Bahir Dar and the Lake Tana Basin: Historical Phases of Growth and Ecology

Abstract

This essay sets out five distinct periods of economic, demographic, and spatial change that transformed the physical landscape and its effect on the region's hinterland on a local, national and international level-that would form the "urbanscape" of the early twenty first century. Lake Tana is at the Blue Nile's first major outflow and is the heartbeat of the watershed, registering its seasonal pulse. Lake Tana and its surrounding ecologies is the font of the Blue Nile's waters, sitting at 1800 meters above sea level from where it frames much of the watershed. The Blue Nile watershed's agriculture and its relationship with human settlement had evolved over many generations of smallholder agriculture and its regional role in trade. The Blue Nile basin, its geology and its geographies simultaneously shaped the cultures of several distinctive peoples. The ethnographic landscape included Christian highland farmers and aristocrats, Cushitic-speaking Agaw farmers, Muslim traders (who spoke Amharic), and Omotic-speaking Shinasha. These cultures traded places and bodies of knowledge on the local ecologies over time, resulting in a cereal-based agro-economy that supported livestock and small farms that managed them.