Focusing on the issue of the Oromo national struggle for liberation, statehood, and democracy, this book critically examines the dialectical relationship between Ethiopian colonialism and Oromo culture, epistemology, politics, and ideology in the context of the accumulated collective grievances of the Oromo nation. Specifically, the book identifies chains of sociological and historical factors that facilitated the development of Oromummaa (Oromo nationalism) and the Oromo national movement. It demonstrates how the Oromo national movement has been challenging and transforming Ethiopian imperial politics, tracks the different forms and phases of the movement, and maps out its future direction. Currently, the Oromo are the largest ethno-national group and political minority in the Ethiopian Empire. They were colonized and incorporated into Ethiopia as colonial subjects in the last decades of the 19th century through the alliance of Abyssinian/Ethiopian colonialism and European imperialism. Since their colonization, the Oromo people have been treated as second-class citizens and have been economically exploited and culturally and politically suppressed. Despite the fact that Oromo resistance to Ethiopian colonialism existed during the process of their colonization and subjugation, it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that Oromo nationalists initiated organized efforts to liberate their people. Presently, Oromo nationalism plays a central role in Ethiopian politics.

The Oromo people are one of the most numerous in Africa. Census data are not reliable but there are probably twenty million people whose first language is Oromo and who recognize themselves as Oromo. In the older literature they are often called Galla. Except for a relatively small number of arid land pastoralists who live in Kenya, all homelands lie in Ethiopia, where they probably make up around 40 percent of the total population. Geographically their territories, though they are not always contiguous, extend from the highlands of Ethiopia in the north, to the Ogaden and Somalia in the east, to the Sudan border in the west, and across the Kenyan border to the Tana River in the south.Though different Oromo groups vary considerably in their modes of subsistence and in their local organizations, they share similar cultures and ways of thought.

Since 1991, there has been renewed debate in Ethiopia concerning the implication of the country s past for the present polity. The long-standing debate was given an added impetus by Eritrea s independence from Ethiopia and the threat of disintegration posed by the continued struggle for self-determination by other ethnonational groups. Ethiopianist scholars, always committed to the indivisibility and unassailability of the Ethiopian state, blamed the country s political troubles on nationalist scholars, accusing them of fabricating history and instigating people into taking up arms against the state. Vowing to protect Ethiopia from further disintegration, the Ethiopianist elite called on patriotic scholars to challenge, expose, and discredit what they described as the politically motivated propaganda of irresponsible nationalists. In Contested Terrain, a team of historians and sociologists confront the scholarship of power that dismisses politically engaged scholarship in the name of academic objectivity. Based on the experience of the Oromo in Ethiopia, they tackle the methodological and political challenges of nationalist scholarship within the highly contested terrain of Ethiopian studies and argue that objectivity in scholarship should not mean neutrality in the face of injustice and exploitation. In eight chapters, they show that scholars can recover the experiences of the disadvantaged and underrepresented and give voice to the powerless and downtrodden. They demonstrate that there is no contradiction between challenging prevailing dogmas and inherited orthodoxies in academia on the one hand and giving support to struggles aimed at ending exploitative practices and dismantling institutions of oppression on the other. Academic objectivity must not be a tool for questioning the scholarly value of nationalist scholarship solely on the basis of the scholar s commitment to certain political causes. As an intellectual enterprise, politically engaged scholarship should be judged on its own merits, not on the basis of its implications for the well-being of political entities. -- Amazon.com.

Oromo Persecution and Discrimination in Ethiopia and Renaissance for Justice and equality for all

Traces the cultural and political history of the Oromo, their colonisation and incorporation into teh modern state of Ethiopia and their long struggle for self-determination and democracy. Focusing on the development of class and nation-class contradictions manifested in the continuing crisis of the Ethiopian state, Jalata examines why the reorganisation of the state in the '70s and '90s failed to change the nature of Ethiopian colonialism.