Arba Minch

The ridge between Lakes Abaya and Chamo has long been a meeting point between the Gamo highlands above and the pastoral lowlands below, with weavers, farmers and cattle keepers trading at the foot of the escarpment. The kingdoms and chiefdoms of the Gamo hills, organised around ritual leaders and assemblies rather than a single throne, were brought into the Ethiopian empire during Menelik II's southern conquests at the end of the nineteenth century, and northern administrators, soldiers and settlers followed.

The town itself is young. It was established in the late imperial period as an administrative centre for the surrounding province, and its name — 'forty springs' in Amharic — comes from the many springs that rise in the groundwater forest below the ridge. It grew in two separate parts, Sikela on the lower ground and Shecha above, a division that still shapes the place. Nechisar National Park was established in 1974 on the plains and hills across the isthmus, and the airport and the paved road from the north made the town the natural base for travel into the far south.

Under the Derg and afterwards, Arba Minch became a regional education centre: a water technology institute grew into Arba Minch University, now a national university spread over four campuses around the town. Irrigated banana, mango and cotton farms spread across the valley floor, and the town became the administrative seat of successive regional arrangements as the south was reorganised, most recently into the South Ethiopia regional state in 2023.

Arba Minch is a Gamo town on the edge of a much wider mix of peoples. Gamo is the everyday language of the highlands above the escarpment, and the Gamo social order of clan elders, ritual leaders and village assemblies still shapes life in the hill villages, where disputes may be settled in public meetings before they reach any court. In the town, Amharic is the common language of trade, administration and the university, and people from all over the south live alongside one another.

Weaving is the region's best-known craft. The Dorze, in the hills above the town, are famous across Ethiopia for finely woven cotton shammas and gabis, worked on pit looms, and their tall beehive-shaped houses of bamboo and enset leaves are rebuilt and moved as the base rots away. Highland markets are as much social gatherings as places of trade, with cloth, pots, enset and livestock changing hands and news carried between villages.

Religion is mixed. Protestant churches, very strong across southern Ethiopia, fill on Sundays with long services and choirs; Orthodox parishes keep the fasts and the feast days of Meskel and Timkat; and there are Muslim congregations in the town. Hospitality follows the national pattern — greetings and enquiries after family before business, the coffee ceremony as the frame for a serious conversation, and the right hand used for eating from a shared platter.

The 2007 census counted about 74,900 people in Arba Minch, nearly twice the 1994 figure, and the town has continued to grow with migration from the surrounding countryside and with the university. Work is in administration, teaching, trade, irrigation farming on the plain — bananas, mangoes, cotton and maize — fishing on the two lakes, and a tourism trade of guides, drivers, boatmen and lodge staff that rises and falls with the security situation and the state of the roads.

Life is split between the two halves of the town. Sikela's market, bus station and workshops start before dawn, when buses leave for Addis Ababa and traders bring produce down from the highlands; Shecha, on the ridge, keeps government offices, schools and quieter residential streets. Bajaj three-wheelers shuttle constantly between them. Water, drawn from the springs below the escarpment, and electricity supply are both subjects of regular complaint.

The days are shaped by heat and by the rains. Trading and building happen early, the middle of the day is slow, and the late afternoon brings people out to cafés, juice bars and the viewpoints along the ridge. Pressure on land in the crowded highlands, the health of the lakes and their fish stocks, and the effect of changing rainfall on the irrigated farms are the issues people discuss.

Enset is the foundation of the local diet. The 'false banana' is not eaten as fruit: its stem and root are scraped, fermented for weeks in a pit and then baked as kocho, a dense, slightly sour flatbread, or ground finer into bulla, which is cooked into a smooth porridge. Kocho is eaten with cabbage and kale, with ayib, a crumbly fresh cheese, and above all with kitfo, minced beef warmed with spiced butter and mitmita chilli, which is the celebratory dish of the southern highlands.

The lakes give the town its other speciality. Nile perch and catfish come up from Lake Chamo and are grilled whole, fried in breadcrumbed strips as asa cutlet, or cooked into asa wat with berbere; fasting-day menus lean on fish, shiro and lentils. On the valley floor, irrigated farms produce bananas, mangoes, papaya and avocados in quantity, and the thick layered fruit juice known as spris, often with avocado at the bottom, is the drink of the hot afternoon.

Everyday eating otherwise follows the national pattern: injera with shiro, lentils and greens, tibs of sautéed meat in the evening, and the fasting platter of beyaynetu. Local drinks include tella, the home-brewed barley beer flavoured with gesho, and honey wine, while coffee is roasted over charcoal and brewed in a clay jebena, served in three rounds and often taken with popcorn or roasted barley.