They live today almost the way they could have lived one or two hundred years ago, and this way differs a lot from that of their neighbours. We look at the main traits of their culture by analyzing the fundamental stages in a person’s life: birth, puberty,
marriage and death.

Birth. It is remarked with horror by neighboring tribes that Gumuz women give birth ‘alone and in the forest’. Is it just a simple rumor or the fruit of prejudice? Gumuz women do give birth outside the home. It could be a short distance away or perhaps next to it, but always outdoors. There are two reasons that explain this practice. The first is that giving birth is a test of courage. A woman has to face it alone and has to do so with determination and skill. She must cut the umbilical cord and wash the child herself, since bearing the pain with fortitude is an honor for a woman. The second reason is related to the taboo of blood. If blood ‘sullies’ the house, it would lead to misfortunes such as the child’s death or deformity.

Puberty. The first menstruation of a girl is a public event and a feast for the village. She is decorated with lots of colorful necklaces and has her newly-developed breasts uncovered. Her girlfriends are also dressed this way when accompanying her. They pay visits to houses in the village and each family gives them something: a chicken, some money, perhaps even a goat.
As night falls, they gather to eat meat, drink local beer and dance. A young girl who has just started menstruation has a series of taboos to respect: she cannot enter her parents’ house and she cannot cross other people’s land. Even after marrying, all women who are menstruating have to follow certain rules, although these vary from one area to another. It may include sleeping in a different house, not opening or closing the front door and such like. They must always take great care not to approach the central pole of the house; otherwise the spirit that lives there will punish them.

In traditional Gumuz culture, women are not circumcised. Female circumcision is only practiced in some areas bordering Sudan, probably under Muslim influence. Boys, on the contrary, are all circumcised when they are between 5 and 9 years old. No boy escapes this rite of passage. If they are not circumcised they cannot marry; an uncircumcised man is not a real adult.
Marriage. Traditionally, there are four basic forms of marriage among the Gumuz: sister exchange, elopement, kidnap and paying a dowry. Sister exchange is the most common form. Any man that wants a wife must give a sister, daughter or other woman from his family group in exchange. Apart from the wedding expenses, no dowry is paid by either party. The second form, elopement, is also frequently practiced. A young man and woman who love each other decide to marry. But, as this is not possible either because the parents do not approve, or because the young man does not have a woman from his family to give in exchange, they run away together. Later, they may contact the elders to resolve the situation. A solution is found when the family of the young man finds a woman to exchange, or promises to provide one when she is found.

The third form is kidnapping. It is different from elopement because the young man takes the girl by force and rapes her. It is a serious criminal offence that frequently leads to bloodshed between families or clans. The way it is resolved is similar to that of elopement.
The fourth way, paying a dowry, was rarely practiced among the Gumuz. It has been recently introduced through the influence of neighbouring peoples. Here, a dowry is paid for the bride in accordance with customary criteria. The amount that must be paid is high, that is why this type of marriage is reserved for the rich and powerful. Girls are given in marriage when they have barely reached puberty. This means that, when they stop being children they are already wives with their first child on the way.
Illness and death. The government has made an effort to open health centres even in the remotest villages but the Gumuz do not go to them. They normally prefer to visit a traditional witch doctor or gafia. The problem is that, when the witch doctors are unable to do anything, the health centres cannot either, because they are badly served and poorly stocked with medicines. Going to a hospital, particularly if it is for an operation, is beyond most people’s reach. The Gumuz have a short life cycle. You see very few old men and even fewer old women. They do everything fast: they marry young, have children young and die young.

