Performing Nationalism in Ethiopia
Cushitic Salale Oromo in Northeast Africa
In this study, drawing my examples from folk songs and narratives of the Salale Oromo resistance to state oppression in Ethiopia, I argue that heroic songs and narratives of heroism are powerful forms of symbolic performance used to fume Oromo cultural nationalism and resistance against internal colonialism. Using examples of oral data of collective performances obtained from Salale as a ritualized remembrance of collective experience, I argue that internal colonialism stance in the Ethiopian context can be destabilized by the examination of the genre(s) of heroic songs and heretic narratives in Salale. To this aim, John Hutchinson’s notion of “cultural nationalism” (2007; 1999) coupled with “internal colonialism theory” (Gordon in Stoler 2006) are employed to legitimize the thesis of the present study. That is, the Salale Oromo cultural resistance has a double function as part of the ongoing Oromo struggle for national liberation and Oromumma revivalism: it is a galvanizing object of resistance movement against internal colonialism in Ethiopia, and it is a vehicle for collective mobilization in terms of “cultural nationalism” embedded in Oromummaa (Oromoness) (Asafa, 2007). 1
Background: Historical Perspective2
The Salale are the Tulama branch of the Cushitic Oromo in Ethiopia inhabiting northwest of Finfinne (also called Addis Ababa), the capital and also the political seat of African Union. Because of their geographical proximity to the Shawan Amhara Christians to the north the Salale live(d) under an unequal historical relationship and suffered economic exploitation, especially land appropriation, and political subjugation before any other Oromo branches to the south (Zeleke 2003; Ege, 1996; Bairu 1986). Available oral data and the social history of power recorded since the 19th century (Krapf and Isenberg 1843; Harris 1844; Beke 1844) show the continuous resistance of the Salale against Shawan domination, which the Ethiopian and Ethiopianist scholars and chroniclers recorded merely the history of political rulers and their coercive measures to guarantee peaceful coexistence and collaboration. As to be further explored in this study, the “grassroots history” of the people shows that the “traditional nationalism” took varied forms of cultural resistance including social banditry and full-scale battles (Tsegaye 2003; Abbink 2003; Ege 1996; Crummey, 1986).
In the history of the Abyssinian rulers, internal power struggle, problems of power transfer and other factors made it difficult for the central government to control tributary local states and enforce laws and tax collection. When the central state could not enforce law and order, the local tributaries apparently exercised a type of sovereignty. Whereas, when power is consolidated at the center, it crashes the tributary states and weakens them, however, resistance and compliance was inevitable. Laws were imposed to be violated, orders were forced to be disrupted, and, consequently, humanity was dislocated, life was disintegrated. For where there was no justice no wrong life could be lived rightly! The Salale were dispersed or internally migrated. Those who remained back home, some rebelled and some lived as tenants under servitude from Ras Darge to his great-grandchildren, Amdie and others. The heretics’ abodes were the heroes’ sanctuaries. The Salale sang thus (interview, Sime, 2010)
ati yaa Amdee Abarraa
maaf qotte maasaa lagarraa
silaa hiyyeessa fixxee lafarraa?
si haa gaafatu ayyaanni warraa!
oh, Amdee Abarra
why you plowed the farm on the banks
and displaced the poor?
may their ancestral spirit judge you, punish you
The Salale Oromo used narratives and folksongs as cultural resistance against domination, and in so doing, to commemorate Salale heroes and constitute their identity and ‘history’ from “below”. I consent that a constructivist strategy must be employed to consider the role of cultural nationalism in general and folk songs and narrative accounts in particular in studying the current Oromo nationalism. Toward this end, the thesis of the present study is that the Salale Oromo have challenged the Abyssinian internal colonialism in Ethiopia through cultural nationalism and continuous resistance to subvert the Christian dominant culture and hierarchical (systematic) political domination mainly since the 1840s (Ege, 1996; Baiu 1986). Thus, based on the data obtained through interview from Salale, this study aims to provide a retrospective analysis of the people’s ‘history’ and cultural politics from “below”. Against the Abyssinian nation-building tenet of the late 19th century, to Eric Hobsbawm (1990), nations are not the mere products of territorial unity but the result of politics, technology, and social transformation, i.e., economic and technological development based on equal distribution of resources. Thus, by the internal colonialism stance, as it will be further explored in this study, the social inequalities and “uneven development” of regions in Ethiopia fumed the glaring fire of nationalism supported by cultural resistance from “below”. According to Hobsbawm (1990: 10), nations and nationalisms are constructed essentially from above which cannot be understood unless analyzed from “below,” to which Gellner’s account does not pay adequate attention (Ozkirimli,2010:96)
Methods and Theories
Oromo folklore scholarship necessitates an appropriate and intellectually stimulating theoretical analysis and new models based not on positivistic explanation of mere facts but rather an intellectual and attitudinal framework to pursue ethnographic3 Oromo folklore research goals. To this aim, folklore produces a different kind of “imagined community” utilizing elements of shared dialect(s) and the vernacular instead of the neo-Abyssinian linguistic and cultural domination and to produce a national sublime, to mobilize collective resistance against domination and help the Oromo nation to come into being through self-reflexive poetic calls to action. Toward this end, I use a constructivist stance that builds on the people’s lived experience by making sense of the world they live in in different ways. Constructivist stance sees human existence as contextual, relational, and ethical. The ‘construal’ act can only be understood in terms of living in a shared world socially negotiated through shared perspectives with others. By a constructivist model, the role of “cultural nationalist” as a social and moral innovator is to maintain a historically-rooted ethical way of life based on the basic tenets of “Oromumma” (Oromoness) (Asafa, 2007): freedom for all, peaceful coexistence, and the principle of waadaa,4 i.e., covenant. From the Salale Oromo perspective, the waadaa principle of Oromummaa overrules how we perceive and describe the world and others who inhabit it with us, and the relationship is always an ethical/safuu one (social/moral order) (Gurmu, my informant, 2010). In this study, the oral data obtained through interview from Salale in September 2009 to July 2010 and other historical (historiographical) information are described and analyzed in line with folkloric, historical, and anthropological ethnographic methods. In what follows I discuss the theoretical stances used to describe and interpret examples of “cultural nationalism” and creative resistance in other sections.
