax laws on any Wayto
who plow land. No taxes exist for foraging activities. Therefore, as long as game
and fish were sufficient for Wayto needs, the tax laws had a latent function of
reinforcing the traditional foraging way of life. To keep out of the grasp of the
state and its taxes, Wayto maintained their hunting ways. Thus, they existed
within the territory of the Ethiopian state but were not a part of it.
Consumption of hippopotami engenders a societal boundary-maintaining