Project Team (Ethiopia)

Dr. Takele Merid (Coordinator at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies of Addis Ababa University)

Dr. Takele Merid is an assistant Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES), Addis Ababa University (AAU). He graduated with BA in History in 2004 and MA in Cultural Studies and PhD in Social Anthropology, 2016 from Addis Ababa University. Between January 2005 and February 2008, he worked as a heritage expert for the Federal Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Ethiopia. In March 2008, he joined IES and AAU, where he is still working as a researcher and Professor of Social Anthropology. Dr. Takele was a research fellow of University of Bath Spa, United Kingdom (2018) and is currently research fellow of Hamburg University. He is an active researcher in the ERC funded SLAFNET Network. He oversees and coordinates the AFRAB Project's research in Ethiopia and focuses on the life and times of Emperor Menelik in relation to slavery and abolition.

Professor Yonas Ashine

Yonas Ashine is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Addis Ababa University. He earned his PhD in interdisciplinary Social Studies from Makerere Institute of Social Studies, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. His research interests include political theory, and comparative politics of state-society relations in Africa and from Africa. Within Project AFRAB, Professor Yonas Ashine focuses his work on the early twentieth century history and is working on the interlink of government abolitionist laws and traditional forms of manumission to understand the public acceptance of an abolitionist ideology.

Professor Ahmed Hassen

Prof. Dr. Ahmed Hassen holds a PhD from Université Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne (2007). He is an Ethiopian historian, university lecturer and former Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES), 2012-2019. He served as Addis Ababa University’s Director for Change Management (2019-2020) and is currently Director of External Relations Partnership and Communication at Addis Ababa University. He served as a post graduate coordinator of the IES and has over the years been involved with various international research projects, in the USA, France, Germany, and Japan. Currently he is the Ethiopian Co-PI of the ERC funded SLAFNET (Slavery in Africa: A Dialogue between Africa and Europe). He was Board Chairperson of the South Omo Research Centre, and PI and co-PI of various research projects of the IES/AAU (among them, Ancient Environmental, Settlement and Cultural Reconstruction, Contemporary Urban Issues in Ethiopia and The Dynamics of Population Mobility and the Implications in Ethiopia). He is an expert on 18th and 19th century Ethiopia, rural sociology, the history of slavery, trade and economics in the Horn of Africa. He also acts as board member of the Journal of Ethiopian Studies, as well as of the International Conference of Ethiopian Studies. He is the author of Aleyyu Amba: L’Ifat et ses réseaux politiques, religieux et commerciaux au XIXe siècle (vol 6. Annales d’Éthiopie Hors-Séries. Addis Ababa: Editions de Boccard, 2020).

Within the AFRAB project Professor Ahmed Hassen works on the suppression of the slave trade and its impact on the rural economy and the trade centres. His research on the aftermaths of abolition in Ethiopia has been featured in an article by Fred Harter in the Guardian of 18 January 2023, the Guardian article: how Ethiopia is in denial about injustices of the past.

Dr Ameyu Godesso Roro

Dr Ameyu Godesso Roro is an anthropologist from the Department of Sociology at Jimma University in Oromiya, Ethiopia. His research interests include peace and conflict studies, displacement and migration. He has lectured anthropology and sociology courses at Jimma University since 2004. He worked as a research fellow at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale) - Germany, where he completed his PhD in 2017. He is now the Managing Editor of the Ethiopian Journal of Social Sciences and Language Studies, one of the nationally accredited journals in Ethiopia. He has published many articles in peer-review journals and his latest co-authored book chapter “Ethiopian Diaspora and Its Impact on Politics in Ethiopia” was published by Routledge Handbook on the Horn of Africa (USA) in 2021. For Project AFRAB, Dr Ameyu Godesso Roro focuses his research on slavery and abolition in Jimma and more broadly in southern Ethiopia.

Dr Bosha Bombe Reta

Dr Bosha Bombe Reta holds a PhD in History from the University of Pavia, Italy. He is both an historian and an anthropologist by training: he holds a BA in History and an MA in Social Anthropology. His doctoral thesis is entitled "An Historical Anthropology of Slavery and Gabbar Servitude System in Wolaita of southern Ethiopia from 1894 to 1975". He is currently Head of the Department of Social Anthropology at Arba Minch University. His research interests include slavery and post-slavery, class, power relations and economic organisation, social inequality, social and cultural history, ethnic history, labour history, indigenous institutions and conflict resolution. He is currently participating in the AFRAB research project under the Ethiopian team. He is currently working on three papers: The Role of Religious Organizations in Antislavery Wolaita of southern Ethiopia, From Slavery to Fitawrari and Government: the Role of a Former Slave in Combating the Marginalization of Former Slaves and their Descendants in Wolaita of Southern Ethiopia, and Combating Marginalization: The Post abolition Experiences of former Slaves and their descendants in Wolaita and Gamo of Southern Ethiopia.

Oljira Tujuba

Oljira Tujuba is Senior Lecturer in History at the Kotebe University of Education in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His field of research is ethno-history, in particular the relationship between Oromo and Amhara in Western Ethiopia, on which he has published a book entitled "Ethnic Interaction: The Case of Oromo and Amhara in Western Ethiopia". Within the framework of the AFRAB project, Oljira Tujuba is researching the history of the abolition processes of slavery and the slave trade among the Oromo of Wallaga, in western Ethiopia.