Study of "unknown" nationalities lags behind

Three years behind schedule, a project to study and document the culture and history of 15 "relatively unknown" nationalities in Ethiopia is only 60 per cent complete, yet it is of major importance to the preservation of the country's history. The project was partly intended to provide input to the school curricula so that the history and culture of the peoples of Gambela, Benishangul-Gumuz and the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People's regional states would be studied as fully-fledged subjects in schools. Data on the ethno-botany, social psychology and social anthropology of these peoples was also to have been collected. Zekarias Megiso, chairman of the regional states' affairs committee of the House of the Federation, was on Thursday quoted by the pro-government Walta Information Centre as saying that the project had been agreed on between the House and the University of Addis Ababa's research and publications office. He told Walta that the project had been discussed by a recent session of the House, but that the university had been unable to honour the terms of the project agreement.