Sunday, November 5, 2017

ETHNOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF OROMO...(Part II)

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 positionIn 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 societyFoucault 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.
[8] Ibid, p168.
[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.
[13] Alice Werner, “The [Oromo] of …,” p124.
[14] Alice Werner, “The [Oromo] of …,” p136.
[15] Ibid, pp.123-137.
[16] Ibid., p125.
[17] Ibid., p125.
[18] Ibid., p133.
[19] Alice Werner, “The Galla [Oromo] People of East Africa…, p318.
[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.
[35] Richard Pankhurst, “The Beginning of ….,” 1976.
[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.
[38] Sir Harry Johnston’ remarks..., Meeting of the African Society, December 12th, 1913, p317.     
[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).
[48] Greg Denning, Ibid.
[49] Mekuria Bulcha, “Onesimos Nasib….,” citing Gustave Aren 1977, p262.
[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).
[51] Victor Turner, 1967, p98.
[52] Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” p.27.
[53] See Mekuria Bulcha, citing Hylander, in “Onesimos Nasib…,” 1995, p41.
[54] Ibid., p22.
[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.
[57] Greg Denning. “History’s Theatre,” 1961.
[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.”
[59] Aster Ganno Salban, Weedduu, (Munkullo: Swedish Mission Press, 1894).
[60]Toponymy studies place names (toponyms), their origins, meanings, use and typology. It includes hydronym for a body of water and oronym for a mountain or hill.
[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. 

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