Death is very present in the daily life of the Gumuz because almost everyone dies at home, for all to see. But not all deaths are seen in the same way. If the person who has died was old, had children and had seen the children of his or her children, the death is not really a cause for mourning, but rather a celebration. They have fulfilled everything expected of them. So people dance. If the person who dies is a child under four years of age, the celebrations are small and limited to the family circle. He or she was just a child and there is no reason to grieve for them. In contrast, the death of a young person, between 4 and 40 years of age, approximately, is considered outside the natural rhythm of things and there will be no dancing or singing. Forty days after the funeral, the so called ‘teskar of the bones’ is held; this celebration is more solemn than after the death itself as there has been time to make preparations and people have been notified in advance. The funeral of an elderly person is one of the biggest events in Gumuz social life and surrounding villages literally empty in order to participate. The grave is deep. The body is carefully wrapped in cloth so the earth does not touch it. They do not use a coffin. After the burial, in the following days, the family will return to the tomb to offer drink or food, to light a fire, etc. They believe that, if they do not follow these rites, the dead person will take revenge. He or she is seated on top of the roof of the house and watches what is done. However, despite these signs of a reverential fear, there is no clear idea of personal survival after death.
If questioned about the existence of a life after death, the answer would be most surely negative.
(J.G.N.)

Travelling around the Gumuz region we did not see specific place for worship. Of course they have explicit acts of worship, but these are few and not particularly elaborate.

They do not require a specific place, specific people to carry them out, special clothes or a precisely set ritual. And yet it would an error to affirm that the Gumuz are not religious, because the supernatural is present in everything. The world of the Gumuz is, in fact, brimming with a transcendent reality that must be answered to. That is why prayer, however informal, short or distracted it may be, appears often on their lips. “We have no religion. But we know Misa (spirit, God). Misa is Mise-kwacha (spirit of the sorghum), Mise-tanka (spirit of the millet), Mise-gicha (spirit of the river)”. Begumb, an elderly Gumuz, told us when we asked him about his religion.

Most of the Gumuz north of the Blue Nile follow the traditional religion, ‘the tradition of our fathers’, as they call it. But, as they are neither Christians nor Muslims, the two well-structured religions they live in contact with, they say that they have no religion. However, they do have religion, because they know Misa, the supreme ‘spirit’ who, according to what Begumb’s assertion seems to imply, is one and manifests himself in several forms or ‘spirits’.
On this point, however, other Gumuz may not concord with Begumb. For them, there is not only one spirit who takes different forms but rather a multiplicity of spirits among whom one reigns supreme. This is Misa-Yamba, or simply Yamba or simply Misa.
While the other spirits act only in their respective areas, Yamba is all-powerful in every field. He created all existing things and he controls and safeguards the functioning of the world. The other spirits are under his omnipresent guardianship. Kolech, who is a gafia (a witch doctor), says: “If my child falls ill, it could have been Mise-kwacha who made him ill. Then I go to Yamba and ask him why Mise-kwacha has done this to me, and to stop him”.Not all the lesser spirits are the same. While Mise-kwacha or Mise-tanka are benevolent spirits, there are others that are dangerous. One of these is Mise-gicha, the spirit of the river. That is why it is always dangerous to cross it or to go swimming in it. When someone, after crossing the river, feels a pain in their side, they must immediately go to the religious specialists called gafia, who will tell them what type of sacrifice they must make.

The gafia or witch doctor play a vital role in the community. People go to them with every type of illness or problem. They will apply a local medicine following a specific ritual, which mainly consists of sacrificing a chicken and then, they will give the patient the suitable herbs.
Another religious specialist is the gola who are types of ‘prophets’ or ‘visionaries’ who have the power to communicate with many spirits. They are capable of knowing what a client’s problem is without explaining it to them. Rather than to cure illnesses, the golas are consulted in order to discover the causes behind events such as the unexpected death of a community member.
The job of gafia or gola is not passed on from father to son. It is a personal vocation that manifests itself through unusual symptoms like dreams, strange conduct or such manifestations. They do not train for their profession all the knowledge they have is supposed to be revealed to them in dreams. If each gafia passed on the medical knowledge acquired through practice to a successor, valid knowledge could be accumulated that could benefit the people. But this is not the case among the Gumuz.
A different type of religious specialists are the possessors (ette) of a particular spirit (mise). The most prestigious is the ette-Mise-tanka or possessor of the spirit of the millet. He guarantees the millet harvests. No one can start to eat from the new harvest of this product until he has done so first. The ette-Mise-tanka has curative powers and, if he touches a sick person, they will get better.

