ETHNOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF OROMO FOLKLORE STUDY
Cushitic Oromo Nation: Ethiopia, Northeast Africa
(Part I)
____________________
Assefa Tefera Dibaba*
Indiana University
_______________
*Assefa Tefera
Dibaba is a PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, in Folklore &
Anthropology. His dissertation titled Ethnography of Resistance Poetics,
is an interdisciplinary project that theorizes, using the case of the Oromo,
folklore performance and ecopoetic practices as a creative resistance and emancipatory
act of subversive response by the marginalized social groups to defy oppressive
power relations. He focuses on the Cushitic Oromo nation of Northeast Africa.
Email: atdibaba@umail.iu.edu
ABSTRACT
The aim of this study is to explore the ethnographic history of the
study of Oromo folklore based mainly on secondary sources from early Oromo
ethnology, philology, folklore collection, and travel writings. Thus, this
study has two objectives: first, to reconsider the historical
background of Oromo folklore research and ethnographic undertakings so as to
offer a critical history of Oromo folklore study; and second, using a
historical and literary approach, to analyze individual (and group) folklore
research endeavors in Northeast Africa in order to connect those early
developments with the current trend of Oromo folklore scholarship. I will do
this in two parts. Examination of the history of Oromo folklore scholarship shows
that initially the preoccupation was with collection and documentation: The
archival collections in Sandra Shell’s PhD research project on Oromo Diaspora Narratives at Lovedale are
useful sources of a broader study of the history of Oromo folklore scholarship.
Alice Werner did substantial folklore collection and ethnology of the Oromo of
East Africa (1913-1915), and the Italian scholar, Enrico Cerulli, published the
first large-scale Oromo folklore study in 1922. The Oromo folklore collection and
documentation begun in the nineteenth century at Munkullo, Eritrea, also play a
pivotal role in the intellectual history of Oromo folklore scholarship. The
study concludes that those early collections and documentations set ground not
only for understanding the intellectual history of Oromo folklore study but
also history of Oromo lexicography,
(bible) translation, and literary
history.
Keywords: Oromo folklore, Ethnographic history, Munkullo Team (MT), Oromo Diaspora Narratives, Lovedale. Chronological data (model), Oromia/Ethiopia
INTRODUCTION
Drawing
on Dan Ben-Amos’ notion of a “history of folklore studies,”[1]
I pose the following question in this study: Why do we need a history of Oromo
folklore study at this historical juncture? First and foremost, as an integral
part of the ongoing Oromo Studies and a “struggle for knowledge,”[2]
we need to construct a history of Oromo folklore research by diligently
engaging in tracing the genealogy of its intellectual ancestry.[3]
One should not dismiss the role of those early collections and documentations
in promoting Oromo lexicography, translation, literary history, and written
Oromo language. Second, by relocating the emerging Oromo folklore study within
the past intellectual and scholarly tradition, we can identify its scientific
identity as a full-fledged discipline and confirm its position in the current
Oromo Studies and in the broader humanities and social sciences scholarship.
Third, as Dan Ben-Amos cautions us, “the examination of the history of folklore
might simply provide an outlet for the obsession with collecting, for which our
profession is reputed and ridiculed.”[4]
Hence, to determine the positive role of current Oromo folklore study in
directing cultural transmission and social transformation from “below,” it is
time to pay attention to the methodological and theoretical orientations of the
discipline so as to establish it as a science on firm historical and ethnographic
ground.
Background
The
present day Ethiopia was created
by the highland Orthodox Christian settler colonizers. Menelik II (r. 1889-1913)
embarked on his southern march, expansionist campaign, to expand his rule and
establish his political and economic conquest from the central highland region
of Shawa to the South, West and East of the country. The conquest gave the region the current map of Ethiopia, a country with nearly one
hundred different ethnic groups trapped under one imperial rule with consequent
cultural domination, economic exploitation, and political exclusion.
Virginia Luling reminds
us that, historically, “from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century
the [Oromo] were dominant on their own territories; no people of other cultures
were in a position to exercise compulsion over them.”[5] Like
many African societies, the historiography of the Oromo has been revived on the
basis of oral traditions.[6]
Available sources show that the Oromo were effectively organized under the gada egalitarian system during the sixteenth-
and 17th centuries until they were partitioned into Kenya and
Ethiopia during the Scramble for Africa and conquered under the Abyssinian
monarchic rule of Menilek II.[7]
Today, the new Ethiopian
Constitution[8]
assigns supposedly extensive powers to the newly-created regional states
divided sub-regionally into zones, districts (woredas), and kebeles which serve as the primary level of
institutions at local level. Theoretically Regional States in Ethiopia are endowed with
self-rule, and almost a “semi-sovereign” status. Regional States have
demarcated boundaries, a constitution, a flag, and a regional language used in
school, in courts and public administrations. Oromia is the most populous regional state in
Ethiopia and is divided into zones with a total population of above 35 million
by the 2007 census. It is a region of vast geographical and ecological
diversity and covers about 141, 699.5mi² (367,
000km²), more than 30% of the country’s total area. Twelve of the twenty
largest urban dwellings in Ethiopia are located within Oromia, with Finfinne (Addis
Ababa), the capital at its center.[9] Asafa
Jalata clearly states that Ethiopian scholars and Ethiopianists ignored the
Oromo altogether or treated them as objects of history and not as people
aspiring for a national sociopolitical and cultural identity of their own.[10] Asafa
Jalata challenges the mainstream Ethiopian Studies’ ethnocentric discourse and
the Western elites’ intellectual hegemony,[11]
and he shares William Shack’s concern: “The
lack of critical scholarship has inadvertently distorted the human achievements
of conquered peoples like the Oromo, including transformations of their social,
cultural, and political institutions.”[12]
The current Oromo struggle for knowledge is to subvert this “top-down
paradigm to historiography” and to make the Oromo subjects of history. This
study attempts to direct Oromo folklore scholarship towards the current Oromo
“struggle for knowledge” as part of the ongoing national liberation movement.
Methods and
Sources
This
study will use two kinds of source materials: primary and secondary sources. In
order to understand the historical background of Oromo folklore research, this
study will rely on a number of secondary sources written between the sixteenth-
and 21st centuries and on firsthand information. The secondary
sources include ethnographic materials and travel writings from the nineteenth-
and early twentieth-centuries. The works of the Munkullo Team (MT), from 1885
to 1898, laid a foundation for the study of Oromo folklore scholarship. Alice
Werner’s ethnological findings (folklore and anthropology) about the Oromo in
Kenya (Equatorial Oromo, as she calls them) in 1913 and 1914, presented to the
Royal African Society in four extensive articles, are worth attention. Access
to Dr. Sandra Shell’s PhD research on the Oromo Diaspora Narratives., i.e.
the former Oromo slave narratives at Lovedale, South Africa, is the result of
my correspondence and conversations with her. The collection of interviews in
Shell’s Oromo Diaspora Narratives can be used for a broader study
of Oromo folklore. For example, Gutama Tarafo’s four-page essay, which he read
to the Lovedale Literary Society in 1897 as a student, is highly significant.
