Saho

The people of the escarpment — Cushitic herders and farmers who move between the Eritrean highlands and the Red Sea coastal plain with the seasons, and whose customary law code was written down and is still cited in court.

Saho people

Saho-Hime cropped.jpg · Wikimedia Commons

Identity

Population: Around 250,000 in Eritrea, with communities in Ethiopia's Tigray

Location: The eastern escarpment between Asmara and the coast, and the Akele Guzai region

Language: Saho

Language family: Afro-Asiatic → Cushitic

Traditional governance: Clan confederations with elected leaders and assemblies applying the written customary code; Eritrean administration today.

Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)

Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.

Assaorta

A principal confederation of the escarpment.

Minifere

Another major group, historically dominant in parts of the coastal plain.

Hazo and Debri-Mela

Further confederations of the highland margin.

Gallery

1 images

Culture

Clothing: White cotton robes and shawls; women's dresses with silver; the herder's staff and knife as everyday equipment.

Food: Milk, sorghum and millet, meat at ceremony; the seasonal move between highland and lowland pasture structures the food year.

Ceremonies: Assemblies at which the customary code is recited and applied; weddings with sung poetry and dance; Islamic festivals; the seasonal transhumance departures.

Marriage customs: Islamic marriage with bridewealth in livestock; the customary code specifies compensation, inheritance and marital obligations in detail.

Initiation rites: Quranic school; competence in herding across two ecological zones; memorisation of the code's provisions is a mark of standing.

Food & Recipes

Every dish the Atlas publishes for Eritrea and Ethiopia, at national rather than community level — 19 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.

Eritrea

8 dishes

StapleEritrea

Taita

also Injera

Fermented teff flatbread, the plate and the cutlery of every Eritrean meal. Sour, spongy and torn to pick up whatever is spooned onto it.

Serves Makes 8 · 45 minutes, plus 3 days fermenting

StapleEritrea

Tsebhi Birsen

also Spiced lentils, Birsen

Brown or red lentils cooked with berbere and onion until thick, the everyday Eritrean stew and the fasting-day mainstay.

Serves 6 · 55 minutes

National dishEritrea

Zigni

Beef stewed slowly in berbere and onion until the sauce goes deep red and the meat surrenders. Served on taita with a hard-boiled egg, and Eritrea's central dish.

Serves 6 · 2 hours 30 minutes

Street foodEritrea

Himbasha

also Ambasha

A slightly sweet celebration bread scored into a wheel pattern before baking, studded with raisins and scented with cardamom. Broken at gatherings and with coffee.

Serves 8 · 2 hours 30 minutes

Festival & feastEritrea

Dorho Tsebhi

Chicken in berbere sauce with whole eggs, the dish made when a guest arrives or a family celebrates. The chicken is jointed into twelve pieces by custom.

Serves 6 · 2 hours

Regional specialityEritrea

Shiro

Powdered chickpea or broad bean flour cooked into a smooth spiced purée, the fasting food of the Orthodox calendar and the everyday food of most households.

Serves 6 · 40 minutes

Regional specialityEritrea

Alicha

also Mild vegetable stew, Alicha birsen

The mild counterpart to zigni: potatoes, carrots and cabbage stewed with turmeric and no chilli, for children, for fasting and for anyone who has had enough berbere.

Serves 6 · 50 minutes

Drink & sweetEritrea

Buna

The coffee ceremony: beans roasted, ground and brewed in a jebena in front of the guests, poured in three rounds over an hour or more. Refusing to stay for all three is a slight.

Serves 4, three rounds · 1 hour

Ethiopia

11 dishes

StapleEthiopia

Injera

Fermented teff pancake, at once the plate, the utensil and the bread. Teff is native to the Ethiopian highlands and grows almost nowhere else.

Serves Makes 8 · 45 minutes, plus 3 days fermenting

StapleEthiopia

Misir Wat

also Red lentil stew, Misir wot

Red lentils cooked down with onion and berbere into a deep red stew. The backbone of the Ethiopian fasting table, eaten on the roughly 180 days a year the Orthodox calendar sets aside.

Serves 6 · 1 hour

National dishEthiopia

Doro Wat

Chicken stewed for hours in berbere and an enormous quantity of onions cooked down without fat. Ethiopia's national dish, served at Christmas and Easter and to any guest worth the trouble.

Serves 8 · 3 hours

National dishEthiopia

Tibs

also Zilzil tibs, Sautéed meat

Beef or lamb cut in strips and seared fast with onion, rosemary, chilli and spiced butter, often brought to the table still sizzling on a clay brazier.

