Opening Paragraph GADA , or generation-grading, systems are found only in a few Cushitic-speaking societies of Ethiopia. Unlike a true age-grading system a gada system is distinguished by the rule that all sons follow their fathers in the sequence of grades at a single fixed interval, irrespective of their actual age. In order to maintain the constancy of this interval, the length of time which a man spends in each grade is fixed at a specific number of years, as is the number of grades separating him from his father. It is evident, therefore, that in such systems the various grades will include at the more senior levels young boys and adolescents together with mature men, a confusion that will not arise in true age-grading systems.
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C. R. Hallpike (1976) studied this question.