Evil eye plays a fundamental role in the Gumuz’s religious system and it is one of the main causes of tension and conflict. In the event that someone dies and it is thought that it was under a spell, there will be a serious crisis that could lead to deaths among different groups or families. When someone is suspected of having caused the evil eye, they may be expelled from the community and forced to go and live in a remote place. Sometimes the supposed possessor of the evil eye disappears of their own accord to go and live where no one knows them. Apart from a secret strictly personal prayer, the Gumuz have the custom of giving an invocation when they gather to eat or drink. Normally they say “lachi Misa” (may God give). Public community prayers are not very frequent. It is for those occasions that have a certain importance or solemnity. For example, when they finish a stage in the farm work, they often sacrifice a goat in the same field where they have been working. Another form of group prayer is the one that takes place periodically on one of the paths that lead to the village. There is no uniformity in the way it is done or in its frequency, which varies from doing it each month to once a year. They also pray when an epidemic attacks the people or livestock. In this case, rather than praying directly to God, they pray to the spirits, asking them to stay away and not harm the village. (J.G.N.)

Changes go very fast. There are many agents responsible for these changes. The first is the government and its laws and programmes of development, which in a society that had been regulating itself by ancestral traditions, has a tremendous impact.

The Gumuz have been living so far on their primitive farming of ‘slash and burn’, scratching the ground with a little hoe and trusting the seeds to the generous earth, gathering wild produce in the forest. They had as much land as they wanted. But now the government is concentrating them in large villages along some main roads and giving them a limited piece of land and leasing the rest to national or foreign investors or those who cultivate with modern machinery.
At the same time, other ethnic groups, more dynamic and with more advanced methods of agriculture, like de Agaw, have been settling little by little among them. The result is that the land, which has been theirs since time immemorial, is slipping out of Gumuz hands. Besides this, more intensive cultivation, whether by them or by others, brings deforestation, which has negative consequences, such as less rains, less land available for hunting, fishing, honey-making, the gathering of wild-growing produce. The continual loss of land is the main reason for mounting tension with their neighbours with the corresponding killings.

Other factors of change come from the exposure to the styles of life which circulate in the globalized world and which have also reached the Gumuz. A loud radio can be heard in the most remote corner of the bush and a solar panel can be seen on the roof of more than one grass house where people go to charge their mobiles. In bigger centres, you can see the TV and films of every kind, mainly those of violence. Boys and girls want to dress or have a haircut in the fashion of their idols, a singer, a football player.
With the recent concentration of villages, the majority of the Gumuz people of Metekel live along the road which leads to the Great Renaisance Dam on the border with Sudan. Traffic drastically intensified since the construction of the dam, began in 2011, and the small towns saw hotels, restaurants, garages, tolerance houses, multiplying. The Gumuz could not help but be affected by all these novelties and they gradually feel more uncomfortable in their traditional habits of life.
Also religion has become as agent of change. The Gumuz have been in contact with Islam and Christianity since the long distant past. In fact, all of the other bordering ethnic groups are either Muslims or members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

The Gumuz naturally refer to these two large groups, but, since they did not systematically instruct people in their faith, they did not have any deep impact on the culture or even religion of the Gumuz. The identification of the Gumuz with these two religions is reduced to celebrate either the four annual feasts of the Muslims or those of the Christians, officially recognized by the government. With the arrival of the Protestants and Catholics, things changed quite radically, because they teach a faith and a morality that asks for an effective change of life. In fact, people are invited to abandon the anti-values while preserving the values. Marriage by exchange, kidnap, conflict resolution by bloodshed, are not values to be kept. Instead, the sense of equality, democratic decision-making, the relatively equal rights for men and women, equal distribution of domestic tasks, no discrimination against specific categories of people, these are all values that are traditional to Gumuz society and must be preserved.

Juan González Núñez

We have travelled for 500 kms in northwest Addis Ababa. First, it was along the road which joins the capital with Bahr Dar, up to Injibara (or Koso Berr). Then, in Injibara we turned straight west in
the direction of Sudan.

