Ethiopia and Historiography

Just this weekend, I finished reading a couple of books about Ethiopia by two of the most respected historians of that region who seem to me to approach the study of Ethiopian history in two different ways. One is Donald N. Levine’s Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society, first published in 1974 by The University of Chicago Press at the same time as Ethiopia’s first revolutionary war. A second edition with a new preface was published in 2000. The other book is Mohammed Hassen’s The Oromo of Ethiopia, 1570 – 1860, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1990 at the same time as Ethiopia’s second revolutionary war, and republished by Red Sea Press in 1994. Notably, Levine’s addendum to his bibliography in his second edition mentions Hassen’s book as one of the top five important books published on Ethiopia since his first edition.

In my view, Hassen’s book does a better job answering two of the questions that Levine raises: (1) what constitutes “greater” Ethiopian culture and society, and (2) why were “the Oromo able to defeat the Amhara so regularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Both books are rigorous and brilliant, and both are controversial in how they challenged the scholarly community of Ethiopianists to revise their understanding of Ethiopian history and society, and in some ways, Levine’s book broke a path for Hassen’s.  Obviously, in some ways they are similar, in some ways very different. I would characterize Levine’s book as an idealist historiography whose understanding is simultaneously holistic and wholistic in a way that fails to fully account for the contradiction between a wholistic and a holistic understanding of culture. In contrast, I would characterize Hassen’s book as rigorously materialist in its approach, and I argue that this approach gives us a sturdier understanding of the social forces at work.

What do I mean by holistic and wholistic? To be fair to Levine, his project was arguably more difficult – theorizing and describing the whole of Ethiopian history – while Hassen focuses solely on how the Oromo emerged as a powerful political and commercial entity by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Levine describes his approach as holistic, meaning that he emphasizes the interplay of a multitude of social forces and protean, hybrid cultural identities in contrast to a single master narrative of history that would single out one social structure and/or cultural identity as representative of the totality of social, political, and economic relations. In particular, he attends to the interplay of several “cultural codes” and “social institutions” that contribute to a social system that is “greater” (as in his title “greater Ethiopia”) than the sum of its parts. So far, so good; I appreciate what he was up to theoretically,  despite a lot of the problematic details of his narrative.  Ultimately, he was attempting to recognize all of the cultural contributions to the Ethiopian state in a way we might today call “multicultural” “pluralistic” and “liberal,” and he did so at precisely the moment (1974) when the possibility of a truly multiethnic state seemed within reach. But herein lies the real problem, and perhaps what I have to say about the problem with Levine’s argument may also suggest why his image of a multiethnic state did not emerge after the 1974 revolution, and instead the ruthless and bloody totalitarian Derg regime did. It seems to me that Levine’s holistic approach depends upon a wholistic approach. What I mean by wholistic here, since Levine himself never uses the term, and since I’m kind of making it up, is an assumption about a national wholeness. In other words, the purpose of Levine’s book is to prove how multiethnic social forces led to Ethiopia’s integrity as a nation, but his argument tautologically assumes Ethiopia’s essential wholeness beforehand (that is to say, a priori).

There is a lot to Levine’s book, and I don’t have time or space to discuss it all here, but his argument is essentially that the interaction between the Amhara-Tigrean culture and the Oromo culture is what produced and developed the modern Ethiopian nation state. Levine formulates this as the “Amhara thesis” and the “Oromo antithesis,” out of which an “Ethiopian synthesis” emerges. The Amhara-Tigrean political structure along with its providentialist Christian ideology contributed a durable imperial political system. In other words, their translation of the Hebrew Bible into a national Ethiopian script (the famous Kibre Negest) that claimed a divine genealogy and the right to conquer others along with their hierarchical political structure and individualistic social habits enabled a strong political system. But they could not have accomplished an Ethiopian state on their own. The Oromo’s egalitarian political structure and collective social habits not only enabled them to often defeat the technologically more advanced and politically more centralized Amhara, but also contributed to the absorption of the smaller ethnic groups and the integration of the expanding trade networks. The Oromo political structures and cultural practices were adaptive and integrative in ways that the Amhara were not.