“Internal Colonialism Theory”
The issue of nationalism and national question is built around the political solutions to the economic exploitation and social oppression examined by internal colonialism theory (Ozkirimli, p78). The theory deals with social inequalities caused by “uneven development” and economic exploitation and whether the oppressed nationality have the right to self-determination as a nation and can exist as a cohesive independent state. The Internal Colonialism Theory is a notion of structural political and economic inequalities between regions within a nation state used to describe the uneven effects of economic development on a regional basis, otherwise known as "uneven development", and to describe the exploitation of minority groups within a wider society (ibid).
Franz Fanon’s (1964) classical book, the Wretched of the Earth is a Marxist analysis of Algerian battle for independence against French domination in a manner that is highly applicable to other anti-colonial struggle. Fanon narrated the paths of the natives’ mindset through various stages of the independent struggle. There are also debates about the root of African nationalism and whether Colman’s (1971 in Adeleke 2012) view of the primary resistances and post-pacification revolts constitute traditional nationalism and fed into modern nationalism (p67). Fanon noted that before the start of an anti-colonial rebellion, endemic violence arises among the colonized toward each other as a manifestation of the brutal psychological violence of colonial domination. The Wretched of the Earth is a narrative of evolving thoughts and actions from below which includes peasants, trade unionists, and laborers and Fanon’s theory of nationalism is very applicable to other external and internal colonial situations. However, by Gellner’s (1997; 2006) theory of nationalism, the political duties of citizens override all other obligations, and this is what distinguishes modern nationalism from the traditional primordial group-identification as less demanding category.
Hobsbawm (1990) assents to the view that nations do not make states and then nationalism, but the other way round. That is, nationalism emerges at the intersection of politics, technologies and social transformation and not just by forcefully hording people into a territorial mélange but through a technological and economic development. By Anderson’s (1991) theory of “print capitalism” the “imagined community” emerge(d) around a common language and discourse generated from the use of printing press and a common language imposed on the local dialects and vernacular languages leading onto “print colonialism”. “Print capitalism” that helped the first European nation-state to emerge around a “national print language” came to dominate other languages and “history” in Africa by forging “official nationalism” (Anderson, 1991:86). From the internal colonialism theory perspective, in Ethiopia, without the spread of literacy and mass education to maintain national language, unite the nation around a common discourse, and create national identification around the official ideology of “official nationalism” has been difficult. Internal colonialism in Ethiopia has been malfunctional to create the common-sense notion of “manifest destiny” (the nation-building thesis) and, in so doing, to stabilize “official nationalism” through deepening what Linda Gordon calls “intimate colonial relations” (in Stoler, 2006) by the construction of colonial practices (education, dominant culture, religion) to perpetuate, for example, Ethiopia as a “heimat”, a ‘homeland,’ a Christian island, a melting pot of ethno-nations. Thus, multiculturalism and modernity are the tools of colonialism. After the four Abyssinian autonomous kingdoms (the Tigray or Axumite, the Gondari, the Gojjami, and the Manz) were united under the Manz which became the Shahwan Kingdom, Menelik led the internal colonial campaign aided by European and Russian military strategists in the second half of the nineteenth century to conquer the Oromo and others ethno-nations (Holocomb and Ibssa, 1990).
History from ‘Below’
Looking back at the oral and social history of the Salale Oromno in the context of the 19th century Shawan Kingdom and the current Ethiopia’s situation, there is no a balanced body of ready-made source-material to depend on for interpretation and, therefore, the need for social constructivist approach and “history from ‘below’” is crucial. Hobsbawm believes that every kind of history has its technical problems (Hobsbawm in Krantz 1988:204), and the Ethiopian history is no exception. Hobsbawm argues most of the history written by chroniclers and subsequent scholars since the beginning of literacy or since the 19th century tells us little about the people they recorded (Hobsbawm, ibid. p202). The same theory applies to Ethiopia where traditionally most history scholarship was written for the glorification of political rulers or for their practical use to concoct ruling-class politics to be taken as true instead of occasional reference to the mass of the subject population. However, society seen as a pyramid, the density of history from the point of view of the common people is immense from “below”. In line with this argument, to Hobsbawm, nations and nationalism are dual phenomena: they are constructed from above but cannot be understood unless studied and analyzed from “below” in terms of the intentions, hopes, fears, views, needs, assumptions, and interests of the ordinary people, the view from below to which Gellner does not pay adequate attention (Ozkirimli, 2010: 96).
