Mursi Online

Ulikoro Konyonomora, the Priest (Komoru) of the northern Mursi. (Ben Dome, 2004)

Looking south over the River Omo and Mursiland. (David Turton, 1981)

The Mursi live in the lower Omo valley of southwestern Ethiopia, 100 km north of the Kenyan border (Map 2). They call themselves Mun (sg. Muni) and number less than 10,000. Over the past few decades they and their neighbours have faced growing threats to their livelihoods. Drought has made it difficult for many families to feed themselves by means of their traditional mix of subsistence activities – cultivation and cattle herding. The establishment of a mechanised cotton farm in the lower basin, and of two national parks and hunting concessions further north, has added to the pressure on scarce resources. Competition for agricultural and grazing land has led to inter-group-conflict, made worse by the spread of automatic weapons in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Mursi are amongst the best known of the peoples of the lower Omo. The pottery lip-plates worn by women in their lower lips have made them a prime attraction for tourists and helped to sustain a view of them, in guidebooks and travel articles, as an ‘untouched’ people, living in one of the last ‘wildernesses’ of Africa. The aim of the Mursi Online website is to help correct this stereotypical view by providing accurate and reliable information about the history, culture and environment of the Mursi, and about the challenges and opportunities facing them and their neighbours today.

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