What is the historical evidence for enset agriculture in northern Ethiopia?
Today the vast majority of enset farmers live in southern Ethiopia. However, historical evidence suggests that enset may have once played a much more important role in the agricultural practices of central and northern Ethiopia. The earliest recorded evidence of enset agriculture in northern Ethiopia is from the “Royal Chronicles”–medieval manuscripts written by priests in the liturgical Ethio-Semitic language of Geez. There is a single passage dating to 1590 mentioning Oromo peasants growing enset for food south of the Blue Nile River (Pankhurst, 1996). European travelers of the 1600s and 1700s provide information on enset agriculture. In the early 17th century, Manuel de Almeida, a Portuguese Jesuit traveling through northern Ethiopia in the area south of Lake Tana and north of the Blue Nile, noted that enset was “the sustenance of most of the people . . . The tree itself is eaten, either sliced and boiled, or crumbled and ground into meal which they put into pits in the ground wher