Why I call Levine’s book idealist is that it characterizes two cultures as two conflicting ideals whose resolution resulted in yet another ideal, the nation state. Though he calls it holistic because it recognizes the many political, social, and cultural factors that had a role to play in the constitution of a “greater Ethiopia,” it is also clearly dialectical in the Hegelian style — thesis, antithesis, and synthesis – and it is idealistic in how it subsumes all of those political, social, and cultural factors to the ideal of a nation state. This is an ideal that Levine assumes rather than proves. What is problematic is that much of the Oromo society he describes currently lives in Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya – outside the borders of the modern Ethiopian state, borders that were somewhat arbitrary and are still contested. Notably, Levine includes Eritrea within “greater Ethiopia,” which was certainly the case when Levine published his book in 1974 but was only the case for a fairly short period of time, from 1950 to 1991. Many of the Oromo and other ethnic groups such as the Somali do not want to be a part of greater Ethiopia or feel exploited and oppressed by the Amhara-Tigrean system, and believe they would run their state differently. It is a bit troubling that the very factors that make the Oromo an “antithesis” in Levine’s formulation also make them a non-state (page 135) and “unsuited for political dominion” (page 155). Notionally, for Levine, they are the antithesis to statehood, which in my view is a problematic way to characterize the culture of any people, especially a people who have been politically oppressed for a long time and who have been struggling for their rights and for independent statehood. (For all of my blog posts about the Oromo, see here.)

In addition, and more importantly, I say that Levine’s book is idealist and wholistic because it leaves out a key event. The Amhara were able to dominate the region largely due to their strategic alliance with the European empires who supplied them with weapons in exchange for access to trade routes. It should be obvious to Levine why the Amhara “resurgence” happened in the 1870s and not at another time. Their so-called resurgence was in large part because of the French and British involvement, but in all his analysis of the many factors that led to the formation of Ethiopia at the end of the nineteenth century, Levine never once mentions Europe or the transformative effects of the Suez Canal that opened in 1869 immediately before the so-called resurgence occurred. Instead he writes: “Where the Oromo culture was fragile, Amhara culture was durable. Where the Oromo were inclined to associate with one another as equals, the Amhara were disposed to rule. The variables which led the Galla [the pejorative name for Oromo] to cooperation, acculturation, and interethnic affiliation led the Amhara to a resurgence of traditional political and religious culture and the establishment of a hierarchical order throughout Greater Ethiopia” (page 164). Levine admits that the Amhara also controlled the gun trade in an offhand remark in the last paragraph of his book (page 185), but he doesn’t acknowledge why they did. Levine’s blindness to outside forces is as much a methodological, historiographic blindness as it is an ideological one. If Levine had admitted contributing factors from outside of Ethiopia, his idealistic formulation of the nation would have fallen apart. In other words, his holistic interpretation of history depends on a wholistic notion of “greater Ethiopia.” As a result, he reads history backwards, assuming that the present conditions of the Amhara and Oromo in 1974 should be the organizing principle for their whole past.

Though Mohammed Hassen’s book, published sixteen years later, never discusses Levine’s book except for a citation or two in the endnotes, some points of his argument agree with Levine’s. For example, Oromo culture was more open to interethnic affiliation and integration. Hassen elaborates this in greater detail and hence provides a richer and better explanation of the Oromo success than Levine. Levine’s characterization emphasizes the Oromo character and what this meant militarily. In contrast, Hassen emphasizes the economy and the long, slow process of acculturation. The Oromo tended to adopt the people they conquered rather than merely exploit them (pages 47 and 58). Their system placed less emphasis on a Biblically inspired, racial genealogy, so the other tribes and ethnic groups could feel a part of the Oromo’s more open political system. Though neither Levine nor Hassen come out and say it, I believe this aspect of Oromo political culture helps explain why the Oromo became and still remain the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia (somewhere between 35 and 50% of the population depending on how the statistics are calculated) despite the efforts of the Amhara government under Emperor Haile Selassie to suppress and erase Oromo language and culture. Hassen’s methodological approach is also similar to Levine’s holistic approach that emphasizes the intermixing of cultures, economies, and political structures, and like Levine he also asserts that the Oromo system contributed to the integration of the economy when he points out that the Oromo language became the language of trade for some areas in the eighteenth century (page 161). It is these commonalities between Levine and Hassen that lead me to believe that Levine’s book paved the way for Hassen’s.

But Hassen’s differs in several important respects. First, Hassen never characterizes Amhara and Oromo culture in the idealist and culturally essentialist way that Levine does. Instead, he points out that political, cultural, and economic practices of all of the ethnic groups were usually contingent on a range of other factors and quickly transformed to adapt to changing circumstances. For instance, the Oromo were pastoralists when they were forced to migrate, but became agrarian when they settled, and commercial when they began to interact with the Arab trade networks. Their political institutions, cultural practices, and religious affiliations changed alongside these economic and political circumstances (pages 86-87). For instance, when the Oromo eventually took over the prosperous and powerful Ennarya kingdom in the seventeenth century – the Ennarya being an ethnic group that no longer exists because of the this takeover – they absorbed a lot of Ennarya’s economy in ways that were transformative for the whole region (for the Oromo, Ennarya, Amhara, and others.) To put it another way, Hassen’s argument does to Levine exactly what Karl Marx did to Hegel; he turns the dialectic off its idealist head and puts it firmly back on its materialist feet.