Thus, the present study is not a complete survey of the history of Oromo
folklore ethnography, documentation and study. Rather, it is an attempt to give
a sample of available research information so as to open venue toward a broad
intellectual history of Oromo folklore scholarship and to initiate a more
organized and collaborated ethnographic undertakings in the field.
Outline
It
is not an easy task to to present a conception of the ethnographic history of
Oromo folklore study by assessing the early Oromo philology, ethnology, and
travelogues in a single journal volume. Hence, to avoid the problem I have
divided this article into two parts. In Part I, in the first section, an
attempt is made to establish a background
for those early collections, documentations and attempted interpretations, and
then move on to the chronological
synthesis of the ethnographic endeavors in the second section to create an understanding
of Oromo folklore history. In the third section, I locate Munkullo as a spatial imagination, a metaphor of home far from
home, and a symbolic representation of identity search in folkloric and
evangelical surge of spiritual connectedness to home—Biyya Oromoo, i.e.
Oromoland. This third section will be further enriched in Part II using
folkloric examples. Finally, to recapitulate the argument, I present a sample
chronological model for analytical practices in an ethnographic history of folklore study seminar. In Part II I will try to construct a framework of literary-historical approach to ground a
critical history of Oromo folklore scholarship from a position of a folklorist
and ethnographer.
CHRONOLOGICAL
DATA
In what follows an attempt is made to determine the
timeline of Oromo folklore study and other literary events that marked its
inception. Here I identify those early collections in sequence and present a
chronological analysis of the ethnographic endeavors to create an understanding
of Oromo folkloristics using available chronological data. Toward
this end, I outline the background history
of Oromo folklore research through exploring early ethnographic
travelogues in East Africa and beyond. In so doing, the primary focus of the
present study will be reevaluating the folkloric collection at Munkullo
(1885-1898), which is the period of the most astounding and groundbreaking
works in the history of Oromo folklore
study.[13]
Early
Oromo Philology, Ethnology, and Travelogues
Oromo
folklore study has endured uneven representativeness in the selection of
folklore materials and/or misrepresentation, or scanty representation, if any
at all, in African folklore scholarship. Since the Oromo language is the fourth
most widely spoken language in Africa, after Arabic, Swahili, and Hausa,[14]
it is unfortunate to underrepresent and/or misrepresent Oromo folklore
materials in anthologies of folklore collections on the African continent and
in encyclopedia entries on African folklore. The examination of the history of
folklore study shows that the early preoccupation was with collections of texts
and classifications.[15]
That is, the early Oromo folklore collection was made not by folklorists as it
was not for folklore scholarship. To do folklore history is more than to
“collect and classify the facts about past collecting and classifying;” it is
more than to list facts into a calendric succession which, according to Dan
Ben-Amos, is a “chronic fallacy” of re-counting a chronicle, not writing a
history of folklore.[16]
“Chronicling” is undoubtedly one methodological pitfall that folklore
scholarship suffers, especially at its formative stage. To practice
ethnographic history is, however, to practice what Greg Dening calls “history’s
theatre” or “performance,” that is, making-history, performing/doing history,
which involves “present-ing” the “past”.[17]
The
groundwork done by the pioneering native Oromo evangelists in the nineteenth
century was a vital reference point to reconstruct the history of Oromo folklore study. Though
no research tools such as classification systems, indexes, annotated
collection, and bibliographies were developed, the knowledge of those early
collections is still vital in terms of theories and philosophical issues for
current Oromo folklore scholarship. The following are examples of early
ethnology, linguistics, missionary and travel writings which made seminal
contributions to the current Oromo folklore scholarship while some made
unscholarly conclusions about the Oromo. By way
of an example for the latter, I present Bahrey’s sixteenth-century chronicle.
Bahrey’s
16-page long chronicle is important not just because of the reproachable motive
of the literature but also because, from the start, it disfigured the Oromo
ethnographic history in general, and the writing of Oromo folklore history in
particular. Bahrey’s chronicle has become part of the emergent Oromo
scholarship to reconstruct the defaced past.[18] Bahrey was considered a
historian and ethnographer by most of the Ethiopian and Ethiopinist scholars,
who referred to his chronicle, “History of the [Oromo],” without
questioning critically its historical validity. According to Huntingford,
Bahrey was a native of Gamo, south Ethiopia, who wrote what he observed closely
when the region was invaded by the Oromo sixty or seventy years before.
Bahrey
wrote the “‘History’
of the Oromo”.[21]
However, it is hard to imagine an individual becoming a monk, an ecclesiastic
chronicler in Geez script, having come from no cultural background in
Christianity and writing tradition in the sixteenth-century southern Ethiopia.
Nevertheless, Bahrey is best known among the Abyssinians for his chronicle and
for recording folksongs in praise of Sarsa Dengel, the Abyssinian king
threatened by the Oromo encounters in the sixteenth-century.[22]
Among
the reasons why Bahrey wrote about the Oromo, as he puts it, was “to make known the number of their tribes,
their readiness to kill people, and the brutality of their manners”.[23] And, he goes on to say, if anyone
should ask why he wrote the history of “bad people,” he would answer by saying
that “the history of Mohamed and the Moslem kings has been written, and they
are our enemies in religion”.[24]
Historically speaking, one can infer that the politics of place/space and
religious intolerance in Ethiopia is as old as the emergence of the two main
world religions, namely, Christianity and Islam, in the Horn. From a general
standpoint, the term “Galla” that Bahrey engraved in the chronicle became a
misnomer for over three centuries instead of the term “Oromo,” and the term
“Galla” began to be avoided in the 1970s as a pejorative term in Oromo
ethnography and scholarly discussions and publications.