Grass roots history, history from below, or history of the common people is relevant to the sort of history written traditionally as “the history of major political decisions and events only form the moment when the ordinary people become a constant factor in the making of such decisions” (Hobsbawm, ibid. p202). In the Ethiopian context, the Bale peasant rebellion is the case in point as Gebru Tareke’s (1996) study shows. The Bale popular revolt and peasant resistance was one of the three important peasant-based rebellions between 1941-1970 against the long-reigned Haila Selassie’s monarchic rule (cf. Abbink et al, 2003; Crummey 1986). By Colman’s (1971) analysis of the history of African nationalism against European colonialism, traditional nationalism which constituted people’s primary resistance and revolts against established colonial actions and rules was a “backward looking and negative”; however, it “had utilitarian value for modern nationalism and as intensely nationalistic as modern nationalism” (in Adeleke 2012:67).
Franz Fanon’s theory of violence is relevant to the notion of mass protest against any form of injustices as efforts to subvert internal colonialism (Fanon 2004). Fanon insists that the “colonist is not content with stating that the colonized world has lost its values or worse never possessed any” (p6). Beyond a nostalgic memory of the past, the natives’ negativistic “backward looking” is, in Earnest Renan’s view (in Bhabha 1990:8-22), to remember what unites them as a nation and to forget what tears them apart and, in so doing “to speak on behalf of large number of anonymous dead people” (Anderson, 1991:198), the violent deaths which “must be remembered/forgotten as our own” (ibid, 206). Towards this end, the study and analysis of grassroots history is essential not “merely to give it a retrospective political significance which it did not always have, we are trying more generally to explore an unknown dimension of the past” (Hobsbawm in Krantz 1988:204). According to Fanon, “this passionate quest for a national culture prior to the colonial era can be justified by the colonized intellectual shared interest …that the past was not branded with shame but dignity, glory and sobriety” (p148). While working on internal colonialism, paying attention to the views of the ordinary people and constructing their history from “below” has a paramount importance.
Description and Analysis
In this study I examine the role of Salale Oromo heroic songs and the narratives rendered by my informants in the context of Oromo resistance to the neo-Abyssinian domination in Ethiopia. What makes the genre(s) (heroic folk songs and narratives) such a pivotal, galvanizing force of “creative co-existence” and a unifying agent for the resistance movement that lacked traditionally a geopolitical focus is a pertinent folkloric enquiry in the present study. The aim is to destabilize the uncritical “common sense” notion of territorial “unity” of nation-state disregarding “diversity” and describe and analyze the problem as evidence of “internal colonialism” the people suffer in the name of “nation building” (Holocomb and Ibssa, 1990). Based on available data and my own personal experience, I share Hobsbawm’s (1990) view that nations are not only the products of the quest for territorial state, but the result of technological and economic development based on equal distribution of resources and power.
Heroes and Heretics: the Oromo View
The heroic quest is allegorical in that the journey involves a move away from the ‘knowable’ and at the same time toward the ‘unknowable’. For the purpose of this paper, the ‘knowable’ is the tension and conflict in the social field of the hero who struggles to challenge and change the face of historically unequal, socially charged life pattern. The quest is an unended journey, a call to adventure, a journey to an unknown zone, to where destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity out of the wretched, dismal pit of embitterment to beyond defiance often seen as transgression by the oppressor. The journey is mythical in that there are several mythic tales, performances and rituals about other ethnic heroes who traveled the same road before him. As to be discussed in this paper, with particular reference to Agari Tullu, the Salale pierced through rebellion and individual heroism the veil of the unknown, the fearful, unspeakable disenchantment hauled them. They performed and sustained Salale identity through rituals and folkloric and spiritual practices in daily life as part of a collective metaphysical quest that transcends spatial and temporal liminal zones through such heroic ardency for identity and the right to life. Unlike the ‘massification’ by the oppressor it is not the mass that joins the resistance but few strong breeds do.
Such is the fate of African and Oromo men who traditionally marked their rites of passage into adulthood and an emerging status of a responsible member of the community through a vision quest. The heroic journey is part of the struggle to discover the internal strength to sustain an external quest since the journey by itself cannot be the destination as it pervades in myths, legends, epics and folksongs of the great traditions. Like spiritual leaders who suffer for the service of others, there are heroes in the secular world whose quest is the never-ending story of humanity and a story of struggle to answer why humanity suffer, what can be done to save humanity. Where collective rights to identity are usurped, the hero sets out in search for personal rights to identity, as if “personal nationalism” were an alternative paradigm (Cohen 1996).
If Anthony Cohen’s Scottish view of “personal nationalism” is right, legitimacy of nationhood is explicitly related to personal and political rights. The Salale Oromo ethnic hero chose to fight back the ‘massification,’ ‘subordination,’ or ‘anonymization’ of himself and his people, against the top-down cultural and political (official) nationalism imposed by the Abyssinian Christian rulers. The immediate cause of the struggle may be economic, such as land or land resource, and, therefore, the nature of resistance is autochthonous (e.g. banditry) (Hobsbawm 1969/2000). The Oromo ethnic heroes lived like the Greek epic heroes (Odysseus) in search of “home,” or like other African ‘mythic’ figures, Sundiata of Mali, or the Oromo traditional law-giver, Makko Billi, who faced and accepted the necessity of the vision quest as old as time along the hero journey. Like those mythic hero figures, for a society to sustain as a people, apparently, both individual and collective heroic vision quest becomes a vital determinant factor. The Salale Oromo heroes are no exceptions.
