ETHNOGRAPHIC MYSTIQUE: THE SELF IN FOLKLORIC FIELD RESEARCH

The Poetics and Politics of Salale Oromo Folklore Research

[Oromia, Ethiopia]

by ASAFA T. DIBABA 

Indiana University

But to make you understand the Salale, first I must tell a story.

________________ Gurmu B.

(My Salale Informant, 78)

Abstract

I have two aims in the present paper. The first aim is to look at the politics of doing research in resistance literature; and the second is to focus on the poetics of interpreting texts of resistance literature in a political context, and to reflect on the way those texts shape our sense of self. In the first part of the paper, the representational modes, positionality and reflexivity including the problem of loss of materiality in the field experience of the ethnographer will be examined. In the second section of the study, the subject of politics and (folk) literature will be examined in three categories: a) the conflicting (local) political contents of the texts: pluralist vs. nationalist sentiments, b) the political goals, intentions or purposes of the texter, c) and actions/interactions and counteractions between the texter in favor of social bandit/ry as popular resistance and the pluralist government officials trying to subduing it. The data incorporated in this study came from three sources: interviews, group discussions, informant conversations and observations during my fieldwork study in Salale Oromo, Ethiopia started in early September 2009 until July 2010 for my PhD research, written sources and archives, and reflexivity from my fieldwork observation and own personal experience as an activist poet.

Keywords: 

folkloric ethnography, research activism, resistance/social bandit/ry, local politics (nationalist vs. pluralist)

I. INTRODUCTION

Narrative of the enigmatic swear

There was an unfortunate widow who drowned in river water—the only river close by the village. She had one daughter and one son, fatherless. Her daughter swore not to drink from the river, never ever. The boy tried to persuade his sister to drink but to no avail. Desperately, he shared the problem to a ritual leader in the village that his sister never drank water since their mother died. To this enigma, the ritual leader thought and said, “My dear. The water your mother drowned in lasted but only for the moment.” To this she asked, heartbroken, “But, where IS Ayya?”

Now, the enigma is double: one, to submit to death forfeiting swear, or, another, to succumb to life resisting death.  (text 1)

Source: Gurmu B

___________________________________

Why Resistance / Why Resistance Research?

The crux of Gurmu’s story is this: In life or death, resistance is bound to happen!

‘No one can step twice in the same water’ is not just Greek (Heraclitus) idea but also African Oromo worldview put in a proverbial metaphor as kan darbe galaana…, meaning, past is a river flow. Who said the root of human knowledge is Greek or Latin, anyways? My informant, Gurmu’s narrative has a profound philosophical depth and artistic beauty. It is the notion that ‘bara’ or ‘time’ is in flux; constantly changing and, that change is the fundamental nature of reality. There are pasts that we remember because to forget them is to forget the imprint left stamped on the present. Are we not born into the present with the past? There are pasts that we forget because to remember them is to forget the present and to lack confidence in the future. The old man’s counsel, ritual leader as he is, to the young girl’s self-avowed unflinching resistance to death is not to forget the past but rather to remember the present (is present committed to our memory pool already?), to embrace it, and predict the future. Gurmu also knows well from lived experience life is all memory except for the resistance of the quick present moment one can hardly catch it going.  The present is an ever moving shadow. It divides yesterday from tomorrow. There lies hope in the future.

The past is central to resistance because it is the soil that feeds the roots of the present, and of our capacity to understand and deal with it. With the socioeconomic and political injustices inflicted in the past we come to the present. A folklorist and/or a social historian is equally passionate and perceptive observer of what lies below the surface of everyday life of his people: the unspoken and unrecorded assumptions of contemporary life, the symptoms that indicate the (ethno)nation’s ailing health and the day-to-day resistance to death. When God is silent, humankind be the master of own destiny. Knowledge is vital to social action and activist scholarship is "a broader, more reflective and more intellectually informed perspective on social sciences" (Hale 2008). 

It was under the influence of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries European Romantic Nationalism that folklore (study) emerged (Abrahams 1993). The Finnish epic, Kalevala, edited by Elias Lonnrot in 1849 was a repertoire of colonial  collective experience of the Finns under nearly 800 years of Swedish (1200-1809) and Russian (1809-1917) domination, and source of their language, philosophy and worldview preserved for generations by ordinary peasants (Mulukozi 1992:72). For Finns folklore served as the expression of national spirit, identity and heritage under domination, and as a reference point for national awakening, cultural and collective movement. In the context of the Nazi Socialist Ideology, however, the slogan “if we want to walk safely into the future,” as Professor Strobel wrote, “then we will have to walk upon the firm soil of folklore” was unfortunate because of Nazi’s vengeance-laden ideology (Kamenetsky, 1972:221). Consequently, in the late forties, folklore as university discipline was to be abolished altogether “to clean the air of the Nazi’s ideological pollution” (Kamenetsky 1972:221ff).

What Africa in general and the Oromo in particular gravely need today is not the new “folk Reich” but the new Kalevala. The Oromo geerarsa (Addisu 1999) and other Salale Oromo narratives presented in this study clearly depict the resistance potential of Afoola Oromo (Oromo folklore) as Kalevala for Africans and the peasants’ subversive imagination against the neo-Abyssinain domination. The purpose of this paper is thus simple and clear: it is partly to examine how folkloristic thinking influences nationalistic movement and partly to explore how folkloristic ethnography is affected by the local politics of culture dictated by two contentious forces of pluralist and nationalist perspectives. 

In the Beginning

The beginning of Oromo folklore documentation goes back to 1894 when the Oromo young missionaries led by Aster Ganno Salban and Onesimos Nesib (Makuria 1995)  based in Munkullu, Eritrea, laid the foundation by documenting from their memory more than 600 oral texts (songs, folktales, riddles, and prayers). The European missionaries, (Isenberg and Krapf (1839/1840) had already recorded some aspects of Tulama Oromo traditional beliefs and folk life in 1840s, their major purpose being exclusively evangelization of the Oromo.  Oromo folklore study did not come to effect until 1922 when Enerico Cerulli (1922), the Italian scholar and later governor of Showa (January 1939- June 1940) during the 5-year Italian rule over Ethiopia (Italian East Africa), collected a large bulk of Oromo songs and narratives for his MA, which, despite its shortcomings, serves as a milestone in the history of Oromo folklore scholarship. The task of Oromo folklore collections, documentations and publications particularly by the Oromia Culture and Tourism Bureau during the last decade in Oromia, Ethiopia, has been immense. The problem with the documentation is that the collectors came to the project with different training background than folklore. The documented texts are uprooted from the original context and analyses and interpretations of the raw data remain open for studies. 

The greater part of Oromo folklore research has been done so far in universities at undergraduate and graduate levels without undermining efforts by independent scholars. Research in Oromo folklore as part of creative/“everyday resistance” against domination and social injustice is still underdeveloped (Asafa 2004, 2010; Eshete 2008; Addisu 1999). The purpose of this study is to examine closely the nature of (Salale) Oromo folklore as the art of resistance against domination in Ethiopia and to explore conflicting local political attitudes and the problem of activist (folkloric) research

.

II. THEORIES AND METHODOLOGY

This study positions the narrative and interpretive methods largely within the postmodernist paradigm that questions the modernist philosophical assumptions of rationality and universal truth, and the objectivist application of empirical methods to social sciences. Instead, the study emphasizes that knowledge is value-laden, and reality is based on multiple perspectives (Brown & Strega 2005). In the rise of the new political configurations, to the postmodernist researcher, truth is grounded in everyday life involving social interactions. Context also plays a crucial role in the social construction of reality and knowledge. Thus, postmodernist research emphasizes the social nature of knowledge creation and reality. Among the underlying principles of postmodernism are: contextual construction of meaning; validity of multiple perspectives; knowledge constructed by people/groups of people; reality as multiperspectival; truth grounded in everyday life and social relations; life as text but thinking as an interpretive act. Hence, by this philosophy of social sciences, facts and values are inseparable; and science and all other human activities are value-laden (Charles Hale 2008).

By the interpretive approach access to reality is through social constructions and an attempt to understand phenomena is generally through the meanings that people assign to them. Interpretive research thus focuses on the full complexity of human sense-making as the situation emerges. According to interpretive approach there is no objective reality to be discovered by the researcher and replicated by others, in contrast to the assumptions of positivist tenet. Interpretive method of research starts from the position that our knowledge of reality, including the domain of human action, is a social construction by human actors and that this applies equally to the researcher (Walsham 1993). Walsham confirms this as saying that internal realism, that is, reality-for-us, is an inter-subjective construction of the shared human cognitive apparatus and subjective idealism is what each person constructs as his or her own reality.

People create and associate their own subjective and intersubjective meanings as they interact with the world around them. Through accessing the meanings participants assign to them, interpretive researchers thus attempt to understand phenomena (Orlikowski and Baroudi 1991 quoted in Walshman 1993). Postmodernist thinking or social constructionism not only accounts for the criticisms of modernist thinking for the limitation, but forms a basis for the application and understanding of narrative (Gergen, 1998). Social constructionism calls for a grounding of knowledge in the context of its social interaction. It emphasizes the social and cultural nature of narrative discourse. Narrative as an interpretive approach used in this ongoing study involves a storytelling methodology. The story as an object of study focuses on how individuals or groups make sense of events and actions in their lives. The theoretical underpinnings to narrative approach also clarify benefits of storytelling: how narrative conveys tacit knowledge, how it can enable sense making, and how it constructs identity and also explores the potential of narrative as a research tool for enhancing understanding of social processes.

The focus is on how individuals or groups make sense of events and actions in their lives through examining the story, and the linguistic and structural properties (Riessman, 1993). Riessman stresses that stories in research interviews are rarely so clearly delimited. Deciding beginnings and endings of narratives is often a complex interpretive task. That is, often there is negotiation between teller and listener, a process that can be analyzed with transcriptions. Transcriptions include care about paralinguistic utterances such as ‘uhms’, false starts, interruptions, and other subtle features of interaction. Locating narratives for analysis is difficult and necessitates an interdisciplinary approach. “Deciding which segments to analyze and putting boundaries around them is an interpretive decision, shaped in major ways by theoretical interests” (Riessman 2000).

Stories told by the oppressed can vary in context and complexity but the purpose is to envision freedom. In the wider public, there is a “fear of freedom,” made up by modern politics “among the oppressed, where theories about freedom and democracy and their practice do not coincide” (Freire quoted in Hale 2008:62). In discussing the “fear of freedom” two concepts come to the forefront: the “freedom from” and the “freedom to”. ‘Freedom from’ is resistance for emancipation from restrictions and repressive rules placed on peoples and/or individuals by other peoples or oppressive institutions and is historically fought for by many. It is a “negative freedom,”  though, when nobody overtly stops anyone from doing something, but institutionally by  means of some “hidden transcripts” of oppressive state structure,  to act or to say to one’s will is only to wince. This force, therefore, can be destructive on its own unless accompanied by the use of positive liberation, i.e., ‘freedom to,’ which is a creative element (Fromm 1991).  

“Freedom to” is a positive force that employs spontaneously the total integrated personality in creative acts. It is a true connectedness, Oromummaa (Oromoness) with others that goes beyond the superficial bonds of conventional social intercourse, to the glocal and global realization of the self, uniting self anew with the world, which is the highest stage of development, finna (Asafa 2001). To be free involves conditions of liberation from any form of social and cultural force seen as impeding full self-realization. Thus freedom is a challenge to be met both on individual and collective levels through personal and social transformations.  An alternative to exercising ‘freedom to’ is to submit to an authoritarian system that replaces the old order, a different external appearance but identical function by prescribing what to think and how/what to act for the individual engaged in ‘freedom from’. Unless by some force of dialectic historical process whereby the original repressive situation (the thesis) is replaced by the emancipation from it (the antithesis),  social transformation (synthesis) cannot be reached to provide humans with a new social security, democratic rights, the rule of law and the right to self-determination.

