Re-envisioning Resentment Theory
(An African Perspective)
Oromia, Ethiopia
Assefa Tefera
Dibaba (PhD)
In
its narcissistic monologue, the colonialist bourgeoisie,
byway
of its academics, had implanted in the minds of the colonized,
that
essential values—meaning Western values—remain eternal
despite
all errors attributable to man.
__Franz
Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
ABSTRACT
This study explores the
phenomenon of resentment in Oromo culture by analyzing some
texts. Thus, resentiment (haaloo) is used to indicate a past
of oppression and domination, a historical grief of loss, and resentment
(quuqqaa) to discuss the political alienation, human rights violation,
and the ongoing protest in Oromia. Using a folkloric and historical data the
aim of this study is to provide empirical confirmation of the poetics of
resentment from an Oromo perspective; to expand our understanding of what makes
the people resilient to respond positively to the feeling of resentment and to
risk and adversity; and to initiate a greater involvement of native researchers
to explore the problem from an interdisciplinary perspective and bring a
nonlinear worldview to cultural resistance and resentment research. Based on
personal experience and available data, the study posits, in spite of the
adversities and injustices the people suffer, the idea of Oromo resistance is
an ethical (haqa), positive, and realistic source of thinking
and acting on what is right for a peace-loving and freedom-seeking people,
instead of living on resentiment (haaloo) with negative and
reactive attitude to what is wrong.
Keywords:
resentiment/resentment, Oromo/Oromia/Ethiopia,
African Perspective. School of Resentment, historical grief, resilience,
resistance, Resentment Theory, safuu (moral principles)
INTRODUCTION: Oromo and Oromia
The Oromo are
the largest single ethnic group inhabiting Ethiopia,
Northeast Africa, and also found in
northern Kenya and Somalia.
Oromia is the most populous regional state in Ethiopia with a total population
of about 35 million by the 2007 census.[1] It
is a region of vast geographical and ecological diversity and covers 141, 699.5
mi² (367, 000 km²), 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 being at the center.[2]
Contrary to the people’s acute demand for democratic rights, the Tigre-led
coalition of the ruling party “has remained centralist authoritarian in a
manner reminiscent of previous regimes”[3]
and declared itself legitimate by wining 99% of the May 2015 national election
for fifth term in power since 1992, despite the promised reforms towards
democratic elections and ethnic federalism secular at both federal and state
levels. Thus, in Ethiopia to date, after nearly thirty years of evil days
of war, famine, and social crisis that ran through 1991/1992, another round of
structured state violence followed and affected negatively the everyday lives
of the people.[4]
The
Oromo resentment has two faces: political and ethical. Politically, the
resentment is the feeling of being denied legitimacy and recognition of
re/actions against injustices and to domination and to the lack of genuine
representation; and ethically, it is to the failure of Oromo elites to take
responsibility to fight injustices and show dynamism and commitment to the
established binding moral and legal norms (safuu)
of the society. Thus, the study has significance to fill the continuing gap on
empirical research in resentment in Oromo oppositionary culture for democratic
rights as it has implications for the moral/ethical responsibility of Oromo
political elites. Based on available data I argue that the dominant ideas of
Oromo oppositional culture have been seen largely as the product of resentment,
as negative reactionary stances to domination and exploitation, not as positive
legitimate actions and forms of resilience in Oromo resistance culture. It is
seen by many as an irrational endeavor for the Oromo people to claim the
ongoing protest and national liberation struggle for their democratic rights as
a legitimate quest while there was no ethno-nation or nationality in Ethiopia
who did not experience oppression.
This
paper is organized into three sections. Beginning with a brief background
orientation in the first section about the Oromo and their country, Oromia,
this study casts light on the nature of Oromo social resentment. The second
section details on methods used in the study and discusses the conceptual
framework. In this section the paper opens venue toward the critical
examination of collective resentment and constitutes resentment theory based on
local knowledge. The third and the empirical section of the paper will
establish and illustrate both the ethical and political implications of Oromo
resentment texts from Ethiopia’s past and present context.[5]
This section grounds the study within the poetics and political dimensions of
Oromo resentment patterns arising from the disenchantment and grief of loss
embedded in the unequal historical relationships in Ethiopia. Toward this goal,
using some examples from Oromo narratives in my collections and texts available
in print, the third
section analyzes resentment discourse and grounds “resentment theory” in an
Oromo context. The paper concludes by indicating that Oromo resentment
discourse not only describe the social condition underlying the repressed
resentment but also point to opportunities for action by linking human agency
or practice with prospects and emotion through motivation against the
structured violence.
METHODS
& SOME CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
This is an interpretive and
interdisciplinary study of Oromo social life perceived from an Oromo
perspective and their resentment to the dire social phenomenon in which they
live in Ethiopia’s past and present. The data in this study
are meaning-making human practices obtained through interviews and direct
observations in the field between 2009 and 2010 in Oromia, central Ethiopia,
and some came from available sources in print. The data encompass
lived-experiences seen as meaningful and historically contingent human actions
and attitudes recorded in songs, stories, and personal narratives over the
years. In this view, the data are located within a particular setting and
analyzed from particular standpoints of resentment theory by focusing on the
specificity of the socio-historical context they come from.
Resentment
Theory
Although
in some contexts the two terms, ‘resentment” and “resentiment,” are used
interchangeably the English term “resentment” does not always carry a sense of
lingering emotion that the French term “resentiment” carries.[6]
Resentment indicates a sense of offense and feeling of ill-will toward another,
whereas, in “resentiment,” there are added connotations of lasting bitterness,
that is, “a sense of animosity and acrimony of temper, action, or words that
resentment does not necessarily carry.”[7] With
these deep-rooted semantic nuances between “resentiment” (haaloo) and “resentment” (quuqqaa),
both senses of loss and grievance are understood, in this study, to have social
roots in oppressions and inequalities in any system in which those placed at
the bottom of hierarchy and differentiation receive less attention, services,
and goods. Some scholars of ressentiment draw on Nietzsche and Max Schiler to
conclude that it is wholly negative repressed emotions, “slave morality,”
affects associated with unacceptable emotions that are repressed as taboo,
“outlaw emotions” inhibited by the body politic as unacceptable but provide
‘clues to suppressed social relations’.[8] However,
both senses of the oppressed, ressentiment and resentment are forms of
knowledge of the human practices and responses to injustice suppressed by the
body politic as unacceptable.
