ETHNOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF OROMO FOLKLORE STUDY
Cushitic Oromo
Nation, Northeast Africa
(A Literary & Historical Approach)
(Part II)
Assefa Tefera
Dibaba (PhD)
Indiana
University, USA
Abstract
In this Part II of the project, I apply
a literary historical approach to Oromo folklore as an attempt toward the
search for authenticity, a renewed vision of the early Oromo folklore study—a
view of what values should be—conceived not just in normative but also in
historical terms. At its heart, the historical approach is the telling of a
story about “producing effects” in exile, about a folklore collection,
documentation, and interpretation based on available credible sources. The
literary analysis examines in detail a set of changes to systems of social
relationships as depicted in the text; whereas, the historical analysis is a
reflection of the people’s life and times which gave birth to the text (and to
the artist) or a reflection of context, the life and times of the performer of
the text.
Keywords: literary
& historical approach, Munkullo Team (MT), context, text, “producing effect,” exile.
INTRODUCTION
Starting
with a folkloric position, here I have drawn concepts and ideas from a wide
range of disciplines, mainly history, literary criticism, and anthropology,
although each of these disciplines has distinct views on folklore.[1]
Knowledge of Oromo history is essential to understand the mosaic of Oromo
folklore. Part of this mosaic is supplied by the historical and political
situations that the Oromo were put in for over a century, the situation to
which they never readily surrendered from the early days of encounters with
Abyssinians in the 16th century.
In the history of humankind, as
peaceful “co-existence” is based on mutual understanding and recognition of
partners and enforces cultural exchange and solidarity, repression and
insatiable greed for expansion in the name of nation-building imposes
assimilation and a gradual “non-existence” of the subordinate. Following the
unequal power balance in the Amhara-Oromo interactions because of the Amhara’s
access to firearms from Europe in the second half of the 19th century,
the Oromo engaged in continuous resistance. The Oromo faced violence, war,
subjugation and serious consequences of the violence, including loss of lives,
famine, and slave-raids remembered and recorded in songs and stories and handed
down to generations to contemplate. As if by lucky accident, the emergent
knowledge creation repressed for years by the Abyssinian despots took a
momentum outside of Oromoland in exile in Europe and in the northeast and
southern tips of Africa by ex-slave Oromo youth and the western scholars
fascinated by the Oromo language and culture.[2]
Outline
In this Part II, I present folkloric
examples using literary historical approach to reiterate the significance of
ethnographic undertakings outside Oromia, particularly Munkullo. I regard Munkullo
as the birthplace of substantial Oromo folklore collection and documentation;
Lovedale in South Africa to a lesser degree, and Europe, particularly Germany,
also mark the beginning of Oromo folkloric, philological, and lexicographical
studies. In what follows, I wrap up the project by appraising the following
issues: the disempowering of the Oromo which left their language and culture
understudied, the unjust language and educational
policies throughout the successive Ethiopian regimes, and the methodological handicap
of most Western scholars who approached the Oromo culture vicariously from the Abyssinian
(or their own) sentimental viewpoint due to the prevailing biased research
methods and values in the mainstream Ethiopian studies. I apply a literary historical approach to
folkloric examples to demonstrate changes to systems of social relationships
and meanings overtime.
TEXTUAL
COLLECTIONS, DOCUMENTATIONS & INTERPRETATIONS
The Oromo folklore collection began
as a craft rather than as science for more than a century but lagged behind and
could not lay the foundation for research, identification and selection of researchable
subject matters, construction of a theoretical framework, and the proposal of methodological
procedures. The Ethiopian language and education policies, among other factors,
disrupted Oromo scholarship.
Folklore study is no exception. As a
common practice of the day at Munkullo and Europe, it could be difficult,
methodologically speaking, for the philologists, ethnologists, missionaries,
and linguists in the 19th and early 20th centuries to work successfully
on collecting and compiling an Oromo
dictionary and grammar without doing folklore collection. The Oromo team at
Munkullo followed the same pattern.
Johann Krapf (1838-1842)[3]
The
Reverend Johann L. Krapf and Carl Isenberg arrived in Shawa in 1838, as King
Sahle Selassie previously invited them; they opened a school in May 1839. With
the beginning of the Church Missionary Society’s successful effort, Krapf chose
Latin script, instead of Ethiopic (Geez) script, and he believed it was most convenient
to promote literacy and evangelization among the Oromo. His justification was
that, among others, “the Ethiopic characters present great difficulty to
writing [Oromo language] as well as to memory,”[4]
which also opened a venue for the later significant measure to choose Qubee (Latin)
script for writing and reading Oromo language. Though expelled and banned from reinterring
Oromoland by the Shawn king, Sahle Selassie, Krapf had collected Oromo
vocabulary and published his collection in 1842, including some Oromo songs and
stories among the Galan Oromo and in Ada’a.[5]
Father
Martial de Salviac (1901)
In the introductory note of Father de Salviac’s
book, E. Christophe, Bishop of Cahors, writes,
“…during your residence with the Oromo,
physiological and psychological observations, abstractions of their habits,
customs and laws, transcriptions of their war and religious songs, their
precepts of morale and their apologues that came down through the centuries by
oral tradition: nothing has escaped you.”[6]
Dr. Ayalew Kanno deserves praise
for presenting this creditable work in English translation. The above excerpt
is evident for the extraordinary contribution of Salviac’s book to Oromo
folklore study. From the outset, Father de Salviac makes clear his position
about the Oromo in his “bird’s eye view” of the people:
“the heart
of the land they inhabit has the privilege, rare in the century in which we
are, of having remained free from the contact of the White man…their ways and
customs, their laws, their religion still would escape investigations by the
terrible children from the north.”[7]
The themes and topics in Father de
Salviac’s book, and the historical traditions describe certain episodes from
the lives of Oromo ancestors, their relationships with their family members,
and their hopes, fears, and desires.