The two contesting forces, namely, one that fights to maintain the old repressive order under the guise of democratic/pluralistic schema and one that resists against such public/hidden transcript under nationalistic principle awfully affects the (folkloric) ethnographic tour. In this study, the critical undertakings of ‘engaging contradictions’ (Hale 2008), analyses and elaboration of the notion of 'critical resistance’ (Hoy 2005), explication of ‘research as resistance’ (Brown & Strega 2005), the search for ‘common grounds’ through stories/narratives (Chamberlain 2003), and exploring the horizon of social bandit/ry and resistance culture (Hobsbawm 2000; Abbink 2003) bring about the persistently vexing enquiries of research activism and folkloric ethnography. In so doing, the study brings to the fore issues of activism, social banditry/resistance, and folklore scholarship to understand the researching self, the various ways of knowing, being and doing through analysis and examples of folkloric research as a participatory one—as one of the primary goals of social research—and to inform about how life is experienced from the inside. It connects the relationships between researcher and researched to transforming research to resistance/activism by making and taking space for marginalized researcher(s) and ideas against domination.

Ted Chamberlin (2003) reveals how stories determine the ways a culture relates to land and to home, how our stories are lies we tell ourselves to describe who we are. He believes stories as metaphors are lies we choose to believe in. And lies, for Chamberlin, are as good as the truth, since the world is arranged/storied and difficult to know the difference. By this postmodern attitude, a final truth, a “common ground” is expressed through the stories people tell.  

Social banditry fermented into popular resistance has made part of the social history of local politics as revealed in studies by the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm (1965; 2000). Thus, why predatory government subdues social banditry and executes social bandits is that the supportive and covert relationship between the peasants and the bandit "sometimes plants the seeds of more substantial peasant resistance against the oppression of the ruling classes" (Curott & Fink  2008:2). Hobsbawm's social bandit model is criticized since "[p]opular culture reveals little of the social reality of bandit behavior" (Slatta 1994) and that "Mediterranean bandits are often romanticized afterward through nationalistic rhetoric and texts which circulate and have a life of their own, giving them a permanence and potency which transcends their localized domain and transitory  nature" (Cassia 1993). Revisionist scholars (e.g., Block 1972, 2001; Vanderwood 1981; Driessen 1983; Hart 1987; Slatta 1987a, 1987b in Curott & Fink 2008) also "claim that real life heroic bandits are only a myth" (Curott & Fink 2008), though some scholars have found evidence for Hobsbawm's social bandit model (Phillai 1974; Austen 1986; Josseph 1980 in Curott & Fink 2008). 

 In his Bandits (1981, [2000]), Hobsbawm acknowledges the conceptual and methodological difficulties in "relying on a rather tricky historical source, namely poems and ballads" which more often reflect ideals and aspirations. Myths around the social bandit/ry, Hobsbawm believes, allow us to relish the nostalgic past, the lost virtue, the "freedom, heroism and the freedom of justice" (pp 10, 131-32) criticism around 'noble bandit' and other stereotypes since one cannot readily infer a specific reality merely from the 'myth' around him/her which necessitates exploring independent evidence out of his/her actions. However, based on the Marxian class analysis, Hobsbawm provides explanation for the positive reception of bandits in his social bandit model. People who praise bandit praise a known evil, "albeit it is the lesser of two evils," that they can "unintentionally increase social welfare by opposing unpopular laws, by providing checks against government predation, and by providing legal services and protection when government does not" (Curott & Fink  2008:1). 

In combination with those other methods, an ethnographic approach is used in this study to (re)tell the informant’s story, interpret the narratives in the form of life histories (Riessman, 1993). However, narrative differs from ethnography and textual analysis. Through narrative acts human agency and imagination are vividly expressed: “With narrative, people strive to configure space and time, deploy cohesive devices, and reveal identity of actors and relatedness of actions across scenes. They create themes, plots, and drama. In so doing, narrators make sense of themselves, social situations and history.” (Riessman, 2000 citing Bamberg and McCabe 1998: iii). With ethnography the first person accounts are intended as realistic descriptions, and as an alternative format from other scientific descriptions. 

Ethnographic interviews, conversations and group discussions with informants, field-notes and participatory observations of folkloric performances are some of the methods used during fieldwork for the present study, September 2009 to July 2010. Initial interpretations of folkloric oral texts began during the fieldwork through transcriptions and later based on examining closely the fieldnotes. Careful investigation into the travel logs and records of social studies by Europeans such as C. T. Beke (M.D.), the D’Abbadie brothers, William Cornwallis Harris (Major), J. L. Krapf (D.D.), C. W. Isenberg, Mansfield Parkyns, etc to supplement the historical perspective of the present folkloric study is also pertinent for two basic reasons: first, to reevaluate the unjust historical relationships of the Oromo in the region under the Showan Amahara rulers since the living accounts of oral tradition cannot fully grasp those historical dynamics two or three centuries back. Second, to underscore the significance of the massive introduction of such social injustices as displacement, socio-cultural, political  and economic oppression and the demographic change that took place thereof, and to investigate the birth of Salale Oromo social banditry and resisitance culture under the new conquering power of Menilik and others later. Some official Chronicles and works of Ethiopian scholars are also considered. 

III. THE POLITICS OF FOLKLORIC ETHNOGRAPHY

1. Setting and Context

Oromia is the largest and richest region in Ethiopia: eighty per cent of the country’s coffee export is from this regional state, which also contributes 65 per cent to the national revenue of the country. Majority of gold and other mineral mining in Ethiopia is in Oromia (Guluma 1998:133) and most of the rivers in the region supply almost all hydro electric power of the country. However, the people live in abject poverty under every regime come and go. While over thousands of Oromo people are languishing in prisons because of their political opinion and ardent resistance against inequities and social injustices, thousands are also dying from curable diseases such as malaria. For fear of persecution, harassment and mass killings, thousands of Oromo flee their country to live on exile in excruciating conditions.

Oromo people’s demand to regain independence they lost to the Ethiopian empire in 19^th century gave birth to popular resistance and social bandit/ry which led to the liberation movement in 1970s staggering to this day hindered by internal and external factors. After the 17 year Derg rule in 1991 a transitional charter was signed by the Transitional Government established the same year based on four basic principles: supremacy of the law, power-sharing, establishment  of just peace, and multi-national democratic state (Mohammed 2007:9). The major objective of the Charter and the Transitional Government was to allow referendum by which the Oromo and others would freely decide their destiny.

Seeing that the Oromo people embraced the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and its objective, the TPLF (Malles Zenawi’s party) started violating terms of the charter and banned OLF’s peaceful political campaign which left the OLF with no option but to boycott the Transitional Government and the election. As oppressors determine the mode of the struggle, so the Oromo struggle for self-determination involved resistance from below for their right to self-determination. Starting from the time of Sahla-Silassie who ruled the Showan Kingdom from 1815 to 1847 and over the Salale, the Salale Oromo also lived the life of serfdom and treated as subjects at their home which made them experience social banditry and intense resistance against intruder and invader before any other Oromo ethnic groups. Contrary to the fact some Oromo members of parliament, the Oromo People's Democratic Organization (OPDO), joined the TPLF-led government to serve the political and economic interest of Ethiopia in Oromia much like the “home guards” that fought alongside the British forces against Mau Mau fighters during the Kenyan people’s struggle for independence from British rule. The OPDO do everything possible today to disintegrate the Oromo struggle for self-determination, instead to reinforce the pluralist political ideology and dismantle the popular resistance which led the people to resort to every form of social banditry and creative resistance to communicate their grievances and support the popular movement.

Notable Salale ethnic heroes who led subsequent social banditries and popular resistances during Haile Silassie, Dergue and now the Tigre-led EPRDF government were Agari Tullu, General Tadassa Beru Kenne, Mulu Asanu and Badhadha Dilgassa, to mention but a few. Their name, heroic deeds and the later consequent executions became the subject of every Salale performer, story teller and fiddler. The Salale are well known among the Oromo and peoples of other regions for their heroism and heroic folksongs which document in great detail the history of Salale resistance against their Orthodox Christian Showan Amhara settler colonizers.

The Salale politico-economic environment

Salale, as North Shawa Zone is generally called, is one of the 18 zones of Oromiya Regional State. Regarding the population distribution of the zone, data from the Public Relations office of the zone indicate that 91% of the population is engaged in agriculture with predominant production of milk and crops for subsistence (Oromiya 2010). The rest of the population engages in different economic activities ranging between trade and craftwork, which is carried out by artisans marginalized as ‘others’. Artisans among Salale are believed to have possessed by evil eye (Serawit 2010; Ege 1996).

In most part of the Salale, wheat is the staple crop and teff and herds of humped cattle are omnipresent. The airy uplands of the Mogor River to the west and Jamma River to the northeast of Slalale, the villages are inhabited by farmers and craftsmen. Most villagers tell narratives of disbandment and recite songs of displacement and revillagization under Amhara monarchical and dictatorial rules. They sing their hope about success in the farm with sounds of exuberant singing. The content of their song vary from social, political and economic to religious chants.

The settlement pattern of the Salale shows that generally the largest and fertile part of Northern Shewa is resided by the Tulama branch of the Oromo since 16^th c (OCTB ), of which the Salale of the Bacho branch are the focus of the present study. The people residing in the highland are predominantly Oromo while those living in the north-east in Jamma and north-west in Abbay valleys (near Warra Jarso district) is inhabited by Amhara. The Salale settlement pattern was delineated by genealogy so much as it was affected by social movements, Orthodox Christian Amhara invasions of the Oromo, and the Islam–Christian war of the 16^th c (OCTB). Some argue the settlement pattern is associated with the Oromo population movement of 16^th c that resulted in the displacement of the Amhara to the rugged and unfavorable part of the rangeland and the Tulama Oromo took hold of the highland and mild area, convenient for agriculture (Ege 1996). This argument leads to the yet unsettled debate as to who first settled in the present North Showan plateau (OCTB   2004; Tsegaye 2003; Sisay 2008;). Currently both the Amhara in the lowland region and the Oromo in the highland inhabit the area. The subject of whether the area was first settled by the Oromo or the Amhara is debatable.

Even if the Oromo are the largest homogenous ethno-national in the north-east Africa, each Oromo ethnic tribe is unique in many aspects. The cultural and dialectal variation accompanied by ecological and geographical disparities are common. Many of the black-soiled Salale plateau is reach wheat-land bordered by forested hills sheltering different species of flora and fauna. Upon the less densely populated, open flat lands lie wheat fields thickly dotted by clusters of windowless mud-walled houses. It is common to see the mud-plastered houses surrounded by stone walls, cactuses and thick eucalyptus trees—the legacy of Menelik II who was said to have imported eucalyptus all the way from Australia for firewood and housing during his reign. Now almost all indigenous trees are overtaken by eucalyptus trees much like the fate of the natives in the face of the Abyssinian socio-political and cultural supremacy.  Orthodox Christian churches built on the top of the hills throughout Salale are surrounded by eucalyptus trees, traditional ritual sites and sacred trees all standing side by side with churches to function the same purpose. 