In
Max Scheler’s view ressentiment takes
its root in an individual or collective impotencies or weaknesses which the
subject constantly suffers.[9]
According to this view, the feeling of resentment wells up from psychic,
mental, social, or physical impotencies, disadvantages, weaknesses or
deficiencies of various kinds, and it can permeate a whole culture, era, and an
entire moral system. Scheler explores
ressentiment from two angles: ethical
and political.[10]
Based on Nietzsche’s phenomenological account of the “genealogy of morals,”
Scheler treats “ressentiment” as a profound source of value judgment. From this
ethical notion he proposes two accounts of ressentiment. First, “ressentiment”
is a feeling of hurt once again, a repeated experiencing of some emotional response
reaction against some evil, which is delayed and removed from the person’s zone
of action and expression because of fear of consequences; not a mere
intellectual recollection of the emotion but a “re-experiencing of it”.[11]
Second, “ressentiment” is a negative and reactive morality, a suppressed wrath
which takes shape through a systematic repression of certain emotions and
affects such as revenge, malice, hatred, impulse to detract, spite, envy,
jealousy, and competitive urge.[12]
On
the political scale, speaking of social ressentiment, Scheler affirms the
importance of two factors, namely, the spread of discrepancy between the political, constitutional, or traditional
status of a group, and the limited spread of factual power. To Scheler, “a potent charge of ressentiment is here
accumulated by the very structure of society.” That is, in a democratic
society, social ressentiment would be slim and “tends toward equality of
property,” but in a class divided society, “social ressentiment must be
strong,” an important determinant factor that influences established morality.[13]
In the case of the Oromo, contrary to the fact that Oromo nationalism evolved
out of the precipitating historical factors and resentment to political
exclusion, economic exploitation, and cultural domination, Oromummaa (Oromoness), the underlying principle of Oromo
nationalism, has been misconstrued as an ethnocentric orientation of a
resentful nationalism, not as a legitimate creed of national struggle for
constitutional and democratic rights.[14]
Thus, Oromumma underlies Oromo
resentment to any form of injustices.
The
School of Resentment
In
resentment studies it is important to learn not just to take wrongs seriously,
but also to examine claims of wrongs carefully (who makes the wrongs, to whom
they are addressed, and how they are made; their performance and context).[15] In Oromo tradition, where the technologies of literacy (especially
writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population, thought and its
verbal expression are transmitted through folklore, the creative process and
act, a medium by which cultural transmission has been made possible and social
transformation has been critiqued. Social criticism is an ideological and cultural
nonconformity to injustices. Marlia Banning is right to note in her “The
Politics of Resentment” that discourse, particularly critical discourse “knows
no national or institutional border” and it can “impact the
language, literacy, and rhetoric that circulate in local institutions of work,
faith, learning, and civic life.”[16]
Next,
I present briefly the critique of canonizing Western literary culture and its
bias toward the social responsibility of creative process/act of the oppressed
branded as the School of Resentment.
The
notion of resentment came to be an ideological battle ground in literary
criticism, as in academic arenas, giving way to what Harold Bloom calls the
School of Resentment.[17]
The School’s view, according to Bloom, is the
leftist ideology against the primary goal of reading cannon, namely, a solitary
aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the “forces of resentment”.[18]
Bloom argues that “a writer’s dialogue with his literary forebears is far more
crucial than the ‘social energies’ of his own time;” whereas, to the School,
the Western canon perpetuates social ills and dominant values and blinds
individuals to the social pretension and oppression around, the contents which Bloom
sees as “ephemeral as shadows in The Cave”. From Bloom’s standpoint, it seems,
the School of Resentment is composed of the ideologically oriented literary
criticisms: Feminists, Historicists, Deconstructionists, Marxists, Lacanians,
and Afrocentrists, among others, and its adherents who consider the Western
canon to include works of the oppressed: blacks, Hispanics, and women. Thus,
Bloom eulogizes canon: “We are,” he asserts, “destroying all intellectual and
aesthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences in the name of social
justice.”[19]
The goal of “improving” one's
society through creative resistance, for Bloom, is an absurd aim. By this
account, John Steinbek’s masterpiece, The
Grapes of Wrath, which powerfully
dramatizes the desperate plight of Depression-era migrant workers whom the
author felt had been abandoned by society, is absurd. Furthermore, those literary cannons of the
oppressed, such as Things Fall Apart,
Beloved, and the poems of resentment
and resistance to ecocolonialism in the Rivers State by the late Ogony poet,
Ken Saro Wiwa, Nigeria, are “ephemeral”.
The feeling of repressed emotion or
resentment is well captured in Alex Haley’s Roots,
in Tony Morrison’s Beloved, or in
Chinua Achebe’s world classic Things Fall
Apart. Those and other literary canons of resentment, which are rooted in
African spirituality, cosmology, folk-psychology, death lore, and African
personality, are examples of many other vibrant voices of the oppressed. Morrison
portrayed cautiously the theme of African Americans’ resentment, which is repressed
by the fear of remembering the past, or more precisely, by the challenge of an
“unmade self” composed of “re-memories” of the unsettled historical grief, the
haunting past, signified in the novel by the attacking ghost of Beloved. Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is another
exemplary literary cannon oriented by African folklore, and in which the author
carefully wove the resentment of his people (and of Africa in general) and
resistance to foreign rule and culture. The ecological activist poet, Ken Saro
Wiwa of Ogony, Nigeria, was executed for his political ideal and revolutionary
writings embedded in his ecopoetic analysis of his people's resentment to the
eco-colonialism commanded by Shell Oil Company for over 50 years.