Second, he also shows (again dialectically) how a weakness can be a strength. Whereas Levine suggests that the Amhara system is more durable because of its will to domination, Hassen shows how the adaptive cultural practices of the Oromo and their adoptive political system (what Levine perceives as their weakness) ultimately makes them more “durable.”

Third, Hassen is always quick to point to external factors. For instance, one particular war between the Amhara Christians and the Muslims of Harar so weakened both sides that the Oromo were able to move in. Hassen’s historical narrative stops in 1860 at the point of the Amhara resurgence, but he indicates that the Amhara control of the gun trade and its strategic relationship with European empires facilitated the end of the Oromo domination of the Gibe region of Ethiopia, one of the richest and most fertile regions of the whole Horn of Africa. Other books continue the story of Ethiopia after 1860, namely Sisai Ibssa and Bonnie Holcolmb’s The Invention of Ethiopia, Asafa Jalata’s Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict 1868 – 2004, and Harold Marcus’s two books, The Life and Times of Menelik II and Haile Selassie I: the Formative Years.

Fourth, and most importantly, Hassen doesn’t formulate the Oromo in problematically essentialist terms as the antithesis to nation building as Levine does but instead explains how the political systems and culture of all the ethnic groups in the region adapted to a changing economy. Hassen’s historical method is, in my view, ultimately more satisfying and convincing than Levine’s.

Nairobi Diaries 3: Oromo in Kenya

Back to my Kenya trip.

As you may recall from the summary of the trip that I outlined a while back [here], I was able to carve out some time from the official itinerary — so rigorously planned by one of my colleagues —  to visit with some representatives of the Oromo community in Kenya. If you’ve been reading my blog much at all, you know from my previous posts [here], [here], and [here] that I’ve been working with the Oromo community in the United States and Canada for about two years. What you may NOT know is that there is a large Oromo population in Kenya. So, there are two questions that I want to raise for this blog. The first question is one that any Oromo reader would know the answer to already: why are there so many Oromo in Kenya? And the second is more theoretical: why would I be so brazen as to think I could promote Oromo arts in Kenya, and what’s the use of doing so? (The answer to my brazenality question, as well as to the use-value question, may be already obvious to anyone who read my earlier Nairobi Diary post on how to write about ethnic violence in Africa.)

So, to answer the first question, there are basically three categories of Oromo living in Kenya: indigenous, refugee, and immigrant. It may surprise you to learn that there is a large indigenous population of Oromo living in Kenya, but in fact there are many ethnic groups living there, and as we all know, the British Empire drew its colonial boundaries to suit its interests without the least bit of deference to the people already living there. The indigenous Oromo in Kenya are called the Borana, and they moved to the rather arid regions  of  north and northeast Kenya about two hundred years ago as the European powers began colonizing the neighboring areas and as the Abyssinian kings began conquering the rest of Ethiopia. I started reading this book about them a few days before I left for Kenya but haven’t finished it yet. Through the global Oromo network on FaceBook, I got the opportunity to meet with a young man who is a Muslim Borana trying to create an NGO to help develop the communities where he grew up. 

Here is some of the backstory. The Kenyan government discriminates against the Borana because it sees them as outsiders and also because it confuses them with the Somali. This confusion is not surprising since the Oromo and Somali languages are both Cushitic and since many of the Borana have mixed with the Somali there for the past century. (And of course, there is a large Somali population indigenous to northern Kenya as well, so it’s not surprising that when Kenya gained independence in 1963, the majority of people living in the northeast area voted to join with Somalia which had already gained its independence a few years earlier. And of course the British — being British — ignored that vote.) Although more than half the Borana are Muslim, a large percentage are Christian, and a few practice the more ancient Waaqeffannaa. The Kenyan government also believes that the Borana towns provide support and refuge for the Oromo Liberation Front who cross the border to escape the Ethiopian military. So, today the Kenyan government makes little effort to develop that region and inside Nairobi the police sometimes harrass the Borana and Somali. So, the work of this young man whom I met is quite important from a humanitarian perspective because his goal is to promote development by encouraging grassroots civil society in the region.