For over nearly two centuries, Abyssinian rulers have attempted to establish a strong central government that holds the various peoples in Ethiopia to the center. Since the attempt has been based on no mutual respect, free will of citizens and socioeconomic equities, the center could not hold, and things fell apart. Consequently, there has been furious resistance from the oppressed nations and nationalities in Ethiopia, which took the shape of ethnically based rebellions mainly since 1960s. The resistance culture, social systems and cultural history of the Salale also exhibit rebellion and banditry as characteristic strategies of negotiating power between the oppressed and the Abyssinian tyrannical rulers over years.  

Socio-cultural Patterns of the Salale

The etymology of the word Salale, according to available sources, derives from the name of the mountain found on the other side of Girar Jarso to the west of Fiche, the zonal capital (Opsan 2008; OCTB, ibid. p141; Zeleke, ibid p16). The Salale livelihood depends on agriculture and rearing livestock, which Zeleke argues, based on data he obtained from informants, that until they were fully incorporated into the Showan kingdom during the period of Ras Darge (1870s-1900), the Salales’ livelihood was based on animal husbandry (ibid, p24; Ege 1996) with 95% of Orthodox Christian religion presumably following the occupation by the Showan Amhara rulers. According to the Slalae Oromo (oral) history (OCTB 2006; Zeleke, ibid), this Tulama branch of Bacho Oromo has lived in the present area of North (West) Oromia from the time of Minas’s successor Sarsa Dengel (r 1563-1597), also known as Malak Sagad (Zeleke, p3.), when the latter was forced by the Salale to flee to Dambia (Hassen 1994; 1980). However, with such a longstanding history of socio-cultural and political contour of its own, but the issue of the Salale Oromo study has been sidelined. 

Since the time of their encounter, the interaction between the Amhara and the Oromo was characterized by hostilities, which resulted in linguistic, ethnic and socio-cultural mélange of the present-day North Showa Zone, which some understood it to be hibridity and coexistence (Serawit 2010). Knutson (1967) contends that there is a strong Amhara influence exerted on the Tulama Oromo of North Shawa that he labeled the Oromo of the area, borrowing Haberland’s expression “Galla [Oromo] speaking Amhara”.

The cultural and sociopolitical pressure happened following the collapse of the gada egalitarian system, as the influence of the Shawan Orthodox Christian rulers became eminent in 1870s and later. Salale chiefs such as Abba Malle of and Gifty Camme of Amuma, Falle (Ege 1996) became chiefs and allies of Sahle Sillassie, the king of Shawa  (1813–1847), and later, invaders from the northern Showan Amhara added their cultural and sociopolitical heritages to create an ethnic  mélange in the south with the dominant Orthodox culture. Sahle Sillassie is said to use diplomacy to win over the Abichu Oromo, who badly needed his help against their neighbors, particularly the Galan Oromo, whom he defeated in the early 1820s (Ege 1996) and consolidated his hold by founding a number of fortified villages, like Angolalla, in the Abichu territory from where he extended the frontier of Shawa into to the southeast and incorporating the Salale territory in the southwest (Mordechai 1968). 

Where social inequities and injustices prevailed and power imbalance was inevitable, marriage was used as a political instrument to form alliance, to resolve conflicts and to pacify tensions. Informants agree that it was against the Salale gadaa covenant that intermarriage with the Amhara, though still to such a limited extent, was predominantly among the Oromo chieftains and the Amhara overlords. Through such social institutions as intermarriage, guddifacha (adoption, as Oromo subculture) and longstanding interactions, out of both ethnic groups, (Amhara and Oromo), a separate identity referred to as ‘Oromo Geber’ originated with Amharic as their language and Coptic Orthodox Christianity as their religion and christened to be Amhara. Guddifacha is a sub-culture by which the Oromo managed to have more family members other than their own biological family. This inclusiveness of the Oromo through marriage and guddifacha served the Oromo as a cultural resistance in the face of Amhara socio-political and cultural domination and enabled them to survive despite every form of social injustices and inhumane acts of cultural assassination of the Salale Oromo to live as Orthodox Christian Amharas, “to the extent of blurring where the boundary between the Oromo and Amhara culture lies” (Serawit 2010). 

The expression ‘Oromo Geber’, according to the Salale informants, is used to refer to those who were born from Amhara and Oromo families. The informants unanimously contend that the Amahara from the Qolla came to the Oromo in the Dega or Woyna-dega, owing to economic, social and religious interactions, and formed marriage alliance which ultimately resulted in the formation of the ethnic mélange came to be known as ‘Oromo Geber’. Those who belonged to this ethnic faction usually thought it prestigious to be categorized as Amhara while others call them “Galla Geber”—since Galla is an offensive term, lately replaced by “Oromo Geber”. Thinking that such an ongoing phenomenon explains more the shifting historical relationship from hostility to intermarriage and negotiation does not prove the dynamics of the later more aggressive interactions between the Salale Oromo and the Showan Amhara despots. Some would believe the Oromo Geber as “endowed with more identities they inherited from both Amhara and Oromo since they are mixture of the two ethnic groups” (Serawit 2010), which would make sense since they can belong to either of the two during the hurdles of war or live at peace midway between the two.

 Associated with the seminal contributions of Edward Said (1978) on Orientalism,  Anderson (1983, 1991) on nation as a modern imagined community, and Eric Hobsbawm (1983) on the invention of tradition, the theoretical discussions about ethnicity focused on the anti-essentialism debate in eighties and in the first half of the nineties. Instead of the essentialist view of ethnicity as 'isolation', a self-contained immanent cultural island, a natural consequence of primordial ties and timeless shared cultural features the argument that ethnicity is historically constituted has become ‘commonplace’ in contemporary social theory (Alonso 1994; Norval 1996: 59).  Frederik Barth’s (1969) analysis as a ‘situationalist approach,’ claimed ethnicity as a product of interaction and varies in intensity, depending on circumstances instead of  considering ethnic solidarity as primordial in the sense of ‘given from the beginning'. Paris Yeros (1999) has recently stated Barth’s approach constitute three interconnected analyses: the first, emphasizing the importance of the subjective understanding of ethnicity, or the ‘native model’ of ethnicity, held ethnic groups to be categories of ascription and identification by the actors themselves; the second, emphasizing social process, viewed ethnic groups as being generated and maintained for social-organisational purposes; and the third, emphasizing group boundaries and their maintenance, viewed boundaries as socially effective and meaningful” (1999: 110).

 

To argue that the Oromo Geber are manifestations of cultural mixing for they have incorporated both elements of Amhara and Oromo traditional culture would be fallacious since there are still Oromo Geber who have definitely taken side to be entirely Oromo or Amhara, as this was evident particularly during the Ethiopian national election campaign, 2005. Fiche is the administrative centre of the North Shawa Zone of the Oromia Region, located about three km off the main road. Citizens in this old small town are exclusively Amharas and descendants of the servants of the feudal-lords since Ras Darge's rule in1840s and during Haile Sillassie regime. The people are referred to as Zara-Fatti, literally, the illegitimates, by the native Salale Oromos, constituting a small ethnic group of Orthodox Christian Amharas. 

Religion: hybridity/coexistence

Among the Salale too many religious festivals and holidays are observed and villages as well as urban dwellers alike make pilgrimages to holy sites to traditional divinities. From the far away corners of Salale as the days become unbearably hot again until the summer rain will start soon. At the ritual sites, male and female, old and young, Christian and traditional believer join to pray for the timeliness of the rain, for the abundance of the harvest, for peace and wellbeing of the people and cattle. Too many a people go to such religious sites for different personal reasons, however. Harvest and such religious thanksgiving traditional celebrations are determined by lunar phases. That is, phases of the moon are closely watched since virtually the Oromo are constantly aware of the physical world and cosmos around them.

In Salale Orthodox Christian, Islam, and Waaqeffanna, which some erroneously call as Pagan and/or exclusively as Qallu, religious practices and very recently, Protestant religion are functional side by side. With respect to Islam, most place names and Salale tribal names as traced in genealogy bear Muslim names which can be traced to six or seven generations back; e.g., Ali Doro, Ali Dhera, I(n)dirisii, Abdalla, Qasimi, to mention but few place names. However, the fact that Islam as a religion in Salale and in North Showa in general is very minimal may force one to pose the obvious question: is it ‘hybridity and co-existence’, or ‘no-existence’ for Islam as a religion in Salale? And what/why are those Muslim names? Traditional religion in Salale as among the Oromo is practiced since time immemorial; whereas, Islam is believed to be introduced to the area before the 16^th c Ahmed Gragn wars of revolt (1524 – 1543). 

The history of Christianity in the area dates back to the 13^th c with the coming of Abuna Teklehaimanot to establish a Christian center in Debra Libanos, northeast of Salale, in Jmma Valley. According to Tadesse Tamrat (1972) and the hagiography of Teklehaimanot, he was engaged in evangelical activities. During this time however, Christianity was limited to few groups of people and Teklehaymanot was not as such successful in converting large number of non-Christians. Hence, when we evaluate the position of Christianity since then, it was not the religion of the majority. The majority had their own religious traditions though they were referred to as ‘pagans’ who were practicing ‘ba’ed amlko’ (Taddesse 1972). In one memorial inscription on the front wall of the Teklehaimanot church, Dabra Libanos, there is a writing in Ge'ez and Amharic that notes the first church was burnt to ash by the Oromo rebellion. 

It is also common among the Salale to attend Orthodox Christian Church and also to go to the ayana shrines to see the Amhara Orthodox Christian believers come to worship at the same shrines (Serawit 2010). Such a transition (or overlap?) can occur from monotheism to polytheism and vice-versa byway of a hybridity and co-existence between Orthodox Christianity and Oromo traditional religion, Waqeffanna, both claiming to be monotheistic and having their own forms or incarnations of the one Supreme God as ayanas for Waqeffanna and saints/angels for Orthodox Christianity. Hence, the attempt made by Orthodox Christian church in the area to replace Oromo traditional religion seen as polytheism was in vain, or what would be the good of letting one form of polytheism replace another form of polytheism?  The divinities in the Oromo traditional religion and that of the Salale Oromo are described as messengers of the Supreme Being Waqa, who is the Ultimate Source and Sustainer of life and the universe. In popular folk imagery and folk talks, Waqa is masculine. Without Waqa, for the Salale Oromo, nothing endures or makes sense, and in every course of life,  “Waqa is on the tip of their tongue in almost all courses of life to bless or to curse, to express fear or hope, failure or success” (Opsan 2010: 17).

This is a dynamics of religion in practice and how adherents produce meaning from their double allegiance to two different religions in the same region, Orthodox Christianity and Qallu religious practices. The hybrid space is created by societies to negotiate lived realities and power relations that affect the way the two religions are practiced. Serawit (2010) clearly maintains in her new book that in a situation where adherents have to go to both institutions, their adherence to Qallu is secret while their being followers of Orthodox Christianity is publicly disclosed. As a consequence of its exclusivity, however, monotheistic religions have historically displayed less religious tolerance than polytheistic religions. The latter have been able to incorporate the gods and beliefs of other faiths with relative ease; the former can only do so without admitting it and while denying any reality or validity to others' beliefs. In the case of the Salale, polytheism also cuts across the monotheistic borderline which makes it difficult to demarcate both “theisms”. However, the adherents on both sides produce meaning from their double allegiance to two different religions, Orthodox Christianity and Qallu religious practice, by way of hybridity and co-existence.

2. The Self in Folkloric Field Research

To begin with, who is the ‘Other’ anyway?

In this section my attempt is to show how my personal identity as an Oromo, which situated me as an activist ‘insider’ researcher, affected my fieldwork experience. How the dynamics of folklore and resistance culture challenge the ethnographer to produce the comprehensive study of protest folklore and culture of resistance is also explicated.

