Oromuma vs. Ethiopia
Then and Now
I have been slowly republishing in Amharic, and publishing for the first time in English, the memoir of my maternal grandfather dañew welde’silasé: teacher, school administrator, lesser consulate minister and ambassador, and governor. Lordwilling, the finished product should appear on my gumroad in due time. My paternal grandfather negash wesené was a deacon, taxidermist, entrepreneur, and hand of the governor. In Ethiopian and biblical tradition there are no family names. Your last name is no last name at all, but your father’s name. wesené is not negash’s father, because she is his mother. Family stories tell me his father was an oromo who abandoned them. DNA evidence I discussed with Razib Khan demonstrates that my paternal haplogroup (my father’s fathers and so on and so forth) are shared with 30% of so-called oromo and 70% of somali.
Family stories are some times tall tales. Genes do not lie. You may be wondering what my paternal great-grandfather has to do with anything.
Some in Ethiopia literally only consider your ethnicity to be what your father’s ethnicity is. It makes no sense in one mixed generation, and even less over multiple. If this nonsense were true, I am an oromo through-and-through.
The two regimes from 1991-2023 have rested there legal frameworks and political philosophies in Race Communism; the replacement of perceived class with perceived race in Marxist clash analysis. At least one of my eight great-grandparents are a part of the race we will discuss today. Whether he was full or half or less we can discuss later, but at least we know patrilineally things add up.
Prof. yirgaw gelaw welde’eeyesus summarized round 2 of our ongoing Civil War in Ethiopia better than anywhere else I have seen in the news. Ethiopia’s Amhara people are being portrayed as the enemy: the dangerous history of ethnic politics. Please read his piece carefully, if you are not already caught up, or if you want to make your implicit knowledge more explicit. For those allergic to clicking on the helpful links I frequently provide, here’s a succinct snippet:
It is only 10 months since the end of a civil war in which around 600,000 Ethiopians were killed, making it the deadliest war of the 21st century.
The conflict was mainly between the federal government, led by the Oromo-dominated Prosperity Party, and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the party it succeeded in 2018. When the TPLF entered the Amhara region, committing atrocities against civilians and taking over towns, the Fano worked with government forces to maintain local stability. With their support, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was able to push the TPLF back to Tigray…
A peace agreement between the TPLF and the government in November 2022 brought relative calm to Tigray and other regions. But the Amhara were left out of the agreement and continue to be targeted even by government forces.
This is the context in which Amhara’s Fano militia rejected the federal government order to surrender their weapons and be integrated into the police and federal army.
The government response was to bombard Amhara towns with drones and heavy artillery. There have also been mass arrests and detentions of Amhara leaders.
So, now, the amhara and the oromo are at odds in open field combat, as it was in the 1500s when the oromo first arrived in Ethiopia. They arrived when Ethiopia was at it’s weakest, during the war against imam ahmed ibn ibrahim al-ghazi the Left-handed and his combined forces of harer, somali, yemeni, and turks. ahmed from the east, and the oromo from the south.
Like many of the steppe pastoralists in Eurasia, these East African pastoralists, the oromo, came on horseback and initially caused huge damage to Ethiopian civilization. Later contributing to it, especially in both Italo-Ethiopian wars.
The oromo who remained as south as possible whilst still being in Ethiopia retained their original culture the most. The ones who travelled north in two different directions assimilated with Amharic-speaking Orthodox Christians and Muslims, and with the whole system of governance of the Solomonic Dynasty of Ethiopia. Some of their mixed descendants ascended the highest levels of power in the country during the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s. But ultimately, to do so, they had to assimilate (punch In memory of Negus Mikael, King of Wollo into your Facebook search bar and read Dcn. Solomon Kibriye’s account), and in some sense lose something.
The current Civil War is now being fought because the TPLF reignited this long since completed struggle for the soul of Ethiopia, through it’s divide-and-conquer Race Communism that transformed Ethiopia from a nation into a nation of nations; a powder barrel ready to explode, just as the 20th Century fascists planned.
The English medical doctor, and I believe spy, Henry Blanc became a captive of Emperor téwodros in the mid 1800s. *SPOILER ALERT* After being militarily freed by an ‘expedition’ of English soldiers, he had time to write a memoir about his time in Ethiopia. By the way, dañew found the reading of this text so critical to Ethiopians that he translated it for them into Amharic. His Amharic intro can be found here. He has this to say about the oromo, who were not his captors, and who he sometimes wished would free him by force.
