Dalacha Dabasso Idho I

Gabra Historical Texts (2023-2024) Number: GHT010

Kalacha

June 3, 2024

STUDY TEAM: Paul W. Robinson & Wata Guyo Ibrae

CONVERSATIONIST & TRANSLATION: Wata Guyo Ibrae

“People have stopped naming the years.”

(Dalacha Dabasso Idho)

Biography

Dalacha Dabasso Idho was 101 years old when Wata Guyo interviewed him at Kalacha on June 3, 2024. He is a member of the Karbayo clan of the Gara section of the Gabra and identifies his birth year as Gumat Bini, 1923–24. Although official identification records did not preserve his age accurately, Dalacha was clear that he had completed approximately one hundred years of life. 

Dalacha is a son of Dabasso Idho, one of the elders interviewed during our original Gabra Historical Texts research of 1978–81. In recalling one Sabdi year, Dalacha himself refers to the occasion when we brought his father from Maikona to Kalacha in 1978 for those earlier interviews. 

Dalacha was born, raised, married, and had children while living in the rangelands. Much of his adult life was spent within the mobile pastoral economy, moving with livestock between grazing areas and water sources. He remembers periods in the Hurri Hills, Forole, Maikona, North Horr, Lake Turkana, southern Ethiopia, and numerous other places across the Gabra rangelands. Camels carried household belongings and water, while livestock movements responded to rainfall, pasture, drought, marriage, ritual obligations, and changing conditions. 

Dalacha settled permanently in Kalacha during Arba Olla (the Wednesday year of drought) in 1991. By the time of these interviews he had therefore spent roughly three decades living in town, after a much longer life in the rangelands.

His historical memory is closely tied to the Gabra calendar. In GHT.010, Dalacha reconstructs more than four decades of named years, rainfall conditions, droughts, migrations, livestock losses, disease, conflict, political events, and ritual transitions. His account also reflects the cumulative knowledge of an elder whose life reaches back into his father’s generation.

Original Transcript

Transcript (pdf.)

Interview Recording

🎧 Listen to interview part 1

🎧 Listen to interview part 2

🎧 Listen to interview part 3

🎧 Listen to interview part 4

Synopsis

In this first conversation, Wata Guyo asked Dalacha Dabasso Idho to reconstruct the Gabra calendar from the years following Gumat Kadi (1979) through the early 2020s. Counting year by year, Dalacha recalled the names and events associated with successive Ganna years, together with the Ganna and Agaya rains, pasture conditions, livestock movements, droughts, conflict, and ritual events. His recollections drew upon his lived experiences across the Gabra rangelands before he settled permanently in Kalacha.

Throughout the conversation, Dalacha related rainfall to the availability of pasture and the movements of people and livestock. He distinguishes years of poor rainfall from olla (drought), explaining that even limited rains could sustain pastoral life when animals could be moved to places where good pasture remained. His account followed movements toward the Hurri Hills, Lake Turkana, Ethiopia, and other areas, and recalled occasions when heavy rains themselves caused devastating livestock losses. Political events, raids, marriages, and ceremonies marking transitions between Luba generations also provided names and chronological reference points.

As the conversation approached more recent years, Dalacha and Wata found it increasingly difficult to identify distinctive names for successive years. Family members on the periphery of the conversation occasionally interjected, assisting in recalling events and sequences. Dalacha acknowledged his difficulty remembering some details but also observed a broader change: “People have stopped naming the years.” The conversation concluded with his recollection of the prolonged drought of 2021–2023 and the rains that followed.

Interview Summary

This first conversation with Dalacha Dabasso Idho is an extended reconstruction of the Gabra calendar from the period following Gumat Kadi (1979) through the early 2020s. Wata asked Dalacha to proceed year by year, identifying names and remembered events while also recalling the Ganna and Agaya rains, drought, pasture, livestock movements, disease, conflict, ritual events, elections, and the locations of people and animals.

At the beginning of the interview, Wata asked whether people name years according to where they live. Dalacha agreed that different communities might give different names to the same year, including, for example, those living east of Lagga Balal and those around Bubisa and Torbi. His account repeatedly reflected this local character of year naming. Some years had names remembered over a broad area; others were associated with events known particularly in his own area; and still other years, he said, had no distinctive name at all.