The refugee population is a bit diferent. They tend to come from other areas inside of Ethiopia. All of the refugees whom I met came in 2002. In 2001, the Ethiopian government brutally suppressed student groups who protested a corrupt election process. Then in January of 2002 the government tried to exterminate all dissent along with the remaining Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). In its attempt to chase down not just the OLF but all forms of it dissent, the government burned down some of the Bale forest where the OLF was supposedly hiding – an environmental tragedy whose real cause was not reported in the Western media as you can see from this BBC report. These refugees fled to neighboring Sudan, Somalia, Uganda, and Kenya, and when the U.S. president George W. Bush asked the Ethiopian government to invade Somalia in December of 2006, presumably to go after al Qaeda terrorists, the Ethiopian government used that opportunity to kill Oromo refugees there. In Kenya, many of the refugees have lived in limbo for the past eight years.  Or rather, they have lived in something like a purgatory. It is illegal for them to work in Kenya, but they can’t leave either, so they can do nothing. Many live in refugee camps on the border, but some live in Nairobi, where they wait year after year for something to change.

Through the Oromo Lutheran church network in the United States, I was able to meet with a woman who works with refugees (not just the Oromo, but all refugees) and tries to help them with their legal problems and find them asylum in the U.S., Canada, etc. Her job is difficult because of course the United Nations refuses to recognize that the Oromo are political refugees and the United States considers the OLF to be a terrorist organization. (This is a curious contradiction — at the same time that the UN understates the political reality, the US overstates it. A whole essay could be written about that contradiction, I think.)  

After talking with her, she arranged for me to go to one of the training sessions for the refugees organized through the church in one of the slums of Nairobi. A member of the church picked me and two of my colleagues up in his taxi and took us there, where we talked with four of the refugees. An hour later I gave a short presentation to a congregation of about 100 people about my work encouraging ”Oromo arts in diaspora.”

The third group is a relatively small group — the legal immigrants living and working in Kenya, such as the person I met who works on behalf of the refugees. Many of them actually came to Kenya not directly from Ethiopia but through other countries like the United States or Germany. They are often middle class, doing business or working for international organizations.

So, the second question for this blog post is, why arts? Most of the Oromo I meet give me a quizical, confused look when I start talking about art and literature. I get the distinct impression that in their minds such artistic endeavors are not so important compared to direct political action, the work of religious institutions, or scholarly efforts to correct the historical record. In fact, when I say I work with literature, almost everyone seems to assume I mean history — something I noticed before in the United States [see here], and noticed again in Kenya.

I think this question can be answered easily. Immediately after I gave my presentation, a young man in the audience came forward and showed me a painting he made shortly after the student uprising and subsequent repression in 2001. As I suggested to my audience that day, art has the ability to help people work through the trauma of history and to develop their cultural identity in response to a changing world. Art also has the ability to communicate across ethnic and political divisions, and therefore it has the ability to tell the human side of Oromo experience to a global audience, to gain recognition for their political struggle.

There is a lot of work to be done. Oromo culture has been largely an oral one, not a written one,  and it has been this way not because of some essential Oromo-ness that privileges oral culture, but  because publishing in their own language was outlawed by the Ethiopian government for most of the twentieth century. In actuality, one of the Oromo heroes is Onesimus Nesib who first translated the Bible into Oromo and thus not only created an Oromo written language but also gave the Oromo a tool for fighting colonization and political oppression. I suppose one could criticize me and suggest that I am imposing Western, middle-class art forms such as the short story and the novel onto their culture, and that as a white guy I have no right to be giving out such advice. But I have little patience for that position. That position assumes an intact, pure Oromo culture, but historically that obviously has not been the case for centuries (if it was ever the case, which I doubt.) It also reaffirms a racialist position that only a member of the ethnic group can understand and speak for that ethnic group. Personally, I agree with the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s critique of that position.

So, onward and upward we go, fostering the kinds of dialogue that I hope will foster art and literature — not art for art’s sake, but art for our sake.

Oromo Arts in Diaspora vs. HIV/AIDS

As the semester comes to an end, and my theory students put their books away, I’m proud to announce the the new issue of Ogina, an on-line webzine devoted to Oromo Arts in Diaspora. 

cover art for Ogina issue 2:1 by Zakia Posey

I have previously posted on Oromo issues in this blog here and here. Those who don’t know who the Oromo people are, see here. One of the basic tenants of the Ogina webzine is that art can effect positive social change, and it is a tenant that it shares with another new Oromo organization Sandscribe Communications, which aims to build a media and arts school in Ethiopia.

So, the questions for this post are these: can art really effect positive change? If so, how?

The new issue of Ogina is dedicated to the topic of HIV/AIDS, a disease that has struck very hard both inside and outside of Ethiopia. As the excellent documentary All of Us demonstrates in its transnational exploration of HIV among women of color in the Bronx and in Ethiopia, fighting the disease is not simply a matter of knowledge, medical technology, or morality. It is also a matter of power relations and of will. And everyone knows that will and power are intimately — and very complexly — related on both the political and psychological levels.