While I was collecting data in Salale many people told me but anonymously that they only waited to see the ‘Judgment Day’ to come. This conclusive situation speaking bluntly and commenting on the status quo came gradually after many of the intimate conversations. As some mutual trust was established conversations flowed from one topic to the next rather freely, and I found that this was a good opportunity for me to elicit their perceptions of the socioeconomic, cultural and political attitudes in their narrative and folksongs.

In light of this positive exchange among the Salale I worked even harder at disclosing my research objectives and my purpose to clarify my role. A key question one official at the zone put to me why I did not go and study among the Macca Oromo in Wellaga where I was born was actually a challenge. He hinted at the felt social/moral distance enforced by ideological difference. ‘Why did I want to study in Salale?’ and ‘What would I do with my findings?’ were the two most important questions the officials frequently put to me. However, beyond showing the research permits and requesting for additional permits, should I discuss my research objectives and the significance of my study with the officials as an ethnographer?

For me, answering their questions was beyond explaining my particular research project. I rather involved disclosing who I was personally and professionally. Was this not all about (inter-) subjectivity, positionality, beyond ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ and which forced me to disclose any ‘position’  with respect to my work as a researcher and my subjects of study. It was only after they came to know my background as an activist humanist researcher, educator and poet and my subjects commented but allusively the Habasha rule and told their experience under the current EPRDF system through singing songs of grievance and telling stories of social bandit/ry and popular Salale resistance. I attempted to clarify my position through telling my background unequivocally about my family, upbringing, work experience and my purpose for wanting to study Salale folklore and social banditry as resistance culture.

I made clear that I was raised and lived in Macca with values, life experiences and roles similar to their own. My desire to pursue study on Oromo folklore and resistance culture is to explore possible terrains for peaceful struggle, non-violent resistance through investigating the Salale Oromo expressive culture around social bandit/ry. Hence, disclosing my personal background as an Oromo, born and lived among the farming Oromo community in Macca, and telling them that I also belonged to the Jarso sub-clan (like the Warra Jarso of Salale) and discussing the similar dreadful situation of the Macca Oromo as elsewhere allowed the Salale to see me as one of them although I came from Wollaga.

The fact that I chose to work with them to discover more about the Salale folklore, way of life, and the culture of social banditry, placing them in the study in the position of authority gradually won their favor to collaborate. Also that my work would contribute to the public knowledge about Salale Oromo, culture of social banditry and ethnic heroes, their creative resistance culture and history of their popular resistance against the Showan Amhara domination and the current government seemed to encourage their collaboration and trust as they offered to help me learn the social contexts of the songs and narratives of discontentment. They did not jut sing songs or tell stories but they often came to me and said, “I hear that you want some songs” and then proceeded to tell me their experience about certain historical events and stories of a certain ethnic hero or a social banditry. They told when a particular song was ‘first’ sung, who sang it, how they learnt the song, and who taught them, on what festival, how the festival and the song changed overtime and why, and under which regime. The contents, in their words, stories, songs and narratives of lived experiences, the hardships, the pains and sufferings gave me clues that they wanted me to inform the outside world about their situation to speak out their muted voice and search for their stolen stories.

It was with such a strong resentment that they told their stories and sang songs of their sufferings that the Salale were misunderstood by others as to have no culture, language and history of their own other than that of long dominating Showan Amhara Orthodox Christians'. On every occasion, at work places, rituals, shrines and funerals and religious profanations and weddings, it was in a very careful and tactful way that the people took as their captive audience who was among them to hear, record and participate in their lives which helped me to establish independent relationship with individuals as key informants and to uncover intriguing nuances and similarities among local perceptions about institutions and systems throughout the unjust historical relationships with outsiders. 

Down the road to folkloric and resistance ethnography are the challenges if the researcher has a ‘research identity’ and if that research identity shapes the research processes or not. I hope this can awaken more understandings as it provokes more questions and provides more insight into such an activist research. The purpose of this section is however to provide an intimate portrayal of my research identity through discussing the politics and poetics of folkloric and resistance ethnography so much as it is to trace the journey into the dynamic place of my research identity through sharing my filed experience. To do so, I engage in a reflexive approach to recount issues of ‘research identity’ and ‘positionality’.

How can one remain ‘unknowing’ the self in a research field, remain indifferent to one’s research identity or without first understanding the self? ‘Research identity’ is one that fits well one’s way of thinking, cultivates the being, congruent with one’s methodological orientation and substantive research phenomenon. It is the conscious self journeying into the moral and dialogical world of more telling as asking, more creative as critic and one of unfamiliar paths crisscrossing before they take us nowhere. As an activist researcher, the journey I took was first towards knowing an identifiable research identity, the “I” in the field. That was an attempt to look ‘inward’ before I looked ‘outward’ (Lapun 2008), a mental exercise that transcends habitual ways of thinking. This journey would be considered as what Jeniffer Lapun describes as “daunting…but captivating and revealing…can often be isolating, confusing and paralyzing” (2008:4).

The importance of “situating ourselves” in the research relationships incorporates a reflexive consideration of how our positioning affects the knowledge that we produce and our research selves. To Shannon Speed, citing Charles Hale (2008), ‘positionality’ is formulating explicitly activist research alliances, making explicit political commitments, keeping the social dynamics of the research processes open to an ongoing dialogue with the research subjects and “simply taking ‘positioning’ to its logical conclusions” (Hale 2008:231). Folkloric and resistance ethnography is characterized as engaged scholarship and involves innovative methodologies and interdisciplinary theories. Why engaged scholarship? It is because to position oneself at a distance and treat social life as an object to decode rather than entering into the flow and rhythm of ongoing social interaction hinders our ability to understand social practice; hence, militant ethnography.

Militant ethnography, in this regard, is a politically engaged ethnographic practice that allows the researcher to remain active political subject while it also generates better interpretations and analyses of the social reality (Juris 2008).  Militant ethnographic methods driven by political commitment and guided by a theory of practice breaks down the distinction between researcher and activist during the fieldwork. Thus, folkloric and resistance/militant ethnography is collective reflection and analysis by an activist researcher about the culture of resistance practices, processes, power relations and networks communicated by the oppressed cultural group—folklore being an “artistic communication in small groups” (Ben-Amos 1972).

To recount the activist field research experience, as a militant ethnographer would do, through poetic restorying of the journey is to unparalize self, liberate the research identity. It is to defend the often avoided, unaccepted and misunderstood self in the research field overruled by the objectivist mainstream ideology as unknown subject, as vagrant or as being in the middle of the road. Hence, the journey is dialogically engaging, emotionally perplexing and intellectually challenging—wander into a journey to a research identity is equally exploratory.

Here is the background to my reflexive field account. By axiomatic assumptions of activist research, i.e., the ontological and epistemological paradigms, no researcher can be neutral and no research unbiased (Hale 2008; Brown & Strega 2005). The research identity includes how the researcher positions self, an aspect of which is ‘positionality’ (Calli, Ray & Mill 2003 cited in Lapun, p4). How the researcher is seeing and interpreting data is equally important to what data to choose to collect, which is determined by positioning the researching self against the theoretical and methodological backgrounds. Positioned research identity is not a static entity but temporal, contextual and shifts with experience throughout our career as a researcher. Hence, reflexivity is a method by which the shifting self is critiqued, shaped and its intersections are relocated and/or deconstructed as a researcher/ethnographer. My research identity is thus re-storied through poetic reflexivity, and narrative recount is not a finished, completed self or a “hardened mold that can no longer shift” (Lapun, p5).

In this regard, the ethnographic self in the folkloric fieldwork is still open for investigation. I reflect on my own folkloric fieldwork experience in Salale, Oromia/Ethiopia, for my PhD dissertation research, and the problems encountered as a result of expectations conflicting with realities. My experience can be evaluated on two grounds. On the one hand, as an ‘insider’ ethnographer, I am an Oromo with the same ethnic background speaking the same Oromo language, except for dialectal variation, share the same historical and socio-cultural background with the people, and moral and religious practices one can observe in Salale day-to-day life experience. On the other hand, as an outsider (or was I?), I evaluated my positionality and interrogated the ideology underlying the notion of objectivity in light of its implication for my research. Hence, the self is a significant variable in the folkloric field. In the present study, I examine my fieldwork experience with the Salale community, Oromia/Ethiopia, as undertaken in the field, I presume, identity “re- identification” mediated through some (sub)cultural, religious and/or linguistic relocation.

Traditionally, it was believed that folklorists do research in their own cultural group; as Zora Neal Hurston did in the Deep South (USA), and anthropologists do research by going to a foreign land, a foreign culture, in which case, the line cutting between same/different, familiar/strange, and self/other was thick. The line also cut across the disciplines as folklorists study arts or the lore of the society while anthropologists study the culture as a whole. Such a dichotomy seems to have faded away nowadays owing to the interdisciplinary nature of fields of studies and, consequently, such an academic border-crossings have become inevitable. 

As it happened to me in Salale, beyond the expectations of the ‘insider’ ethnographer, there are other factors that disrupt the fieldwork process, which could be quite frustrating early on. The state power and local officials congruently play major role to impede or facilitate for the fieldwork research and data collection practices. With a letter of support from Addis Ababa University, and the Oromia Regional State, President Office, it was still not a direct path for me to go to the community and conduct my field research. The local officials had authority to issue or not to issue a research permit, which took me nearly a month going from office to office from one zonal, district and local (tribal) council official ‘protecting the subject of research’/the community to another official purportedly doing the same. The first practices of the ethnographic fieldwork, namely, to establish trust with officials and the community, was the major challenge I ever experienced as an ‘insider’/’outsider’ ethnographer.

The dynamics of the self in the field was affected by those factors which enforce the need to consider “reidentification” of the researcher’s identity as the identity of the ethnographer is interrogated. Such a challenge crops up when the ethnographer who speaks the same language and of the same socio-cultural background interviews his people and records their answer to those questions he (partially) knows the answer for (or was expected to know as a native himself or herself) rather than answering the questions. Having passed through such several passages of rites imposed by officials and the community in the field research, the challenge of putting the research question to the research subjects and expecting answer(s) was very significant to me as an ‘insider’/‘outsider’ ethnographer working resistance and folkloric research in my culture. Equally important challenge to me was that the officials, not my research subjects, often asked me why I did not conduct the research in Wollega, the Macca tribal group to which I belong (or where do I belong?). Let me explain it as follows.

In this folkloric/ethnographic field research in Salale, at least two challenges were most daunting. First, the research question(s) I put to my people rather than answering them myself as a native Oromo was more methodologically and theoretically demanding and tended to be more thought-provoking than I thought it to be. (Example, what is the message in this song (a particular protest folksong))? When/where is it performed?) The second question equally alerted me about the “threat of tribalism” among the Oromo at this historical juncture, while the (ethno)nation is engaged in the a struggle for self-determination (or is it not?). While studying “Oromo folklore and resistance culture” in Salale if I was asked why I did not do the same among the Macca Oromo of Wollega (where I was born), it could be startling, really as it was. If this was an indicator for a felt ‘threat of tribalism,’ whether it exists or not, I had to rethink of alternative identity, i.e. ‘re-identification’ as a possible immediate panacea for my purpose and to heal such an internal seizure.

Even if “both localism and tribalism are normal expressions of one’s quest for one’s own identity” (Megalommatis, 2008), this can be an indicator, so much as a problem prevalent in the leadership of the Oromo liberation movement, then Oromo ethnography is also trapped by such a negative local/tribal danger of regionalism within the same (ethno)nation. However, my answer to the officials and to my research subjects differed and not this long, detailed and analytical (or was it?). I was not comfortable with such a question and felt adamant as any ‘insider’/’outsider’ ethnographer would; it was a nudge for me, however, to beware if the same would happen in my research subjects. Contrary to my fear, despite all odds and suspicions about my membership to a rival political party in the region (to which I was/am not a member), but the hospitality, receptive and sympathetic attitude of the community humbled me. The Salale are very loving, caring and accommodating people as long as they felt secured and all is well so much as they are rebellious when they knew their life is at stake.