Antithetical
to his own position, Harold Bloom eulogizes Walt Whitman as “the American
shaman,” whose work we can understand, according to Bloom, “when we see in him
a throwback to ancient Scythia, to strange healers who were demonic, who knew
themselves to possess or be possessed by a magical or occult self.”[20]
However, it is not clear why Bloom fails to consider Tony Morrison as “the African
American Shaman” who invokes the ghost to depict African Americans’ loss of self, which could only be remedied by the
acceptance of the past and the memory of their original identities. Bloom is not ignorant
of the role Beloved serves as a
masterpiece which is both aesthetically and thematically
appealing to remind African Americans of their repressed
memories, eventually causing the reintegration of their selves. I should add that the fixity of cannon
is problematic, as Andrea Paris notes: “if the community could no longer see
themselves represented by the cannon, the danger was for it to be no longer
widely read and interpreted…”[21]
By
another example, Harold Bloom’s polemics against “engaged literature” reminds
us of the neo-conservative “academic bill of rights” like the Ohio Senate Bill
(S.B.) 24 which focuses on the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts
and prohibits “critique and dissent in the public sphere to higher education,
and challenges the authority of faculty and their professions to determine the
subject matter and practices in a classroom.”[22] It is another form of the “academic
politics” used to crash resentment stated in Charles Hale’s “Introduction” to Engaging Contradictions, a counterpoint
to the standard admonition to graduate students entering social science and
humanities: “Welcome, come in, and please leave your politics at the door.”[23]
By
the same token, in Ethiopia,
“professors told
Human Rights Watch that they refrain from criticizing government policies
because …all professors can be fired for speaking their minds even when they do
so in their personal capacity. The government has made repeated promises to
grant the university autonomy through a charter since 1991 but has yet to do
so.”[24]
Following
the most troubling reality of the political crisis in Ethiopia, when the Oromo
rose up for their cause and sacrificed their life, it is hard to imagine Western
powers to turn their back on them or to shove aside the issue simply as the
problem of/for the Oromo or as a resentful nationalism heavy with negative
agenda. The Human Rights Watch report of academic rights violation in Ethiopia
adds that
“The U.S. is
even less inclined to demand respect for human rights in Ethiopia because it is
completely dependent on the cooperation of this strategically located country,
which borders Sudan and Somalia in the horn of Africa, as an ally in the U.S.
war on terrorism.”[25]
Hence, academic rights
violation provokes resentment. Social critic as an embodiment of literary
project or as an activist scholarship is distracted by repressive academic
politics.
African
Perspective
Available data show that African
resistance to European colonialism was precipitated by the deep-seated
resentment brewed in secret societies that led to local revolts such as the Aba
Women’s revolt of the 1929 in rural Igbo, Nigeria, and many more other revolts
prior to the wars of decolonization leading to independence.[26] In
Africa, religious and ethnic conflicts are often interrelated sites of volatile
fault-line marked by major strikes and bloodsheds (e.g. Nigeria, Egypt).[27] In
one recent report on religious beliefs and practices in 19 Sub-Saharan African
countries, “many Africans are deeply committed to Islam or Christianity and yet
continue to practice elements of traditional African religions.”[28]
According to the survey, “roughly a quarter or more of the population in 11
countries say they believe in the protective power of juju (charms or amulets),
shrines and other sacred objects.”[29]
The African values are “shaped by African problems, needs and aspirations,
expressed using symbols derived from the immediate African environment.”[30]
It is imperative to add that African spirituality is not a static spirituality
of the past incapable of adaptation to new situation, but it is a culture to which
each African is born to live, practice, influence and be influenced by.
Africans’
resentment to the influences of Western culture includes the cultural bias
inherent in Western science and technology (e.g., the scientific racism about
Saartjie Baartman, DDT put in EPA toxicity class II but still exported to
Africa), and the Christian disapproval of sacred ecology as part of African
spirituality. Another example of African resentment relates to the negative
impacts of science which is, to repeat Leopold Sedar Senghor, “humanizing
nature” or more exactly “domesticating nature,” and to the Western
anthropocentric (humanist) worldview, i.e., to its views of dualism between
humanity and nature [31]
THE POLITICS
& POETICS OF OROMO RESENTMENT
In
this study I focus on the notion of unacknowledged social resentment, an
explosive force in unequal social relations, more precisely, resentment against
inequality and not holding remorse but a search for justice. Here the “poetics”
deals with the “cultural work,” which is considered as a creative expression of
unequal historical relationship and agency, and the “politics” is the
“resentment,” the opposition from “below” in reaction to the structural effects
of a coercive power on individuals’ agency to perceive their situation and to
exercise their own responsibility. The poetics and politics of resentment (quuqqaa) endures the new on the old experience
and, so doing, it is neither new nor old, but it continually takes on a common
stem rooted in the existing tradition. By the long established academic bias of
the Ethiopian and Ethiopianist chroniclers, the Oromo people and their history,
culture, worldview, and perspective were defaced as rootless and, instead, an
“outside origin theory” was introduced and repeated as fact until in the early
1970s Oromo nationalism was intensified and the reconstruction of Oromo history
and knowledge production took momentum.[32]
The Politics of
Resentment
To
date African studies face multiple institutional contradictions and
occasionally methodological challenges around divergent attitudes of unfinished
projects of (ethno-) nationalism and maintaining unity of the nation-state. For
example, the conflict of “Oromoness” and/or “Ethiopiannes,” “Biafranness” and/or
“Nigerianness,” etc. has been a major challenge to disregard for African heads
of state for years both in historical and ideological contexts. African Studies
is one of those intellectual locations where the far less well discussed issues
of how collaborative praxis and interdisciplinarity are deliberated, contradictions
and challenges can be debated, and alternative ways can be sought about what
should be the social responsibility of an Africanist today, and what is or what
should be the academic concern of an African scholar and how to synchronize
divergent attitudes. When people hold the notion of popular sovereignty as a
nation, attempt to transform the identity of their people and demand the right
to self-determination, and in return, when the nation-state represses the democratic
rights enshrined in the constitution, then the unacknowledged resentment
combines into a revolutionary discourse. The word of a resented young Biafran
is the case in point: he declares his identity indignantly as reported in the
VOA Africa News next:
‘I am supporting
it [Biafra] because that is who I am,’ says a senior university student Sofuru