The Tale of Agari Tullu
Gurmu critically pointed it out to me during the interview that Agari Tullu’s journey from the early days of his serfdom to a rebel was part of change in the individual to revenge his father’s untimely death caused by wretched poverty and a symbolic social transformation as a collective life experience of the Salale. Gurmu, as a heretic would, also believes that problems, conflicts and stress are neither good nor bad. From what Gurmu attested to me, to say violence, conflict, or stress is good or bad in life depends on how the hero deals with them to turn his fate into negative or positive force. That is to say, factors like self-discipline, ardency, and perseverance significantly affect the hero and his people. Agari Tullu chose the life of a rebel as he strongly believed from the outset that it was by immersing himself in problems, tests and trials and living austere life, one could come up with creative solutions. By avoiding real problems, there is no productive change because, in real life, it is by confronting problems that breakthroughs are made possible. In the lines next,
Agari yaa Agarii!
yaa tokkicha qixxee nama sagalii.
oh Agarii, what a wondrous hero you are,
Agari! not one you are equal to nine
the Salale perform resistance, and recount the deeds of their heroes through songs and narratives believing that it is important to reconstruct the journey if one is to direct the profusion of attributes that have been imputed to the hero, not as a single hero but manifold.
As part of a great metaphysical quest, the heroic journey allegorically symbolizes, beyond its literal meaning, the awakening of spirit. The people believe that the hero possesses a mythic power that leads him through severe tribulations and tests so that he survives. According to Raggasa (92, Informant, 2010), when Agari Tullu shot himself with dummy bullets in public and did not die or bleed, he also asked the people to shoot him with the same gun, and the people shot at him but in vain, he did not die or bleed. From that day on, Agari was believed to be a demigod among the Salale, and during the heyday of Agari Tullu in the 1960s, people said a prayer in his name, cursed or swore by his name.
Whether or not the heroic deeds of the individual hero is associated with the social or economic, the moral demands that the society places on the individual is determined by his self-discipline and heroic imagination to carry on the fight to end or revenge their predicaments. Though the hero is anthropomorphized and his courage is taken for granted, the underlying principle in heroism and warrior like sentiment is handed down from generations and traced to the exploits of other ethnic heroes in the past from the time of Sahla Selassie (r1813-1847) to 1930s. Such traditional Saale heroes include Beru Kenne of Hidhabu, Gissilla Geto of Amuma, Alamu Ejersa of Warra Jidda, and Janka Nagawo of Kurfaa. By commemorating those supermen, the Salale constitute their history and politics from “below” and transmit sense of heroism and resistance to the young generation.
The Salale believe that the kind of warrior hero that the society looks up to in the time of need is essentially motivated by the values of warrior culture, which he supremely exemplifies. Those values of warrior culture are honor and deeds extolled and retold by others through songs and narratives like in the Indo-European epic tradition of Beowulf, Iliad and Odyssey, or the Bhagavad Gita, and narratives in honor of the African warrior heroes such as the Mali’s Sundiata. Despite their peace-making principle called waadaa (covenant), among the Salale, there has been such a warrior culture induced from the first encounter with the expansionist Showan Kingdom whose motto is “Die, you win heaven; conquer, and you enjoy the earth,” a version of USA’s “Manifest Destiny”. The Abyssinian imperial whim is to subjugate the Oromo while it is a matter of life or death for the Oromo to defend their territory. In the 19th century Shawa Kingdom, Svein Ege (1996) writes citing Krapf and Isenberg (1843), the central areas “supplied most of the soldiers for the campaigns against the Oromo,” and he adds, “army service was limited to peasants holding land on favorable conditions” (p188).
Text, Folkloric Representation, Identity (Re)Creation
The analysis of texts and folkloric representation brings us to the issue of accessing subjugated knowledge and the lived experience of those who are disenfranchised. Heroic songs and narratives presented in this study are paramount to the interpretation of marginalized voices. Underneath the texts, the subtexts shape our perception and understanding of the social reality about those forced to the peripheries of the dominant order, outside the trajectory taken by the heroes. The Salale sing of their hero who walks from one end of the world to another. They tell that he travels day and night until his feet blister, until the sun turns dark, until the shadow sinks into the sea, until the shooting star cools down, until his last breath. He travels until the torch grows shorter in his hand, until his fierce temper feeds life to the flame and the fire leaps high again above his head to give light to those caught up in fear of pitch-darkness in the disenchanted world of internal colonialism. In the overall heroic journey, like the “road of trials” (Joseph Campbell, 1949), the hero and his companions face significant tests, trials and tribulations which, in the following tender lyric, the Salae minstrel, Naggasa Abdi recaps the futility of humanity,
Kurfaa Jaankaa Nagawoo
in koran malee bu’a hin oolanii,
jabaadhu yaa ilmoo-namaa
in turan malee du’a hin oolanii!
Kurfaa of Jaankaa Nagawoo is such a mystery
one ascends the hill only to descend and fall,
oh, humanity, you should stand it,
be persistent, perseverant
to the end, as death is inevitable and all!
