The Farmer in Chaha Song

Opening Paragraph The songs presented here were collected for me by Wäldä Sänbät Bänti. In my experience of collecting linguistic material in Ethiopia, Wäldä Sänbät deserves special mention. He is about twenty years old, a speaker of Gyeto which is a slight variant of Chaha. When I asked Wäldä Sänbät whether he would be willing to work with me on the Gyeto vocabulary, he readily agreed in terms that I at first considered rather boastful. He told me indeed that he was the most knowledgeable man in the dialect of Gyeto, a statement that I did not hear too often from my Ethiopian informants. The truth of the matter is that Walda Sanbat was the best informant I encountered in my linguistic work in Ethiopia. Not only did he know his language admirably well, but he was also a born field-worker. Without my prompting, he brought me all kinds of plants, cereals, and grasses and gave me their native names. He knew how to illustrate difficult terms with appropriate gestures and stories which explained the difficult word in context. Thus, having noticed his ability as a fieldworker, I asked him to collect Chaha songs dealing with any subject. Here again he showed that he knew the technique of a professional. When he presented me with the bill agreed upon in advance, he had added to it an item for which I gladly paid. Indeed, on several occasions he had found it necessary to offer the singer a bottle of native beer to put him in the mood to recite the song. So it was that he brought back to me at Addis Ababa a considerable collection of Chaha songs.