Afah. ‘Nigeria is an artificial creation by the British. I am not a Nigerian
and I have never been and I never will. Buhari hates our people.’[33]
And the following comment tells much about
the level of the resentment:
‘If
Nigerians (hausa/fulani) wants us (Biafrans) to stay as one, then let them
treat us as part and pacle of this one nigeria. Don't you know that it pains to
see majority of the oil wells being owned by northerners who can kill an Igbo
without reason. Nothing is going how it should be; if your are a fulani man,
your are licensed to kill. No federal character. Infact the fulanis treat us as
slaves hence, the reason for seccestion. I love BIAFRA and wants it's
actualisation. Instead to die a coward, i rather die a hero.’[34]
Similarly, even though the fall of the Derg military
junta in 1991 created an opportunity for democratization and transformation
toward a new Ethiopia in which all citizens cherish equal civil, economic and
political rights and where freedom of expression and participation are
guaranteed, and above all, a system in which the supremacy of the rule of law
was to be established, but the following twenty-six years of marginalization,
exploitation, and massive human rights violations left the country in a general
disarray and the Oromo in a continued dismay and resentment. Ethiopia just
ended the 10 months long state of emergency declared on October 9, 2016 to
subdue the persistent Oromo protest in Oromia through brutal forces. The
perceived democratization of Ethiopia and the much promised equality and
stability, the right to self-determination inscribed in the Constitution and the
rule of law seem to be postponed indefinitely; thus, to date with the ever
growing resentment and disenchantment of its citizens, Ethiopia is stuck at the
crossroads of decolonization and democratization or disintegration.[35]
The
Poetics of Oromo Resentment
The
Oromo are not typically characterized as resentful people; rather they are
peace-loving (nagaa) and law-abiding (seera/heera) people. The Boorana Oromo
notion of nagaa (peace)[36]
and the Salale Oromo waadaa (covenant),
the non-violence principle of araara (arbitration),[37]
the guddifacha (adoption) institution
are typical examples of the Oromo views of peace and solidarity. It has been
generally agreed among the Oromo and non-Oromo scholars that there are diverse
ways of being Oromo but among the unifying elements are the notions of nagaa (peace) and waadaa (covenant),[38]
which are part of the Oromo generational knowledge (beekumsa/oguma), and traditional religion (waaqeffanna).[39]
The guddicfacha institution is an
individual (usually male) or group (ethnic/clan) adoption, which involves a
symbolic ritual, “for the purpose of family continuity or social security.”[40]
The domestic communal rituals of greetings, blessings, and prayers, arbitration
(araara), and cooperatives are other
aspects of the nagaa (peace), safuu (moral system) and waadaa (covenant) Oromo institutions and prosperity for all to which an Oromo
individual is introduced from an early young age.[41]
It
is hard to think of Oromo perspective in isolation from an African personality which
generally refers to the manifestations of cultural uniqueness among Africans as
reflected in the individual’s behavior and attitude, social norms, values,
beliefs, religion, attitudes, worldviews or explanations of the cosmos and the
supernatural, the social and political systems of historical and contemporary society.
This perspective determines the notion of “development,” which, Walter Rodney
writes, “in human society is a many-sided process.
At the level of the individual, it implies increased skill and capacity, greater
freedom, creativity, self-discipline, responsibility, and material well-being,”… depending on age,
class (in absence of an egalitarian system) and “one’s personal code of what is
wrong... very much tied in with the state of the society as a whole.”[42] Even
though religion (Christianity and Islam) is one among many other tributaries to
African resentment, it had played a number of roles in intensifying resistance,
including inspiring action, creating community, and buttressing courage among
movement participants. Studies make it clear that ideas expressed and promoted
by intellectuals, especially those of Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal, Diopian
thought as it is called, are cultural unity, transnationality, and shared
cultural continuity across African peoples despite ethnic and linguistic
differences.[43]
The
themes of the songs are land and eviction from ancestral home, unlawful arrest,
displacement, and mass killings, and liberation. This collective shared
experience of disenchantment has been articulated in Oromo folksongs and
contemporary narratives over the years at different levels of safuu (moral system).[44]
In this Macca Oromo song of Masqal, the New Year seasonal festival in
September, the maidens prompt the youth / qeerroo as morally responsible to
break the silence and to end atrocities once and for all:
Boqqolloo qoti qoricha beelaa Satisfy your hunger,
produce corn
Dargaggoon keenya lola kajeelaa Our youth longs to fight, to
bellow
Korma sandaaboo gaafasaan beekuu One can tell a vying bull by its horn
Garaa waayaadu duubumaan beekuu As one can tell uneasy gut by its
sorrow
Qilleensa birraa daraaraa keelloo Whirl wind whirl wind, oh
daisy flower
Sirbaa
qajeelaa maraataan qeerroo Our
youth longs to dance and to soar
Similarly,
this song next is a symbolic representation of a strong relationship the Oromo
have with their land:
Yaa Oromoo, ya
saba guddaa garaa qulqullu Oh,
Oromo, the great nation on earth
Qonnee nyaanna
lafa hin gurgurru! Say
no to land grab and yes to till it![45]
A
Song of Displacement (SD)
Today,
Finfinne, renamed Addis Ababa, is expanding sideward uncontrollably by evicting
the Oromo peasants surrounding the capital. The regional statistical data shows
that about 91% of the population near Finfinne is engaged in agriculture and
cattle rearing.[46]
The city is overwhelmed by a growing population and consequent acute demand for
land to implement the controversial Addis Ababa city integrated Master Plan.[47]
SD
is a theme of significance, resentment, and historical grief and the
reclamation continued to this day. It is the theme of reclaiming a broken
place, a place once revered as a sacred site now wrecked by pollution, eviction,
displacement, marginalization, and desecrated by prostitution,[48] a
place which the Oromo consider as their traditional and constitutional home of
gadaa.[49] The
historical song of displacement presented next is a contextualized experience
of dislocation and eviction suffered by the Oromo clans around Finfinne over
100 years ago and is believed as a typical example of Gullale Oromo resentment
songs that can be titled as “Hafe!” / “No More!”:
Inxooxxoo irra
bahanii No more standing on
the Enxooxxo hilltop,
Caffee ilaauun
hafee to
watch the meadow and wild grass below, no more
Finfinne loon
geessanii no more taking
cattle to Finfinne,
Hora obaasuun
hafee to
water at the mineral spring. no more
5 Oddoo Daalattiirratti No more gathering on Oddo
Daalattii,
Yaa’iin
Gullallee hafee where the
Gullalle assembly used to meet, no more
kooraa Dhakaa
Araaraa no more elders’ counsel,
jaarsummaa
taahuun hafee at Dhakaa Araaraa, no
more
Hurufa
Boombiirratti No
more taking calves,
10 Jabbilee yaasuun hafee to the meadow at
Hurufa Boombii, no more
Gafarsatti
darbanii No more
going to Gafarsa,
Qoraan
cabsachuun hafee to collect
firewood, our maiden, no more
Bara
jarri dhjufanii the
year the enemy came,
loon keenyas in
dhumanii our cattle perished.