The Wallo Gallas are a fine race, far superior to the Abyssinian in elegance, manliness, and courage. Originally from the interior of Africa, they made their first appearance in Abyssinia towards the middle of the sixteenth century. These hordes invaded the fairest provinces in such numbers, they excelled so greatly the Amharas in horsemanship and in courage, that not only did they overrun the land, but lived for years on the resources of the country in imprudent security. After a while they settled down on the beautiful plateau extending from the river Bechelo to the highlands of Shoa, and from the Nile to the lowland inhabited by Adails. Though retaining most of the characteristics of their race, they adopted many of the customs of the people they conquered. They lost in great measure their predatory and pastoral habits, tilled the soil, built permanent dwellings, and to a certain extent adopted in their dress, food, and mode of life the usages of the former inhabitants…
The food of both races is nearly the same; both enjoy the raw meat of the cow, the shiro or hot spiced dish of peas, the wat, and the teps (toasted meat); they only differ in the grain they use for bread, the Amhara delighting in pancakes made of the small seed of the tef, whilst the Galla’s bread is more loaf-like, and is prepared with the flour of wheat or barley, the only grain that propers on their elevated land…
The most apparent difference is in their religion. At the time of their first appearance, the Wallo Gallas, like many of the divisions of the same family who, having settled further inland and having less intercourse with foreigners, are still plunged in the grossest of idolatry, worshipped trees and stones; or rather under these natural objects rendered adoration to a being called the Unknown, who was to be propitiated by human sacrifices. It is impossible to obtain any correct information as to the exact date of their conversion to Islamism; but it has been accepted by the Wollo tribe almost universally. None at the present day are given to heathen practices, and only a few families belong to the Christian faith. (pgs. 290-292)
The first thing I must address in 2023 is the usage of the word Galla by Blanc in the 1800s, long before Emperor mineelik (their Hitler and starting point of history) became emperor. I was slapped across the face in 2008, at my own high school graduation, for using a conjugation of this word in reference to my aunt (now recently departed) who proudly called herself this to all her close family and friends instead of her given name. The slapper said it’s like the n-word. Surely, nothing is like the n-word in power, but racial slurs exist. I came to learn that this word means heathen, or person outside the Abrahamic faiths and thus with significantly different morality codes. Elders have told me oromo was used as an endonymn earlier, but not as an exonymn till the fall of emperor hayle’silasé in the 1970s.
I skipped the parts about clothes and women in the snippet, but kept the parts on: origin, nomadic pastoralism, food, and religion. If you want to imbibe all of Blanc’s 19th Century English POV on Ethiopia, read the whole book.
The origin of the oromo is hotly contested to this day. The wildest theory is that they are from Madagascar. I don’t find this convincing at all, but find it funny from time to time when it comes up in heated insults of who is a settler and who has been around. The plainly false theory some oromo promote is that they have always been in modern-day Ethiopia, and the amhara are settler colonialists from the middle east. There is written evidence in ge’ez, Arabic, and Portuguese as to when the oromo arrived in Ethiopia, and the oromo have only oral records. Oral records are of some value, but they cannot contradict this many varied written sources. The amhara are roughly 50% middle eastern, of two different stripes, and the oromo would have been originally 40% middle eastern like their somali distant cousins, but after centuries of assimilation they are mostly approaching the 50% of the amhara. Speaking of the somali, their homeland is likely the source and origin of the oromo.
Humankind has had three basic modes of existence: hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and agriculturalist. Hunter-gatherer is how we all began, moving around a lot hunting animals and gathering nuts and berries. This is where the Paleo diet is rooted in, respecting the evolutionary adaptation and Lindyness of our bodies. Pastoralists also live nomadically, but they domesticate a few animals, like horse and sheep, and reap the benefits of their military application and meat and dairy products. Agriculturalists are sedentary farmers. From farms we get towns, then city-states, and empires. But sometimes and in some places, farmers revert to pastoralism.
The original food of the oromo, being pastoralists, would be meat and dairy products. Nothing fancy. That’s why even the most separtisty separatists have a fat chance of opening an oromo restaurant with food that isn’t shared by all of Ethiopia. En masse, they mostly adopted habesha cuisine, and contributed a couple of items like CHiko and CHeChebsa.
Religion is the most highly valued piece of culture in Ethiopia. Besides a small number of Jews and Animists, most Ethiopians are either Orthodox Christian or Sunni Muslim, and have been so for a millenium, with Orthodox Christianity stretching back even centuries earlier and being one with the State.
The oromuma Project, aided and abetted by TPLF’s decades-long plot to Balkanize Ethiopia, and promoted by political activists posing as scholars like asafa jalata, has two goals.
If humanly possible, remake Ethiopia in their image and likeness (oromize everything: language, dance, religion), to get ‘revenge’ for their humiliating military defeats of the late 1800s and early 1900s and assimilation thereof to highland Ethiopian culture.
If Plan A fails, go with Plan B. Secede and separate from Ethiopia with as much territory as is humanly possible, and create an oromo only nation-state, including adees abeba and its 3 million + inhabitants who are mostly amhara and guragé.
There is a dialectic at play that fools many, but not the savvy onlooker. The oromo Liberation Army or Front (OLA/OLF), guerilla fighters, and their friends in academe and journalism, are said to be distinct from the official regime Prosperity Party of Prime Minister abiy ahmed ali. By analogy, I would say they are akin to Sen. Bernie Sanders and Pres. Joe Biden, or Antifa and the Democratic Party. Sanders and Biden may have their umpteenth public debate on any matter of public policy, or means to an end, but at the end of the day, Sanders will endorse Biden against the other guys seven days a week, and twice on Sunday.
As the Civil War rages on, Ethiopia’s soul is being fought for. Will she be what she was from 300 AD to 1974? Or something else? I prefer the former, with some adaptations to our ever-evolving context, and if you do too, join me in saying, “ድል ለፋኖ” (dil le’fano), victory to the fano forces!
They may bring about a true blue democratic republic. Or a classic African secular military dictatorship. It’s all the mood right now in Niger, Burkina Faso, Gabon etc. Or, just maybe, they’ll get the band back together; throne-and-altar.
There is nothing hidden which will not be revealed.