Welayta people

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Welayta (also spelled Walaytta, Wolaita) is the name of an ethnic group and a former kingdom, located in southern Ethiopia.

The kingdom met its demise with the expansion of Emperor Menelik II into the regions south of Shewa during the early 1890s; Kawo (King) Tona, the last king of Welayta, was defeated and Welayta conquered in 1896. Welayta was then incorporated into the Ethiopia Kingdom. However, Welayta had a form of self-administrative status and was ruled by Governors directly accountable to the king until the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. The Derg afterwards restructured the country and included Welayta as a part of the province of Sidamo.

In 1991 the Ethiopian Transitional Government restructured the country in Administrative Regions and Welayta become the centre of Region 9. After the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front was elected, Welayta was include in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples' Region as part of the Semien Omo Zone. Since November 2001, Welayta was promoted to full Zonal status with an estimated population of over two million.^{[citation needed]}