The two kilils of southwestern Ethiopia's 138 thousand square kilometers include the bottom left corner of the Ethiopia Highlands, and the southernmost end of the nation's part of the Great Rift Valley. In the very west are lowlands, lined with the headwaters of the Sobat River, a tributary of the White Nile(2).
The highlands reach above 4,000 meters at Guge, west of Lake Abaya.
The Rift Valley is represented locally by the very top of Lake Turkana(3), by Lakes(4) Ch'ew, Abaya and Awassa along the Oromia border, and by Lake Chamo. Feeding Lake Turkana, and cutting deep into the plateau, is the Omo river.
There is no majority first language. More than 19 in 20 speak Afro-Asiatic languages: Cushitic, Omotic and Semitic ones. The prinicpal Cushitic languages, and their portion of the region's speakers, are Gedeo, six percent; Hadiyya, nine percent; Kambaata(5), six percent; and Sidamo, 18 percent. All of them are in the East Highland sub-group. The principal Omotic languages are Gamo-Gofa-Dawro(6), 12 percent; Kafa, five percent; and Wolaytta, 12 percent. All three are in the Gong-Gimojan sub-group. Wolaytta is a national official literary language. The most important Semitic language is Silt'e, spoken by 18 percent of the region's speakers. It belongs to the Ethiopic family.
The most important religion is Christianity(7), historically the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but including some recent Protestant converts as well. Next most important are indiginous religions, usually labeled animist because of the blurred line between the conventionally objective and spirits. Moslems are a substantial minority in western Gambella and the south of Southern Kilil.
Awassa, the capital of the region, and previously the capital of an abolished region, is the only city with over 100 thousand residents.(8) The triple-domed Ethiopian Orthodox Church is sited to dominate the view down a major Awassan street.
Nilo-Saharan languages have been spoken in the area for many thousands of years. J.E.G. Sutton and Patrick Munson equate the physical 'aquatic tradition' of the eight millenium B.C.E. with the language group.
It is speculated that the Cushitic and Omotic groups moved west from the Horn of Africa as long as 18,000 years ago. Ethiopic, the ancestor of the group, came across the Red Sea in the 3rd century C.E. and spread westward thereafter. From the fourth century on, Ethiopic speakers were Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. Their empire conquered the Omotic-speaking kingdoms in the 19th(9) century, but their new subjects were already Christian by then. Oromo speakers spread Islam in the 16th and 17th centuries. Europeans introduced their versions of Christianity in the 19th and 20th centuries.
north and east
south
southwest
west
(1) Ityopia, officially.
(2) The Nile, including the White Nile, is the world's largest river.
(3) Formerly Lake Rudolph.
(4) Bahir.
(5) Also spelled Kembata.
(6) The three dialects names give the linguists a language name.
(7) Methodology: allowing for less than two million animists in Amhara and Benishangul kilils,and assuming almost everyone beyond there and the southwest is Christian or Moslem, and taking the national (high) estimate of 12 percent times 71 million (2004) to yield a national animist total of 8.5 million, and thus a regional animist total of between 6.7 million million plus, makes them a minority of the region's 14.2 million (2004). Moslems are a local minority according to a map in the
(8) 133 thousand (2005 estimate). An official source estimates 120 thousand for the same year.
(9) They had a tribute-paying relation before the conquest.