In
spite of its ethical failings and methodological shortcomings, Bahrey’s
chronicle, in Sabean (Geez) script, is a significant source for learning about
Oromo folklore and social structure in the sixteenth-century. Regarding Oromo
genealogy, Bahrey chronicled the two Oromo lines of descent, Borana and
Barentuma, and most of all, the gada
system, an egalitarian structure of unlimited folkloric, historical
and anthropological values.[25]
Manuel de Almeida borrowed heavily from Bahrey in writing the history of
Ethiopia as Hiob Ludolf derived much information on the Oromo from Baltazar Téllez's summary of Almeida’s
work.[26]
However, not until after 1974 was the term “Galla” fully shunned in media, conversations
and publications in Ethiopia.[27]
Bairu
Tafla considers Bahrey’s “history of bad people”[28]
as “one of the two serious historical documents on the Oromo,”[29]
the other “serious” work being that of Asma Giyorgis, in which he “devotes
attention to the four-hundred-year period” of Oromo history.[30]
Bahrey attempts to chronicle the time and manner of the Oromo expansion and he
recounts the genealogies of the two major branches of the Oromo, namely, Borana
and Barentuma, the names of early Gada Luba, Oromo traditional social class of
the time, and their division of labor contrasted with that of the hierarchical
Christian social organization.[31]
Bahrey presents two opposing views about the Oromo’s victory and the Christian
Abyssinians’ defeat: that of the court, who explain it as the disintegration of
the Shawan state unlike the Oromo united under Gada system and that of the
clergy, who attributed it to unremitted sin – their fathers’ and Lebna-Dengel’s
pride.[32]
While
suffering from the author’s bias and prejudice, visible shortcomings and lack
of coherence, Bahrey’s chronicle sounds ethnographic in its methodological
orientation; he testifies, “I know not the name of his [Melbah’s] father, for
no man was able to tell me.”[33]
Thus, the chronicle is a factual exposition of the Oromo narratives, not a
hypothetical analysis of the early history of the Oromo and their origin and
movement, the changes to Oromo language and culture following the movement,
social structure and interethnic relationships with neighbors, the questions
which gave rise to “fantastic legends” and “propounded explanations.”[34]
Bahrey’s theory of the origin of the Oromo people (“came from the west”) favors
an “outside origin,” which has never represented an Oromo perspective.[35]
In
spite of its vivid shortcomings, Bahrey’s work is seen as a pioneer of Oromo
ethnographic history based on oral historical tradition of the time; the
meaning of the facts and their interpretations depend on our vantage point. Bairu Tafla calls
Bahrey “that learned monk who tried to understand and record” the Oromo
“history, institution and ways of life.”[36] Ekaterina Gusarova also describes the
chronicle as “the starting point of any research focused upon the literary
traditions about the Oromo.”[37]
However, Tafla reminds us that, the objective recording of historiography or
“the history of the antagonist whoever he might be” is problematic “not so much
in ignorance of the events or in the lack of material worth recording but
rather in intense prejudice deeply rooted in the Amara-Tegray society.”[38]
To ease this tension, “in absence of other reliable sources,” Gusarova seems to
recommend using “the information obtained from the available texts,” and, I
should add, doing so with caution.
Bahrey’s
History, with its “partisan perspective”[39]
explains the Oromo social organization, unity, movement and conflicts with
Christian Abyssinians and presents the reasons for the victories of the Oromo
and defeats for the Christians of Ethiopia. Bahrey’s particular ethnographic
approach is relevant to the purpose of the present study, namely, to trace the
genealogy of Oromo folklore study and to reexamine it in historical context.
The chronicle has four manuscripts; as Ekaterina Gusarova declares, “Now my
research consists of analyzing all four manuscripts of the work of Bahrey, ‘The
history of the [Oromo].’”[40]
To identify, to fully grasp and determine the specific significance of the
16-page Bahrey’s slim History book to
construct the ethnographic history of Oromo folklore study, requires reexamining
those four manuscripts of the work with due care.[41]
Asma Giyorgis and His Work
Drawing on Bahrey’s and Asma
Giyorgis’s works, Bairu Tafla illustrates the paradox of Oromo “expansion” in
the sixteenth-century and introduces the notion of guddifacha, i.e. the Oromization (assimilation) process.[42]
He writes, “the Oromo assimilated the various peoples they conquered,” and, in
so doing, “they boosted the size of their society and naturally became the
victims of their own overexpansion.[43]
It is during this time that it became difficult for the Oromo to attend their caffe, the central assemblage, to
participate in the activities of the gada
institution (a “symbol and essence of their unity”) and therefore they
divided into several branches—the division which “subsequently gave way to
alien cultural and religious institutions.”[44]
Sydney
Waldron hails Bairu Tafla’s annotated English rendition of Asma Giyorgis’s work
“long regarded as an essentially minor and folkloric work document,” but a
“neglected milestone in Ethiopian historiography.”[45]
Asma Giyorgis’s History is presented
as an interpretation of the “origin and differentiation” of the Oromo and
Amahra over the last four hundred years with rich bibliography coupled by broad
scholarship and a thorough introduction to ease the unintelligibility of the
texts. Asma’s History, unlike
Bahrey’s History, presents the Oromo
not as “murderer invaders,” not as emasculated and scorned objects of history
but as a society with a history of its own, with social and political
institutions as a “full-fledged historical phenomenon.”[46]
The interaction between the two societies over the four hundred years was
two-way in that the Amhara cultural, linguistic, and religious influence was
counter-posed by the Oromo political and military ventures.
In
the first part of his History, Asma
Giyorgis relies heavily on Bahrey’s History
to establish the basic themes and patters of Oromo tradition and gada constitution. As he presents the
Oromo and Shawan history through the end of the nineteenth-century , Asma
Giyorgis is also concerned with the notion of “curse,” a folkloric element
widely believed to have a negative impact on the victim unless revoked. In the
context of the “outside origin theory” about the Oromo, the archetypal “curse”
motif is recurrent and manifested in the hostile Oromo-Amhara interactions over
four centuries.
In
the second part of Asma Giyorgis’s History,
the focus is on Menelik’s reign and on his relationship with the Oromo in
the late nineteenth-century . Hence, Asma Giyorgis’s book presents a real
historical context of the imbalanced Oromo-Amhara relationships which came to
be the subject of Oromo folklore and oral tradition. In the early ethnographic
undertakings in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries are texts that recount
and preserve Oromo “folk ideas” as documented, for example, in the works by the
Munkullo Team of former slave Oromo evangelists, philologists, ethnologists,
missionaries, and travelers. Part of the folkloric significance of Asma
Giyorgis’s work is that it recounts earlier historical traditions and
“preserves place names and other details.”[47]
The “curse” invoked by the Portuguese Jesuit, John Bermudez, who was falsely
accused of theft by Abyssinian monks in the sixteenth-century is mentioned in both Bahrey’s and Asma
Giyorgis’s works as one unique factor—causal attribution—for the Amhara
“defeat” at the hands of the Oromo.[48]
Thus the theme of curse is another significant folklore form, like toponyms,
which has wider implications among the Oromo referring to the “moral decay of
Ethiopia’s Orthodox clergy.”[49]
Philipp
Paulitschke
In
his two-volume Ethnography of Northeast
Africa, Philip Paulitschke stands out as one of the first foot-steps in
Northeast Africa. His collection encompasses an Oromo genre of war ritual, a
taboo accompanied by song and dance
as a treatment of the slain enemy’s spirit among the traditional Oromo society.
The ritual involves appeasement (of
the spirit), restriction (on the
slayer) until expiation or purification rites
are performed, and other ceremonial
observances accompanied by songs and ritual dances before the victors
reenter their own houses. This folklore practice among the Oromo in the
nineteenth century is quoted by James Frazer in The Golden Bough, which Sigmund Freud also cites in his Totem and Taboo, fits into an example of
ethnic genre that cuts through the universal/analytical category of belief
system and narratives.[50] One
can see how a folkloric genre, like a flash of lightning, like a shooting star,
crosses the “location of culture,” the border between, and represents the
society to which it belongs.