Conformity with African cultural
ideals and moral values such as this by a European scholar is rare. It is important
not only because it upholds Africans and Africa, the continent labeled by
Joseph Conrad as “the heart of darkness” (1899)
just two years before Father de Salviac’s work, but because it also sets and
perpetuates a standard for a responsible and ethical ethnographic activity from
the natives’ viewpoint. This is why Father de Salviac is highly regarded. He
recounted meticulously a wide range of Oromo “folk ideas” knotted in the
aphorism, “akka abbootii keenyaa,” meaning, “we are doing it this way because
our ancestors have taught us.”[8] Here I
do not intend to present Father de Salviac’s work but, generally, before I
continue to present other less familiar works, let me add this: The particular
oral traditions and folklore events presented in one scholarly work are
associated with other universally occurring social conflicts, ecological or
political crisis of everyday lives of the society in historical context. Hence,
as events are intertwined, one discipline traverses another to the point that
the border between disciplines becomes fuzzy. This means that it is important
to cross-check a particular ethnographic activity with others to determine the
identity of the work and its significance and also to provide analysis
pertinent to the understanding of relationships between historical events
across time (diachronic) and at a fixed point in time (synchronic).
Alice
Werner (1913-1914)
“…But,
after all, the ancient Egyptians were closely allied to the Galla [Oromo].”[9]
Alice
Werner (1859-1935) was an
ethnologist, linguist, and poet who studied
East African peoples’ language and folklore at the turn of the 20th
century. She focused on the folklore and
culture of the people located between the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria. These
include the Oromo in Kenya, the Somali, Bantu, Nandi, Massai, Gikuyu, Pokomo,
and the Wasanye, among others. During one African Society Meeting in London in
1913, when Alice Werner read her paper titled “The Galla [Oromo] People of East
Africa and Their Vassal Tribes,”
the chair of the meeting, Sir Harry Johnston, remarked that “the [Oromo] had
played a very great part in the ancient civilization of Savage Africa…All these
[Oromo] peoples, both in Abyssinia and further south in Equatorial East Africa,
have been remarkably neglected by European students,”[10] and later ostracized as “having nothing
to contribute to the civilization of Ethiopia.”[11]
“The
[Oromo] People of East Africa Protectorate, Part I,”
In her two-part paper, Alice
Werner focused on the folk-life of the Oromo in Abyssinia
but mainly on “Orma,” meaning “free men,”[12]
part of the Oromo settled in the southeastern side of Kenya, along the lower
Tana River. In the first part, Werner reported that the Oromo live near
Abyssinia in Wollo to the north, in the mountains of Shawa near the head-waters
of Abai, to the neighborhood of Harar in the east and, across the border, the
Borana Oromo who settled on a large tract of land east of Lake Rudolf. In other
sections she presents her two-year ethnographic odyssey in Orma, Kenya. This
account of the Orma Oromo is of some folkloric significance.
Werner’s
ethnographic voyage covered four settings close to where she camped at Nagawo,
southeastern Kenya: Kulesa, on the Tana, a day’s journey by motor-launch; the
Golbanti, a short distance from Nagawo; Witu of Godana Jarra (chief), and Kurawa.[13]
In this ethnographic encounter with the “Equatorial Oromo,” Werner’s methods
include apparently interview and observation to
draw a conclusion that the Orma, looking back one hundred years, were an
exogamous matrilineal society and organized into two moieties of Irdid (Arsi)
and Barentuma.[14]
Her methods also drew on secondary sources done by Philip Paulitschke, and
Johann L Krapf, a missionary who traveled in the region in early 1840s, and
Charles New, Thomas Wakefield, and Robert Moss Ormerod.
Alice
Werner’s study is most pertinent in the ethnographic history of Oromo
folkloristics in that she presented the folkloric and ethnological accounts of Orma tradition. She describes gift
exchanges among the Orma,
festivals (e.g. Godeya)
and rituals, costumes, dance, artisans/tumtuu, houses and household items such as a filaa
(wooden comb), genealogy, ritual chats as “secret words of the
old times,” or argots centered around the lu[b]a (chief), marriage customs and kinship.[15]
Most of the cultural nuances she discusses are not radically different from
what Enrico Cerulli presented in his folklore research in 1922 except for the Orma moiety structure and matrilineal
kinship system. The transcription and translation of the folklore text
presented in the same paper would be unintelligible here because, added to
dialectal difference, the text rendition was problematic. However, from the
ritual context, one can tell that the text is one of
blessings and prayers by the Orma luba
(chief). The Orma belief about building a house facing sunrise has much in
common with those in Oromia. Alice notes, “The huts of [Oromo] village
are built in a line, facing east, so that every doorway fronts the rising
sun.”
Ethnographically
speaking, interviewing, taking photos and conducting research among the Orma
was not easy. Werner states that she was unable to obtain photographs of “the
best feminine types and did not get one successful negative of [Oromo] woman.”[16]
The reason was that Kulesa maidens, for instance, were too shy to consent to
pose. Werner’s theory of origin for the ‘Equatorial Oromo’ was Tullu (hill) on
the Lower Tana, between Nagawo and Kulesa near the site of Marfanno; this
theory is as controversial as that of the ‘Abyssinian Oromo’ origin coming from
Tullu Nam-dur (Fugug) through Bale to the east.[17]
According to Werner, there are hardly any available data for fixing the time
when the Oromo settled in the equatorial region. Oral tradition and genealogy
such as that of the chief Godana Jarra gives a clue. However, Godana could
trace back seven or eight generations: Jarra (his father), son of Bagura, son
of Uto, son of Dida, son of Kolbo, son of Dayu, son of Nine, son of Okole.[18]
In 1824 when Captain Owen was there, the Orma were in the hinterland of Lamu,
in southeastern Kenya. The presence of the Oromo in the north of Kenya was
reported as a fact by Abba Bahrey in 16th century.
At the meeting mentioned previously,
Alice Werner concluded by addressing the urgent need for study of the Oromo:
“It certainly is most important that all the material for the study of [Oromo]
should be exhumed as speedily as possible.”[19] According to
Alice Werner, there are two Oromo groups in East Africa: the Northern Oromo and
the Equatorial Oromo groups. She shares Telez’s report to confirm that the
Northern Oromo inhabitants were already in the region, i.e. today’s Oromia,
neighboring Abyssinia, in 1537. The
Equatorial Oromo were those pushed southward by Somalis and by the Bantu
speaking peoples; they settled in Kenya. Werner’s folkloric and anthropological
studies discuss the Orma in Kenya. Werner is wary of depending on the social
memory alone and the oral tradition, to determine the origin and migration of
the Oromo group she was studying, which is a legitimate concern for an
ethnographer. She writes, “of the few pedigrees I was able to collect, none
goes back beyond the informants’ great-grandfather.”[20]
By the same token, Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler shows his concern about individual
and collective memory in reconstruction of ethno-history. Mirzeler states that
among the Jie/Turkana communities of East Africa, “the local people do not
recall information beyond three generations.”[21]
Thus, they use oral traditions as a reference point, totems as symbols, rituals
as metaphors, and genealogies and weave their personal experience narratives
into the general collective memory to claim common ancestry, and shared destiny
to share land and land resources such as water and grass.[22]
In
her enlightening article entitled “The [Oromo] of East Africa Protectorate,
Part I,” Werner recounts the settlement pattern of the Northern Oromo clans and
describes in more details the life style and physique of the Equatorial Oromo.