[Gurmu, Informant, 2010]
[Gurmu, Informant, 2010]
After repeated and failed attempts the trials and tribulations ultimately initiate the mythic hero into a higher level of personal identity earnestly sought and to a new sense of awareness, self-consciousness, to know himself and see from the top of the hill (Kurfaa) the world around him, know the “unknowable”, the inexplicable abode “Kurfaa,” which one ascends to the peak only to slip and fall away. The inevitable period of spiritual and emotional doubt and despair that may precede the breakthrough of insight, wisdom, and transfiguration is the same as the journey of “the dark night of the soul”.
The Minstrel’s song above is about the inevitable, i.e., about death as the ultimate fate of mankind. In Oromo worldview much like the Christian eschatology, death is a journey of the soul from its bodily home to its union with God, the journey narrated in “The Dark Night of the Soul,” a poem by the 16th century Spanish poet, Saint John of the Cross. “Darkness” represents the hardships and difficulties the soul meets in detachment from the world reaching the light of the union with the Creator. Allegorically speaking, a way up the hill is a way down the hill, which is to mean, temptations abound along the journey, luring the hero to deviate from the heroic vision quest and move backward toward innocence, to the less demanding phases of the journey or to make serious mistakes and fall in a trap. The perpetuity of the hero’s tenacity in search of “personal identity” (personal nationalism) is continually tested by the fear and trepidation of the journey through darkness as Odyssey was tempted to forsake his (sacred) duty and turn from the chaos of the battle surrounding him to undergo countless tests back home to Itacha, tests that can thin his moral fiber so that he fails to overcome them. The same applies to the Salale hero in the massive gorges of the Mogor River and the terrains of Jamma. This quell of the self is in favor of the cause and the unended heroic vision quest recapped in the song and is a lament for the continuing denial of the integrity and authenticity of the Salale Oromo ethnicity. For the oppressed, the songs, rituals, performances and the imagined journey are symbolic subversions against the denigration of their culture and identity by the Shawan Amhara Christian rulers.
As some touchstones along the heroic journey, the hero is determined to move toward the danger, toward the unknown, as if problems are his friends, and, for him, tests are natural and constant to help the hero grow as a quester. The problems (tests and trials) help the hero to use his power of discrimination to choose between good and evil. That is, it is a chance for him to ask himself something, now that he has learnt something, being tested and learnt something in life, what is he going to do about it? Tests along the heroic journey are opportunities to assess the quality of his behavior and to examine his motives, purposes, and strengths. Tests are the trials, rituals that prove whether or not the hero has learnt the lessons the journey is teaching him in the hardest way. According to Gurmu (78, Informant, 2010), one of my primary informants in Salale, for him as Salale, problems were natural and inevitable, and parts of initiation and growth in life. Gurmu’s comment about Agari Tullu and his other two brothers, Jima Tullu and Herko Tullu, the three Salale brothers executed same day at the same place as Salale ba ndits in 1970, is “Lubbuun dhiiraa billiqa,” literally, “The hero’s soul is a quick sunbeam,” which is consent with the belief about the unpredictable fate of the hero. It is a version of the Spanish Poet’s nightlong journey of the soul from the world reaching the light of the union with the Creator.
Collective Identity (Oromummaa) and “National Identification” Paradox
To Asafa Jalata, the concept of Oromummaa (Oromoness) is beyond the issue of a national identification with the “state”. It is instead, a “complex and dynamic national and global project” (2007:12). As a national project, Asafa rightly argues, Oromummaa is a master ideology of the Oromo national movement” which enables the Oromo work on cultural revivalism to maintain their cultural memories, fight against “internal colonialism,” voice their grievances, mobilize resources, and develop Oromocentric political strategies to subvert the neo-Abyssinian domination. As a global project Oromummaa is a principle of national self-determination and multinational democracy and promotes global human freedom (ibid). Of ordinary people’s view of national identification project and the significance of “history from ‘below’”, Hobsbawm cautiously notes three preliminary conclusions about an attempt to understand the ordinary people and their view of “national identification”: that official ideologies are not reliable guides to what ordinary people think; that national identification is not always superior to what constitutes the identity of the social being, and, finally, that what national identification means to each individual can shift in time, and in the course of short time (Hobsbawm, 1990:10-11; Ozkirimli, 2010:96).
In this genre of commemorative ritual song called amsala, the Salale sing of identity, of affine and close kin in desperate situations. The first two lines below,
namni alagaaf gubate cilee hin qabu;
namni lammiif gubate hambaa hin dhabu!
namni lammiif gubate hambaa hin dhabu!
he who died for the alien is in vain, no trace of his name
he who died for is people is a martyr, slain beyond a fame.
is a social critique of surrogate ‘national identity’ which Hobsbawm comments as difficult to “assume that for most people national identification is always or ever superior than other forms of identification which constitutes the social being” (in Ozkirimli, 2010: 96). In this song rendered by Ababo Tulama (my informant, by correspondence, 2012) there is a revivalist account of Oromo tradition “consisting of survivals” as carried in a literal translation of the two words above “cilee” (line 1) and “hambaa” (line 2) meaning, “cinder” and “remain/heritage,” respectively, where new forms emerge out of old forms, which imply a “spurious” nature of “modernity” instead of “authenticity” of “tradition”. The praise song of “lammii ofii” “one’s pedigree” next, is an unpretentious glorification of one’s ancestry and identity, not a sycophantic account of irrevocable ideological rivalry as in the first two lines above:
lammiin ofii kafanaa,
yaa aabboo, yaa aayyoo
yaa aabboo, yaa aayyoo
….jedhu gamaa gamana!
one’s own people is one’s refuge
oh father! oh, mother
…. they say, here and there!
