From slavery to freedom : the Oromo slave children of Lovedale, prosopography and profiles.

• Main Author: Shell, Sandra Rowoldt
• Other Authors: Saunders, Christopher
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2015
• Subjects: Historical Studies
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/11559

Includes bibliographical references and index. === In 1888, eighty years after Britain ended its oceanic slave trade, a British warship liberated a consignment of Oromo child slaves in the Red Sea and took them to Aden. A year later, a further group of liberated Oromo slave children joined them at a Free Church of Scotland mission at Sheikh Othman, just north of Aden. When a number of the children died within a short space of time, the missionaries had to decide on a healthier institution for their care. After medical treatment and a further year of recuperation, the missionaries shipped sixty-four Oromo children to Lovedale Institution in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. From 1890, Lovedale baptised the children into the Christian faith, taught them and trained them. By 1910, approximately one third had died, one third had settled in the Cape of Good Hope, one third had returned to Ethiopia and one had headed for the United States. The present study is a cohort-based, longitudinal prosopography of this group of Oromo slave children, based on the core documentation of the children’s own first passage accounts, supplemented by numerous and varied independent primary sources.