In both Part I and Part II, Werner provides a descriptive analysis of
Equatorial Oromo’s folk-life and “folk ideas” (worldviews) including costumes,
hairstyles, ornaments, weapons, utensils (names and uses), habitations and
housing (and housing taboos), cattle and cattle magic (taboos), cattle brands,
sheep and goat ear incisions, milk and milk taboos, totems, festivals, rituals,
initiations, funerals, and marriage and marriage taboos. In Part II she
familiarizes us with some ethnographic examples of the Equatorial Oromo
folklore of gada Oromo Polity and its
traditions, particularly focusing on the luba
(chief) roles and rules.[23]
In the two folklore articles titled “Some Notes on East African Folklore”[24]
Werner outlines stories and, using a comparative method, she sketches the linguistic
and cultural relationships among the peoples of East Africa who had more or
less similar social structure and life style. In her study of the West African
folktales she claims that “the predominance of the Hare in one and the Spider
in the other has never yet been culturally explained”[25]
However, she does not analyze the folktales but “outlines” the texts and
documents them. Methodologically speaking, “outlining” was her method of
writing down the stories, not transcribing them verbatim, which Werner
apologizes for throughout her articles. Writing of animal stories in which she
claims Hare and Jackal are interchangeably used in East African animal stories,
Werner states, “he [her informant] told me a story which, unfortunately, I
could not take down verbatim, but which is somewhat as follows….”[26]
It seems that since tape-recording and other fieldwork tools were not easily
accessible back then, the possible option was “outlining,” i.e., writing down
the texts as dictated by the informant.
Let
me make the following remarks before I hasten to turn to other ethnographic
endeavors that contributed to the early Oromo folklore study. The significance
of Alice Werner’s studies for the ethnographic history of Oromo folklore
scholarship can be viewed from two angles. On one hand, the need to explore the
Oromo and study their rich and expressive culture was pressing. This is nowhere
more evident than in Sir Harry Johnston’s remarks at the Meeting of the African
Society where Alice Werner read her paper in December 1913. Johnston commented
that the Oromo peoples, both the Northern and the Southern, “have been
remarkably neglected by European students.”[27]
And, he added, “I do hope that the works of Miss Werner …will draw the
attention of governors, travelers, and missionaries to the [Oromo] as they exist
today.”[28]
Regretfully lamenting the lack of precise accounts of the Oromo and Oromo
language, Johnston acknowledges the efforts of the German philologist, Karl
Tutschek, who worked on Oromo lexicography and collected a few items of Oromo
folklore from the freed young Oromos in Germany in 1839 and early 1840s.[29]
On the other hand, the objectives of the ethnographic incursions were more
political and colonial than academic—it was to pave the way for colonial
“governors.” This is not pure speculation but based on the words of the high
ranking colonialist Sir Harry Johnston and other guest speakers who attended
the meeting: “In order to administer rightly and wisely a man must know
something of the thought and character of the people committed to him.”[30]
In
general, at the time when there were only a few serious ethnographic
undertakings by national or expatriate scholars on Oromo, such as the
pioneering folklore collections by the Munkullo Team and Martial de Salviac’s
inspiring work, The Oromo, Alice
Werner ventured these groundbreaking academic tasks to explore cultural values,
belief systems, and the Oromo polity. Though her Oromo folklore collections are
marginal, the endeavors are still worth noting.
Enrico Cerulli: Oromo Folk Literature (FL) (1922)
A
significant source of information for critical Oromo studies into the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ Oromo folklore, history and culture
is Enrico Cerulli’s Oromo folklore collections in Naples, Italy. Enrico Cerulli
acknowledges four major sources of his data: Lij (Haile Mariam) Gugsa Darge (born in Salale, the son of the
Abyssinian duke of Salale), Aga Mohammed Seid of Limmu (Macca), Loransiyos
Wolde Iyasus, and the collections in Oromo
Spelling Book, which include love
songs, war songs, and songs of religious ceremonies (Wadaaja, Atete), which, Cerulli
believes, “have been written to discredit the Swedish Mission.”[31]
Contrary to Cerulli’s view, the authors Onesimos Nassib and Aster Gannon Salban
claim that they collected the texts “to show the natives of the Oromo countries
the way to God.”[32]
Cerulli recorded most of his Oromo texts through interviews, primarily with
Loransiyos, a war veteran of Abbichu in Salale. Of the three informants,
Loransiyos was the most resourceful and significant one, not only by providing
the researcher with substantial data from memory but also by his knowledge of
the Oromo language during the translation and interpretation of the texts in
Latin script. [33]
The
songs and narratives focus on three major themes: war, worldview, and love. A
substantial number of the texts are historical accounts of three major wars the
Oromo participated in during the second-half of the nineteenth century: the war of conquest by Menelik II led by Ras Goobana Daacii[34]
and the continuous Oromo resistance; religious wars between Oromo Mohammedans
and Oromo traditional believers; and the Ethio-Italian
war. Enrico Cerulli’s collection is ethnographic in its methodological
orientation, but detached from the social context since he collected the texts,
for the most part, in Naples. The study is important in the ethnographic
history of Oromo folklore study for its substantial collection, text rendition,
and transcription of the original data in Latin script, though it lacks
theoretical grounding.
The
involvement of one of his four informants, Loransiyos, who was very
knowledgeable, is central in the whole ethnographic process. He is not only an
interviewee but also Cerulli’s research assistant, who provided him with texts,
transcription, translation, and interpretation in a historical context. Those different perspectives in the historical
songs and prose narratives, including Loransioys’s personal experience stories,
give us a diachronic account of some basic themes in Oromo social history in
the region, specifically central Shawa and its environs.