The rhetoric and strategies of local political activities are veiled and that of the day-to-day religious exercises are equally less inclusive. The search for truth is obstructed in many ways and, to repeat Camus (1960, 1995) "I have never believed in the power of truth in itself. But it is at least worth knowing that when expressed forcefully truth wins out over falsehood" (p8ff). My expectation was, however, a fieldwork in one’s own cultural group familiarizes the researcher with many socio-cultural and religious institutions and local political processes/activities. It is equally important that the ethnographer working research in his or her own culture interrogates the positionality of the self and reconsiders its relationship with ‘other’ (but who is the ‘other?’) in the field and the dynamics of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ reflexivity or intersubjectivity. The issue of negotiating power, constructing and performing the self among the research subjects is still another aspect of my fieldwork experience on Oromo folklore and resistance culture in Salale and to document it in its social setting.

In this section, I examined my folkloric approaches to the study of folklore and resistance culture among the Salale Oromo of the Tulama branch from September 2009 to July 2010 and explored the negotiations necessary for the move between the role of fieldworker and my identity, and between the folkloric ethnography and the conflicting local political ideologies. Through the research process, I interrogated the ideology underlying the notion of objectivity considered my identity and evaluated my position as an insider/outsider. The implication of being an ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ at the same time in an ethnographic field research is self-evident. As to be argued in this study, the self is a significant variable in the field since practices in the field will reflect the scholarly paradigms and theoretical positions of the fieldworker’s discipline at any given moment in time. This fieldwork process involves the question(s) of ethnographic identity, that is, “who is the other?” the fieldworker or the subject of fieldwork research, the problem to be further recounted in the section next?

IV. THE POETICS  OF FOLKLORIC ETHNOGRAPHY

1. Restorying the ethnographic journey

Through poetry and stories, here the ethnographic poetics (poetics of ethnography?) and politics of studying Salale Oromo folk literature is examined. Poetry as part and parcel of the expressive culture of the Oromo, especially the Salale widely known for their performative culture of folksongs and story-tellings, is a creative means of communicating grievance and repression, a thesis-antithesis dislocation along the journey to nowhere, singing nostalgic songs of home by one who is not at home when at home. I presented in this study only few verses and stories out of dozens I recorded on various occasions or recited to me from memory during my field research (example, Gurmu B; Ragassa B.). As a displaced poet myself, a vagrant bard, an insurgent folklorist, I study the people whose pain I share, my people whose stories are stolen and voices are muted. Gurmu of Shararo and Ragassa of Dedde Xiggi, among others, are special in that they are most creative reciters and story tellers and what they have, they have it in memory in great abundance starting with early days of Haile Silassie (1931-1974), and before.

Displacement, Estrangement and Nostalgia

Such a woeful tale of not to be at home in one’s home is a Nietzschean thesis of estranged self, the antithesis of which, “no sooner uttered, is an ideology for those wishing with a bad conscience to keep what they have. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (Figueroa, 2009:6). I echo the woe of such an “estranged self” of the displaced Salale Oromo as in this Salale text of grief and longing, 

xuqanii nu kaasanii

biyyaa nu calaasani

xuxxuqaan biyyee kaasaa

xuqaan kanniisa kaasaa

maal abbaa isaa nu xuqu

nuyyuu awaal-diigessaa

They hassled us, stirred us

not to live in peace and serve our home.

to pound the silent ground rouses dust

to rock an idle beehive awakens swarm

why They do this unto us? let Them know

we too are wild beasts, gravediggers—

mild at peace, wild at war

(text 2)

The same can be reiterated as in the Salale ironic view of home—"Mana hin jirruu, ala hin jirru"/“At Home We are Already Not at Home” (Gurmu B., my Informant) recapped next: 

at home we are already not at home!

dozens of such songs to sing
beyond imagination
many unheard voices in every humanity
when nostalgia is beyond mankind.

and as time passes
one's father's funeral song
mixes with a love song....

in the history of our displacement
we left our home
we left our land
only we took with us our memory and misery!

when we became refugees
in our own homeland
intruders were "settlers"
natives were "wanderers"

and they gave us one common name
and they gave us one common cause
so we were ONE! given the DIFFERENCE

(if any) in the face of Death.

when we crossed the border between
to this distant land of Bale, Arsi, Jimma
we came to understand
we were already ONE
having suffered together,
and a common suffering
is greater than a common happiness,
for it makes us ONE!

yet, being at home,
we are already not at home
we said: mana hin jirruu, ala hin jirru!

(text 3)

For the native who no longer has a homeland, it is meaningless to say ‘I have a home’ and so songs/poetry and stories become means of escaping alienation and seeking refuge into a sanctuary for struggle.  In the end, when it comes to eviction, imprisonment and murder, hence, the native is not even allowed to live in his song so much as the poet or the lyricist in exile.

The warp and woof of the Salale narratives is made of the obscurity and glimmer of hope in their daily life as they soldier on resistance against those two neo-Abyssinian totalitarian forces: one, to maintain the Tigrayan control of power over Oromia and other regions for long; and another, of the same stock, to restore the Solomonic monarchic rule toppled by the Derg regime in 1974, and to rejuvenate it under the Amhara-led Abyssinian supremacy. Both forces have common goal of imposing the Abyssinian hegemony on Oromo and Oromia, the region covering nearly more than half of the total population of the country, and exploiting its natural and human resources and debilitating the economy of the people, not to mention other external pressures on the region as a base for strategic surveillance and war against terrorism based in the Horn.

The Showan Amhara and Tigre tyrannical rulers  have been engaged in an age long historical conflict about who was/is to lead the ‘southern march’ and incorporate Oromia and other peoples to the south and accomplish by force the ‘nation building’ project. The expansionist mission began by Sahle Sillassie in 1840s, while swiping the Salale, was accomplished by Menelik in 1890s following the European power ploy of the “scramble for Africa.” Due to proximity to the Shawan Kingdom, the Salale were at risk first and foremost throughout history, the antipathy that marks their resistance culture.

The Salale have carefully knitted into their narratives those invasive experiences of war of conquest and its aftermath during Sahle Sillassie, Menelik’s invasions and later. The tales of cultural resistance about the two rival religious institutions, namely, the Coptic Orthodox Christianity, religion of the state, and the traditional Oromo religion, Waqeffanna, are kept in the memories of the old Salale Oromo storytellers, such as Gurmu B. (age, 78), Regassa B. (92), among others, and Tolcha (95) and Ijara (92). They recount but bitterly the outrageous experience of displacement, evictions and lynching under Haile sillassie’s overlords and later under the 17 year brutal Derg rule followed by the present Tigre-led authoritarian rule.

Such poetic articulation of veracity affects the ethnographic self and the concept of ethnographic reflexivity rapidly to change with the changing understanding of those we represent in our study. Such a politics of field research directly affects the method of obtaining data and also the underlying theories of the project which also undergo significant change before methods of research would acknowledge the identity of the fieldworker. Issues of identity and reflexivity, boundary and power, authority and legitimacy have been affecting our academic research. In their article titled “The Self in fieldwork: a methodological concern” Beverly Stoeltje and co-authors (1999) maintain that changes to the nature of questions concerning legitimacy, authority and location of the ethnographer and developments in the academy of diaspora, displacement, feminism, race, added to the growing number of practitioner in the fields have affected methods and theories for folklorists and anthropologists alike (1999:158). This dynamics of ethnographic field research coincides with what came to be known as “historicity” of the ethnographer, i.e., the  researcher in the field with one’s own “cultural baggage” and seeing the subject(s) of the research with own ethnographic lens.

The motivation for an analysis of folkloric and resistance culture can take a variety of forms. However, the desire for more information might be altruistic as we learn that 40, 000 babies die of starvation each day in developing countries of which Ethiopia is among the countries below poverty line. In a country with such an abundant natural and human resource as Ethiopia, but resources debilitated by corruption, nepotism, favoritism under the semblance of totalitarian government, hence, social injustices and inequities are orders of the day and resistance is also inevitable with its multi-facades. A researcher interested in studying the resistance culture and folklore of the oppressed faces challenges and the problem of what to select from the totality of human experiences in the field as he is equally challenged by predisposed literatures.

In such a song of desolation performed by Naggassa Abdi, a celebrated Salale fiddler:

nan deema bariitee

nan bula yoo dhiitee

halkan ka’ee boo’a

nami bultiin miitee

the dawn is near for me on the long trek

and to sojourn, if weary, at dusk

one sits upright over night to whine

to woe wretchedness, to lament being, wretched

(text 4)

the Salale have confronted fundamental socio-historical issues of the Oromo in their folksongs and narratives as they did through violent resistance which is often belittled to banditry by mainstream historians. Their songs are consistently engaged in the depiction and critiques of social and political inequalities. That is, through the deconstruction and articulation of ‘subjectivity’/‘captivity,’ folk artists turned what is a mere ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ or ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ into ‘objectivity’/‘freedom’. The aesthetic presence in the oral poetry above by Naggasa Abdi the fiddler and the ‘phenomenalization of the poetic voice’ render it objective articulation of the real life situation of the people. Here, to ask as Edward Chamberlin does, “Do we believe the singer or the song, the teller or the tale?” (Chamberlain 2003:21) may not do any justice or may be misleading. It is only believe it and not; not believe it or not! They still sing with resentment about their ritual sites desecrated, sacred trees destroyed and religious leaders converted and humiliated and their home deserted.

Those studies conducted on the Salale, and the Oromo in general, by travelers, missionaries, and military officers in 1840s and later accompanied Menelik’s expedition (Bolatovich 1897/1900 Seltzer 1993) throughout Oromoland to the dawn of the 20thc, regardless of their motives, would offer countless examples that demand to look at cultures misinterpreted, ignored in the past, or studies that paved the way toward those still open for exploration (de Salvaic, 1901; Cetrulli, 1922). The present study is such an attempt to investigate closely the folkloric and resistance culture of the Oromo, particularly the Salale, so far ignored and/or misinterpreted.

 

If we accept the view of culture of folklore held by Ethiopian and Ethiopianist scholars those days with the Abyssinian cultural mentality of superiority, it becomes more impassable today to discover all there is to know about any one group of people other than the one they came to know and adopt as superior, i.e. the Orthodox Christian Abyssinians, as exalted and all encompassing cultural entity, by sheer sentimental view of ‘Others’ as lowly. That is to say, the Salale Oromo culture vis-à-vis the Showan Amhara Orthodox Christian culture seemed heathenish to the outsiders and supposedly needed the good will of the intruders to civilize the native practicing traditional religion and social systems. No native human creature living as a cultural group can be untouched by culture. The decision what aspect of human life to study, what to include or exclude in the analysis of culture is but based on the background and purpose of the researcher. Problems tend to encounter in the field research are also caused by the researcher’s epistemological and ontological bewilderment or scholastic observance. 

As the Salale Oromo community has had a deep-rooted tradition of religious ethnicity and socio-cultural organization, Orthodox Christianity did not impact to its base and influence their traditional religion. Through hybridization and co-existence (and no-existence, e.g., Islam?) (Serawit 2010), Orthodox Christianity and traditional religion have been practiced side by side for over two centuries in North Showa. Perhaps because the Showan kingdom conquered the Oromo, the largest ethnic group to the south, its socio-cultural influence is not deep rooted as its political influence among the Salale.