15 Eega Mashashaan dhufee Since Mashasha came,
Birmadummaan in
hafe Freedom vanished.[50]
This
SD is an evidence that historically, Finfinne and its surrounding was the home
of the Gullalle (and Ekka, Galan, and Abbichu) Oromo who were evicted in the 19th
century by the Shawan rulers, Sahle Selassie (reigned 1813-1847) and later by
his grandson, Menilik II (r. 1889-1913) from each and every place named in the
song. Traditionally, Finfinne served as a ritual site of sacred spring, grazing
land, meeting ground and horse-riding (gugsii)
for the Tulama Oromo living in close distance surrounding the city. Through a
creative imagination and spatial representation of this significant place
Finfinne, the heartland of Oromia, and through continuous resistance, the Oromo
challenged evictions, land grabs, atrocities, and eco-colonial and crony
capitalist injustices not only to
reclaim Finfinne but also to exercise fully their democratic rights, the right
to self-determination. It is very evident in the SD that there are “‘essential human needs and essential human
powers’ in order to survive and develop fully.”[51]
Those basic needs and self-actualizing powers that the “people who were
colonized and dominated cannot adequately satisfy include: (a) biological needs, (b) sociability and
rootedness, (c) clarity and integrity of self, (d) longevity and symbolic
immortality, (e) self-reproduction in praxis, and (f) maximum
self-determination,”[52] the
human attributes which one cannot assume without connectedness to the
environment. No more!
Social Commentary
As
a social critique to condemn oblivion and indifference, and to appeal to the
people’s sense of justice, the following proverbial metaphors are evident:
Nami mana tokko ijaaru,
citaa wal hin saamu. Those who build a
common house use a common resource
(thatching grass) fairly/properly.
Walii galan, alaa
galan. Only if they reach agreement, so can they
come home
safely and promptly
Illeensi marga ofirratti hin dheeddu A rabbit does not eat & ruin the grass
around its own den
Risaan mannee
ofiititti hin hagu An
eagle does not poop in its own nest [53].
Using
such rhetorical devices, the Oromo decry the awful conflicts and senseless
divisions among Oromo political elites. The Oromo liberation struggle for
democratic rights has been slowed down by various factors. First, the Ethiopian
regime sought to assert and maintain its power indefinitely using lethal force.
Second, while the ongoing #OromoProtest is intensified, instead of reorganizing
themselves, cooperating and forming organizational alliance, Oromo political
elites are caught up in dilemma about crusading for “Ethiopianness” on one hand
and “Oromoness” on the other. This conundrum has been overextended, hindered
the long protracted struggle, and reduced it to clashes of interest over power.
Consequently, the struggle suffered major setbacks such as the lack of
ideological clarity, purpose, commitment, and organizational discipline, i.e.,
transparency and dynamism, among others.
The following song is a typical
example of such a social critique about interventions by local officials in the
daily lives of the people:
Daanyaa har’a
dabballeen kudhanii! Local officials,
cadres, are multiple today!
Maaltu hammaannaan
shimala keenya gubanii? Why they burn our sticks and swell our
dismay?
I
observed a group of angry young Salale Oromo who performed the folksong above
and many more at Kurfa, near Shararo (Debra-Tsigie), in 2010. During the
religious observance of Saint Mary’s procession, boys and girls joined and
performed songs of defiance when the police and local officials confiscated sticks
from the boys and burnt them. Local officials, also known as Kebele councils, form the primary unit
of administration,[54] and
determine eligibility for food assistance, recommend referrals to health care
and schools, and provide access to state-distributed resources like seeds,
fertilizers, and other essential agricultural inputs based on loyalty to
government. They also run the community social courts, which deal with minor
claims and disputes at the kebele level, local prisons, and local-level
militia.[55]
The song below is one of the typical examples of Oromo resentment songs
composed and performed to invigorate resistance and challenge the unbearable
human condition in which they found themselves. This particular song is about a
helpless, passive milk cow representing Oromia, which is fertile and has
adequate natural resources, but its people are kept in abject poverty:
Burre yaa
gaaddidduu Oh,
Burre, the lactating cow,
booso
maa si elmatti how
could a stranger milk you,
dhiittee
hin didduu? how
dare he, how?[56]
A Song of Love, Themes of
Alienation & Resentment
Most
recently a lyric song titled “Maalin Jira!” meaning, “Distracted!” (2015), by
the young Oromo artist, Hacaaluu
Hundeessaa has gone viral on the social media as it taps into the Oromo
people’s feelings of alienation, deprivation and resentment. This song
expresses precisely the resentment of an individual who has been harassed and
removed from his ancestral home, and in effect, is broken by strong feelings of
homesickness, melancholy, and his mind is troubled by nostalgia and grief of
historical loss and woeful love.