Despite
a resurgence of scholarly interest among the pioneering young Oromo evangelists
in the second half of the 19th century, there were only a few
‘ethnographic’ endeavors by European travelers and missionaries involving
natives when Enrico Cerulli took up his pioneering folkloric (and historical,
linguistic, and anthropological) project in 1922. However, Enrico’s folklore
research is not the first folkloristic endeavor ever made. The history of
Oromo folkloristics might have started, as Pankhurst points it out, with
those collections and compilations of Oromo folklore in Germany by the freed
young Oromo girl in 1839 with the philologist Dr. Karl Tutscheck.[35]
Those early large collections and compilations of more than 600 texts by the
young Oromo evangelists in 1885 to 1898 at Munkullo can be considered as the
first Oromo folkloric ethnography ever made by natives in the region which
serves as a source of folkloric and linguistic research works.[36]
While
Cerulli remains well acknowledged for his contribution to Oromo folklore study,
Bahru Zewde is right to describe him as an “Ethiopicist of considerable repute,
and the perfect example of scholarship being put at the service of colonial
administration.”[37]
After more than a decade of collecting Oromo folklore, Enrico Cerulli was made
governor of Shawa and deputy of the last viceroy, Amadeo Umberto d’Aosta,
during the Italian occupation in Ethiopia.
This reminds us once again Sir Harry Johnston’s call[38]
on the African Society’s Meeting in 1913, after Alice Werner had read her
paper, “The [Oromo] of East Africa,” to study the Oromo and peoples in the
region and tame the ungovernable, as it were, for colonial governors.
It
is legitimate to say here that African folklore research (collection,
documentation and brief interpretations) started, presumably, with the coming
of European travelers, missionaries, philologists and ethnologists (anthropologists)
to Africa in the middle of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
aim of the collectors was not primarily to pursue folklore scholarship,
however. The aim was to understand Africans’ psychosocial temperaments and
cultures in the area, i.e., to peep into the cave of their mind, to advance
evangelism and colonial goals and enhance the comparative study of languages
and cultures.[39]
Through their experience under external pressure and internal colonialism, the
Northeast Africans used their expressive culture and symbolic performances
(rituals, festivals, and songs) for emancipatory resistance and creative
co-existence; these have not been given adequate attention. None of the
travelers in the 19th century or before, except for some (e.g., Philipp
Paulitschke), seems
to have shown interest in collecting and interpreting Oromo folklore in
Ethiopia despite the massive travel narratives.
There
is also a lack of clarity in the previous studies about the history of the
early Oromo folklore collections. Ethnographic history is not just narrating
words about events, as the traditional historical approach would do, but
engaged from a particular vantage point in the dialogue between history and
folkloristics, history and literature, and history and ethnography/ethnology.
Starting in the mid-19th century through the first half of the
twentieth century, missionaries, travelers. emancipated native evangelists and
immigrants, ethnologists, colonial governors and philologists, Jesuits put the
anchor and marked the history of Oromo folklore collection and documentation.
One
can roughly sketch the timeline of the history of Oromo folklore scholarship as
follows: those until the 18th century by travelers, Jesuit missionaries, and
explorers; the 19th century endeavors by
travelers, missionaries, philologists, ethnologists, and native evangelists,
inside and outside Oromoland; the 20th century works by philologists,
ethnologists, missionaries, colonial governors; and the BA, MA and PhD research
undertaken inside and outside Oromoland, and, finally, the current trend and
prospects. After Cerulli’s FL of 1922
until the late 1970s and later in Addis Ababa University when a few BA and MA
folklore research began to appear, in spite of the hampering language and education
policy, it requires thorough investigation to fill the gap. Equally important,
two landmarks are worth noting in the history of Oromo folklore scholarship:
first, the Lovedale group between 1889 and 1900. Based on Dr. Sandra Shell’s
groundbreaking research, it needs a separate research undertaking to determine
where there was merely a barren time period in Oromo studies in Lovedale in
folklore collection and documentation. Second is the Munkullo Team. What
happened to the Munkullo original texts, collections and handwritten
documentations after the MT came back home to pursue teaching and
evangelization? As the 13-year period at Munkullo was the most productive time
in the history of Oromo studies, what other activities, handcrafts,
agriculture, performances, games, and life style were there in that “[Oromo-]
speaking colony?”[40]
These and other inquiries remain open for more qualified ethnographic search in
addition to the folkloristics,
lexicography, and translation works
based at Munkullo between 1885 and 1898. Each discipline (folkloristics, lexicography, translation,
and literary works) needs
close study separately as the history of those disciplines has been fuzzy so
far and lumped into one, namely, Oromo language, or Oromo literature (writing)
with fewer details and clarity regarding each one; it is also important to pay
close attention to the case of the Lovedale group.
Previously in this paper, an attempt has been made
to constitute a historical context for the scholastic commitment that our
predecessors handed down. Those pioneers
showed radically new forms of action and perseverance that could transform the
historic landscape of the history of Oromo studies in general and folklore
scholarship in particular.
THE MUNKULLO TEAM (MT)
By
drawing attention to the activities of research and writings at Munkullo, the
site of the young Oromo bible translators, lexicographers and folklore
collectors in the 1880s and ‘90s, and their engagement with documents and with
the manifold uncertainties of historical inquiries I suggest that Munkullo
represented a “home far from home.” Through collections and documentations, and
presumably, performances, Munkullo served as an oasis of Oromo folklore
scholarship to mediate “otherness” and alienation far from home.
Munkullo:
“Home” far from “Home”
Using
a folkloristic approach, I import liminality[41]
to discuss the “in-between space” and time of isolation, the ‘ritual’ which the
pioneering Oromo young evangelists went through as slaves. In line with Van
Gennep’s liminal situation, I apply Foucault’s notion of
“other space/place” in a non-Foucaultian regal sense of colonists, the notion
of heterotopia, i.e., a separate space.[42]
This is to reveal the situation under which Oromo folkloristics started at
Munkullo by the people displaced from their homeland, who were put in a state
of social crisis. For our purpose, in this section, the recurrence of the
following concepts will be explored: “ritualized,” metaphoric and
folkloric “other space,” “liminality,” “performing history,” and
“to produce effect.”
Ethnographic
history has an epistemological strand and interpretive scheme as a model. Ethnographic history claims that there are
many ways of engaging in the past by interpreting the stories from different
vantage points. Ethnographic history transforms the cultural relativism
approach that all cultures are equal into a more radical stance— that different
cultural histories were produced for different occasions, values and ethos. Victor Turner’s notion of “liminality” arose,
rooted in performance and rituals in a balanced approach to meaning and action.