Art and imaginative literature, I think, can expose not just ignorance but also disparities in power in a very special way — a special way that helps the disempowered discover both the psychological sources of empowerment and the political resources of will in order to change their lives for the better. Hence, in some ways, art and imaginative literature are superior to theory and political science which may analyze power relations and prescribe solutions, but don’t inspire, raise consciousness,  or lead an individual to a personal epiphany and ethical transformation. But of course, art alone will not solve the AIDS epidemic. Critical theory and political organization each have their role to play, as all three work in concert to illuminate and transform the world.

Cyber Hip Hop in Diaspora… multicultural, multinational, glocal, transnational, post-national…

With some pride, I want to announce the new issue of Ogina: Oromo Arts in Disapora, the new “webzine” (on-line magazine) that I help to edit. This issue has been praised by Oromo websites and blogs here, here, here, and here. Naturally, it is very exciting for me to be a part of this adventure and to be a part of what I have previously in this blog called the “Oromo Renaissance.” As I mentioned there, most Americans don’t know who the Oromo are, even though they are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, and this sudden flourishing of cultural activity has only recently become possible because of a more tolerant Ethiopian government and a newly globalized Oromo culture. The new issue of Ogina focuses on hip hop and spoken word poetry, and it features several artists, an interview with two of them, and an essay about how the internet changes the nature of culture and politics by creating a transnational public sphere.

What that essay by Qeerransoo Biyyaa argues is that Oromo hip hop is a “glocal“ phenomenon because it brings together a global art form and a local political movement. However, Qeerransoo Biyyaa raises important questions about the internet as a tool for cultural and political communication. On the one hand it allows displaced Oromo refugees a means to share their cultural identity all over the world, but on the other hand, less than 1% of Oromo living in Ethiopia have access to a computer.

Making such observations, Qeerransoo Biyyaa raises some important theoretical questions about the very nature of culture itself as well as the nature of what the philosopher  Jürgen Habermas calls the “public sphere.” Such questions are clearly important to many Oromo in the United States and Canada who are refugees living in exile, and since my blog is a “theory teacher blog,” I want to draw attention to how he is using theory to make very practical observations about his culture and about the possibilty of political agency for his people.

But here I will raise yet another question. What is the best concept for describing the kind of cultural activity we are seeing here?

Before you continue reading this blog post, please take a moment to think about how many times you’ve heard the words “multicultural” or “multiculturalism.” Probably a lot, and since the early 1990s, it has become popular for Americans to say that we live in a multicultural society. Instead of the proverbial “melting pot” metaphor in which everyone is supposed to assimilate to a single national culture, we now celebrate the “salad bowl” of different cultures all mixed together. To celebrate our cultural diversity is to participate in the ideology of multiculturalism.

But is multiculturalism really the best concept? Certainly, in my view, it’s better than monoculturalism (a.k.a. national chauvenism) which argues for a homogenous culture and celebrates that one culture as somehow superior to all others. But multiculturalism’s celebration of diversity (as I have mentioned in my previous blog post on intercultural competency) can sometimes seem a little shallow. We’re all different, hooray? Is that it? Certainly there’s more to multiculturalism than that, and indeed there is. Theorists of multiculturalism are very serious about not only the importance of cultural recognition but also the problems of cultural recognition when it is understood as an end in itself. In other words, for many, the true end — or goal — of multiculturalism ought to be social justice, not the naive celebration of difference.

However, as many scholars and journalists have pointed out, all the while that people in the United States were celebrating their multicultural nation in the mid-1990s, large multinational corporations such as Nike and Wal-Mart were moving their factories overseas where they could find a cheaper and more powerless workforce to exploit. For the Oromo living in Ethiopia, such global trade was both good and bad. It was good because it opened up large markets for their biggest commercial product — coffee. But it was bad because the multinational corporations controlled the market and left the Oromo people politically powerless, economically dependent, and socially traumatized. In fact, an award winning movie Black Gold analyzed this problem and proposed fair trade coffee organizations such as Equal Exchange as a possible solution.

At the same time that we notice the rise of multinational corporations in a more globalized economy, we also notice another phenomenon. Not only are there more immigrants, but — because of new technologies such as the telephone, television, and the internet — immigrants are remaining more and more emotionally, culturally, and even politically attached to their homeland. Hence, just as multinational corporations are not based in any single nation-state but operate in many nations around the globe, so are diasporic communities such as the Oromo also multinational — living and operating as a single culture in many different nations. The concept “multicultural” doesn’t really capture this phenomenon, so today we use the word “transnational” to better explain the movement of commodities, capital, culture, and people across national borders. And what about communities such as the Oromo and Native Americans who have never felt fully at home within their own homeland and who have never been fully enfranchised by the national government to which they are subject? Aren’t they essentially transnational communities, even if they never emigrate?

