Sir ‘At' Adkeme Milga’—A Native Law Code of Eritrea

Extract

The Abyssinian farming communities of the three highland provinces of Eritrea (Ḥamasên, 'Akele Gûzay, and Serawê) may be said always to have had two agencies of government: on one hand, the institutions of village society, and, on the other hand, the central government of Ethiopia, known in Eritrea as the mengiśti and comprising the military organization of the Solomonid monarch—the Nigûśe Negeśt—and the quasi-feudal establishments of his provincial governors and of the Coptic Church. To the latter of these agencies, in constitutional theory, there succeeded the Italian monarchy when the Eritrean Colony was proclaimed on 1 January 1890. Even before that date the scope of the mengiśti in Eritrean affairs had never been well defined, but had been modified or intensified as political conditions changed in the Empire generally. Thus when highland Eritrea was governed by a Bahre Negȧśê, before the Somali and Turkish invasions of the sixteenth century, the Nigûś and his nomadic Court were probably an appreciable factor in village government. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries scarcely any functions of imperial government can be traced in Eritrea, and the villages, in the words of the contemporary Abyssinologue Job Ludolf, ‘Regi Habessinorum quidem parent, sed sibimet Rectores præficiunt, ac suis legibus in modum alicuius parvæ Reipublicæ utuntur.’ During the nineteenth century political authority—which may be summarized as power to exact tribute (the strict etymological implication of mengiśti), to requisition and re-allocate land, and to beat the war-drum (kitet)–passed into the hands of mesafinti, chiefs of local peasant origin who claimed a dubious imperial sanction for the authority they had won by their arms. This phase culminated in the unsuccessful attempts of John IV (1870-89), himself a mesfin from the Tigray, partially to reorganize Eritrean village society on a feudal basis that would enable him to reassert the lapsing imperial authority. The only code of laws known in Ethiopia was the Fitha Negeśt, or Canons of the Kings, culled from Scripture, from ancient canons of the Church, and from early Byzantine statutes by a Syrian compilator of the fifth century and translated into Ethiopic in the fifteenth. The Fitha Negeśt stood until the twentieth century as the basic law of the Empire beside the Law of Moses, and was no less inept in village affairs for being highly revered by the Abyssinians.