Turner ensured the widespread usage of the concept in anthropology and other
fields based on Van Gennep’s concept of “ritual.” To experience the
nuances of historical particularities, the wider values and ethos of particular
cultures, ethnographic history can be fruitful if it is put into practice in
conjunction with the “thick description” of the notion of “home far from home.”
In such an interdisciplinary fashion, for the purpose of this study,
ethnographic history can adopt those concepts of “separation,”
“liminality,” and “re-assimilation” applied
creatively by drawing attention to the richly textured nature of activities
which were rituals in their own right but had also been seen in instrumental
ways. The words “liminal” and “liminality” derive
from the Latin “limen” which means “threshold”—that is, the
bottom part of the doorway that must be crossed to enter a building.
“Liminality” was first used in a publication in the field of psychology in 1884
and introduced to the field of anthropology by Arnold Van Gennep in his The
Rites of Passage.[43]
According to Van Gennep theory, the ritual ceremonies that
accompany the landmarks of human life differ only in detail from one culture to
another and they are in essence universal. Van Gennep described rites of
passage such as coming-of-age rituals and marriage as having three
part-structures: separation, liminal period, and re-assimilation. In
this view, the initiate undergoing the ritual is first separated, alienated,
i.e. stripped of the social status possessed before the ritual, and then
inducted, inaugurated into the liminal period of transition, and finally given
new status and re-assimilated into society.
Given the folkloric and anthropological affiliations of this
concept of liminality later developed by Victor Turner’s theory, I
apply the concept here to the ethnographic history model to explain the
condition of the ex-slave young Oromo evangelists at Munkullo. The native
Oromo ex-slaves were caught by slave raiders and estranged from
their home, converted to Christianity and stayed in camp far
from home for years, which was a prolonged liminality, though a productive
period. They were banned for years from re-assimilating with their society. Likewise,
Sheikh Bakri Saphalo, the Oromo poet and educator from eastern Oromia, Hararge,
produced a large number of poems until he was
forced to flee his homeland
to Somalia by Haile Selassie’s officials and confined to a liminal position.
In his Ndembu Ritual based in Zambia, Turner
interprets liminality by drawing heavily on Van Gennep’s
three-part structure focusing entirely on the transitional or liminal
stage, the middle stage of the rites of passage where the subject of
the passage ritual is structurally ‘invisible’ during the liminal period.[44]
Similarly, the “social invisibility” of the Oromo young ‘initiates’ at Munkullo
was also obvious, though relatively “free,” but they were encamped and kept in
confinement in Eritrea deprived of the right to re-enter the Oromoland
and re-assimilate with their people. Much the same way as
liminal individuals, their status was socially and structurally ambiguous. That
is, their liminality was that, spatially, they were “neither here nor there,”
rather “in-between”. As Turner rightly states, the liminal stage is
the realm of “pure possibility” and structural invisibility. The liminal individual
is “betwixt and between” the positions, which are assigned and arrayed by law,
custom, and convention.[45]
Turner’s liminal period is a source of positive structural
assertions and a realm of pure possibility “whence novel configurations of
ideas and relations may arise”[46]
In 1880s and ’90s the young Oromo evangelists lived in a
“space-between” in Munkullo, Eritrea, after they were freed from slavery. They marked
the beginning of Oromo studies and practiced, though not preplanned, ethnographic
history in a wide range of the fields of folkloristics,
lexicography, translation, and
literary history set in a liminal position. In this
regard, as Greg Denning states, the abiding grace of history is not in knowing
the truth by being told it but in experiencing it in everyday life, which
requires seeking it earnestly since truth can be clothed in a story in some
other way than expected.[47]
For the individual(s) in a liminal stage,
‘truth’ is being “not here nor there,” a space of otherness that is
simultaneously physical and mental, a heterotopia, a concept
elaborated by Michelle Foucault as a place/space that functions in
non-hegemonic conditions. In line with this, Denning argues, we experience the
truth “in everyday life sometimes uncertainly, sometimes contradictorily,
sometimes clouded by the forces that drives us to it, sometimes so clearly that
it blinds us to anything else.”[48] The Munkullo Team, as if by an irony of fate,
were separated from home at childhood and enslaved, then freed and put in a liminality far
from home until they turned in adulthood to become sources of
positive structural assertions and a realm of “pure possibility” from where
arose a “new light” of history in Oromo literacy and folkloristics.
After repeated attempts to enter their homeland, against
prohibitions by Menelik, the Abyssinian despot, Onesimos resumed with his team
the teaching duties at Munkullo and “set about the most important part of his
life-work: that of creating an Oromo literature.”[49]
To allow the young evangelists into Abyssinia and then to cross to Oromoland,
for the Abyssinian warlords, was to pollute the “purity” of Amharic language,
Orthodox Christian religion and Geez civilization, all sanctified by the
Orthodox Christian rule. Instead, Menelik chose to keep the Oromo in darkness,
without education and, consequently, without political consciousness, and to
spread Orthodox Christianity among the Oromo. By citing Mary Douglas’s Purity
and Danger, Turner argues liminal individuals are polluting and
dangerous to those who have not gone through the liminal period.[50]
That is, the liminal group is not a typical social hierarchy but a communal
group in which all are equal; they have no status, rank, kinship position, or
anything to demarcate them structurally from their fellows.[51]
Since they might “infect and spoil” the status quo with the new religion
(protestant), the scripture translated into the native language, that is, Oromo
language, and new way of worshiping, the young Oromo evangelists were banned
and kept from entering Oromoland and ritually reincorporating with the people
from the liminal position, from isolation.
The Spatial Imagination of “Home”
To construct the ethnographic history of Oromo
folkloristics one faces, among others, the problem of the possibility
of space spread out of reach as time. However, as
Michelle Foucault writes in his “Of Other Spaces,” one of the two functions
of heterotopia is a “compensation” of a space, that is, to
create a real space, a space that is “other.” In this new home, Munkullo, the
displaced Oromo youth gave themselves land and dreams, and perhaps told stories
and sang songs about their people, rivers, mountains and hills, plains and
trees, and grasses, and animals in whose form the spirit of the nostalgic home
dwells. Far from home and estranged from
their people, they compensated for the real space by relating to the space/place
that could not immediately come to their eye, namely, “Biyya Oromo”
(Oromoland), the “heimat.”