Rainfall provided much of the structure of Dalacha’s chronology, but he repeatedly distinguished between poor rainfall and drought. A year might receive little rain without becoming olla (drought) if people and animals could still move somewhere that showers had produced pasture. At one point he explained the distinction directly: olla exists when there is no place to migrate to.

During earlier dry periods, Dalacha remembered people moving toward the Hurri Hills, Lake Turkana, Ethiopia, or other areas where scattered rains had produced pasture. In the severe Arba drought of 1984, when both the Ganna and Agaya rains failed almost completely, people moved widely in search of surviving pasture. Dalacha remembered this as one of the droughts that first brought some pastoral households permanently into towns.

His chronology also preserves the importance of rains falling outside the principal seasons. Sabdi Somatale (the Saturday year of Somatele out-of-season rains) was remembered for rains that arrived after poor principal seasons and temporarily altered pastoral movements. In other years, sorara, halad, sagaltama, or scattered showers extended pasture conditions or redirected herds toward specific areas.

Not all abundant rain was beneficial. Dalacha named several years for rains that themselves killed sheep and goats, including Ahad Ree Gate and Talassa Ree Gate. In one Talassa, he recalled that animals went out to graze but only a handful returned after a torrential and destructive rain.

Conflict, political events, and ritual transitions also entered Dalacha’s chronology. He recalled raids involving Rendille, Borana, Turkana, and Dassanech; the Kokai massacre; political elections; and the death of Member of Parliament, Dr. Bonaya Godana. Ritual events provided other chronological anchors, including Hitu, Jilla Galani, and faymadh associated with different Luba generations.

Dalacha also remembered ways people adapted during periods of crisis. During one severe drought, people and livestock moved into Ethiopia near the Algana yaa. Migrants protected themselves by identifying with the yaa, which Borana would not attack, allowing people and animals to remain in otherwise contested territory.

As the chronology approached the most recent decades, Dalacha and Wata increasingly struggled to recover names and sequences of years. At one point, Dalacha said that age had overtaken him and that he was confused. Wata suggested that the difficulty might not be age alone; rather, people no longer moved from place to place as they once had, and many recent years had no recognized names. Dalacha then stated plainly, “People have stopped naming the years.”

The final years of Dalacha’s account returned to severe drought. He identified Gumat as the beginning of the prolonged drought of 2021-2023 that continued through subsequent seasons, followed eventually by the good rains of Ahad.

Notes

Dalacha’s distinction between poor rainfall and drought is one of the most revealing observations in this interview. Drought, as he described it, is not defined simply by how much rain falls at one location. Poor local rainfall can remain manageable if pasture and water are available elsewhere and people and livestock can reach them. Olla (drought) begins when those alternatives disappear: “there is no place to migrate to.” Drought is therefore experienced across a landscape, through the relationships between rainfall, pasture, water, livestock, and the possibility of movement.

This helps explain the extraordinary geographical range of Dalacha’s memories. The Hurri Hills, Lake Turkana, Ethiopia, and other areas are not simply places through which pastoralists happened to travel. Together they constituted alternative landscapes within a larger pastoral environment. Scattered rainfall in one area could matter to people living far away because it created somewhere to go. Mobility enlarged the geographical field within which people could respond to environmental variability.

Dalacha’s account also complicates any simple equation of rain with abundance. Out-of-season rains could rescue pasture after failed principal seasons, while exceptionally destructive rains could kill livestock. What mattered was not rainfall alone, but its timing, location, intensity, distribution, and consequences for animals and pasture.

His statement near the end of the interview—“People have stopped naming the years”—raises a different question. Wata first suggested a possible connection between the increasing difficulty of remembering recent years and the decline of movement from place to place. Dalacha’s response did not establish why year naming has diminished, but it confirmed his peceiptoin of a change in the practice itself. Earlier in the interview, he noted that names of years emerged from events situated in specific locations: rainfall, migration, livestock loss, conflict, ritual, and other memorable occurrences. If year naming is indeed becoming less common, something more than a vocabulary of names may be changing.

That possibility is especially striking in an interview with Dalacha. His own life has spanned more than a century, much of it spent moving through the rangelands before he settled permanently in Kalacha. His father, Dabasso Idho, belonged to the generation interviewed in the original Gabra Historical Texts research. Dalacha’s memories therefore reach across generations in an archive that now does the same.