By the all-encompassing, unifying general pact of nagaa, “peace” of (Borana) Oromo endorsed by waadaa, “covenant” as among the Salale, “differences” are resolved guided by a larger overarching concern for the social cohesion and stability of the whole society (Augliar, 2008:181-202) than just individual:
shuu! shuu buchi yaa saree,
maalitti waamu saroota?
lakki gorii narraa,
maalitti waamu saroota?
lakki gorii narraa,
nu walii obbolootaa,
adaraa Waaqa dhalootaa!
adaraa Waaqa dhalootaa!
shu! shu, away oh dog
what to call a pack of dog for?
we are affine,
for God’s sake, behave yourself!
(Ababo Tulama, ibid )
The song is an example of performing resistance through culture, through reference to the controlling function of songs against violations of social norms by confrontational behavior. To make claims for the centrality of protest songs as part of Salale cultural resistance against Ethiopian state oppression is to trace the ways in which other Oromo cultural forms are performed to revitalize the concept of cultural nationalism.5 The texts are also fresh evidences of the disintegration of Ethiopia’s “territorial unity” of the “state” along ethnic lines.6
It is an accepted convention to alienate groups or individual seen as a threat to the nagaa, “peace” of the Oromo and to watch those who violate the waadaa, “covenant”. The following lines are rather critical about those who trespass and break the social law, the safuu (social and moral order) of the society:
aaboon anaa mana ol hiikse bakkaa,
yaa gadhee, waan ati gootun argaa!
aabboo tolchee mana ol hiikse roggee,
yaa gadhee ofitti hin dhiitin dhoqqee!
yaa gadhee, waan ati gootun argaa!
aabboo tolchee mana ol hiikse roggee,
yaa gadhee ofitti hin dhiitin dhoqqee!
my father has built a house for me off the terrain
I’ll see, you slothful being if you train!
my father has made a home for me up the hill
oh, you indolent I know how jealous you feel!
(Ababo Tulama, ibid )
According to Benedict Anderson, songs work to foster intense feelings of solidarity and solidify nationalist bonds between a group of people too large to know one another personally as “there is a contemporaneous community which language alone suggests above all in the form of poetry and songs….no matter how banal the words and mediocre the tunes, there is in this singing an experience of simultaneity” (p145). Anderson adds that, “at precisely such moments, people wholly unknown to each other utter the same verses to the same melody. The image: unisonance” (ibid).
Memory and Cultural Revival
The dominant culture in Ethiopia, working through Amharic language and Orthodox Christianity, wields the most power and sets the rules and standards of the minority cultures in the country. Thus, dominance is determined by who holds the power over political and economic institutions than by who holds the majority. Hence, the census shows, the Cushitic Oromo branch have been, politically speaking, the minority although numerically the majority in the country, i.e., twenty-seven million by the 2007 national census. According to Finfinne Obse Robale (my informant by correspondence, 2012) in the text below elders play the role of heretics to advocate against the dominant culture through their symptomatic narratives of cultural revival: 7
namni alagaa keessaa lama nama dhiba:
-gaafa du'aa dhiba
-gaafa gumaa dhiba
-gaafa gumaa dhiba
one who sought refuge among aliens,
woe is a duo:
-to perform his funeral is awkward
-to avenge his murder is absurd
(Ababo Tulama, ibid )
In narratives of resistance and protest folksongs the Salale continually galvanized a sense of collective “unisonance” by making the audience recall the value of unity and solidarity against state violence. Folksongs are particularly effective as part of the covert resistance against the minority-led state that they are compact in form, yet replete with emotion and it is customary to disseminate subtle messages of resistance on such grand occasions as weddings, festivals, funerals, and ritual performances and cooperative works. Contrary to the Amhara-Tigre ruling class elitism and relative literacy status of the Abyssinian dominant culture, it is the very accessibility of folk songs in the Oromo context that makes it such an important genre for collective political mobilization and identity formation against “national identification”. And this total expression comes about in such a heretic way of saying of “lammii”:
-yoo jabaatte kofoo sii baafata
-yoo sitti hammatte kofoo sirraa baafata
-yoo jabaatte kofoo sii baafata
-yoo sitti hammatte kofoo sirraa baafata
the alien and a shifting time are one:
when you are strong they revere you
when you are weak they contempt you
(Ababo Tulama, ibid )
Not only because they live in conditions of poverty but also they come from a historical experience where they had to rely on their very breath rather than on “print capitalism,” the Salale folk songs and narratives, as exuberant oral forms that impel the audience to participate and contribute through the sheer joy in the shared oral tradition. They are intimately connected to their land and stood throughout history distinct from the hierarchical and aristocratic Shawan ruling class:
lammiin walif shanan Gadaati:
-yoo dhihoo sii yaada
-yoo fagoo si yaada
-yoo malkaa galmaa si qaba.
-yoo galmaa malkaadhaa si qaba
-bakka sii qaba, bakkaayis si qaba
-yoo dhihoo sii yaada
-yoo fagoo si yaada
-yoo malkaa galmaa si qaba.
