Like the
Gambela Region, Benishangul-Gumuz is historically closely linked to neighbouring areas of Sudan, and to a lesser extent to the
Ethiopian Highlands. These regions served as slave-hunting grounds since
Aksumite times, and their
Nilosaharan-speaking inhabitants were pejoratively called
Shanqella (Šanqəlla, also Shanqila, Shankella) by the highland Ethiopians. Besides slaves, gold was traditionally an important export of Benishangul. Little is known about its history before the 19th century. Archaeologists have found sites that they date to the end of the 1st millennium BC or the beginning of the 1st millennium AD and assign them to the forerunners of today's
Komuz-speaking ethnic groups. Finds attributing them to the Berta date from the 17th to 20th centuries and are mainly located on mountains, hills and in rocky areas that are easy to defend. It was not until the mid-20th century that Berta also settled in the lowlands, as slave hunts and armed conflict had ended. The area lay as a "
buffer zone" or "
no man's land" between southern
Sennar and
Damot in the highlands. The Ethiopian Emperor
Susenyos invaded the area in 1617/18, and it fell to the
Funj Sultanate in 1685. In the first quarter of the 19th century, Arab traders arrived from
Sennar, which was occupied by
Ottoman Egypt from 1821. These traders married into the Berta upper class and thus gained political influence. By the middle of the century, the
waṭāwiṭ, the descendants of Arabs and Berta, had become the new ruling class. They also began to spread Islam among the Berta. Various trade routes met in Benishangul, and local gold and Ethiopian
amole (salt bars) were exchanged for slaves, cattle, horses, iron, civet, musk, coffee, ivory and honey (which also came from the Oromo areas of
Sibu and
Leeqaa). Luxury goods such as textiles and glass beads were imported via
Sudan. The southwards expansion of Emperor Menelik directed against Oromo, Kafa, and peoples further south, was also perceived as a campaign of submission of the
Shanqella. This also included the Sheikhdom, a successor to the previously tributary
Funj Sultanate. In 1898, Asosa became the political and economic capital. Until the
Italian occupation of Ethiopia in the mid-1930s, the area supplied gold and slaves to the central government on a large scale. Slaves were also smuggled into Sudan across the border, which was established in 1902. It was reported that Benishangul region continued to provide Ethiopia with Gold in the early 1970s. Under the regime of
Mengistu Haile Mariam, who ruled Ethiopia from 1974, some 250,000 drought and famine-stricken peasants from the highlands—mostly
Amharas from
Wollo province—were relocated to Benishangul-Gumuz from 1979 and especially in the mid-1980s. Resistance to the Mengistu regime here came mainly from the Berta. In addition, the
Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) - supported by the
Eritrean People's Liberation Front, which in the meantime had advanced far south from Eritrea - also fought for the area in the
Ethiopian civil war in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The OLF tried to incorporate the local population as "black Oromo", but met with little support. The Berta rebels instead allied with the
Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which overthrew the Mengistu regime in 1991 with the coalition
EPRDF. As the Berta People's Liberation Movement or
Benishangul People's Liberation Movement (BPLM), they - like the
Gambella People’s Liberation Movement of the Anuak in Gambella - were not accepted as full members of the EPRDF, but became regional partners of the new ruling coalition. In 2019, the
Metekel conflict began. In December 2019, about 200 people were killed in the
Metekel massacre. == Agriculture ==