Descriptions and recollections of the lives of pastoral slaves indicates significant differences from those of plantation and agropastoral slaves. In the Somali raids on Oromo settlement during the nineteenth century, Oromo women and children were claimed as slaves, while men were usually killed. These women and children were taken into the family life of their abductors, while still, of course remaining subjects. Abducted Oromo children became "children" of the master. Somalis only took very young children as they were easier to abduct and adopt. Oromo women, valued for their beauty, were kept as concubines or as domestic servants or were given in marriage to other slaves
Catherine Lowe Besteman, Unraveling Somalia: Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press: 1999), pp. 82.