When the Salale were forced to move from their home forced by Haile Sillassie warlords, elders say that they moved along with their cattle on the long journey to Bale and Arsi for months and to other regions they thought relatively harmless. The flight was a fight for the Salale, a passive resistance they practiced almost throughout the successive Ethiopian regimes singings such songs of flight:

Kuulle dhale

iyya-andaaqqoo

iyya-andaaqqoo gara boodaa

siifan dahabe

Lafa Abbaa koo

Lafa Abbaa koo kan dhalootaa

Kuulle, my cow, delivered

she delivered at dawn on the road

or toward the crack of dawn

I missed my Father Land

because of you oh, neftanya

my Father Land I was born to own and to protect

(text 5)

Such songs of fury, full of resentment and agony caused by forced internal migration and displacement are common today in Salale work songs, religious songs and other songs implicitly communicating grief, dissatisfaction and grievance. In the song above, my informant Gurmu said, it was unfortunate that expectant women also delivered on the way to nowhere while the family was forced to leave their home and journeying their way onto a no-return. And so did cows, goats or sheep and pack animals. The Salale hold their history in such a high regard and it is the oldest members of the tribe who know most of the history and recall and narrate verbatim. Young people can also learn the history but only gradually as they mature and progress through each of the life-stage groups.

The Salale also value cattle as sources of food, fuel, trade, medicine and rituals. Cattle added to farming have given the Salale their traditional mixed farming life style (Ege 1996). A man with more number of cattle is a more respected man. The Salale kill cattle only for a special occasion such as holidays, marriage, rituals and when a special guest visits since they believe that cattle originally was given to them  by Waqa (God). The tale of Ate-Lon, the totem of Atete, the cow revered as a symbol of fecundity in the family and used in rituals is said to have swallowed the Oromo book of wisdom reveals the reason for highly revering cattle as a supernatural entity. There are seers called moortuu, fortunetellers who ‘read’ moora, the outer cover of the stomach   of the animal killed for a ritual purpose and foretell good or bad omen to the man or woman performing the ritual or for eschatological purpose to foresee the fate of the human soul in its relation to death, heaven (iddoo dhugaa) and earth (iddoo sobaa). That is, cattle have a horoscopic value as they have eschatological values to appease the spirit of the ancestors.

Issues of Salale mass displacement, flight, and lynching during Haile Sillassie’s longest reign and under the Derg are reiterated to implicitly and cautiously comment the present. Songs about dozens of lynching, one such adversity of the three brother ‘rebels’ same time same place, and of forced exile or flight and mass displacement occupy most of the folkloric ethnographic field of the Salale. The Salale bard or minstrel has it that while the displaced tills the land of the dead and sows coerced...etc, the nation is at war!
That no convoys and heavy armed military on street does not prove peace!
Factors that contribute to the complexity may vary from region to region. However, in Africa, a statesman comes to power, often after severe blood shed, and power is once in his grip he is there for decades...so long as his party and CIA needs him there as an icon, for extra CIA power ploy in Africa!
See, not the People, but the Party first! TPLF's Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia is the case in point. Who cares he is there for three decades when the peoples are tied up in handcuffs and shackles to protect democracy and enhance development, as the story goes and ends tragically with sad characters languished by alsmost severe poverty?the seed of hatred in despair,  s/he also harvests it singing but softly songs of war and peace, love and hate, hope and fear and such songs of gods and goddesses to appease or to cause wrath. The Oromo historical war songs, heroic songs of banditry and rebellion, curses and swears are working examples of such polarities of the folkloric ethnographic self to be discussed in this study.

Social Bandits, Ethnic Heroes

Bandits, revered as ethnic heroes "steal from their fellow men. Yet they are regularly subjects of folksongs…In these outlets they are presented as folk heroes despite their crimes," which constitute the bandit-hero-phenomena (Curott and Fink, 2008). Why people perpetuate mythical stories about bandits or sing songs and praise them and, perhaps a more important question still, why a society would glorify bandits, what the romanticizing of bandits might tell us about the way people relate to their powerlessness is astounding. Social bandits like Robin Hood are a universally familiar type of folk heroes belonging to remembered history as distinct from the official history of books. They robbed from the rich to give to the poor. Such bandit myths have an appeal wider than their native environments and have the power to move us even today.

The study of social bandit or brigand is the subject of Eric Hobsbawm's study that social bandits are peasant outlaws whom the state regard as criminals. However, they remain within peasant society and considered by their people as heroes, avengers, and fighters for justice and leaders of liberation (Hobsbawm 1959; 1969, 2000). This relation between the ordinary peasant and the rebel seen by the state as outlaw and robber came to be a significant field of study as popular forms of resistance. Social banditry is a widespread phenomenon that has occurred in many societies throughout recorded history. Though Hobsbawm termed social banditry as a form of "pre-historic social movement" it still exists as evidenced by piracy, street gangs, trade in illegal drugs and organized crimes. According to Hobsbawm's thesis social bandits, considered by the state as outlaws, were individuals living on the edges of rural societies by robbing and plundering.

The song praising Asafa Sharo Lammi, the Salale ethnic hero living in Kuyyu (Dhaye),

yaa Asafa Sharo Lammi

duuba nama ilaalti nammi

oh, Asafa Sharo lammi

your back does observe your enemy!

(text 6)

is an instance of the public support for social bandits and that they are often seen by ordinary people as beacons of popular resistance. Ironically, in many such instances the Salale Oromo historical bandits were actually in league with the forces of reaction and yet they have been portrayed as defenders of the oppressed. When the most feared rebel leader Badhadha Dilgassa of Qarre Tokke was surrounded by the EPRDF troops in 1994 in Mogor Valley and shot himself to avoid captivity, the Salale sang with resentment,

yaa Badhoo kiyyaa

maaltu hammaannaan gante hiriyyaa

oh my dear Badho

how on earth you let down your comrades

(text 7)

Hence, to study banditry we need to look at both the heroes of the myths and the mythmakers, the heroes of the folksongs and the performers who to varying degrees have created these heroes.

Despite their longtime exposure to the hostile relationship with their Showan Amara despots and domination by the Coptic Orthodox Christian culture, the Salale sense of pride and self-conception remained fueled by their view of themselves as warriors. Throughout the history of their rebellion almost always misconstrued and sidelined to be non-nationalistic,  the Salale  have ethnic heroes to look up to like General Tadassa Birru, Agari Tullu and his two brothers, Mulu Asanu, Baqala Badhadha and Badhadha Dilgassa, to mention but a few. Contrary to the fact, the notable Menelik warlord, Ras Gobena Dachi, is considered to be a Quisling, a traitor, among the Oromo in general and the Salale in particular. The following is a popular elegy about the execution of Agari Tullu and his two brothers said to be sung by their mother recounting their heroic exploits and exalting the ethnic hero to the level of Waaqa:

yoo utubaa dhaabani

samaayit' jigen se'ee

yoo wadaroo hidhani

Waaqat' gad bu'en se'ee

Agarii yaa Agarii

edaa guyyaa keet' ga'ee

Salaaleen cidha ba'ee

seeing them erect a wooden pole

I thought the sky falling

seeing them tie a leather cord

I thought God descending

oh, Agari, my Agari

your day has come, your wedding day

for Salale to sing to dance and celebrate

(text 8)

This inspires my poetic reflexivity of the folkloric ethnography of Salale social bandit/ry, particularly commemorating the execution of Agari Tullu, the Salale Robin Hood:

aching memories

of threading rebellion—

if you forget

the earth you tread cannot forgive

if you remember

the stars you reckon cannot outlive

you before you learn to shuffle your wounds.

Agari Tullu is not a mythic Robin Hood

of the Sherwood Forest

but a real seed geminated in the fertile Salale soil

of popular resistance! a living memory of social bandit/ry.

as we make our ways to birth

if we all make our ways to death,

death is singularly the same

Agari came

stood before the flame 

Jima and Hirko followed

the river of rebellion they rode

before we learn

to untie our gird

uncover our wound

the mother of the three rebels sang:

oh charitable waves of Mogor

hospitable caves of Jamma

radiant eyes of Waaqa

see me, feed me residual chalice of their death

give me commemorative crust of their birth…

stuff it back into my womb

that it shall never carry a hero/heroine again

oh, Dagam…(yaa lammii koo) my people!

Monday, Dagam market day,

is said a ghost day

shadow of death hid our indigence

spit of foam filled us with militant bubbles

tossed another river of spade

printed our domestic scar red

in the colony of iron fist

on the mysterious seat of aging Dagam Mount

under the foot of the bridal look of Mount Ilen

came thrilling voices

echoing waves

and hooves of wild horses

of Tadassa Birru, Mulu Asanu,

Baqqala/Gurre, Sharo Lammi

Badhadha Dilgassa

which no bristle could not hold.

when gods dropped iron

under bleached torn sky

Hirko fell lynching flinching

as a coward

he fell as another falling star

in thunder rain stormed

to the ground

he was late, mossy unlike a rolling stone

as no hurry into a disorganized death—

he mourned the residual fresh death

of his people (not his own to this time)

took Ayyaa’s salute to Abba

storied her sterile face of agony

to retell the stories, feed the hungry  

woven eyes beyond the tides

he was late for a while

picking faces, smiles, songs,

praises of lovers and mistresses. 

obliged—lynched twice

to redeem once the oppressed

died a new death

against the will of law

on Salale land

our rebellion is unpunctuated

rumored coward mourners:

by birth and death of Salale rebels

new death is a new birth

to this day

into this museum of Poverty

into this gallery of Civility.  

(text 9)

This poem draws on the story Gurmu B. (my Salale informant, 78) told me in 2010 about the execution of the Salale Oromo rebels by Haila Sillassie warlords and local officials in Salale, particularly the three sons of Tullu of Lemman: Jima, Hirko, and Agari, same time same place in 1960s at Dagam town.

Apart from such poems that are purely occasional or emotional in character, the majority of Salale Oromo poetry are heroic. Reference is frequently made more to ethnic heroes than to clans and lineages, especially in poems dealing with warfare. The poems rarely show any explicit conception of the issue at stake in the real life situation of the people than allusions to the past incidents used only to indirectly communicate the present grievances. Allusions to single incidents and achievements are common. Heroic style of the poem is well matched with dance and the dramatic stick-fight show in a menacing theatrical way amidst call and responses on occasions. It arouses emotions beyond the socio-cultural, religious or linguist boundary one is bound to. The real situations the poems imply correspond to the past and present socioeconomic and political realities the Salale and the Oromo at large have prevailed.

Among my subjects, in Salale, were elderly adults, religious or ritual chiefs, and my relationships with the Salale youth was most productive and widely covered the work songs, songs of horse-riders, nuptial songs, songs of religious profanations and love songs on almost all contexts. The youth were in focus of local officials and live under the surveillance of peti-local officials in villages. However, they knew how to address the social problems they thought common that does not tell official from the ordinary public.  They sang songs of a horse-rider or misplace a lullaby alluding at someone they knew as a ‘double-stander,’ an imposter:

bakka morma-lameen rafu malee

hin rafu jedhii didi

hururuu! hururuu mucaa nana

bakka morma-lameen nyaatu malee

hin nyaadhu jedhii didi,

hururuu! hururuu mucaa nana

hush, hush hush my child

resist to sleep anywhere else

than where morma-lamee sleeps

resist to eat anywhere else

than where / what morma-lamee eats

hush, hush, hush my child

(text 10)

where they repeatedly stressed on “resist to sleep”  and “resist to eat” convey the core meaning of ‘resistance,’  ‘defiance,’ and that a nursery song is no compatible song at a workplace; it is intentionally misplaced to a different context, of soothing a child to sleep. The consistent presence of the youth in my fieldwork at work places, profanations, weddings and cattle-herding led me to consider the importance of folksongs, contexts and performance and their implications of the pressure the local people also live in.