However, though we may throw around terms such as transnational, global, and glocal, the nation-state has not disappeared (as the recent effort to strengthen the border between the United States and Mexico indicates.) The nation-state is still the primary political structure available to people through which to adjudicate legal disputes and deliberate on policy. But in terms of both cultural identity and business practices, it has become more confusing and complicated. Some people such as John Carlos Rowe argue that the word transnational is too weak. It doesn’t draw enough attention to the conflicting senses of identity and the challenges of governing multinational corporations and transnational communities. Since the old model assumed that the nation-state governs people and their business inside a nation, how do we govern people and businesses that seems to exist in more than one nation or between nations? Rowe favors the word “post-national” because, he argues, the very strangeness of that made-up word actually calls attention to itself as a fundamentally paradoxical situation.

So, which of these words — multicultural, transnational, glocal, multinational, transnational, global, or post-national — provides us with the best conceptual lens through which to see our world today?

The Oromo Renaissance

There is one thing I want to emphasize in this post, as the end of the semester approaches. It is something we have been discussing all semester in various ways, but I hope it will appear especially meaningful now. It is the many inter-connections among literature, socio-economic conditions, the many different spaces in which we live our daily lives, and politics. Similar to Michel Foucault, Slavoj Zizek, and Jacques Derrida whom you read earlier in the semester, Naomi Klein and Jane Juffer, whom you are reading now, focus on the enormous complexity and incredible density of these things, as well as the way such things are not always “innate” or “natural” but rather change over time and therefore can be changed.

I want to give you a real world example, a project that I am currently in the middle of working on, a project whose success and outcome is entirely indeterminate — and that project is the Oromo Renaissance.

Most of you do not know who the Oromo are. They are Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group and have been violently oppressed for the past 150 years by another ethnic group who was only able to dominate the region by means of military support provided by commercial interests in Europe and the United States. So, in this blog, I want to share with you the rough draft of an essay I am writing and planning to publish in the first issue of an on-line magazine of literature and culture, which I am also helping to edit. I hope, as you read this draft, you will notice the different social spaces, institutions, legal structures, activist movements, and history — as well as the literature — which all overlap and interconnect in complex ways. Anyway, here it is… 

In July 2007 in Minneapolis, the Oromo Youth Leadership Conference discussed how to promote Oromo cultural identity. After the conference, several of the participants—including myself—proposed the creation of a new Oromo webzine that would feature poetry, fiction, visual arts, fashion, interviews with musicians, essays on culture, and more. As we first imagined it, the goal of our webzine was to contribute to an event that hasn’t fully happened yet—the Oromo Renaissance. Coincidentally, unknown to us when we began our project, the Oromo playwright Dhaba Wayessa was thinking along similar lines. He recently wrote, “As we all aspire to participate in the Oromo cultural renaissance, we need to nurture and develop our magnificent cultural traditions so that our children may embrace and carry them forward as an essential part of their lives,” and this March, he began raising money in Washington D.C. and Minneapolis for a new film project, Halkan Dorrobaa. Also unknown to us when we began, yet another Oromo intellectual, Asafa Jalata, concluded his new book Oromummaa with an essay that encourages the Oromo to learn from the political projects of other black communities, namely the Harlem Renaissance.[1]

Clearly, something is in the air. And something important is on the horizon. But what? What will an Oromo Renaissance look like? It is difficult to write about the future, especially from the perspective of an outsider—as I am obviously not an Oromo—but that is precisely the task of my essay. To accomplish this task, I will raise three questions: (1) What is the meaning of the word “renaissance” and what sort of project does it entail? (2) What is the usefulness of comparing one cultural renaissance such as the Oromo Renaissance to another such as the Harlem Renaissance? and (3) Is there something new about the twenty-first century that would make the formation of a cultural renaissance today different from earlier ones? To put it another way, since I am not myself an Oromo, I can only offer the readers of this new webzine my expertise as a professor of English and American literature.Hence, like the English, American, and Harlem renaissances before it, the Oromo Renaissance today will have two different audiences. One will be the Oromo community itself, but the other will be the international community. Therefore, just as within their ethnic community, Oromo artists adapt non-Oromo art forms, so too, beyond their community, artists hope to secure a place for themselves in a global culture. This attention to the “cultures of globalization” and the multinational publishing corporations that produce “world literature,” however, presents us with a paradox.  And the paradox is this: in order to achieve their cultural integrity, the Oromo are finding that they must look outside their own culture and work closely not only with people of other cultures but also with other cultural forms, such as the modern cafe and multinational networks of distribution and consumption.