For
the Gullalle, Galan, and Abbichu clans near Finfinne, the grief of loss of
their ancestral home, became rather discrete and challenging experience
following subjugation by Minilek in the second half of the 19th
century. Those Oromo clans who were evicted from Finfinne continued a non-violent
resistance and sang, narrated, and performed the bitterness of losing their
ancestral home. The lines below reiterate the deep-rooted resentment:
Gullalleen kan
Tufaa Gullalle
of Tufaa
Gaara Abbichuu
turii Abbichu’s
hilly land
Galaan Finfinnee
dha..see And Finfinne of Galan
Silaa akka
jaalalaa Love
contains all
Walirraa hin
fagaannuu We never chose to grow apart,
Jara t’ nu
fageessee! But
they pushed us to fall!
The
ethnonyms above, Gullalle, Galan, Abbichu are also toponyms, not names used to
indicate the topographic features of the lands but to present lineages of the
same name of Tulama branch.
The
bitterness was subdued by fear of repression and ostracism imposed by
“Jara”/“Others,” the oppressors (line 6) throughout Oromo history until the
nation/region-wide Oromo Protest broke out in 2015 anew. Hence, the singer
whines about the lack of unity and solidarity by alluding to his beloved whom
he misses:
Diiganii, gaara
sana Level
that hill
Gaara diigamuu
hin malle Not easy to bulldoze
Nu baasan adaan
baane They rendered us asunder
Nu addaan bahuu
hin malle Division
we never chose
The
feelings represented as intimate sentiment are shared through expressive
culture, i.e., songs, narratives, and performances. Thus, this lyric is typical
of a resentment song in which a sense of having been treated unfairly provokes
frustration and rebellion:
Maalan jira,
maalan jira Distracted,
alienated,
Ya Galaane
maalan jira Oh,
beloved, am ruined
Caccabsee na
nyaatee garaa Gut broken, torn,
unhinged.
An hin jiru ya
Galaane Oh, Galaane,
am in limbo
An hin jiruu, Broken
heart
Kukkutee na
nyaate tiruu! Mutilated
and hurt.
One
can see in this example the multiplicity of negative feelings of anger, hatred,
sense of injustice, disappointment, contempt, and disgust that inform the art
and the artist in a given historical context. Resentment takes a shape of
reaction when it bursts out as a desire for revenge as showed in the above
lines that indicate the ruined organs and a broken system.
The
issue of Oromo nationalism has been one of the preferred topics in both
academic and popular discourse over the last few decades. However, its
vagueness and significant emotional content often remains murky in the
Ethiopianist discourses surrounding it. In this article, taking one step back
and looking at Oromo national struggle through the lens of songs, one can see
the process by which folksongs and the popular culture merge to create a sense
of resentment. As in the works of Hacaaluu Hundeessaa (Tuulama Oromo) and
Abbush (Boorana/Guji), to mention but a few, provide a source of identity and
strategic traditionalism, the folkloric elements in Hacaaluu’s song (korma didaa, harqoota, adda baasuu, gaara, garaa, an hin jiru) engage heavily
with the historical Oromo resentment to alienation, estrangement, exploitation,
and divide-and-rule policy. The narrative voice may not embrace conformism,
reform and collaboration but confrontation and defiance. What is more, through
the adaption of folksong, which is traditionally spread by word-of-mouth, into pop
culture the Oromo resentment and resistance to injustices is spread beyond its
social base that informs both the song and the singer. The beliefs and opinions
about alienation become solidified in the resistance process in the same way as
folklore evolves.
CONCLUSION:
Shaping Resentment Discourses
In
this study, the primary goal has been to examine the collective agency and
contemporary forms of cultural works or poetics of resentment at the local
level. Toward this end, I presented some examples of folkloric criticism on the
politics of resentment. I tried to show that the poetics of resentment is a creative
reaction to injustices which, if left unacknowledged, combines to form a cultural
politic to critique the deprivation, alienation, exploitation, and uneven
distribution of resources the local people resent gravely. Drawing on Marlia
Banning’s notion of “cultural politic,” I conclude by restating, discourses of
resentment do two works: cultural work
and political work. They “do the
cultural work of shaping the meaning and value given to issues, and they do the
political work of deflecting public attention (and discussion) away from basic
political questions such as who receives what goods in society.”[57]
The examples of Oromo cultural expressions showed that the body politic and its
surrogates maneuver the political work of resentment discourse through its
coercive measures or structured violence including media, police and cadres, to
which the general public reacts creatively through the cultural work of songs,
stories, and performing nationalism, which often ends awfully.[58]Using
embodied practices of cultural works the body politic conditions public spaces
for its own agenda.[59] There
has been no single storyline so far about the end goal of Oromo national
liberation struggle: the two lines of Ethiopianness and Oromoness are still
zigzagging. There is no doubt how crucial is performing nationalism for the
sustenance of national spirit and to express resentment. What needs further
study is, however, set in a “historically
derived relationships of domination in which peasants were subsumed,” to borrow
Allen Isacmann,[60] the strategic logic of
unstructured non-violent protest in the face of structured violence and lethal
forces in Africa today.
ENDNOTES
[1]
Central Statistical Agency (2008), "Table 5: Population size
of Regions by Nations/Nationalities (ethnic group) and Place of Residence:
2007," Census 2007 (PDF), Addis
Ababa: Central Statistical Agency, p. 16, Table 2.2, archived
from the
original (PDF) on 27 September 2016.