There were my key informants, youth, adult, elder, men and women who helped me to establish a respectable place in the community and who could also confirm in way or another, that my research commitment was genuine. These people also made especial efforts to ensure that I was safe while moving from village to village and the officials too strictly followed up my daily relationships, interviews, interviewees and encounters through their security agents in every tribal council. In Shararo, 49 miles northwest of the capital, for example, almost every day after I came home back from my fieldwork I sat with Gurnu B (78) outside his shop where I would sit with him and had long conversations about many topics as he could sing songs or recite, or tell stories in relation to almost every incident in his life. I could establish a good rapport with Gurmu as he was visually impaired and almost always spent his time at his shop sitting and guiding his family buying and managing skins and hides.

Once Gurmu was recounting his own life experience as a poor young man to which he sang this song to signify the callous nature of colonial power and its divisive nature along ethnicity, class and gender:

dur yeroo dhirsi qotuu

niitiin meeftuuf’ footuu

enyut’ baatee

eenyut’ nyaatee

lubbuun lubbuu hin caaltuu

in the beginning, when Man plowed

and Woman span and hoed

who was Master

who was Slave

no one soul better; nor one bitter

(text 11)

In the song, the poetic voice imaginatively enters the past, dur, into the ‘natural world’ where all is equal and sacred and, in so doing, is able to register and articulate its claim for justice against the present patriarchal and oppressive state formation. Intercalated between lines and time spans, the singer impressionistically recalls events whose relation to the present remains oblique and unsaid.  Thus the singer (bard) remains safe isolated from the myriad of events around, protected behind the time’s cart as dur (in the beginning) whereas the focus is to critique the present as time enforces the need for a certain cohesive unity that the surrounding universe seems to lack. Thus the song is a reminder of something important that insists on imposing itself on the old man as he is at present wholly dependent on his wife and young children, which is a rhetorical distance or aesthetic mirage he created rather than to articulate it as here and now.

The song is as much about the remote past, before the colonial experience, as about the reciter’s obsession with the present, and the shape it takes in the singer’s subjectivity. His obsession eventually settles on the immediate practices, on the day to day life activities which fill his songs and stories with mystery and sensuality. In the song above, Gurmu recounted the history of his people suffered under Haile Sillassie’s divide-and-rule policy and the consecutive regimes.

At one point Gurmu heard a customer complaining with his daughter, a storekeeper, about her mishandlings, at which Gurmu later recited,   
                                       

garaan tan abbaa;

ilkaan tan ambaa.

gut is private;

tooth is public

(text 12)

to comment on her impoliteness to the customer.      

           

The recitation is revealing because it also describes quite adequately the Salale’s customarily subdued but unavoidable covert observation of everyday life experience. It is to mean smile, sell a smile cheap, and you buy hides (and skins) at same cheap price. This opposes what Opsan Moreda heard one Salale old man saying on settling disputes between spouses: afaan tolanii garaa baduurra / garaallee tolanii afaan baduu wayya, meaning, better to be soft-hearted and remain humane / than be empathic in words and callous in action (Opsan 2010:11).

The Salale youth are well known for stick-fighting which is nowadays categorically banned. On one profanation of the St Marry at Kurfa Janka Nagawo, near Shararo, in May 2010, I attended the youth dancing and singing brandishing their heavy sticks, which, at one point, struck me on the head (by mistake) as I was busy recording with the performer. The police, having observed the accident, interrupted the youth-group to put down their sticks and burned the sticks on the spot. The youth were annoyed with what happened since they have no more power now barehanded as they are and cannot defend themselves and also cannot fit into the dance style normally accompanied with their stick. They believe stick on such occasion is one of other tools accompanying the traditional dancing. The infuriated youth immediately composed the following verse to jokingly but harshly criticize the police for their controlling act:

daanyaa har’aa dabblleen kudhanii

maal balleechinaan shimala keenya gubanii

poolisiin duruu nama sobaa

ol galchee alangeen ciibsee nama gobaa

authorities today, cadres are dozens

why burn our stick ceremonially

police are hypocrites

they only know shutting in and  flogging

(text 13)

To carry a stick is nowadays equally provocative to the police in Salale as carrying an unwarranted armament since the Salale youth are well feared stick-fighters and can attack the armed police with mere sticks in a group. The Salale folklore is as such replete with tales of their fighting with incredible fearlessness in the force of enemies carrying modern weapon with such a primitive weapon, i.e., stick they make out of a tender but dry eucalyptus tree. The act of the word ‘gobuu’ meaning ‘to beat’ or ‘to strike’ ranges from punishing for a wrong doing, or attacking someone to avenge or defend oneself in such a physical compromise, which the Salale patriarchy accepts it to be manlike to beat an enemy or an intruder and protect oneself and one’s family.  Salale boys getting older have different life-group of their respective age-sets which they construct cooperative work, horsemanship and stick fighting. Traditionally, two Oromo boys join to form a fraternity, i.e., waa'ila, brothers in vow; so much as Salae girls make sorority, addooyyee, life-long sisters in vow which both groups manifest on their wedding day, hunting, rituals and profanations and expressed through nuptial and work songs. The Salale youth are no exception.  By exercising the virtues of obedience, honesty, wisdom and fairness to their society, the Salale consider themselves to be respected. Hence, these are their pride and one should exhibit those characteristics in public to be well respected. Besides, the girl's dignity is in her remaining virgin and chaste until her marriage and women's pride lays in the number of children she has, how hardworking she is, if she helps her home and her neighbor and whether she is an obedient and faithful wife to her husband and to the clan.

2. Negotiation and resistance

There is a sense of nostalgia that pervades in their songs: nostalgia for space of stability and unity or lack of it. Even if the Showan Amhara hegemonic rule in the region made the dream of stable and unified pan-Oromo resistance impossible, it also made the wish for its fulfillment unavoidable as it fueled the desire for resistance in the subaltern/oppressed. The Salale told stories and sang songs in praise of the rivers and prairies/grassland and mountains and plains and springs and their land they believed for ages indisputably theirs. The poor widow whose son was martyred following his father at the war front during the five-year Italian invasion and later upon the confiscation of her land by Haile Sillassie’s warlords she chanted in anguish,

lafa badiin hin oolle

yaa ilma koo

Sidaama gabbarree

yaa ilmoo koo, eessan seenaa

yaa ilmoo garaa masheenaa

oh, my boy  

I pledged you for land but in vain

we lived in servitude (of Amhara), in disdain

my son, where are you on earth

my only begotten son, empty is my hearth

(text 14)

Ragaassaa B. of Dedde Xiggii in Salale recited this song on January 14, 2010 when we sat in his homestead talking about the ritual site and the sacred tree (adibaarii) nearby his home but now empty and desecrated as the Orthodox Church, Ba’ala Wold, was planted instead during Hailee Sillassie regime. Lamenting the loss of the native land and the tradition, and above all, human lives, there is resistance and negotiation in the poetic voice.  Not to lose land to the hands of the Amhara settlers, the natives were forced to join the defense force recruited by the local officials. False promises about maintaining land to the tillers and rewards after the war were deluding to the people.  This resulted in an utter refusal to cooperate and the mother, who was asked if she would let her son go to war for the ‘national service’ or relinquish the land in her domain, she resisted dreadfully in favor of her son. Gurmu of Shararo had this to sing:

(Biyya)

-ammas duula jedhanii

yaa Badhaatuu

Kadirii ergita moo

(Haadha)

-kan duule

natti hin gallee

yaa fudhatani

lafa cabaree

(They)

oh, Badhaatu

it is war again

you let your son go to war, or

(Mother)

all went but

no-comeback

let them take away the land

and who cares, for this wasteland

(text 15)

The poem is politically committed is undeniable. There is a sustained attack against the intruders and all forms of inequality and injustice sang mournfully by the weak old woman who lost her husband and her son to keep the land and maintain peace but it was futile. In effect, now that the hearth, i.e., the home (qe’ee) was left empty and what remains is the desolated ritual site and emptied hearth left dismal and gloomy. “Hearth,” by Oromo tradition, is not just the fireplace but thought of as a symbol of 'home'/'land' and the life of the family who live in it. At times, the articulation of such poetic subjectivity enters in conflict with commitment to the dispossessed mass as it highlights an almost unbridgeable distance between the poetic subject and the mass that it claims to represent. There are such fluctuations between collective enthusiasm or resistant ardor and intimate despair, that is, paradoxical circles between rebellion at a literary level and compromise at a local political level in Salale resistance folksongs.

Alternating between seemingly conflictive strategies the songs are aggressive confrontation of the oppressive state structure, proud affirmation of pan-Oromo liberation movement and overt humble acceptance of the system.  The song,

asmaariidhaa mannaa

si wayya yaa dibbee

kan du’eef maa boonya

kan jiru wal jibbee

the drum(-mer) is much better

than a fiddler (so to speak)

but how nonsensical to cry over the dead

when the living is indifferent, hostile

(text 16)

perpetually problematizes the anti-colonial struggle as a negotiation among the oppressed who are already fatally linked by history but stood divided under the burden of that shared history. The definitive choice between “the drum(-mer)” and “a fiddler” and between “the living” and “the dead” is a concept-metaphor of margins between the oppressed and the colonial master that remains radically “other,” and solidarity as a recovery of a lost pre-colonial authenticity. As “the living” is indifferent and hostile, the margin between the resister and collaborator is not locatable, and the emancipating struggle becomes discontinuous, heterogeneous but nonetheless inescapable. The poetic voice is so observant that hostility, indifference and espionage deadened the ongoing liberation struggle and better to gather to the dead than to see the malevolence and cynicism of the living instead of mutually respectful decorum and unshakable unity.

The oppressed is situated in such a contradictory position—between “the living” and “the dead”—so much as the poetic voice representing the oppressed is torn between divided loyalties, which in fact go beyond a merely strategic use of creative resistance against oppressive structure. In the song above, the move from self-alienating acceptance of subjectivity and Abyssinian hegemonic standards to proud affirmation of Oromo solidarity is avowed by the denunciation of wrong life that cannot be lived rightly. And, the assertive question, …how nonsensical to cry over the dead, when the living is indifferent, hostile? is a poetic contemplative flux flowing into the empty lives of the oppressed marginalized and divided as “a drummer” and “the fiddler” etc.

For example, as I came to finalize the interview and discussions with Ragassa, he said he would add one last word for the road:

ya Ayyantuu ya Ayyee

Ayyaantu Daadhii Roobaleetii

cawaan hin jarjaruu

suuta suuta deemi naa jedhiini

oh, Ayyaantu, oh Ayyee

Ayyaantu of Daadhii Roobalee

a moderate makes no haste

please tell to be alert

(text 17)

 This was an allusion to the unfavorable stiff political condition I was working in and Raggaasaa wanted to be guarded against making direct comments about the system but he preferred to remain honest to me and to himself by indirectly recommending me to be cautious, moderate and wary about everything, which finds expression in many of other Salale resistance folksongs. The paradoxes between the two movements, i.e., resistance and acquiescence, goes on the same organic process but inevitably keep on moving apart from each other as the state structured violence escalates. Such ambivalent nature of the songs is fundamental component of Salale’s exploration of their lived experience and the Abyssinian colonial legacy. They kept modifying the songs, alerting their form and contents to covertly express their grievance and impart their intention. The ambiguities are not of old men’s confusion or youth’s inexperience but they have been the predominant approach to evade risks while clandestinely supporting the rebels.