For the young Oromo evangelists put in liminality, Oromoland
was a utopia, in a non-Foucaultian regal sense,[52]
but Munkullo became a heterotopic compensation for Oromoland, an
idea or image not real back then, but representing a perfected version of
society, an “[Oromo-] speaking colony.”[53]
The notion of heterotopia and liminality theory
is compatible in that the ritual heterotopia, like the liminal space,
is a physical representation or approximation of a utopia, other space,
isolated from the real space and not freely accessible like a public space.
Ethnographic history cannot disregard the intersection of time with space since
in everyday human life there are places of important function, real or
imagined.[54]
Of crisis heterotopia in the so-called primitive society, Foucault
writes, there are forbidden places reserved for people in a state of crisis:
for menstruating women, a pregnant woman, and the elderly, or as in spirit
possession, spaces reserved for the subject, diviner and clients.[55]
In the case of the Oromo ex-slaves who were
freed from slavery but not free to go home, and banned from re-entry, thereby
put in a state of crisis, they
had to create a liminal space, a crisis heterotopia where,
as converts, they could make “history” and experience “truth” in exile. They
formed a small heterotopic society of “other space,” an [“Oromo-] speaking
colony” entwined with several places (Munkullu/Eritrea, Sweden, Red Sea,
Oromoland, Abyssinia, and Northeast Africa) not only for the affirmation of
differences but also as a means of escaping from the disempowering situation
they were put in. Thus, the idea of place as a heterotopic entity
relates more to ethnicity and gender than class in the postmodern theoretical
discussion of social heteronomy, or in absence of autonomy.
In the next section, I will present two
ethnographic examples of folksongs (nuptial songs) from the works of the MT and
demonstrate the literary and historical practice. The songs often overlap
with faaruu gaddaa, i.e., songs of sorrow. The
genre chronicles the bride’s past experience with her peers and the care and
love of her kin which she misses now that she is separated from her home and
her natal relations because of marriage; far away from her village, she bemoans
living, day and night, among “strangers.” Through editing some place names in
the folksongs, Aster and Onesimos recapitulated their memory and recreated the
nostalgic presence of irresistible love for their imaginary home in the Oromo
Spelling Book.[56] Thus, the collection of
the folksongs and stories in the book are metadata, or metacontent
since they serve as data
about data. The metadata
serve two purposes: first, they represent the life
experience of the evangelists at Munkullo, the “other space;” second, they
express the living memory of “home” which they were not allowed to reenter and
to reincorporate themselves with the people. Through the act of reading,
writing, translating, and collecting folklore, I posit, the Oromo team
exercised agency under a disempowering situation. Thus, historically, Oromo
folkloric and literary practice has played an emancipatory role.
Poetic Metadata
In the hegemonic contract fused with consent and
dissent in the life experiences of the ex-slave Oromo young
evangelists, one can feel them torn in two and stuck in “betwixt and between”
like initiates forsaken unduly, in a ritualized but heterotopic other
space. However, put in a liminal situation, in “other” space, they vowed to
“produce effects,” to borrow Greg Dening’s performing phrase.[57] The consent is a refusal
to succumb to a stultifying trauma of slavery and, instead, work on reinforcing
nostalgia of reenactment, make a living museum, i.e., “produce effects,” and
make history. In the two songs below in Onesimos Nasib and Aster Ganno
Salban’s Oromo Readers, the singer recaps the group’s inundating
return of past experience in the hands of slave raiders under Menelik’s
warlords. This song also recaps the fact that they did not remain in lifeless
silence and emptiness, but, in Paul Valery’s words, how they lived and
“produced effects” in “the active presence of absent things.” This is the
woeful song:
Yammuu gaara
baate,
maaf na hin waamin
maaloo?
Yammuu gargar
baanee
yammuu “Macca” taanee
maaf na hin nyaatin Baaro!
When way up the hill you hurried,
why did you leave me in despair?
Or when we parted for good,
and became alien,
Oh! Had I drowned in the Baro River!…
[text 1]
At the heart of this nuptial song sung by
peers is a close emotional association which causes the listener(s) to shed
tears hearing the song, as simple in form as in style, and accepted without any
question for its dense content, embedded by the melancholic heave of separation
and estrangement represented by “Macca”[58] as by marriage. At the
same time, by the universal appeal of liminality, at least by
their collective memory and shared experience of misfortune, the “initiate”
finds himself (herself) in a limbo.
However, through the intrinsic beauty of childhood memory he/she sees in
resentment the nostalgia of inseparability, closeness, and home unlike the
“other space.” The sublimity of the seemingly simple tune of the nuptial song
above lies not just in an overcoming of the heterotopic “otherness” but
persists in the consent of the group to have a common vision
to “produce effect,” i.e. the folklore collection from memory,
compiling Oromo dictionary, and bible translation as
they are also teaching and learning.
Onesimos Nasib and Aster Ganno Salban drew
heavily on their memory and that of other Oromo ex-slaves for the folk songs in
the collection titled Oromo Readers. Aster also recorded at
Munkullo more than 500 maiden songs later published as Weedduu.[59]
In the folksong below, Onesimos reflected
his own despondent poetic voice instead of the bridal mournful image and lashed
out at those raiders who heartlessly caught and sold him seven times before he
came to Massawa, near the Red Sea:
Utuu jirbii
footanii
bubbuuttuu akkam
gootanii?
Ofii “Galla”
teessanii
Moxuwwaa na
buuftanii
guungumtuu na gootanii,
guumgumtuu akka ilmoo
dhabaa
As you spin and turn a spindle,
where did you hide the spinning machine?
Now you settled as if calm at home,
but you flung me
away to Massawa
and I became a moaner, whiner,
like the only begotten naughty child!
[text 2]
This folksong provides poignant reminders
of the universal timeless characteristics of humankind, that is, the shared
humane quality of living, loving and “suffering truth” in exile. It is the
personal quality of the nuptial song, which probably the bible translators and
lexicographers adapted for their own poetic end that makes the persons or
events very real to identify with and share the irresistible feelings of
homesickness, the personal identification which makes folksongs vitally
important.
Toponymic Functions of Place Names[60]
In Oromo nuptial songs, the bride mentions local place names
and the names of her kin in order to memorialize those places where she
harvested, fetched firewood and water, danced, and played with her peers as a
young girl. Now she is married and living in a village far away from home among
strangers, “Macca,” as the notion of “estrangement” is thus recapped to refer
to “alien,” “others.” Onesimos and Aster used “Macca” interchangeably
with “Cush” in the Bible they translated. However, Macca is also the name of
one of the two ethnic branches (Macca and Tulama) in the
western part of Oromia, where I come from. Most of the former Oromo
slaves, including Onesimos and Aster, were captured from western Oromoland,
Macca and Sadacha.
