SUMMARY
The Mursi (or Mun, as they refer to themselves) are a herding and cultivating people numbering between 4000 and 6000. The group lives in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley, where it occupies the area between the Omo River and its tributary, the Mago, around 100 km north of the Kenyan border. The Mursi began to settle in their present territory about 200 years ago, when they crossed the Omo River from the west. The first area to be occupied was around a village called Kurum, which is now considered by the Mursi to be the historical centre of Mursiland. The group subsequently began spreading north, occupying the area between Kurum and the River Mara, their current northern boundary, in stages during the 20th century, displacing the territory’s previous inhabitants the Bodi by force. Since the late 1970s, a group of Muris have also made a sideway move to the Mago valley.
The Lower Omo Valley is located on the fringe of the Ethiopian state and it was not incorporated into Emperial Ethiopia until in the late 19th century, when Emperor Melenik conquered the area. The Mursi first began experiencing incursions in the early 20th century, when the Imperial army and government officials established its control. Some of the groups in the area came under more effective control and became part of the feudal social structure and were also forced to pay tribute. Others, like the Mursi, were instead raided intermittently, but there were no attempts to exercise administrative control over them. This led the group of follow a strategy of avoidance, simply trying to have as little to do as possible with representatives of the state. This served them relatively well until the mid-1970s, as they remained more or less unaffected by the Imperial regime. However, with the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie and the coming to power of the Derg (the military council ruling Ethiopia between 1974 and 1991) the state came to play an ever more influential role in the lives of the Mursi. This process became even more evident when the present regime, EPRDF (Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front) came to power in 1991. During the 1990s, the new Addis Ababa regime restructured Ethiopia as an ethnic federation, and under this at least nominal decentralization, the Mursi was one of many groups that became more closely incorporated into the state’s control structures.
While the Mursi themselves place great importance on the keeping of livestock, the group depends for well over half of their subsistence needs on agriculture. They engage in both flood retreat cultivation, and shifting cultivation, with the former producing a harvest in January and the latter in June-July. Since these two forms of cultivation are carried out in different terrains, a majority of the Mursi move twice a year, between the Omo River and areas of cleared woodland. The main crops cultivated are sorghum and maize. Due to the prevalence of tsetse flies along the Omo River, the Mursi’s livestock has to be kept in other locations for most of the year. During the October – February dry season the herders mainly keep the cattle in the Elma Valley, living in temporary camps. With the onset of the main rains in March – April, the herders move the livestock westwards to more permanent settlements that are no more than an hour’s walk from the wet season cultivation areas.
The Mursi are divided into three territorial units: Gonulobibi, Ariholi and Dola (from south to north), with the last one consisting of three sub-divisions, Baruba, Mugjo and Biogolokare. Each division has its own politico-ritual leader (komoru). A main feature of the group’s social organisation is that it is divided into age sets. This is especially important when it comes to the military organisation of the Mursi. Men usually marry in their late 20s or early 30s, which creates a class of physically mature men who are unmarried and subsequently have no domestic or agricultural responsibilities, and thus functions as the groups’ main source of military manpower.
As a group, the Mursi are classified as “warlike” by anthropologists. They have more or less hostile relations with all of their neighbours, save for the Suri who live across the Omo River and south of Maji. Relations with this group are mainly peaceful, and there are frequent intermarriages between them and the Mursi. The remaining neighbouring groups can be divided into two categories: those with whom the Mursi have occasional conflicts, but with whom there are also periods of peaceful cooperation and those with whom there are no peaceful contacts at all. The Bodi (to the north) and the Nyangatom (to the south) belong to the first category, whereas the Hamar (to the southwest) belong the second one.
The Mursi have been involved in the non-state category of UCDP organised violence.