[2]
Oromia:
Facts (Year
Book). (Finfinne: Published by Office
of the President, 2010); Central
Statistical Agency (CSA) of Ethiopia, 2007.
[3]See Jon Abbink, “Discomfiture
of Democracy? The 2005 Election Crisis in Ethiopia and Its Aftermath,” African Affairs, 105/419, (2006),
pp.173-199. See also John
Markakis, in his historical profile of the country engaged in the endless
process of contestable nation-state building, notes, “Waged against determined opposition,
it [Ethiopia] has incited endless conflict and stained the pages of the country’s
history with the blood of generations. Today the struggle continues, and so
does the bloodshed and the misery it brings” (p xvii). See John Markakis, Ethiopia: The Last Two Frontiers. Woodbridge,
Suffolk: James Currey.
[4] “Evil Days: 30
Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia.” An African Watch Report, New York.
September 1991.
[5] FAO May 2017,
“Ethiopia Situation Report” Available on
http://reliefweb.int/report/ethiopia/ethiopia-situation-report-may-2017?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=shared&utm_source=facebook.com.
Retrieved
May 16, 2017. See
also “Evil
Days: 30 Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia.” An African Watch Report, New
York. September 1991.
[8] Ibid., p74.
[9] Max Scheler, Ressentiment (Marquette Studies in Philosophy) 1994, with a foreword of Manfred Frings.
[10]
The word
“resentiment” originates from French “ressentir,” re-, intensive, prefix, and sentir “to feel,”
hence, “to feel again.” The English word has become synonymous with anger and spite. See Manfred S Frings,
2nd ed., Max Scheler: A Concise Introduction into the
World of a Great Thinker. Milwaukee:
Marquette University Press, 1996.
[11]Chielozona Eze, “Resentment
and the African Condition: An Inquiry,” Journal
of African Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2005. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality. Maudemarie
Clark & Alain J. Swensen, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
1988), xxix.
[12] Max Scheler, “Ressentiment” (1912-1915), trans by
Louis A. Coser from the text of 1915, pp2, 9.
[13] Ibid., pp7-8.
[14] Speaking of the
young Oromo protesters, preferably Qeerroo, Messay Kebede writes “...I want to remind
that most of the young Oromo protesters have no idea of Ethiopia as a unitary
nation: as the established political system forces them to do, they see Ethiopia
as a collection of different nations.” See Messay Kebede, “Then and Now: A Rejoinder to my Critics,”
Available on http://www.ayyaantuu.net/then-and-now-a-rejoinder-to-my-critics-messay-kebede/. This echoes
the debate began 47 years ago in the then Haile Selassie I University among the
students about “Ethiopianness” and “Oromoness” or Ethiopia being a prison house
of ethno-nations and nationalities in the writings such as the controversial
poem titled “Ethiopiawew Manew?” (“Who is an Ethiopian?”) by Mr Ibsa
Gutama.
[15]See Alice MacLachlan,
“Unreasonable Resentments,” Journal of
Social Philosophy, Vol. 41 No. 4, Winter 2010, 422–441. p422.
[16] Marlia Banning, “The Politics of
Resentment,” Journal of Advanced
Composition (JAC), 26. 1-2 (2006), p68. p69.
[17] French, R. W. "Bloom,
Harold. The Western Canon [review]. Walt
Whitman Quarterly Review 12 (Fall 1994), 117-120. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.13008/2153-3695.1442.
[18] Dan Geddes. Literature as Cultural Memory. “Bloom’s Elegy for Western
Literature – The Western Canon.” A book review. February 2001. Available at
http://www.thesatirist.com/books/western_canon.html.
[19]
Ibid, p117
[20] Ibid., 119.
[21]Mihaela
Irimia et al., eds., Literature and
Culture. NV,
Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke, Brill, 2017, p104
[22] Marlia Banning, “The Politics of
Resentment,” p69.
[23]Charles R. Hale, C.
R. (Ed.). (2008). Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods
of activist scholarship. Berkeley, CA: GAIA Books, Global, Area, and International
Archive, U. of California Press, p1.
[24] Human Rights Watch, Ethiopia.
Report, Vol. 15, No. 2 (A) – January 2003, p4.
[25] p4.
[26]The rural Igbo
women resentment was to the British colonial administration which put an
impending tax policy and control over culture by violating the women’s rights
to social and economic autonomy hitherto maintained by Igbo tradition. See
“Aba
Women's Riots (November-December 1929),” Online
Encyclopedia Index, available on http://www.blackpast.org/gah/aba-womens-riots-november-december-1929.
See also Allen
Isaacman, “Peasants
and Rural Social Protest in Africa,” African Studies Review. Vol.
33, No. 2 (Sep., 1990), pp. 1-120.
[28]
Tracy
Miller, ed. “Tolerance
& Tension: Islam & Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Pew Forums on Religion and Public Life,
2010. Available on http://www.pewforum.org/files/2010/04/sub-saharan-africa-full-report.pdf.
[29]
Ibid. p33.
[30] Sussy Gumo et al. “Communicating
African Spirituality….,” p523.
[31] Leopold Sedar
Senghor. Prose
and Poetry. John Reed and Clive Wake, trans. (London: Oxford University
Press, 1965), 32. See Krista
Harper, "'Wild Capitalism’ and ‘Ecocolonialism’: A Tale of Two
Rivers" (2005). American
Anthropologist. 72. http://scholarworks.umass.edu/anthro_faculty_pubs/72.
See also Martha L. Henderson, “Revealing the origin of human-nature
dualities in Christian political structures,” Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 74 (01),
(2012), pp15-27. See also Vinay
Srinivasan, “The Separation of Humans and Nature as it Relates to Environmental
Degradation,” (2014). 2014 Claremont Colleges Library Undergraduate Research
Award. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cclura_2014/4.