-yoo galmaa malkaadhaa si qaba
-bakka sii qaba, bakkaayis si qaba
Gadaan ni mosoomsa, hin hiyyoomsu!
one’s own people, like the basics of Gada ritual,
are vital. those near you care for you
those far away fond of you
at well-spring, to tow water and fill the tow-hole
at court, to make a sound judgment
your people are your refuge
your heimat, your home are your people
and gadaa prospers, never fails you!
In sum, those folksongs and narratives show that the stories the people live by, the values they hold, their creative expressions, how they build themselves as ‘community’ constitutes the realm of culture. It is pertinent to foster cultural nationalism and construct national identity since it serves as a ground on which the battle is fought (Hutchinson 2006; Fanon 1969). Hobsbawm shares Gellner’s point of view that “the political and national unit should be congruent” (Hobsbawm 1990:9; Gellner 2006/1983:1). From a cultural nationalist point of view, however, “ethnic and linguistic groups are synonymous” and, to Hutchisnon (1999) cultural nationalism is essentially a language movement” (p393).
In this paper I have made a claim that the cultural root of nationalism can be authenticated by folkloric data. This includes a collection of expressions that make a society who they are: stories they tell and believe about who they are, songs they sing about what they accomplished, what they failed and why, their values and world views all constitute their culture that makes up Oromumma. Thus, culture is a lens through which the society interprets the reality. The dominant culture within the Ethiopian context is overruled by Orthodox Christianity and Amharic language as a national emblem of Semitic ancestry though in reality there are about one hundred different ethno-nations and nationalities in the country. Based on the data obtained through folkloric ethnography and “history from ‘below,’” Oromummaa as Oromo cultural nationalism reflects the economic, social and material conditions of the society and expresses the ways the people suffer, jubilate, survive, and evolve and as a form of resistance, it also served as a “weapon throughout history” or used for “social control”. Those Salale heroes who survived dictators’ murder and unlawful executions in Ethiopia are today’s heretics and tradition bearers.
I have argued from Oromo perspective that Oromummaa or Oromo cultural nationalism influences all kinds of daily activities and events, and shapes the most self-conscious public actions and identities, especially when the people feel they face strong threats as a result of internal social changes, economic instability or external pressure to their well-being. Using the Salale folksongs and narratives of heroes and heretics, I have demonstrated that during the times of internal social tensions caused by Abyssinian domination the need for unity and historical references emerge by invoking the history of sacrifices of past generations and heroes who exemplified the national values now at risk. The Ethiopian state domination is not without the support of external ally from Western powers.8 Although modernity has emancipated humanity from laborious tasks and made life easier and better for few, it has also aroused insatiable human greed for power and wealth and to misuse the debilitating resources. Thus, by linking national politics to specific cultural, linguistic, and religious identities, Oromo (cultural) nationalists promote Oromummaa by constructing cultural revivalism and working towards literary culture. Literary culture serves as a site where vernacularization as a process of change replaces the universalistic orders, formations and practices by localized forms which gradually evolve into the coalescence of nationalist ideologies. In so doing, Oromo cultural nationalists and tradition bearers (as well as heroes and heretics), idealize visions for the national future while working on fixing the false consciousness of the people, i.e. changing the systematic misrepresentation of dominant social relations set in the people’s consciousness by internal colonialism.
Finally, I should add, the aim of cultural resistance as a historical element of cultural nationalism is to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers” of humankind and perpetuate emancipation of mankind from any form of injustices. While the definition of ‘resistance’ can be problematic, ‘culture’ transcends the political, economic and social meaning of human practices. A “theory of culture,” Kenneth Surin (1997) claims, “does not impinge directly on culture, but on the concepts of culture, which are no less practical, actual, or effective than culture itself” (in Mudimbe, 1997:202). Thus, theory of culture is constructed by reflections on the natures and functions of its expressivities (p203), presumably, of human life experience.
1. Professor Asafa Jalata’s (2007) profound research shows the concept of Oromummaa is Oromo cultural identity and oppressed nationalism looking the impact of Oromummaa on Oromo liberation movement and community organization, and political and societal unity. Asafa also identifies and explores the nature of Oromo political behavior and how Oromummaa affects Oromo politics, and why some Oromo elites in the diaspora engage in destructive behavior. As a result of several structural problems, the unevenness of the development of Oromo nationalism is a serious problem, Asafa rightly argues, and the Oromo movement is currently in the process of confronting its obstacles to march towards the intended goal, i.e. Oromo self-determination (p10).
2. Lael Weissman (1991) in “Herder, Folklore, and Modern Humanism,” discusses nationalism as an agenda of modern humanism, i.e., an essential conflict between the ideal and the actual (p51). Citing William Wilson (1973) Weissman states that serious folklore studies from the beginning searched the folklore record of the past not just to see how people lived in the past, which is “a principal interest of the antiquarians….but primarily to discover “historical” models on which to reshape the present and build the future” (Wilson p819, in Weissman, p51). From the time of their encounter with the Christian rulers (the Amhara-Tigre) in the 16th century, the Oromo were often described “as the fierce horde of warriors aiming at ruthlessly destroying the Ethiopian state,” and, Bairu Tafla adds, “the prejudice deeply rooted within the Amhara-Tigre…, to the disadvantage of science and art, undermined the objective recording” of the history of the people (Tafla, 1987:48). Like any oral society, though the Oromo recorded their history through oral tradition, Tafla is right in that the time-depth of the oral tradition “does not at any rate exceed the documented time period,” (p49).
