Author : Christine Gibb
Year ; 1999
Over a hundred years later, the Harari are described by the anthropologist Sidney Waldron, in much the same terms. He writes that this ‘single city culture’ of at least 15,000, effectively remains a self governing community aloof from the central administration; ‘closed’ through a strict preference for endogamy and the exclusion of others from its primary forms of social organization: the family, the friendship group and the community observance association, or afocha (1975, vii, ix, 111)[2] Waldron introduces us to the Harari in their own terms, as the Ge usu’ or, ‘people of the city.’