I raise these three questions—and I emphasize that they are open-ended questions to which I have no answers—in part because of a vague uneasiness I observed being expressed at the OYLC. Many of the Oromo living in Diaspora feel disconnected from their cultural roots and have developed attachments to other forms of culture (e.g., American hip hop, American consumer culture, western universities, Lutheran churches, and Muslim mosques.) However, there is a deep desire to reconnect creatively and imaginatively. For instance, around the same time that the editors of Ogina were thinking about creating this webzine, two other individuals—Roba Geleto and Gity Teressa—created an “Oromo Art and Poetry” group on the on-line networking tool FaceBook to “unleash the beauty of Oromia throughout our imaginations” in a way that would transcend the political and religious differences within the Oromo community. The FaceBook group includes poetry written in both English and Afan Oromo as well as links to YouTube videos of hip hop by the Oromo artist Epidemic the Virus who lives in Toronto. What is notable here is how young Oromo are already exploring their cultural identity through a hybrid of American and Oromo poetic forms. At the same time, many Oromo youth have been long dissatisfied with the political rhetoric of their elders who assert a simplistic and often jingoistic image of Oromo-ness, or Oromummaa. The editors of this new webzine Ogina want to follow the advice of scholars such as Mekuria Bulcha and Asafa Jalata by not simply asserting a nostalgic sense of what it means to be Oromo. Instead, they want to honestly and courageously explore the strange paradoxes and deeply felt contradictions of real, lived experience—their culture in a globalized world.

With the goals of the editors of Ogina in mind, I want to mention something I noticed when I first mentioned “Oromo literature” to the several of the older generation of Oromo scholars and journalists. They seemed to think that I was interested in old Oromo folk tales, when what I was really interested in was the possibility of something new—an Oromo novel set in the present. And I mention these divergent senses of the word “literature” because there is more at stake in these two very different emphases than mere idle speculation. There is money and the question of what to use it for. The Oromo community financially supports scholars at universities both in Oromia and in the U.S., Sweden, and elsewhere who research and recuperate the cultural and political history of the Oromo, but as far as I could tell, no money was being used to support young literary talent. This, of course, is important to me not just because I am a teacher of literature, but also because it is well known to historians that the African-American literature in the 1920s significantly helped to enable the Civil Rights movement. That the literature, music, and art of the Harlem Renaissance were important to the Civil Rights movement is obvious. Both of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson—were also novelists.  And we also know that much of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance could not have been written without a significant injection of capital from various organizations, such as the Communist Party of the U.S.A. Theorists and scholars of civil rights movements all over the world have long appreciated the role of magazines, novels, poetry, and theater not only for galvanizing a political community but also for exploring the ethical dilemmas and problems faced by that community. So, at first, I thought that the Oromo living in Diaspora should really be using their limited financial resources to focus on the present and the future, not the past.

 But when I thought further, I began to think about it differently. Literally, the word “renaissance” means “rebirth,” and so one of the peculiar aspects of a renaissance—any renaissance—is that it is simultaneously a looking back and a looking forward. For example, at the time of the English Renaissance in the 16th century, England was not yet a “nation” in the modern sense of what a nation is. Looking ahead to England’s new imperial future, poets such as Edmund Spenser invented a mythic past dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I. In other words, England’s “rebirth” was not just about becoming something new or different, but a metaphorical renewal of the past. The same is true of the American Renaissance in the early 19th century following the Revolutionary War. And likewise, many writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s recuperated an African-American folk tradition. So, this renewal of the past—based partly on truth, but also imaginatively invented out of scarce archival resources—was important for the African-American project of self-liberation.[2] Likewise, their children, growing up in the U.S.A., Canada, England,  Australia, Sweden, Kenya, and Somalia, struggle to understand their cultural roots, a culture that sometimes even their parents have difficulty articulating except through other institutions such as the church or the mosque.here].)

Not only did these three renaissances re-imagine their cultural history, but their poets and scholars worked hard to institutionalize a national language. Alongside the English Renaissance came the first Bible in English and the first English dictionary. When one looks at the spellings of words and names in English before 17th century, there seems to be no consistency to them. Even the famous playwright William Shakespeare spelled his own name different ways. Similarly, we have all noticed how some words in Qubbee seem to have several spellings. And the institutionalization of a national language and culture was not unique to the English Renaissance. Alongside the American Renaissance came the first American-English dictionary and a state sponsored elementary education system. And though the Harlem Renaissance did not produce a “dictionary” in the usual sense of that word, its writers experimented with how to represent the uniqueness of “black” English, and linguists later developed something called Ebonics. The Oromo today find themselves in a similar situation as the English in the 17th century, the Americans in the 19th century, and the African-Americans in the 20th century.  For almost one hundred years, the Ethiopian state made it illegal to publish or teach in Qubbee. Only since 1991 have people in Oromia been able to publish books and go to school in their own language. And, among the children growing up in Diaspora, there is a powerful desire to learn their own language. For instance, a young man in Norway is currently busy trying to program iPods in Afan-Oromo.