Though attempts were made to collect and
document Oromo oral literature starting in the nineteenth century in Europe and
Northeast Africa, theoretically and methodologically oriented study of Oromo
folklore genres is only a very recent development. Those early collections and
documentations began in the nineteenth century could not continue to fully
flourish in Ethiopia since “unfortunately [the] government policy hostile to
the use of written Oromo made this impossible.”[51]
Among other factors was the expatriates’ lack of interest in African folklore
traditions and languages. Andrzejewski writes, “research experience in oral
literatures reveals that very frequently even the existence of major oral prose
and poetry genres was overlooked by expatriate scholars, especially if their
knowledge of the relevant language was inadequate or if they had no literary
interests.”[52]
Andrzejewski adds that “partly responsible for such omissions is the semantic
confusion” about genres; for example, “song” and “poetry.”
Diaspora Oromo Narratives
The
“diaspora
Oromo narrative” includes
the
earlier accounts of emancipated Oromo “prize” slaves at Lovedale, South Africa.
This story of the Oromo children (14-17 years of age), which was hitherto only
scantily recorded, was reconstructed by Sandra Shell for her PhD project and
became a pioneering reconstruction of representative history of slavery in East
Africa.[53]
Using interviews with descendants of the freed Oromo slaves and secondary data
at Cory Library in South Africa, Shell successfully reconstructed the history
of the ex-slave Oromo children at Lovedale.[54]
Next I present a sample of some folkloric incursions into Gutama Tarafo’s essay
which recounts, out of his memory, the Oromo folk-life until he left his home.
Gutama Tarafo’s
Essay: “My Essay is upon ‘[Oromoland]’”
The essay is short but contains detailed accounts of Oromo
folk ideas and folk-life in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through
comparing and contrasting methods, the author constructs his memory, identity,
and culture as he is learning a new culture. Toward this goal, memory was
needed, not simply to understand the past but also to relate to who he was in
the present. By relying on the objects which he closely observed and his
experiences as a child, Gutama Tarafo reifies his memory and reframes it into a
folkloric and nostalgic narrative of homeland.
The four-page essay
which he read to the Lovedale Literary Society in 1897 as a student, about a
decade after leaving home, recounts Oromo folk life and folklore. As Shell
describes the essay in our email correspondence, she says, she found it “particularly moving…given his
nostalgia and sheer pride in his beloved homeland.”[55]
It is dense with data about the Oromo world-view, food-ways, livestock, traditional
costumes, marriage, lifestyle, customs, climate, landscape, and flora and
fauna. In this narrative, the author provides rich accounts of the past through
conversation and using landscape as mnemonic devices and sites of memory. He
uses different discursive techniques to contrast the present with the past, and
“here” and “there,” as a sheer practice to counteract forgetfulness, to
meditate in the new space, and in so doing, to traditionalize the old, to forge
homogenous units of value soon to be lost in time, without trace, without autonomous
meaning. The retellings like “…many things are different..; people are
different; …the country itself is different;…there are many other rivers, whose
name I forgot…” are
not intended as purposeful ideological traditionalizing using differences. They
are ways of providing the name, identity, and place of one culture against the
other in which case the age and memory of the individual are determinant
factors to aim at precision. In this essay there are at least three major items
that are not accurate: one, the Oromo are not heathens; they worship Waaqa,
that is, Creator (God); second, Oromo women are actively involved in both
productive and non-productive chores; and third, Oromo marriage, by tradition,
is arranged by parents. The narrative of traditional Oromo religion and folk
ideas is collected and documented by the former-slave young Oromo evangelists
at Munkullo, Eritrea, Northeast Africa, is presented in more details in the
second section.
In what follows, I turn to sketching the historical
background of Oromo folklore scholarship began at Munkullo. The rationale for
focusing on the Munkullo team is the relatively massive work of Oromo folklore collection for linguistic endeavors and bible translation by
the former- slave young Oromo evangelists led by Onesimos Nasib and Aster Ganno
Salban.
Munkullo: the setting
Munkullo is an inland village in today’s
Northern Red Sea Region of Eritrea that lies along the northern three quarters
of the Red Sea. It is 5.6 kilometers (3.5 miles) from Massawa port (today’s
Eritrea), where the Swedish Mission School was relocated. Munkullo possibly
emerged in the early period of Ottoman rule to develop in the first decade of
the nineteenth-century as a satellite of
Massawa, the port town of Eritrea. It served as a main gateway for exports of
civets, gold, ivory, and slave from the south of Abyssinia and imports of
spices, silk, and garments of all kinds from India, as well as carpets and
weapons.[57] Munkullo, about four
miles inland, was the main source of drinking water for Massawa and a place of
refuge for well-to-do families from the hot and stifling climate of Massawa. By
1830 Munkullo was inhabited by people from Massawa who had come with their
cattle and slaves to the relatively cool and green area and to procure good
drinking water, which was carried by donkey and slaves to Massawa.[58] Munkullo was home to the
ex-slave young Oromo evangelists who founded the Munkullo Team (MT) of
mini-Oromo academy in exile. After repeated and failed attempts to go back
home, they embarked on the collection and documentation of Oromo folklore (songs,
stories, and proverbs), collecting corpus for Oromo dictionary, and
translations of religious stories and the Bible for the next thirteen years
between 1885 and 1898.[59]
Former-Slave Young
Oromo Evangelists (1885-1898)
In this paper I do not aim to provide
comprehensive details of the places where early Oromo studies and inceptions of
folkloric research works started. My intention is rather to give a few accounts
of the places, such as Munkullo and Lovedale, in relation to the early attempts
made to initiate Oromo studies in the nineteenth-century . Place names
present a particular difficulty since they have been spelled and pronounced
differently by people speaking different languages in various historical
contexts. Hence, in this study, I have chosen the most common variant
used in Oromo studies such as the works of Mekuria Bulcha, who has been writing
extensively with a particular interest in the history of written Oromo
language and Ethiopian language policy.[60] Hence, I follow Bulcha’s
way of common vernacular transcription and pronunciation.
In the 1880s the
presence of missionaries in Northeast Africa was evident, especially “the
Swedish Protestant School at Munkullo, and the French Lazarist school at Karan.[61] Improvement at Massawa,
the colonial capital of Italy until 1899, led to the growth of Munkullo, the
nearby satellite village town. According to Pankhurst, although banned by
Emperor Yohannes, the Swedish Missionary School was very well conducted and
provided the pupils with a very useful education. The boys were trained as
carpenters, blacksmiths, and masonry, and the girls were trained in cooking,
sewing, and household management. However, limited by the static character of
the economy, it was difficult to be employed with these skills. “Outcast from
their own people and unable to find employment,”[62] which was even harder for
women than for men, the ex-slave young Oromo at Munkullo had ample time to
focus on Oromo folklore collection, dictionary and bible translation while
attending school.
