Sidama

The Sidama are a Cushitic people of the Ethiopian Rift Valley southwest of the Bale highlands, speaking Sidaamu-Afoo. Oral tradition traces their name to the Siddo clan and places their earliest home in the province of Bale along the Dawa River; in the early 1500s the Oromo expansions drove them westward, and the migrants defeated the local Hofa people before settling around Lake Hawassa.

Their new country was divided between two sets of clans, the Yemericho clans of the first settlers and the Aletta clans who formed the numerical majority, each holding its own territory.

They lived by cultivating enset, the false banana, and coffee, while venerating a supreme creator and the spirits of their ancestors. The clans remained organized as a loose confederation of small Sidama kingdoms, ruled through councils of elders in a traditional gerontocracy.