Towards the end of such a precarious environment, as the sun hurried westward, Raggaasaa now soothed the averse, the indifferent and cynic to sleep for ages wrapped up in the torpor unseen from this universal suffering. By this song, now he put us on the symbolic voyage of return into the past, to the native land singing the song to stir the quick and/or soothe the weak:

gamanaan Biriitii

gamasiin Biriitii

itti dhahii rafi

yaa nama yaada hin qabnee

qixxuma bariitii

there Biriitii is, afar

here Biriitii is, near

you sleep fast

oh, feeble, if it dawns, it shall

dawn for us all equal

(text 18)

Identified himself with all the dispossessed of the world, the oral poet expressed his will through poeticizing elemental natural world to overturn the oppressive order and by communing to the inactive, indolent and inefficient citizen incapable to be free from the inescapable realm of history.

As a way of knowing and being, poetry (folksong) is in itself an aesthetic journey into the transcendental world beyond what can be experienced. The songs Raggaasaa recited can be taken as a representative of the reciter’s thinking at the moment—thinking of the past, intriguing the present and signifying the future. Through such personal recounting, poetry (folksong) rendered my journey into an emotional and articulate creative expression vacillating between restorying and reciting, especially as poetry can express emotions by engaging closely and personally. The dialogical nature of the songs is naturally engaging, particularly in the case of call and response dialogic mode as in the folksongs discussed in this section (see songs no. 13 & 14 above). 

Hence, through storying and poeticizing, though I was telling and retelling my purpose of studying in Salale, telling what exactly I was doing, and why in Salale, yet the questions “who am I?” and “where do I position myself?” were part of the daily challenges I encountered in the field to clearly relocate my research identity, particularly as an activist research, not conforming to the mainstream objectivist stance (Hale 2008; Brown & Strega 2005) nor to the status quo.

Humor and laughter as a means of resistance

Humor functions as a form of resistance to the despair and loss of faith imposed on the oppressed by the dictator. The dictator defines his own freedom in relation to the lack of freedom of the oppressed. Every free thought renders the oppressor impotent and every free man is his adversary.  Hence, for the oppressed, weeping and tears often signify submission, acceptance, pain, sadness and despair (Bussie 2007:37). Laughter evoked by poeticized humor is preferable for the victim as a more defiant and protesting stance, as an explicit supra-linguistic choice for human communication. It is “a necessary interruption of the silence logically imposed by extreme emotional pain and an expression of the tensions lived within an unlivable experience” (Bussie, p36). Through restorying events with paltry words and singing such songs of humor, the Salale refused to domesticate pains and critically expressed lived experiences by laughing and dancing at it since one protests the best one can. Not to take things the way they were, the Salale dressed up them up different in humors, folksongs, folkdance and stories.

For the folksingers and storytellers, such a humor is strengthening of spirit, morale, the will-to-live, i.e. abdi, hope, since resistance, the antithesis of oppression, is impossible where sodaa, fear, and yaaddoo, despair and resignation have overwhelmed the self. Humor and jokes are ways of building relationships among the oppressed, weapons for fighting back, that is, keeping control over one’s own reactions in a situation where the oppressed have little control over anything else except the self under oppression. Laughter through the poetic humor and jokes builds its own abode versus the official one and enables the oppressed to overcome fears and prohibitions and empower the disempowered.

There are minor illustrations of this phenomenon.  Such a brisk and multi-meaning laden poetic saying Gurmu uttered above (text 15) also resembles this humorous song from Yayya Gullale, about the 2005 (and 2010) national election:

si ganeef’ si s^xxee

namatti hin himu Salaalee

Mallas nurraa gali Maqalee

biyya abbaan dhaalee

goonni Abbaa Daalee

no one can tell

when or where the Salale f^xxk or deceive

go home, Mallas, go to Maqale

the country is owned by the countrymen

and by Abba Dale, the warrior

(text 19)

Humor as non-violent resistance can create the feeling of belonging together in the group, and support each other in difficult situations by making three things happen at the same time. First, it escalates the conflict by mocking and ridiculing the oppression; second, as it reduces fear of repression, third, it makes it difficult for the oppressive forces to respond adequately (Sorenson 2006:7). The Salale confer humorous sociopolitical critiques against oppression and oppressors using irony, satire, parody and ridicule. Humor used to ridicule artisans, ethnic minorities, women or children can indeed be oppressive and cruel, but the kind of humor presented above encourages critical reflection about how humor can have a liberating function.

One day, towards the end of daybreak, I was in Salale, Fiche, sitting outside on a stone waiting the zonal administrator for a research permit to districts for my data collection. It was my second week waiting. This man whom I taught folklore during his postgraduate study at Addis Ababa University had seen me every morning waiting and now came to me and said this rather bawdy tale briskly: kan keessaa qabu, akka barbaade nama godhaa, godhi yaa gurbaa, jette jaartiin jedhan... meaning, one who has his cock deep inside stirs it in and out as he wills..., said the old woman (to a young man) (text 20).

The humor came in at right time and right place. In a tone mixed with compassion and disdainful despair, he said this and laughed and made me laugh. At the humor, I felt beneath the old woman since I too was incapable to take my destiny in my own hands! He left me waiting as he himself, suspected of being an OLF, was working at a lower post under a local member of council (Kabinee) who did not finish college. I laughed to fill the regrettable gap but, truly, felt distracted and my friend left heavy-heartedly. By such a consideration of laughter “from below,” from the perspective of the oppressed, the mistreated, the powerless, the reviled, from the perspective of those who suffer, the social scientist James Scott, in his study of domination and resistance, must be right saying that “every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a ‘hidden transcript’ that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant” (1990: xii). Hence, the public lived to counter those “authoritative voices” singing songs of wrongs, telling untold stories, and giving voice to the voiceless through folk-art. Other disciplines such as ecclesial theology, academic philosophy or theory or other hegemonic resources have tended throughout time to exclude the voices of the disempowered. Art, however, “has often creatively functioned to capture the perspective of the marginalized when the state or other systematic powers denied such persons mainstream political voice and expression” (Bussie 2007:5).

In the context of the humor around the old woman, there is awareness of the deep socio-historical reasons for the apparent paralysis, the incapacitated large mass of the oppressed whose cry of hunger, of poverty, of revolt, of power, of hatred is muted much like the muffled cry of the old women. Such humiliations are lashed at following a song, a story or an anecdote, and personal memories of poverty and deprivation which evoke our immediate intellectual and spiritual discomfort. Hence, laughter interrupts the system, disarrays the order and state of oppression and creatively attests to hope, resistance, and protest in the face of hopelessness and humiliation. 

An anecdote that parallels what I heard above in Fiche was the one that two peasants in Warra‘ee, Darroo Dannisaa of Goshu Gisilla Geto, told in June 2010. They were walking, talking and laughing and complaining about tax and the skyrocketing price of fertilizer. One of the two men said, was it so and so who expelled the third wife after unsuccessful remarriages yelling, Sanii-gadii haadha raaw! Bahi mana kootii, meaning, You beneath “those-ones!” Get out of my sight. You mother fxxxer!  (text 21). While they used the tale to release repressed feelings of aggression, anger, and criticism toward the government, they laughed sarcastically at the poor husband who unsuccessfully remarried constantly only to force out one woman after another: You beneath “those-ones!”  There is such a “tendentious joke” with a hostile and subversive purpose common in Oromo folk sayings and folksongs, “tendentious joke” that “is a masked way of saying something forbidden and getting away with it under the guise of humor” (Bussie, p14).

What emerges in the tale is not simply the articulation of a politically resistant Salale realm but also a particularly precarious folkloric persona, the persona of the Salale peasant in perpetual embrace and conflict with successive regimes. The insistence, persistence and resistance of the oppressed articulated in their folkloric stance distance them from the realm of subjectivity, the distance which finds an outlet through expressive culture, i.e. humor, and irony in stories and folksongs, but alternates between their disdain and a concerned bleak vision under oppressive system.

Gurmu B. told me such humors, jokes, stories of Salae rebellions and songs of rebels, particularly Agari Tullu with his two brothers, and Mulu Asanu: This is not to mean that others were not sincerely interested in providing me with important data, only that I had to exercise more cautions to avoid any misinterpretations within the community since instead of telling their experience sometimes less valuable information were offered fearing that I could be a government security agent. There were ritual leaders and ayana diviners who played a significant role in giving me information regarding the devotion of the community to traditional religious beliefs and to abate their insecurities, to Orthodox church, the discrepancy tied up in a dictum “alatti akka Sidaamaa;  manatti akka Oromoo.” Literally meaning “openly, live like the Habasha; but covertly, live like the Oromo” an epithetic dictum around which revolve experiences of acquiescence and resistance through cultural dynamics.

Hence, based on my ethnographic fieldwork experience, I came to recognize that it shaped my understanding of folklore as a power of creative human mind used as inherent solution to tackle recurrent human problems. The creative resistance of the oppressed, by calling attention to the multiple dimensions of the ethnographic encounter as a site for performance and referring to the manipulation of power, helped me to rethink significant but often overlooked insights on conducting folkloric and resistance ethnography.

One such insight is the possibility of key questions posed by the people studied which one may fail to tackle in spite of one’s professional training and/or one’s cultural background to manage such interpersonal encounters. The questions and encounters with the people and the local officials are frustrating at the beginning but one can turn them into precious resources for the fieldwork. They also equip with the necessary knowledge of (un)expected behavior and provide an important bond between the ethnographer and the community. Hence, doing a folkloric and resistance field research involves much more than just interviewing and collecting data. To engage many different perspectives, to link expressive experience and creative resistance to everyday lives of the oppressed may require combining brief and extensive periods of fieldwork (Hale 2008:   ). It also involves attending to personal relationships to discover what people say, think and do with respect to creative resistance as this exposes the ethnographer to a broader range of interactions with a wide range of community members and enables to capture the variety of experiences and perceptions of the people as one of personal and professional challenging experience.

A Recap

In this ongoing study set in Salale, Oromia (Ethiopia), it has been my primary purpose to reflect on my PhD fieldwork experience, on problems of practicing folkloric ethnography as an activist research, exploring creative resistance culture and claiming identity within it as an ‘insider’/‘outsider’ folklorist ethnographer. The politics of this folkloric resistance research revolves around the poetics of composing, performing and interpreting/reflecting creative resistance by Salale Oromo and the imprint on nationalist and pluralist conflicting local ideological nuances in the region. It has been argued that folkloristic thinking influences social banditry (and vice versa), an obscured nationalistic sentiment, and that folkloristic ethnography is sharply affected by the conflicting local politics of contentious forces of pluralist and nationalist perspectives. The folkloric examples and social history of the popular resistance culture of the people have also revealed that outlaws, brigands, or in the historian Eric Hobsbawm's terms, social bandits, among the Salale Oromo were peasant outlaws whom the successive Ethiopian governments regarded as criminals, or terrorists and executed.  However, they remained in the memory pool of the peasant society, and considered as heroes, avengers, fighters for justice, even leaders of the liberation movement and commemorated as martyrs through stories, heroic songs and in other possible forms of creative resistance. It is clear that such a clandestine relationship between the ordinary peasant and the rebels makes social banditry and folkloric resistance culture an interesting and significant social phenomenon to be further investigated.

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This paper was presented at the MELUS (Multi-ethnic Literature/US) 2011 Conference, held from April 7 to 11, 2011 at Boca Raton, Florida, hosted by Florida Atlantic University.