In the two texts
above, the place names Baro, “Galla,” and Moxuwwa (Massawa) have two toponymic
functions. First, they show the origin of the folksong, and, second, they also
give some geographical information about the place from where the singer comes.
Editing folksong is another scenario worth mentioning here. Those texts
were/are widely known and popular among the Macca Oromo. In the second nuptial song, the
singers (author(s)) edited the original variant song and changed some place
names, i.e., the bride’s village or any local name, to “Galla” which, in this
context, is to refer to the pejorative term used by Abyssinians, the slave
raiders, for Oromoland.[61]
What poetic purpose is achieved by editing the original text? First, the song
describes in a lyrically sorrowful way the distance, banishment, and the
overwhelming feeling of nostalgia not of their immediate birthplace but of
Oromoland as a whole.
In the two songs above, the singers,
i.e. the young Oromo evangelists, lived and worked under the paternalistic
mentorship of the Swedish Missionary Institute until they came home to
Oromoland in 1903 to teach, and preach to, the Oromo of Macca in the west. Baro
is a river in Ilu Abba-bor, where Onesimos (also called Hiika) was captured in
southwestern Ethiopia. The river is also called Upeno River by the Anuak
people. Massawa is a city on the Red Sea coast of Eritrea and an important port
for many centuries. It was also a Swedish missionary station in the 1870s. It
was at this port that Werner Munzinger, a Swiss scholar and
adventurer “who worked as a consular agent of the French, British and Egyptians
at the Red Sea port of Massawa,” rescued Hiika, later called Onesimos, and
“handed him over to the Swedish missionary station in Massawa in 1870.”[62]
CONCLUSION
In this paper I have tried to outline the ethnographic
historical context so as to examine the development of Oromo folklore
scholarship at Munkullo using a historical and literary stance. Thus, this
study is not a history of Oromo folklore (for
each folklore genre has history of transformation); it is a history of Oromo folklore study. By
focusing on the ethnographic examples at Munkullo, I have highlighted two major
historical factors which negatively affected the development of Oromo studies
in general and Oromo folklore scholarship in particular. The first is the
language and educational policies of the authoritarian Ethiopian regimes that
hindered the promotion of Oromo culture. We have seen that the expulsion of
missionaries and the banning of native evangelists from re-entry played a major
role in delaying the expansion of literacy in Oromoland.
Second, the unrelenting biases of ethnologists and travelers
and their relative lack of methodologically and ethically oriented engagement
with “ethnographic” endeavors to work among the Oromo also impeded Oromo
folklore scholarship and cultural studies in general from facilitating cultural
transmission and social transformation from “below.” The fact that the early
ethnologists and travelers came to the Oromo through the regal door of the
Abyssinian kings and approached the people with their sentimental views and
copied each other in their travelogues influenced other scholars to participate
in unscholarly projects appended to the overriding and unrepresentative
Ethiopian Studies. The effect of the two setbacks discussed here becomes
obvious as the radical and “emergent knowledge construction” project known as Oromo Studies is banned from entry by
the regime and also distanced by the rather conservative rival unit, the Ethiopian Studies.
NOTES
[1]
Dan Ben-Amos succinctly
descries these disparities in the many disciplines working with folkloristics.
He wrote, “while anthropologists regarded folklore
as literature,
scholars of
literature defined it as culture”. See Dan Ben-Amos,
“Towards a Definition of Folklore in Context,” in Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 84, No. 331, 1971, pp3-15). p3.
[2]Mekuria Bulcha,
“The Language Policies of Ethiopian Regimes and the History of Written Afaan
Oromo: 1844-1994,” Journal of Oromo
Studies, Vol. 1, no. 2, (1994), pp91-114, see pp96-97.
[3] Johann Krapf , An Imperfect Outline of the Elements of the
[Oromo] Language, (London: Richard Watts, 1840.); see also his Travels, Researches and Missionary Labors, (Boston:
Ticknor and Fields, 1860); also Carl Isenberg and Johann Krapf, Journals Detailing Their Proceedings in the
Kingdom of Shawa, (London: Cass, 1843).
[4] Tsega Etefa, Integration and Peace in East Africa: A
History of the Oromo Nation, (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2012), 139.
[5] Richard Pankhurst,
“The Beginnings of Oromo Studies in
Europe,” Africa, no. 2, (1976), pp199-201; E.C. Foot, A Galla-English, English-Galla dictionary,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913). Foot acknowledges Liban Bultum
of the Lovedale team, then back home, for his assistance on compiling and
collecting the corpus.
[6]Ayalew Kanno, The Oromo: Great African Nation (as
Recounted by Martial De Salviac), (Michigan:…?, 1901/2005,), p2.
[7] Ibid. 7.
[9] Sir Harry
Johnston, British linguist, botanist, and colonial administrator, convening the
African Society Meeting, and introducing Alice Werner to read her paper titled
“The Galla [Oromo] People of East Africa and their Vassal Tribe,” London, 1913.
[10] Ibid, p317.
[11] Edward Ullendorff was a British
philologist, Ethiopianist, and historian widely quoted in Oromo Studies for his
unscholarly sentimental view about the Oromo. See his The Ethiopians. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), 76.
[12]
Alice Werner, “The [Oromo] of the East
Africa Protectorate, Part I,” Journal of
the Royal African Society, Vol. 13, No. 50 (Jan., 1914), pp. 121-142, p121;
Cf. also
Alice Werner, “The [Oromo] of the East Africa
Protectorate. Part II:” Journal of the
Royal African Society, Vol. 13, No. 51 (Apr., 1914), pp. 262-287.
[15] Ibid, pp.123-137.
[16] Ibid., p125.
[17] Ibid., p125.
[18] Ibid., p133.
[20] Alice Werner, Part I, p133.
[21] Mustafa Kemal
Mirzeler, Remembering Nayeche and the
Gray Bull Engiro , Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2013), p130.
[22] Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler, Remembering Nayeche…., pp143, 219ff.
[23] To add a few notes on Luba and
Gada
[24]
Alice Werner’s “Some Notes on East African Folklore” in Folklore, Vol. 25, No.
4 (Dec. 31, 1914), pp. 457-475; See also her “Some Notes on East African
Folklore (Continued): Folklore, Vol.