After leaving Chagni behind, the last town of the Amhara Region on that road, there is a mountain pass and the road abruptly descends into a plain roasted by the sun. A group of women are walking along the dusty road. They carry a pole, roughly one metre in length, across their shoulders. Tangled ropes hang down at either end, each supporting a load: a large plastic water jerry can, containers one on top of another according to size, filled with grain, bundles of firewood, etc. Given that the jarry cans hold 25 litres of water, you can quickly calculate that the weight each woman is carrying on her back could easily be 40 or 50 kilos. Their bodies are short and stocky and their skin is black,
very black, in contrast with the other people we have met so far
on our journey.

It becomes immediately evident that we have just crossed not merely a mountain pass but also a human frontier. The people we have met are the Gumuz and this is their land. In contrast to the highlanders who are either of Semitic (Tigreans, Amharas) or Hamitic stock (Oromos, Agaws Sidamas), the Gumuz are catalogued as Nilo-Saharians, consequently, more related with Sudanese people than with the Etiopians. In the present administrative division, which goes back to 1991, they are found in the Regional State of Benishangul-Gumuz, which stretches north and south of the Blue Nile, near the border with Sudan. It covers 77,269 square kilometres and the capital of the region is Assossa, located south of the Nile. The Gumuz are not the only people living in the region nor are they the largest group, making up only 23%. The most numerous are the Berta (26%), a Nilotic group like the Gumuz. Other groups like the Amhara, the Agaw and the Oromos, though numerous, are considered foreign to the region, so they cannot hold high political positions.

A history of oppression and marginalization.
The Benishangul-Gumuz Regional State is divided into three provinces. The largest of them is Metekel, north of the Nile, in which two thirds of the Gumuz live. The other two, Kamashi and Assossa are south of the Nile and the Gumuz living there seem to have left Metekel and crossed the river little more than a century ago.

Although they still retain many of the gumuz traditions, they have lost others through exposure to the Oromo.
The concept the people from the highlands (Amharas, Oromos, Agaws) have of the Gumuz is deplorable. For them the Gumuz are primitive and savage people who kill each other and who assassinate those who venture into their land.
Until the works of the Nile Grand Renaissance dam started in 2011 and traffic intensified in the area, there were touristic guides or track drivers who categorically refused to go beyond Chagni, the last town of the Amhara region before descending into the land of those whom they derogatorily called ‘blacks’. There can be an appearance of truth in these prejudices. First of all, there is the undeniable physical fact that the Gumuz are very black in comparison with the ‘red’, a word by which the people of the highlands of much lighter skin color and thinner facial features, are known. The relation between the two groups has always been, and still is, conflictual, not excluding episodes of bloodshed. But those on the losing side have been always the Gumuz, not the ‘red’.

The construction site of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

In fact, the history of the Gumuz, until recent times, is a history of oppression and marginalization. The lands inhabited by them were the hunting grounds of the high class of the Ethiopian empire. These were lowlands, hot and rich in wild animals. Hunting expeditions of the Amhara or Agaw included also the hunting of slaves. One of the main sources of emperor Menilik’s self-financing were the slaves captured among the Gumuz and other Nilotic tribes along the border with Sudan. When the open slave trade stopped around 1930, the marginalization of the Gumuz and the occupation of their land on the part of the neighboring tribes continued and even intensified. The other tribes progressively invaded their best land, especially on the slopes of the mountains, pushing the Gumuz to the lower and hotter places.

In this process, they counted on the collaboration of the Gumuz themselves, who were ready to rent their land to the ‘reds’, mostly the Agaw, in exchange for money or for a division of the crops. This practice still continues today since the agriculture of the Agaw is much more advanced than that of the Gumuz.
This history of marginalization has undoubtedly marked the character of the Gumuz. The first impression one gets of them is that they are reserved and surly, almost hostile, at least in comparison with other neighbouring peoples. Their smile is not immediate and spontaneous, not even taken for granted. Their greetings are short. If neighbouring peoples have many prejudices against the Gumuz, also they have their prejudices against the ‘reds’ and their stories about them which they tell in an ironic tone, that tone with which the ‘weaker’ take revenge on the stronger. (J.G.N.)