[32]
Linda T. Smith reminds us of Albert Memmi’s “series
of negations” here: “The fact that indigenous societies had their own
systems of order was dismissed through what Albert Memmi referred to as a
series of negations: they were not fully human, they were not civilized enough
to have systems, they were not literate, their languages and modes of thought
were inadequate. As Fanon and later writers such as Nandy have claimed,
imperialism and colonialism brought complete disorder to colonized peoples,
disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages.” Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Decolonizing
Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books. 1999, p28.
[33]
See Chika
Odua, “Biafran Secessionist Movement Grows Stronger in Nigeria,” On VOA
News.Com. Available at http://www.voanews.com/a/biafran-secessionist-movement-grows-nigeria/3873873.html. Updated May
28, 2017.
[34] Ibid.
[35]Leenco Lata. The Ethiopian State at the Crossroads: Decolonization and
Democratization or Disintegration?
Lawrenceville,
NJ: The Red Sea Press, INC.
[36] Mario I. Aguilar. “The Peace of
the Boorana,” New People, 27 (1993),
pp10-11.
[37] Assefa Tefera
Dibaba. “God speak to us”: performing power and authority in Salale, Ethiopia,” Journal of
African Cultural Studies, 2014 Vol. 26,
No. 3, 287–302.
[38] Ibid.
[39]
Mario I. Aguilar, “Keeping
the Peace of Waso Borana,” Being and
Becoming Oromo eds. Baxter, P.T.W, Jan Hultin and Alessandro Truilzi,
Nordiska Afrika Institutet, Uppsala (1996) pp 190 -201,
[40] Tesema
Ta’a, The
Political Economy of an African Society in Tranformation: the Case of the Macca
Oromo (Ethiopia), Otto Harrassowitz GmbH
& Co KG, Wiesbaden, 2006, p41.
[41] Mario I. Ahuilar, ibid. (1996),
p198.
[42]Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
Tanzania Publishing House and Bogle L’Ouverture Publications. 1973.
[43]Cheikh,
Anta Diop, The Cultural Unity of
Negro Africa (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963), English translation: The Cultural Unity of Black Africa,
(London: Karnak House: 1989), pp. 53–111. See also Molefi Kete Asante,
"Cheikh Anta Diop: An Intellectual Portrait" (U of Sankore Press:
December 30, 2007).
[44] Lambert Bartels,. Oromo Religion: Myth and Rites of the
Western Oromo of Ethiopia- an Attempt to Understand, Berlin: Reimer, 1983,
89. See also Gemetchu Megerssa, “The Oromo Worldview”, Interdisciplinary
Seminar of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies 1 (June 6-7, 1998), 41.
[45] This is a widely chanted and
repeated song on Oromo Protests led by Qeerroo, the Oromo youth league.
[46]Oromia
Facts, (Year
Book). (Finfinne: Published by Office
of the President, 2010); Central
Statistical Agency (CSA) of Ethiopia, 2007. See also Alain Gascon’s “Shäwa, Ethiopia's
Prussia. Its Expansion, Disappearance and Partition,” in Proceedings of the
16th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. by Svein Ege, et
al. (2009, 85-98).
[47]The rightful
claim to Finfinne was put succinctly in the 1995 Constitution: “The special interest of the
State of Oromia in Addis Ababa,
regarding the provision of social services or the utilization of natural
resources and other similar matters, as well as joint administrative matters
arising from the location of Addis Ababa within the State of Oromia, shall be
respected. Particulars shall be determined by law,” Article 49 (5) of the
Constitution (1995). Constitution of
the Federal Democratic Republic of
Ethiopia, 1995,
Article 49 (5).
[48]Bethlehem
Tekola, “Urbanization and Prostitution in Ethiopia: A Historical Sketch” in Narratives of three Prostitutes in Addis
Ababa. Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa
University, Center for Research Training and Information for Women in
Development (CERTWID), 2002. Available
at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245109004_Narratives_of_three_prostitutes_in_Addis_Ababa
[49]
Gadaa is an egalitarian cultural and political
system by which the Oromo administered themselves. Legal matters were discussed
and the law laid down or reiterated at caffee
(a meadow where assembly meet) to protect human and non-human, and to
reenact the safuu social/moral order.
See Asafa Jalata, “Gadaa (Oromo Democracy): An Example of Classical African
Civilization,” The Journal of Pan African
Studies, vol.5, no.1, (March 2012), pp.126-152, p126. See also Asmarom
Legese, Gada. New York: The Free
Press. (1973).
[50]
Griefenow-Mewis, Catherine
and Tamane Bitima, Oromo Poetry Seen from
Within. Koln: Rudiger Koppe Verlag, 2004, pp42-43. Dajjach Mashasha is the
son of Abeto Sayfu Sahla Selassie (Ras Darge’s half-brother).
[51]
“Gadaa
(Oromo Democracy): An Example of Classical African Civilization,” The Journal of Pan African Studies,
vol.5, no.1, March 2012, p128. See also Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of
Oppression, (New York: Plenum
Press), (1985), p262.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Informal communications with the
Oromo in the Diaspora and back home, Oromia.
[54] See Human Rights Watch Report, “One Hundred Ways of Putting Pressure:
Violations of Freedom of Expression and Association in Ethiopia, (2010)”
[55] Getiye Gelaye,
sub-topic “Local Officials,” p9.
[56] Gammachu Dadhi, 2008, Finfinne.
[57] Marlia Banning, p71.
[58]Irreecha Massacre, October 2,
2016, Bishoftu Incidents:
a)The youth decry the TPLF-led government: https://www.tesfanews.net/irreecha-massacre-hundreds-oromo-festival-dead-bishoftu/.
d)
Public reaction to the PM’s account from the Oromo side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0mCllVjld4.
[59]Kyle
J. Anderson, "Performing Nationalism: Peasant Consciousness and the Dinshaway
Incidentin Rural Egyptian Popular Culture." submitted for the Department
of Near EasternStudies, Cornell University,
Working Paper.
[60] Allen Isaacman, ibid.
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Tefera Dibaba. “God speak to us”: performing power and authority in Salale,
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Alice. “Unreasonable Resentments,” Journal
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Award.
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