Onesimos Nassib and Aster Ganno Salban
Onesimos Nasib (c.1856-1931) and Aster
Ganno Salban (c.1872–1964) organized the hard
core of historical facts by initiating the Oromo mini-academy at Munkullo
around the turn of the twentieth century. After repeated failed attempts
in the 1880s to reenter the Oromoland through Abyssinia, the Oromo team at
Munkullo turned to collecting Oromo folklore, compiling dictionary, and
translating the bible and bible stories. Under the leadership of Onesimos Nasib
and Aster Ganno Salban, the team contributed a large Oromo collection to the
Swedish Missionary School which was opened in 1866.[63]Among the collections
published by the MT include short religious books, a collection of folksongs
and stories in the Oromo Spelling Book by Onesimus Nasib and Aster
Ganno Salban, Weedduu, or Oromo Maiden Songs by
Aster Ganno Salban, a comprehensive grammar of the Oromo language, more than
15,000 Oromo vocabulary words in a dictionary, John Bunyan’s Man’s
Heart translated into the Oromo language, Luther’s Catechism, and
Dr. Barth’s Bible Stories, all translated into the Oromo language
with the Holy Bible, published in 1899.[64] The MT of Oromo used Geez (Ethiopic) script
but also relied heavily on the memories of the young evangelists, Aster Ganno
Salban in particular.[65] The
Oromo Spelling Book was one of the achievements of the MT which
Enrico Cerulli translated into English with Lorensiyos Wolde Iyasus (his
informant); he included in his publication the songs, stories, riddles, and
proverbs documented by the MT from their memory.[66]
Aster Ganno Salban worked
with Onesimos Nesib as a translator of the Oromo Bible published in 1899.[67] Aster
was enslaved by the king of Limmu-Ennarea, where she was born, in the
western part of Oromia. She was emancipated in 1886 when Italian ships intercepted
a boat which was taking her to be sold on the Arabian Peninsula; they took her
to Eritrea where the Munkullo School of the Swedish
Evangelical Mission admitted her. Aster was educated at the school and
Onesimos quickly “discovered that Aster was endowed with considerable mental
gifts and possessed a real feeling for the Oromo language.”[68] She
was assigned to compile an Oromo dictionary, which was first used in polishing
the Oromo translation of New Testament published in 1893. Aster also
translated a book of Bible stories and wrote down 500 traditional
Oromo riddles, fables, proverbs, and songs, many of which were
published in the Oromo Spelling Book (1894). She later worked
with Onesimos in compiling an Oromo hymnbook. Gustave Arén reports that a large amount of folklore
she collected is still unpublished and preserved by the Hylander family.[69]
In
this study I do not intend to repeat what Mekuria Bulcha has discussed
extensively. But I find it important to share his view here to consolidate the theme
running through this article, namely, the significance of the scholarly
undertakings by the MT. Makuria maintains that the Oromo youth liberated from
slavery were between the age of 13 and 15 and “sheltered at the Swedish Mission
station of Geleb in the highland of Mensa in Eritrea.”[70]
Thus, according to Bulcha, the Oromo language team was organized about 1890 and
consisted of fifteen to twenty members. Besides Onesimos and Aster, other Oromo
youth on the team were Lidia Dimbo, Stefanos Bonaya, from Lamu in present day
Kenya, Natnael, and Roro; these were the most active members of the team.[71]
In Part II of this study, I will turn to discussing a few folkloric examples in
the collections by the Munkullo
Team (MT) from a historical and literary
perspective.
ANNOTATED CHRONOLOGY MODEL: A Coda
From
what has been presented in Part I of this study, it is difficult for at least
two reasons to map a timeline for the history of Oromo folklore scholarship at
present. First, to make an annotated
chronology of ethnographic undertakings related to folklore, we need to
establish an exhaustive chronological
data about the historical events and social context in which the work was
situated, which is not an easy task at the moment. Second, to survey and
pinpoint with a reasonable degree of precision who did what and when and determine a documentation of bibliographical database using periodization and classification methods, it requires
skill, funding, personnel, and time. Thus, it is important to practice presenting
annotated chronology as a model in
constructing an ethnographic history of Oromo folkloristics in “Oromo Folklore History” class.
In
an “Oromo Folklore History” class,
using an annotated chronology model, this
final section will serve as an introductory outline, if not as a master
roadmap. Using those tentative chronological data outlined in this Part I of
the study, one can show how events exist in relationship to one another. For
example, let us make the following two cases:
Case One:
In the English version of Father Martial De Salviac’s (1900) influential book, The Oromo: Great African Nation, Dr.
Ayalew Kanno notes,
“the author
provides rare eyewitness reports of how men, women and children were captured and sold into slavery” to be
“…bought back by the missionaries and freed. Some of the freed slaves were
educated and joined missionary works.”[72]
In
the first page of the same book, Antoine d’Abbadie is quoted:
“The Oromo would have had qualities
of the French, had they been Christians.”
Based
on the above claims which are interwoven with history, religion, politics, economics, identity, human rights,
education, stereotypes, and Eurocentric views, it is possible to plot
events analytically. To assist with cultural memory and to grasp sequences of
events as shown in this study, it is profitable to observe, for instance, how
the unlucky accident of the victims of slavery led them to become the happy
victors of Oromo intellectual history at Munkullo, which is not the case with
those “prize” slaves shipped to Lovedale, South Africa. Why?
Case Two:
The groups at Munkullo and Lovedale were enslaved about the same time (1880s),
and emancipated and educated to join missionary works. What happened to the
Lovedale team? There were descendants of those ex-slaves, who ascended the
academic ladder. For example, the late Dr. Neville Alexander was a grandson of
Bisho Jarsa, an Oromo woman who became a school teacher.[73] One
can speculate about the possible relationship between missionaries, human
freedom, abolition of the slave trade, colonial administration (internal colony
and foreign rule) in East Africa and in South Africa.
Thus,
in presenting an annotated chronology of Oromo folklore study, it becomes
necessary to create those links between units of time and events in the history
of the Oromo and the region and not just to make a linear sequence with past,
present, and future. The main aim of chronological analysis should be to
establish a critical history of intellectual advancement, or the lack thereof.
It is also important to map out the terrain of events unique in the
intellectual history of the discipline, folklore study in general, and Oromo
folklore scholarship in particular, and to identify how events do not simply
repeat themselves exactly, but incorporate changes, and demonstrate cause and
effect.
Using
the case examples presented in this study, it is possible to construct an annotated chronology around topics or themes by drawing on available research sources, both secondary and
primary. When reading the source (a volume of folklore, travel writing,
ethnography or ethnology) it is vital to note details that emphasize dates,
place, and brief descriptions for the most important historical events with the
end goal in mind of annotating the chronology. When crosschecking with other
sources, it is important to examine the annotated chronology to discover a
definite (or tentative) storyline of events in the book, book chapter, or
journal article as it unfolds.
