Dizi (also known as the Maji) is the name of an ethnic group living in southern
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...
. They share a number of somatic similarities with certain culturally (but not always linguistically) related peoples of south-western Ethiopia, which include the
Sheko and
Nao, the
Gimira (
She
She most commonly refers to:
*She (pronoun), the third person singular, feminine, nominative case pronoun in modern English.
She or S.H.E. may also refer to:
Literature and films
*'' She: A History of Adventure'', an 1887 novel by H. Rider Hagga ...
,
Bench,
Mere), the Tsara, the
Dime, the
Aari Aari or AARI may refer to:
* Aari (actor) (born 1985), Indian Tamil film actor
* Aari language, an Omotic language
*Aari people
Aari or Ari are a tribal Omotic people indigenous to Omo Valley of Ethiopia. According to 2007 census there are 289 ...
and certain sub-groups of the
Basketo people The Basketo people are an Omotic-speaking ethnic group whose homeland lies in the southern part of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Region (SNNPR) of Ethiopia. The Basketo special woreda is named after this ethnic group. According t ...
. A. E. Jensen has gathered these groups under the label of the "ancient peoples of southern Ethiopia". They speak the
Dizin language
Dizin (often called “Dizi” or “Maji” in the literature) is an Omotic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by the Dizi people, primarily in the Maji woreda of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region, located ...
(part of the
Omotic languages
The Omotic languages are a group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia, in the Omo River region. The Ge'ez script is used to write some of the Omotic languages, the Latin script for some others. They are fairly agglutinative and have com ...
).
Before their forced incorporation into the Ethiopian Empire in the 1890s, based on their own statements and the evidence of numerous abandoned terraced hillsides, the Dizi are estimated to have numbered between 50,000 and 100,000. However, as Haberland observes, the imposition of an outside authority and its misrule led to a massive depopulation due to the abuses of the ''
gebbar'' system, slave-raiding, "famine, disease and a growing sense of hopelessness and resignation, engendered by a total absence of justice. These things not only caused the number of Dizi to shrink (in 1974 there were probably scarcely more than 20,000) but shook their whole culture to its roots."
[Haberland, "Amharic Manuscript", pp. 241f]
Demographics
The 2007 Ethiopian national census reported that 36,380 people (or 0.05% of the population) identified themselves as Dizi, of whom 4,968 were urban inhabitants. The
is home to 98.9% of this people.
They are the majority of the inhabitants of the
Maji woreda
Districts of Ethiopia, also called woredas ( am, ወረዳ; ''woreda''), are the third level of the administrative divisions of Ethiopia – after ''zones'' and the '' regional states''.
These districts are further subdivided into a number of ...
, and have notable minorities in the neighboring
Meinit Meinit was one of the 77 woredas in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region of Ethiopia. Part of the Bench Maji Zone, Meinit was bordered on the south by Dizi, on the west by Sheko, on the north by Bench, on the east by the Kefi ...
and
Surma woredas.
References
Ethnic groups in Ethiopia
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