Support for this notion comes in an essay (included in this book; see appendix D) written by one of the Oromo boys, Gutama Tarafo, while at Lovedale. Drawing a direct comparison between the Oromo and the Xhosa people, Gutama insisted that Oromo men would never allow their wives to work in the fields. Instead, the Oromo women had dominion over the family home. As a male Oromo teenager, Gutama tellingly championed the right of women to be relieved of heavy manual field labor and to regard their position in their homes as one of domain rather than servitude.
Ethiopia and the Oromo People
Ethiopia, of all African countries, has a sui generis historiography.48 However, the preponderance of Ethiopian studies have largely bypassed the history of the Oromo people, focusing on the agencies of power rather than on those who have been, and remain, powerless. Even those critical of the successive monarchies remained state-centered, focused on the rulers rather than the ruled, giving little attention to the powerless and the ordinary people in the southern regions below the geographical boundaries of old Abyssinia.49
The middle years of the twentieth century saw a surge in both Ethiopian and Oromo scholarship. However, the tendency remained to valorize the elite and powerful with barely a nod to the conquered peoples—including the Oromo. Identity politics wielded in Ethiopian halls of power played a powerful role in suppressing the history, the culture, and even the language of the Oromo people. Given that the Oromo were (and are) the largest population group in Ethiopia, the leading Tigrayan elite feared that to permit recognition and widespread knowledge would promote a sense of Oromo identity. Given their superior numbers, this would, in their view, place Ethiopian identity at risk. However, at the height of the period of the Derg—the administration put in place following the socialist military revolution that overthrew the Ethiopian monarchy in 1974—Oromo scholars, many of whom had already fled the country and were living in the diaspora, took the reins into their own hands. In the vanguard of these were Mekuria Bulcha, Mohammed Hassen, and Asafa Jalata, who began writing about their own and others’ experiences, exposing the historical, political, and social causes of forced migrations of Oromo from Ethiopia. These studies initiated a burgeoning of nationalist—particularly Oromo—scholarship.50
Interestingly, in the early twenty-first century and echoing evolving changes in historiographical approach, non-Oromo scholars like Bahru Zewde, who had hitherto focused on the history of the ruling elite, began exploring Ethiopian democracy from the bottom up, partly redressing the criticisms of their earlier work.51 In recent years, Oromo scholarship has responded to the intransigency of the ruling party and the growing oppression of the Oromo by becoming increasingly militant regarding the tensions between the Oromo and southern nations on the one hand, and the Ethiopian state on the other, from the era of Emperor Menelik II to date.52 Issues of Oromo identity, slavery, dispossession, land tenure, and political contestation underpin the history and nature of escalating Oromo nationalism today.53
When the Oromo children arrived at Lovedale in 1890, they were no longer slaves, but theirs was, nonetheless, a form of forced migration. In recent years we have witnessed the forced migration of Oromo individuals and groups fleeing widespread repression, arbitrary arrests, detention without charge, enforced disappearance, torture, and possible death. While Oromo migrants and refugees have been seeking protection in other African countries—including South Africa—for decades, an “Addis Ababa Master Plan,” proposed by the authorities in Ethiopia for the expansion of the capital city, triggered major Oromo protest and heavy government response. For the Oromo, the majority of whom are agriculturalists and nomadic pastoralists, the plan meant expropriation of their land. In response the government declared a state of emergency in October 2016, shut down communications (including Internet connectivity), and closed Ethiopia’s doors to foreign journalists, observers, and human rights organizations. Hundreds were killed, and many more were injured, arrested, or detained.
Since then, the Master Plan has been shelved and an apology issued for the deaths, while in April 2018 an Oromo member who had served in the Ethiopian Parliament since 2010, Dr. Abiy Ahmed, was elected the twelfth prime minister of Ethiopia. This was doubtless a strategic move designed, at least in part, to placate the Oromo people. Though his vision is believed to be at odds with the Oromo people’s demands for self-determination within their Oromia region without federal interference, toward the end of 2017 he issued a statement that may signal hope: “[Ethiopian citizens] expect a different rhetoric from us . . . we have to debate the issues openly and respectfully. It’s easier to win people over to democracy than push them towards democracy. This can only succeed peacefully and through political participation.”54
When the Oromo runner Feyisa Lilesa crossed the finish line on 21 August 2016 to win the silver medal for the marathon at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, he raised his arms above his head and crossed his wrists. In that silent sign of protest, he signaled his support for the hundreds of thousands of protesters back home in his Oromia state in Ethiopia. With that simple gesture Feyisa Lilesa was more effective in delivering a startling wake-up call to the world that all is not well in today’s Ethiopia than any number of mainline media articles or NGO reports.55 As one South African online newspaper headlined his story: “Ethiopia’s Feyisa Lilesa Gets a Silver for Running—and a Gold for Bravery.”56
What many among the world’s reading and viewing public discovered in the backwash of Feyisa Lilesa’s graphic message was that the ongoing protests and the injustices meted out to the Oromo in Ethiopia were not new. The Oromo people have been marginalized and oppressed as a political, economic, and social minority in modern Ethiopia since Emperor Menelik II ascended the imperial throne in old Abyssinia in 1889—the year the final group of Oromo children of the following story were liberated.
PART I
Roots: Memories of Home
CHAPTER 1
Ethiopia: The Lie of the Land
Modern, landlocked Ethiopia occupies the largest portion of the territory known as the Horn of Africa. Bordered on the south by Kenya and on the west by Sudan and South Sudan, Ethiopia’s access to the Red Sea in the north is blocked by Eritrea and in the northeast by Djibouti. The eastern tip of Ethiopia is wrapped by large, number-7-shaped Somalia, whose long coastline takes in both the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The topography of Ethiopia is complex, but the center of the country is dominated by a high plateau with an altitude ranging from 1,290 meters to a peak of more than 4,500 meters. The central plateau is intersected diagonally by the Great Rift Valley. From this plateau, the land drops away—in places sharply—to the lowlands of the north, west, south, and east. Lake Assal, in the Afar or Danakil Depression, one of the hottest and driest places on earth, constitutes Ethiopia’s lowest point at 155 meters below sea level. The country is watered by the many rivers that rise in the mountainous regions of the plateau and wash down toward the Nile on the west, with others, like the Awash, flowing into Djibouti and Somalia; and the Omo, feeding into Lake Turkana.
Drawing an arc from the western border of Ethiopia with Sudan to the Kenyan border in the southwest is Oromia, the region occupied by the Oromo people (see map 1.1). Oromia, constituting one of nine ethnically defined administrative regions (or kililoch), occupies the largest land allocation of all the regions (353,007 square kilometers), which accommodates the largest single population group (approximately 40 percent of a total estimated Ethiopian population in 2016 of 102,374,044).1
The topography of the Oromia region is varied and is generally divided into three principal topographical categories, ranging from the mountainous areas of the Ethiopian central plateau in the north to the grassy lowlands in the east, west, and south. Despite several substantial rivers and other water sources in Oromia, the region, like the rest of Ethiopia, is vulnerable to periodic and often devastating climate-driven droughts and famine.