NOTES
[1] Dan Ben-Amos, “A History of
Folklore Studies: Why Do We Need It?” in Journal
of the Folklore Institute, Vol. 10, No. 1/2, (1973), pp. 113-124.
[2]
See Asafa
Jalata’s “The Struggle for Knowledge: The Case of Emergent Oromo Studies,” in African Studies Review, Vol. 39, No. 2
(1996), pp. 95-123.
[3]
Asafa Tafarra Dibaabaa.
2009. Eela: Seenaa Oguma Oromoo (History
of Oromo Literature). Addis Ababa: Far East Trading.
[4]
Dan Ben-Amos, p114.
[5]Virginia Luling, Government and Social Control among Some
Peoples of the Horn of Africa, (MA thesis, University of London, 1965),
cited in Asafa Jalata, 2005, p18.
[6] Gada Melba, Oromia: An
Introduction to the History of the Oromo People (Minneapolis: Kirk House
Publishers, 1999), pp10-13ff.
[7] Teshale Tibebu, The Making of Modern Ethiopia: 1896-1974, (Lawrenceville,
NJ: The Red Sea Press, 1995), p.xv.
[8]“Constitution of the Federal Democratic
Republic of Ethiopia,” http://www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/en/et/et007en.pdf Retrieved, May 2015; Cf.
“Ethiopian
Constitution of 1931,” states in its Article 1 that
“The territory of Ethiopia, in
its entirety, is, from one end to the other, subject to the government of His
Majesty the Emperor. All the natives of Ethiopia, subjects of the empire, form
together the Ethiopian Empire,” p1, in Margery Perham, The Government of Ethiopia, (London 1969).
[9]
Oromia:
Facts (Year
Book). (Finfinne: Published by Office
of the President, 2010); Central
Statistical Agency (CSA) of Ethiopia, 2007.
[10] Asafa Jalata, p95.
[11]
See
Asafa Jalata, p100. Jalata criticizes Western scholars, particularly Edward
Ullendorff and Donald Levine, for their bias and unfounded Ethiopianist
discourse. See also Edward Ullendorf, The
Ethiopians. (London: Oxford University Press, 1960:76). The intellectual
history of Oromo culture has been swept under the rug by Western scholars who
wrote justifying the Ethiopian conquest of the Oromo. Jalata reminds us that
Ullendorff blames the Oromo “for the failure of the Ethiopian social system”
and contended that the Oromo had contributed no material or spiritual culture
to Ethiopian civilization (Ullendorf, 1960, p76). Donald Levine praises the
Ethiopian monarchic rule for solving serious intertribal wars “by establishing
Ethiopian rule over the conquered peoples” (Levine 1974:26). Levine also claims
that “Ethiopian colonialism eliminated slavery” and “protected all the peoples
of greater Ethiopia from falling prey to European imperialism” (Levine
1992:16).
However, the young Oromo ex-slaves
presented in this study were victims of slave raids during the Abyssinian
rulers’ expansionist wars in the 19th century in Oromia, Oromo
country. Examples are Dilbo, Waare, Berkie, Ulaa, and Karrisa, among others, who
served the European missionaries and travelers in Ethiopia as informants about
the Oromo and Oromia in the mid-19th century. Dilbo, for example,
was an informant to the traveler Charles Beke in 1841 and to the Reverend John
Krapf while at the same time “enslaved in the house of King Sahle Selassie of
Shawa (1813-1847),” which Svein Ege (1996) calls “court slavery.” See Tsega
Etefa, Integration and Peace in East
Africa: a History of the Oromo Nation (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012), p120ff. See Svein Ege, Class,
State, and Power in Africa: A Case Study of the Kingdom of Shawa (Ethiopia)
about 1840, (Harrassowitz Verlag: Aethiopistische Forschugen 46, 1996),
pp115-123. For those ex-slave young Oromo boys and girls and their
contributions to Oromo studies in Europe in the 19th century, see
Richard Pankhurst, “The Beginning of Oromo Studies in Europe,” Africa 31, no, 2 (1976): 171-206.
[12] Asafa Jalata, p95; See William
Shack, “Review of the Oromo of
Ethiopia: A History 1570-1860, by Mohammed Hassen,” in American Ethnologist. (1994), 21/3: 642-43, p642.
[13]Bulcha, Mekuria, “Onesimos Nasib's
Pioneering Contributions to Oromo Writing,” in Nordic Journal of
African Studies 4(1): 36-59 (1995); Richard
Pankhurst, “The
Beginnings of Oromo Studies in Europe,” Africa, no. 2, 199-201.
[14] Abdulaziz Y. Lodhi, “The
Language Situation in Africa Today,” Nordic
Journal of African Studies 2(1) (1993), 79–86 , see pp79, 84.
[15]
Alan Dundes once wrote “All too often
…when writing about the practices and traditions of a group of people,
folklorists spend more time collecting and categorizing the material than
analyzing it,” (Dundes, 2002, p. ix). See his “Folk Ideas as Units of
Worldview,” p179 and “On the Psychology of Collecting Folklore, p410ff” in
Simone Bronner, The Meaning of Folklore:
The Analytical Essays of Alan Dundes, 2007).
Historically, the major collections of Oromo folklore shows concern with Oromo
religion and worldview (“folk ideas”), social customs and verbal arts. See
Onesimos Nasib and Aster Ganno Salban, Oromo
Spelling Book, (Munkullo, today’s Eritrea: Sweden Mission Press, 1894).
[19] In his very informative article
on survey of Cushitic literatures, Andrzejewski insists that readers should
“note that the name Galla, previously used in the majority of scholarly
publications, has been replaced here by Oromo. Although the two names refer to
the same language, the name Oromo is preferable, since it is now very much
favored in Ethiopia, and the name Galla seems to be on the way out.” See B. W.
Andrzejewski “A Survey of Cushitic Literatures, 1940-1975 in Ethiopianist Notes, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1978),
pp. 1-27, p2.
[20] Bahrey,
Almeida, Huntingford & Beckingham, History
of the [Oromo] of Ethiopia: with ethnology and history of South-west Ethiopia. (Oakland,
CA: African Sun Publishing, 1993). “Abba
Bahrey is a monk who recoded in writing for the first time the early history of
the Oromo (migration) from the direction of Bale. He lived in the second half
of the 16th century. He was the Alaqa (head priest) of Maryam church
in Gamo, southern Ethiopia. See Bairu Tafla, Asma Giyorgis and his work: History of the [Oromo] and the Kingdom of
Shawa, (Stuttgart: Frantz Steiner, 1987), p890.