26, No. 1 (Mar. 31, 1915), pp. 6078; See also Alice Werner.
“The [Oromo] of the East Africa Protectorate. Part I.” A. Werner. Journal
of the Royal African Society, Vol. 13, No. 50 (Jan., 1914), pp. 121-142.
[25] Alice Werner’s
“Some Notes…, 1914, p459.
[26] Alice Werner,
“Some Notes…, 1915, p70.
[27] Sir Harry Johnston’
speech on moderating Alice Werner’s paper on the Meeting of the African Society
held at the Royal Society of Arts on Friday, December 12th, 1913, p317.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid, p318. Sir
Harry Johnston said, “The most we can glean of the language of the Southern
[Oromo] is that work by Tutschek from one or more [Oromo] peoples of Abyssinia
somewhere about 1848, and that gives one a tolerably correct
impression, …But, after all, the ancient Egyptians were closely allied to the
[Oromo].” For the collaboration of the emancipated young Oromo with Karl
Tutschek, see Richard Pankhurst, “The tragic romance of Mahbuba the beloved,”
Root, February, 56-8 in Military History, (1981); See also Richard
Pankhurst, “Mahbuba, the `Beloved’: The life and romance of an Ethiopian
slave-girl in early nineteenth century Europe,” in Journal of African Studies
6(1), (1979), 47-56. Tsega Etefa notes that Bilille met Oshu Aga in Viena, “an
Oromo language informant to Tutschek in Germany, and she taught him some Oromo
songs.” See Tsega Etefa, Integration and Peace…p110. The historical journey of Bilillee to Germany
in 1830s, meeting other Oromo ex-slaves such as Oshu Aaga and Akka-fedhee, was
a lucky accident, as they could help to lay ground for Oromo studies in Europe.
Bilillee’s “tragic romance” presented in the Encyclopedia Aethiopica
(2007) shows her contribution to the Oromo culture, which was arrested by her
premature death at 16. The purpose is, here, to excavate the unwitting
ethnographic excursions of the Oromo pioneers somewhere else outside ‘Ormania’
(today’s Oromia, Oromoland) but outside of their beloved homeland. The
collections and contents of her folksongs await further study.
[30] Ibid, “Meeting…,” p321
[31] See Enrico Cerulli’s Folk Literature of the [Oromo] of Southern
Abyssinia, (Cambridge: MA., Harvard African Studies, III, Peabody Museum of
Harvard University, 1922). See also Onesimos Nasib and Aster Ganno Salban’s Oromo Spelling Book, (Mankullo, Eritrea,
1894), in Cerulli, pp14-15.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Enrico Cerulli, FL, pp13-14.
[34]
Brian Yates, 2013.
“Christian Patriot or Oromo Traitor? The Ethiopian State in the Memories of Ras
Gobäna Dače,” in Northeast African
Studies, 13 (2), 25:51.
[36] See Cerulli, FL, pp14-15; Arnold Hodson and Craven
Walker, Practical Oromo Grammar. (London: William Clowes, 1922). Mekuria Bulcha, “Onesimos Nasib’s
Contributions…,” 1995.
[37] Bahru Zewde, A
History of Modern Ethiopia: 1855-1991. (London: James Curey Ltd., 2001),
p162.
[39] Peek and Yankah
are right in commenting that in African folklore study even folklorists (let
alone travelers) cannot apply the narrow European setting to an African setting
without clarification and contextualization. See Philip M. Peek and Kwesi
Yankah, African Folklore: An Encyclopedia,
(New York, NY: Rutledge, 2004), p11.
[40] Mekuria Bulcha,
“Onesimos Nasib….,” in Nordic Journal of
African Studies 4(1): 36-59 (1995), p41.
[41] Victor Turner, The
Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu
Ritual. (New York: Cornell UP,
1967); See also Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and
Anti-Structure. (New
Jersey: The State University, 1969).
[42]
Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec,
“Of Other Spaces” in Diacritics, Vol.
16, No. 1. (Spring 1986), pp. 22-27.
[43] Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908/1961), p11. The concept of rites
of passage relates to the transition from one stage of life to
another. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957) first
articulated it in his book The Rites of Passage (1908) and subdivided the rites of passage into three: rites of separation, transition rites, and
rites of incorporation. Thus, these rites might represent components
of one overall rite of passage, or be given greater or lesser emphasis in
specific ritual ceremonies. Theoretically, a complete scheme of rites of
passage includes “pre-liminal rites
(rites of separation), liminal rites
(rites of transition), and post-liminal
rites (rites of incorporation); in specific instances these three types are
not always equally important or equally elaborated.”
[44] Victor Turner, The Forest of
Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. (New York: Cornell UP, 1967), p95.
[45] Victor Turner, The
Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. (New Jersey: The State University, 1969), p95.
[46] Ibid, p97.
[47]
Greg Denning. “History’s Theatre,”
inPerformances. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1961).
[50]
In her Purity and
Danger, Mary Douglas is concerned about “purity” as a
central theme of every society in their everyday life. Purity for
Douglas has a wide-ranging impact on the individual’s attitude to society,
values, cosmology and knowledge, and her perspective has a huge influence in
many areas of debate in religion and social theory. See
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An
Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Keegan
Paul,
1966).
[53] See Mekuria Bulcha, citing
Hylander, in “Onesimos Nasib…,” 1995, p41.
[55] Ibid, p24.
[56] Onesimos Nasib and Aster Ganno
Salban, Oromo Spelling Book, (Munkullo,
Swedish Mission Press, 1894), 140; Enrico
Cerulli, Folk Literature of the Oromo of Southern Ethiopia, Cambridge:
MA, Harvard African Studies III, Peabody Museum of Harvard University, 1922.
[58]
“Macca” is the western
branch of the Oromo, and of one of the two moieties which founded the first
Oromo Relief Association, the Macca-Tulama (MT) Association. “Macca” is also
used as a casual swear word, “Macca taana,” meaning, “If you fail to do this or
that, we become like alien.” In the Holy Bible, Onesimos also used “Macca” and
Cush interchangeably to mean “Humankind,” or “Multitude.”
[61] In Onesimos’s
biographical note, Mekuria Bulcha makes it clear that “Onesimos refers to
himself consistently as nama biyya Oromoo
or “a man from the country of the Oromo,” throughout his writings, and not
otherwise. See Onesimos’s biographical note in
Mekuria Bulcha’s “Onesimos….,1995, p37.
[62] Ibid.