3. In this study, the term ethnography is used with the intent of providing a detailed, in-depth description of everyday life practices of people under a disempowering situation. Clifford Geertz (1973) calls such a detailed ethnographic interpretation of culture as a “thick description” in his writings about an interpretive theory of culture in the early 1970s. Thus, for the purpose of the present study, while ethnography is defined as a qualitative research process or method, the aim of ethnography goes beyond a mere cultural interpretation and reporting events and details of experience. In the present study the ethnographic search is to explain how the experiences represent what Geertz calls “webs of meaning” of the cultural construction in which humanity lives and theorizing people’s daily life practices the way they live.
4. Waadaa (Covenant) is a ritually sanctioned solemn oath especially among the Salale to maintain social cohesion and solidarity among themselves and for a sustainable co-existence with others. Other equivalent words for the same moral / ethical concept overriding the principle of peaceful co-existence among the Oromo as part of the safuu (social/moral order) are irbuu and kakuu, as among the Boorana and Macca Oromo branches respectively.
5. Cultural Nationalism, John Hutchinson (2006) states, was a concept initially subsumed into a state-oriented political culture, which was recurring, legitimizing innovation through conservative arguments. In its various forms of media, art or language as both ‘unifier’ and ‘oppressor’, for Hutchinson, cultural nationalism is a “communitarian,” not “statist,” concept of the nation and it can shape bottom-up the agenda and direction of nation-states through expressive culture.
6. History describes the temporal scope in terms of the contemporary (very recent) events, a defined intervening period (a century, a reign, a dynasty, a decade or a particular event), an originating episode or set of circumstances that gave rise to the entity for which the origin is claimed (the origin that places the history of one people as early as possible and transplant the “barbarian pasts” into a world chronological scheme much later than that of the West, which becomes a total chronological span over which the historical entity (people or event) has existed (Woolf in Wang et al 2007:86). The tension goes beyond nationalist forums to academic dialogues and, consequently, historical debate emerges to settle what happened to the community, society, people or nation. To tackle the challenge through process and answer when and why nationalism became such a powerful “ism” in their politics and public life constitutes the national history. In general, the subject of how nationalist fears and aspirations affect relations and the emotional power in people and in the personal lives of the ‘modern’ individual emerges as a compelling historical project both for scholars and nationalists. A social history constituted from “below” critiques how nationalism shapes those competing ideologies and the increasing arguments, and marks the spot where (and when) nationalism intersects with culture as a proper object of narration.
7. Where the ancient poetry is resistant to interpretation against the daunting culture-history elements, but for the interpretation of ancient history and culture, conversely, poetry is a favorable illumination of the veil between the remote antiquity and the present (Bauman & Briggs, 2006). In this regard, literary culture serves as a site where vernacularization as a process of change replaces the universalistic orders, formations and practices by localized forms which gradually evolve into the coalescence of nationalist ideologies. By this metadiscursive paradigm of the localization of poetic tradition, texts in the vernacular repertoire are highly valued as national symbols and, in their hybrid state they are remnants of the past in the present without the intervention, mediation, and authorization of intellectuals. In the vernacularization process, to Herder’s poetics and ideology of language, language is the treasury of the thought of an entire people, its whole heart and soul, in which tradition, history, religion and principles of life dwell. For a nation, its national language is a storehouse of thought.
8. Against the culture model of nationalism, Kwame Appiah (2006) argues, the focus should be on the long-term political and economic development of nations in line with the Western capitalist and democratic model, an approach that relies on continued (quantitative) growth of the capital-driven world. However, with the global flow of information, capital, labor that aggravates the uneven distribution of power, knowledge and resources in the Third World countries, the Western capitalist model is introduced to disrupt the livelihood of the peoples involved, the ethical question which Appiah shoves aside in his “Kindness to Strangers” that ‘it is not up to “us” to save the poor and starving, but up to their governments, and the cosmopolitan’s role is, to Appiah, to ensure that the nations-states respect, provide for, and protect their citizens (ibid.). And Appiah’s view that only our “fair share” and not at the expense of our own comfort, or the comfort of those “nearest and dearest” to us is an evidence for the presence of Western capitalist architects in the Third World which heightens the ambiguity of the ‘internal’/‘domestic’ colonialism vis-à-vis the presence and surveillance of ‘external’/‘foreign’ power(s). His view of cosmopolitanism also challenges cultural ‘difference’ in favor of ‘universal’ values which he suggests taking precedence and culture, in his view, matters less than the Western democratic/capitalist model. This conception of capitalist model of development and the focus on quantitative (GDP) growth further complicates the cultural root of nationalism.
The political thrust of nationalism is not necessarily revolutionary. An oppressed nation can seek to end its oppression by achieving self-determination but has limited options in its battle for complete equality and to obtain a higher level of democracy through fully enacting regional autonomy. Earnest Gellenr (1983), in his Nations and Nationalism describes nationalism as taking “pre-exiting cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invent them, and often obliterates” and Gellner stresses, “that is a reality, and in general an inescapable one” (pp48-49). And almost at the same time Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) introduced the notion of ‘inventing traditions’ that involves ‘adaptation’ of old values and institutions and invention of “new” ones for some purpose. John Hutchinson (1999:392-407) challenges the notion of “invention of traditions” as surrogate statist than communitarian in principle. Thus, in Hutchinson’s view the primary goal of cultural nationalist as a social and moral innovator is to maintain a historically-rooted way of life.
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