For the origin of the Oromo, see Feyissa Demie, “The Origin of the
Oromo: A Reconstruction of the Theory of the Cushitic Roots,” in Journal of Oromo Studies, Vol. 5, Nos.
1&2, July 1998, pp134-155; Darrell Bates, The Abyssinian Difficulty, (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979). Despite the unfounded wild speculations and sentimental views, it is
widely agreed that the Oromo are the largest Cushitic-speaking people
in Northeast Africa. Available
information suggests that they have existed as a community in the Horn of
Africa for several millennia. Scholars contend that the Oromo were a very
ancient race, the indigenous stock, perhaps, on which most other peoples in
this part of eastern Africa have been grafted.
[21] See
Mohammad Hassan, “The Significance of Abba Bahrey in Oromo Studies: a
Commentary on the Works of Abba Bahrey and Other Documents Concerning the
Oromo,” in Journal of Oromo Studies,
Vol 14, No.2, (2007), pp132-155.
[22] Bahrey, Almeida, Huntingford
& Beckingham, History of the Oromo of
Ethiopia, (Oakland, CL, African Dun Publishing, 1993),
p44.
[23] Ibid.
[25] See Asmarom Legesse, Gada: Gada: three
approaches to the study of African society. (Washington, DC: Free Press, 1973). Asmarom
Legesse, an Eritrean anthropologist, studied the Oromo Gada system for his PhD
and published it as Gada, ALSO later Oromo Democracy (2000).
[26] Bahrey, History. pp44-55.
[27] See Mohammed Hassen, “The
Significance of Abba Bahrey in Oromo Studies,” Journal of Oromo Studies, vol. 14, no.6, (2007), pp131-155, see
p135. It was not
until the “revolution of 1974 which ended the institution of the monarchy” and
“undermined the ideological underpinnings of the Ethiopia state” that the name
“‘Oromo’ was officially recognized as the historic autonym of the people for
the first time in Ethiopian history.”
[30] Ibid, p52.
[31] Bahrey, Almeida, Huntingford
& Beckingham, History of the [Oromo]
of Ethiopia: with ethnology and history of South-west Ethiopia. (Oakland,
CA: African Sun Publishing, 1993), pp44-55.
[35] See Ekaterina Gusarova. “The Oromo as
recorded in Ethiopian literature,” in Proceedings of the 16th International
Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. by Svein Ege, Harald Aspen, Birhanu
Teferra and Shiferaw Bekele, Trondheim, 2009,
p1323. Gusarova clearly states that the earlier and mid-20th century
view shared among scholars (e.g. Haberland, Baxter, to mention but a few) is
that the Oromo “originated from the tableland of Bale in the West of Ethiopia;
and more recently this theory became more elaborated by Oromo historians (e.g.
Mohammed Hassen, Tesema Ta’a) that the Oromo movement “was in fact a way back
to the territories that had already been occupied by them in the past,”
(Gusarova, ibid. citing Bassi 1996).
[36] Bairu Tafla, p61.
[39] Ekaterina Gusarova, p1326, citing
Jan Hultin, 1996, p84.
[41]According
to Professor Mohammed Hassen, Bahrey’s 12 page manuscript, which made him an
authority on Oromo history of the 16th century, has six significant
scholarly contributions: it details the accounts of Oromo social history,
social organization, and migration; was used as historical justification for
campaigns against the Oromo by two Amhara kings of the time; presents analysis
of the strength and weakness of the Abyssinian Christian society compared to
the Oromo in the then socio-political framework; dates the arrival of pastoral Oromo on the
border of' historical province of' Bali, i.e. on the southern borders of'
today's Arsi region, during the first quarter of the sixteenth century, as “new
comers” from the “west,” which disregards the Oromo as one of the original
inhabitants on that land; was used as a base for the interpretation of Oromo
history since 1593, as a historical source of canonical status; and finally, it
serves as a religious script written by a monk who was diligent “to save the
Christian kingdom”
from the control of pastoral Oromo (Hassen reminds us of Bahrey’s “Song of
Christian” dated 1576). See Mohammed Hassen, “The Significance of…,” p136.
[42] Bairu Tafla,
p48
[43] Ibid.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Bairu Tafla, p363.
[46] Bairu Tafla, p61.
[47] Bairu Tafla, p365.
[48]
Bairu Tafla, p481; John
Brundez’s curse, is considered as an overarching moral narrative: “…let faith,
love, and hope vanish from you. Let your country pass to an alien people.”
[50]
Philipp
Paulitschke, Ethnography of Northeastern
Africa , 2 vols., Berlin
(1893-96); See the text of (post-)war ritual below in Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, (London and New York:
Routledge, 1950), pp43-44.
The ceremony of appeasing the spirit of
the war victim includes dance accompanied by song:
“Be not angry”,
they say, “because your head is here with us; had we been less lucky, our heads
might now have been exposed in your village. We have offered
the sacrifice to appease you. Your spirit may now rest and leave us in peace.
Why were you our enemy? Would it not have been better that we should remain
friends? Then your blood would not have been spilt and your head would not have
been cut off.”
The same is true of the people of Paloo,
in Celebes. So, too, ‘the [Oromo] [of East Africa] returning from war sacrifice
to the jinn or guardian spirits of their slain foe before they will re-enter
their own houses’.
Freud cites James Frazer quoting
Paulitschke (1893–6 [2, 50, 136]). Other Paulitschke’s works include Contributions to the ethnography and
anthropology of the Somal, {Oromo] and Harrari. Leipzig (1886); Harrar research trip to the Somali-Oromo and
East African countries. Leipzig
(1888)
[51] (Andrzejewski 1985:410; Bulcha
1995).
[52] B. W. Andrzejewski “A Survey of…,
1940-1975 in Ethiopianist Notes, Vol.
2, No. 1 (1978), pp. 1-27, p2.
[53] Slave raids
were evident within and across ethnic groups in East Africa. However, as Shell argues,
“in the
1880s, when the Oromo children’s narratives begin, the Oromo were entrenched in
the territories to the south and south west of Menelik’s kingdom of Shewa.” It
was Menilik’s “era of ascendancy” that was needed to augment his material
wealth and fire-power, for territorial expansion and hegemony in the region.
His gains included raiding the territories for livestock and slave raids. See
Sandra Carolyn Teresa Rowoldt Shell, “From slavery to freedom: the Oromo slave
children of Lovedale, prosopography and profiles.” A dissertation submitted in
fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in Historical Studies. Faculty of the Humanities. University of Cape
Town, 2013, p26.
[54]In 1888 some
Oromo child slaves were rescued by a British warship in the Red Sea and taken
to Aden. Within a year a further group of liberated Oromo slave children joined
them at a Free Church of Scotland mission at Sheikh Othman, north of Aden. As a
number of children died, the church shipped the remaining 64 children to Lovedale
Institution in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. At Lovedale
they joined the church and attended school. What happened afterwards to the
young Oromo in Lovedale? Sandra Shell’s study shows that “By 1910,
approximately one third had died, one third had settled in the Cape of Good
Hope, one third had returned to Ethiopia and one had headed for the United
States.” Sandra Shell, p. xii.
