Shanqella

Shanqella (Amharic: ሻንቅላ, šanqəlla—also spelled Shankella, Shangella, Shankalla, or Shangalla) was first the name of a single Nilotic-speaking community on Ethiopia's western frontier, but it gradually broadened into a catch-all label for many small, politically decentralized peoples who lived along the Ethiopian-Sudanese borderlands, (modern Gambela and Benishangul-Gumuz regions), including the Bareya of what is now western Eritrea. Lacking strong centralized institutions and residing far from the highland heartland, these groups were militarily weaker; their darker skin tone, non-Christian, and distinct cultural practices marked them as "others" in Abyssinian eyes, making them especially attractive targets for slave raiders.

Because the Shanqella and Bareya were the two frontier communities most commonly raided, their names themselves eventually became synonyms for slave. In this way, notions of darkness and servility fused: to be visibly darker and from a loosely organized border group increasingly implied a status fit for bondage. Richard Pankhurst's survey of Aksumite and later Ethiopian records shows how highland armies—beginning with kings such as Ezana in the fourth century CE—systematically exploited this combination of political vulnerability and racialized difference, seizing "black" captives from the west and south as tribute, labor, and human property. Thus, over time, "Shanqella" and "Bareya" shifted from ethnonyms to racialized terms denoting people who were both dark and servile.