Kingdom of Yamma
former kingdom in southern modern Ethiopia
The Kingdom of Yamma, also spelled Yemma, was a small kingdom located in what is now Ethiopia. It lay in the angle formed by the Omo and the Jimma Gibe Rivers; to the west lay the Kingdom of Jimma and to the south the Kingdom of Garo. Three mountains — Mount Bor Ama, Mount Azulu, and Mount Toba — all distinguish the location of the former kingdom. It covered the area of present-day Sekoru district and Yem special woreda.
This kingdom was also known as Janjero. However, this an Amharic exonym that Yem people who inhabit the present-day site of this kingdom consider pejorative. The Yem people who inhabit the land of the former Kingdom of Yamma have been subjected to prejudice from other Ethiopians, and in the past some Yem speakers have expressed discomfort speaking their own language for fear of negative judgement.
Overview
Although one of the Sidamo kingdoms, until its conquest in 1894 Yamma was "isolated, and had little to do with its neighbors, its rivers being very difficult to cross. Although first visited by Europeans in 1614, until the late 1950s this region remained poorly known to outsiders. As a result, its people were said to have preserved a number of "customs so barbarous and strange that there cannot be any more so."
Some of these alleged customs are as follows:
The king had the right to take persons of either sex from their homes to either be sold into slavery, or to work for him.
The public source identifies “Kingdom of Yamma” as former kingdom in southern modern Ethiopia. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Kingdom, Yamma and former.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1461024. Authority coordinates are 7.850, 37.517. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1894 and 1614.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kingdom of Yamma” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.