A History of Bele Town from Foundation(1965) to Present

This paper tries to reconstruct a history of Bele town from foundation to Present with special reference to the period since 1941. The year 1941 is taken as the lower benchmark because of since this year because the restoration of Emperor Haile Sellasie I to the power marked the consolidation of centralized policy, which had effect on the overall aspects of the country including the town Bele. I preferred the year 2021 on the other hand as the upper limit of my study because the fast growing of the town sees after the Ethiopian millennium. In carrying out this thesis, the historical investigation depends on describing and analyzing the historical sources: both primary and secondary sources. Therefore, this study has attempted to explore such and other facts through a historical study of the town of Bele between 1941 and 2021. There is a variety of historical writing developments, which are not uniform at all areas, have been occurred in Ethiopia. From the beginning, the northern and central parts of Ethiopia are rich in written history. On the other hand, the Southern Ethiopia had no such advantages and people maintained their history by oral tradition through transmitting from generation to generation. Hence, the historical writing in foundation of Bele to present on this region had not been studied in detail. Notwithstanding, this particular area is rich in natural, historical, and cultural heritages as well as several accounts of socio-economic developments. To this end, this historical study targeted to rebuild the general foundation of Bele town since 1965. The springboard of this study is to reflect the historical reality of the town in particular. I hope that this study is helpful to establish a meaningful urban history in Southern Ethiopia by bringing some urban situations of the town under study. Therefore, this thesis attempted to fill the gap in the historiography of the study area in general and Ethiopia in particular. Nonetheless, the history of the town of Bele with its diverse socioeconomic aspects is much too vast to be fully reconstructing in a thesis. Hence, the thesis does not claim to have exhaustively covered all historical issues and processes that took place since 1941. Thus, it is not a final work and as such, it readily expects improvement from scholarly comments. Methodologically, the thesis works of this kind need to reconstruct the history of the society. Without reconstructing the past foundation of town and comparing it with the present, it would not be possible to judge the changes at present. To reconstruct the past reality, I employed interview as one means of gathering oral information’s of the society. In addition to the interview, the data source for this study analyzed and interpreted documents and letters collected from local archives and record offices of different government and non-government. However, many of the archival sources do not have either folder or file numbers or both folder and file numbers. Despite these problems, I attempted to manage authenticity of source as much as possible.