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Shanqella (, šanqəlla—also spelled Shankella, Shangella, Shankalla, or Shangalla) was first the name of a single Nilotic peoples 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 Region 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.
Many Shanqella were recruited into service of Menelik II. At the Emperor's coronation in 1889 it was reported by the chronicler Gebre Selassie that the monarch was flanked to right and left by Shanqella dressed in gold-embroidered tunics and velvet cloaks, and holding spears with golden sheaths. Subsequently at the Battle of Adwa, the same chronicler reports the presence of a force of Shanqella at the battle. In 1906, a group of Shanqella soldiers were stationed at Harar where they were trained by a French officer, Captain de la Guibougere.
In Ethiopian discourse, they were commonly portrayed as primitive and lacking any recognizable socio-political organization—fit only for economic exploitation and physical subjugation. As a result, traditional Ethiopian folk art often depicted them with grotesquely exaggerated features, casting them as brutish, dark-skinned figures engaged in profane or "unholy" rituals. With the rise of the Derg regime in the 1970s and the imposition of new administrative structures, Ethiopia entered a second phase of forced cultural transformation—one that also marked the eventual disappearance of the term Shanqella from official and popular discourse.
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