Godana Boru had spent much of his life in this region, and his memories reveal that world connected by migration routes, wells, kinship ties, and trading networks rather than by fixed political boundaries.  

When I spoke with Godana in November 1978 at Sorr (near Dukana), I encountered an elder whose understanding of history extended far beyond the immediate concerns of his own community. 

Godana’s life embodied this borderland experience. He explained that his father survived the devastation of Chin Tite Guracha by seeking refuge among the Konso, where he eventually became a Shumi (chief). Godana himself was born in Konso and grew up with firsthand knowledge of the close relationships linking Gabra, Konso, Borana, Arbore, and other neighboring peoples. His family’s history illustrates the fluidity of identity and belonging that characterized the region during times of drought, disease, and social upheaval.  

While some elders organized their knowledge through formal chronology, Godana understood history through relationships. Genealogies, clan affiliations, migrations, and remembered events formed an interconnected web through which he reconstructed the past. Questions about conflict led to discussions of ancestry; questions about place led to stories of migration; questions about drought opened to broader narratives of social transformation. To modern readers his style may appear digressive, but it reflects a deeply relational way of understanding the world in which people, places, and events are never separated from one another.  

One of the central themes running through Godana’s testimony is the memory of Chin Tite Guracha, the great livestock catastrophe of the late eighteenth century that devastated cattle herds across the region and beyond, over much of the African continent. For Godana, this was not simply a disease outbreak but a defining historical rupture that reshaped communities, livelihoods, and identities. Many of the migrations, alliances, and settlements he describes are explained in relation to its aftermath.  

Godana also possessed a broad knowledge of regional geography. He spoke of wells, grazing areas, migration routes, and historical territories stretching across northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. He credited a somewhat mythical people, the Wardai, with digging many of the wells used by later generations and recounted traditions concerning the movements of Rendille, Gabra, Borana, and other peoples. These accounts revealed a man whose mental map encompassed an enormous geographical area and whose historical imagination was regional rather than local.  

Perhaps most memorable to me all these decades later was the force of Godana’s personality. He was not a passive respondent. At several points he challenged my questions, corrected my assumptions, and insisted on his own understanding of events. I originally described this interview as “chaotic”, less like a formal question-and-answer session and more a lively conversation among people jointly struggling to interpret the past. Through all that emerged the portrait of an elder deeply confident in his knowledge and determined to ensure that history was understood in its full complexity.