And so, obviously, what motivates the Oromo elders to recuperate their cultural history is the fact that not just their culture but even their very language had been suppressed for so long. I will not spend time in this essay on that history as many Oromo scholars have already described it in considerable detail. I assume that all readers of this essay know already (far better than I do) the effects of Ethiopian state violence on Oromo language, culture, and sense of self.

However, no renaissance can simply be a nostalgic looking back at a past only dimly recollected. And so, the novelists, poets, and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance also dramatized their present condition as well as imagined a brighter future. They invented the new musical form of jazz by blending together musical forms from Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Their writers borrowed the traditional European forms of prose and poetry but changed them in order to express their own way of speaking, feeling, and thinking. They were inventive, playful, and experimental.

Thus, the second question of this essay is a comparative one. The Italian and English Renaissance writers looked to ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration and even imagined direct cultural linkages, and likewise, the Harlem Renaissance looked everywhere for inspiration, from German philosophy and literature to French modernist art to ancient African traditions. At the same time, of course, these renaissances also paid attention to how they differed from all other cultural traditions and trajectories—above all, they asserted their uniqueness. And what made them unique was their heritage, the heritage that we call Oromummaa. Interestingly, if one reads carefully Jalata’s book Oromummaa and Legesse’s book Oromo Democracy, one notices that they are describing two things at once. They are describing the unique heritage of the Oromo people, but they are describing it in the universal terms of democracy and human rights. So, just as a renaissance is simultaneously a looking back and a looking forward, it is also simultaneously a celebration of its uniqueness and its universality.

Today, no Oromo man or woman can help but notice the globalized nature of his or her own culture. Musicians have adopted western electronic instruments. Hip hop is popular not only among Oromo youth in the United States but also in Oromia. And this cultural hybridity is nothing new. Not only did the revolutionary culture of Ethiopia in the 1960s and 70s borrowed heavily from Russian and Chinese Marxism, but so too were its popular music and even the hairstyles (e.g., the Afro) a mixture of local and global cultural forms. Moreover, the Oromo know that their future has been—and continues to be—affected by the politics of the United Nations and other global institutions as well as the economics of multinational corporations. And so, the Oromo have always deeply understood the necessity of making connections to people and cultures outside their own community. In other words, they have always understood that to achieve political freedom and to end the injustice of their oppression, they have felt the need to demonstrate the injustice of their situation to a world audience. One important example of how they have done so is to link their interests with the fair trade coffee movement, as much of the world’s coffee is produced by impoverished Oromo farmers. A Minnesota coffee roaster has recently created a new blend of coffee called “Organic Oromian” to increase awareness of the Oromo contributions to a global economy and world culture. (For more on that story, and to find out how you can buy Organic Oromian Coffee, click [

 

And this paradox leads to the third question of this essay, and that is the question of the 21st century. What is novel about the Oromo Renaissance—and perhaps any cultural renaissance of the 21st century—is its location. Unlike the renaissances of Europe, America, and Harlem, the Oromo Renaissance is happening not just in one location, but in a state of Diaspora. Although all renaissances have historically emerged out of a dialogue between a local culture and a world culture, in the past they have typically been rooted in metropolitan centers such as Venice, London, and New York. In contrast, the Oromo Renaissance is an event that has no single center but is happening everywhere. It is happening in the U.S.A., Canada, England, Australia, Kenya, Somalia, Sweden, Norway, and even in Cyberspace as well as within the political state of Ethiopia. Therefore, the artists of the Oromo Renaissance, both young and old, are paying close attention to something truly wonderful—just how profoundly new their situation actually is.

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NOTES

[1] Dhaba Wayessa, Halkan Dorrobaa. http://boornagaa.com/; Asafa Jalata, Oromummaa (Atlanta, GA: Oromia Publishing, 2007): 272. See also Jalata’s “The Place of the Oromo Diaspora in the Oromo National Movement: Lessons from the Agency of the “Old” African Diaspora in the United States,” Northeast African Studies 9:3 (2002): 133-60.

[2] To name just a few of the books on this subject: Bonnie K. Holcomb and Sisai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia (Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press, 1990); Asafa Jalata, Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868-2004, 2^nd ed. (Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press, 2005); Mekuria Bulcha, The Making of the Oromo Diaspora (Minneapolis, MN: Kirk House, 2002); Asmarom Legesse, Oromo Democracy (Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press, 2006).