Serves 4 · 40 minutes

Street foodEthiopia

Sambusa

Lentil or minced beef pastries fried crisp, sold on Addis street corners and eaten to break the fast in Ramadan and during Orthodox fasting periods in their vegan form.

Serves Makes 24 · 1 hour

Festival & feastEthiopia

Kitfo

Raw minced beef warmed in spiced butter with mitmita and served with ayib cheese and kocho. A Gurage dish that became a national delicacy, ordered leb leb or fully raw.

Serves 4 · 30 minutes

Regional specialityEthiopia

Shiro Wat

Ground chickpea flour cooked into a smooth spiced purée, the daily food of most Ethiopians and the mainstay of the 200-odd fasting days in the Orthodox year.

Serves 6 · 40 minutes

Regional specialityEthiopia

Gomen

also Collard greens, Ye'abesha gomen

Collard greens braised long and slow with onion, garlic and ginger until sweet and silky. The green on every Ethiopian platter and one of the fasting dishes.

Serves 6 · 1 hour

Regional specialityEthiopia

Kocho

also Enset bread, False banana bread

Bread made from fermented enset — the false banana — scraped, buried in a lined pit for months and then baked flat. The staple of the Gurage, Sidama, Hadiya and Kambaata highlands, and Ethiopia's insurance against famine.

Serves 6 · 40 minutes, from prepared kocho dough

Drink & sweetEthiopia

Tej

Honey wine fermented with gesho, a buckthorn twig used as a bittering agent, and drunk from a round-bottomed berele flask. Served in dedicated tej bets across the country.

Serves Makes 3 litres · 3 to 4 weeks

Drink & sweetEthiopia

Tella

also Talla, Ethiopian home beer

Home-brewed beer of barley and gesho, the buckthorn leaf that stands in for hops. Cloudy, sour and low in alcohol, brewed for every wedding, funeral and saint's day.

Serves Makes about 5 litres · 1 hour active, plus 5 to 8 days fermenting

Stories & Oral Literature

The Law They Wrote DownLegal tradition

The Saho customary code sets out compensation for injury, rules of inheritance, marriage obligations and dispute procedure, and it was committed to writing rather than left purely oral. Eritrean courts have taken account of it, and elders still convene under it. It is one of the more fully documented customary legal systems in the Horn.

Two Climates, One YearLivelihood

Saho herds move down the escarpment to the coastal plain for the winter rains and back up to the highlands for the summer, a vertical transhumance covering large altitude differences over short distances. It requires access agreements with highland farming communities, and those agreements — and the disputes over them — are a central subject of the customary code.

Proverbs

“The law is heavier than the spear.”
The code's authority over force.

“Grass grows where the herd is not.”
The logic of rotation.

“A neighbour's field is a road you must pay for.”
Transhumance access agreements.

Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs

Creation: Islamic cosmology; older Cushitic traditions surviving in the customary code and in beliefs about particular places.

Beliefs: Sunni Islam; saint tombs visited; the customary code carrying quasi-sacred authority; belief in the evil eye and protective amulets.

Ancestors: Clan genealogies determine grazing rights and standing in assembly; the code's provisions are attributed to named ancestral gatherings.

Gods, Goddesses & Spirits

Allah

The one God

Local saints

Holy figures whose tombs mark the escarpment

The code (Saho customary law)

Not divine, but treated as inherited authority binding on all

Architecture

Traditional settlements: Portable mat-and-frame dwellings for the transhumant sections; stone and mud houses in the settled highland villages.

Building techniques: Mat and pole construction transportable by camel; dry-stone and mud building in the highlands; cisterns and wells.

Village layout: Camps by pasture and water; villages around the mosque and assembly ground.

Artifacts

Written customary code

Historical Timeline

Pre-1500
Saho confederations occupy the eastern escarpment and coastal plain.
1800s
Egyptian and Italian pressure; the confederations negotiate access and autonomy.
1890–1941
Italian colonial rule over Eritrea.
1961–1991
The liberation war; the escarpment sees heavy fighting and displacement.
Present
Transhumance continues under pressure from land policy and drought.

Sources & Further Reading

Open sources

Britannica: Eritrea — peopleEncyclopaedia Britannica
Ethnologue: SahoSIL International

Premium & scholarly sources

Customary law in the Horn of Africa — scholarshipJSTOR