[55]
Sandra wrote to me in her email, “Pasted below
is Gutama’s essay. I find it particularly moving. Given his nostalgia and sheer
pride in his beloved homeland, I was keen to discover from the various records
I have been able to uncover if he ever returned home and, yes, he did. He and
Dinkitu Bonsa, one of the Oromo women, returned home together in 1909. They
were both still alive in 1925 but I have no word of them after that…” Sandy,
dated 11/30/12.
[56] To
establish the background of “Diaspora Oromo Narratives,” the five-part VOA
(Oromo) interviews with Sandra Shell and with the late Prof Neville
Alexander David, among other sources, are rich enough. Neville Alexander
was a maternal grandson of Biisho Jaarsaa who was a former Oromo slave at
Lovedale and served as a teacher. The interview titled the “Story of Onesimos
Nasib as told by his grandson, the Reverend Barnabas Daniel, is also another
document to delve further into the works of Onesimos Nasib and the Munkullo
Team and later in Oromoland until he died in 1931 at age 75 or 76. To be
acquainted well with the specific context of the documents, the present study
uses maps of the regions mentioned in the text to assist the contextual
introduction of the discussion.
[58] Ibid, p241. European (French, British, Austrian, and later Swedes)
consuls also built residences there in the 1840s; they abandoned them after the
arrival of a Tigre warlord, Dajjazmach Webe in the 1850s (ibid. p241). In 1885
the Swedish Evangelical Mission established a press in Munkullo to print
religious books. The press was later transferred to Massawa. There was also
Bethel in Munkullo later in the 20th century, the first evangelical
congregation on the coast, which was multiracial and multi-linguistic in its
make-up, but worship was in Amharic, the dominant official language in
Ethiopia.
[59]
Mekuria
Bulcha, “Onesimos Nasib's Pioneering
Contributions to Oromo Writing” in Nordic
Journal of African Studies 4(1): 36-59 (1995); Mekuria Bulcha, “The
Language Policies of Ethiopian Regimes and the History of Written Afaan Oromo:
1844-1994” in Journal of Oromo Studies,
Vol. 1, no. 2, (1994), pp91-114, see p93-94.
[60] Mekuria Bulcha, Ibid.
[62] Ibid.
[63] From the
mid-nineteenth century, the Swedish missionaries dedicated their lives to
Africa and built schools, churches, and hospitals in addition to preaching.
They also engaged in agriculture and small-scale industries. Since 90 percent
of the population belonged to church automatically at birth (Wohlgemuth
2002:42), they valued the spread of missionary activities in Africa. The first
Swedish Missionary Station was founded at Munkullo in 1871 by the National
Missionary Society of Stockholm who sent their first missionary in 1866 to
Massawa, Eritrea. According to Connell and Killion, Lutherans of the Swedish
Evangelical Mission (SEM) established themselves in Eritrea in 1864, founded a school at
Munkullo in 1866 and worked with Werner Munzinger to distribute Bibles. In
1890, SEM’s Munkullo School was moved to Beleza, which became the center of
missionary activities through the 1920s (Connell and Killion 2011:432).
[64] See Mekuria
Bulcha, “The Language Policies…” in Journal
of Oromo Studies, Vol. 1, no. 2, (1994), pp91-114, see p93-94. Mekuria Bulcha,
“Onesimos Nasib's…” in Nordic Journal of African Studies 4(1):
36-59 (1995), p40.
[65] At Munkullo,
the Swedish Protestant missionary activities provided a contextual frame and
the young Oromo evangelists mixed Protestant zeal with romantic European
nationalism and the Oromo past to reformulate modern elements of Oromumma
(Oromoness). The ardent feelings of estrangement and the love for homeland are
evident in the folksongs and stories collected at Munkullo by Aster Gannon
Salban with Onesimos Nasib and published by Paulitschke as Oromo Spelling
Book. In the Spelling Book Aster
“deplores the fate of being thrown out from Biyya Oromo” [Oromoland, today’s
Oromia, also called Ormania between
1700 and 1880s]. They suffered
homesickness, alienation imposed by Minilik, the Abyssinian Emperor, and the
love to reach their homeland to which they all devoted their academic endeavors
and folkloric collections. The word “Galla” in the song (text 2) and in the
collection is loaded with the meaning of “estrangement” inflicted from the
beginning of the Amhara-Oromo encounter in the 16th century,
the “estrangement” that implied “otherness,” that the Oromo were people without
known origin and, therefore, without cultural history. See Thomas Zittelmann, “Reexamining
the Galla/Oromo Relationship: the Stranger as a Structural Topic,” In PTW
Baxter, Being and Becoming Oromo, (New Jersey: The Red Sea Press, 1996); See Enrico
Cerulli, 1922, p102.
[66] See both of
Mekuria Bulcha’s articles above in this study; Richard Pankhurst, “The
Beginning of….,” 1976.
[67]
Mekuria Bulcha reminds us
that “those victims of the slave trade,” led by Onesimos Nasibs and Aster Ganno
Salban, “were destined to play important roles in laying the foundations of
Oromo literature and the introduction of modern education and missionary work
in the western parts of Oromoland.” The literary works were both religious and
secular, in translations and in Oromo language undertaken between 1885 and
1898. According to Mekuria Bulcha, during those thirteen active years,
“Onesimos translated seven books, two of them with Aster Ganno.” Aster was one
of the young girls liberated and brought to the missionaries in 1886. While she
worked with other short volumes, Aster also helped with the compilation of
corpus for the Oromo-Swedish Dictionary of some 6000 words. Generally, the
Team, with its modest but practical academic endeavors, laid a foundation for
the study of Oromo folklore, language, and culture. See Mekuria Bulcha, “Onesimos Nasib's Pioneering Contributions to
Oromo Writing” in Nordic Journal
of African Studies 4(1): 36-59 (1995), p40.
[68] Gustav Arén. Evangelical Pioneers in
Ethiopia: Origins of the Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus. (Stockholm:
EFS Forlaget/Addis Ababa: Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, 1978), p383.
[70] Mekuria Bulcha, “Onesimos Nasib…, pp, 15, 41ff. Bulcha quotes
Dr. Fride Hylander (Hylander 1969: 83) about the team’s activity:
As the interior
of the country seemed to be closed, the pioneers in Eritrea made themselves
ready for a future advance by gathering a group of intelligent and promising
Gallas and giving some a refuge at Geleb, in the province of Mensa. Here they
were engaged in education and translation and formed an “[Oromo]-speaking
colony,” the leader of which was Onesimos.
[71] Ibid., p41.
[72] Ayalew Kanno, The Oromo: Great African Nation, (?,
2005).
[73]Sandra Shell, “From slavery to
freedom…,” 2013, p.xvii
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