A history of the Oromo peoples of Ethiopia; their culture, religion and political institutions.

First full-length history of the Oromo 1300-1700; explains their key part in the medieval Christian kingdom and demonstrates their importance in shaping Ethiopian history.

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.

Reframes the story of modern Ethiopia around the contributions of the Oromo people and the culturally fluid union of communities that shaped the nation's politics and society.

In Children of Hope, Sandra Rowoldt Shell traces the lives of sixty-four Oromo children who were enslaved in Ethiopia in the late-nineteenth century, liberated by the British navy, and ultimately sent to Lovedale Institution, a Free Church of Scotland mission in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, for their safety. Because Scottish missionaries in Yemen interviewed each of the Oromo children shortly after their liberation, we have sixty-four structured life histories told by the children themselves. In the historiography of slavery and the slave trade, first passage narratives are rare, groups of such narratives even more so. In this analytical group biography (or prosopography), Shell renders the experiences of the captives in detail and context that are all the more affecting for their dispassionate presentation. Comparing the children by gender, age, place of origin, method of capture, identity, and other characteristics, Shell enables new insights unlike anything in the existing literature for this region and period. Children of Hope is supplemented by graphs, maps, and illustrations that carefully detail the demographic and geographic layers of the children’s origins and lives after capture. In this way, Shell honors the individual stories of each child while also placing them into invaluable and multifaceted contexts.

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.

This book is not a definitive history of the Oromo people, but an attempt to provide an account of the struggle of the Oromo people to affirm their place in history. The Oromo people make up a significant portion of the Horn of Africa population. They account for approximately half of the population of Ethiopia. Oromia is a title used to refer to the Oromo as a political, cultural and social entity. The Oromo people living in the Horn of Africa share a common language and a homogeneous culture. During their long history the Oromo developed their own cultural, social and political system known as the Gadaa system. It is a uniquely democratic system governing life from birth to death. Ecologically and agriculturally Oromia is the richest region in the Horn of Africa. Livestock products, coffee, oil seeds, and spices are the center of the economy. Mineral resources also are a part of the Oromo economy, and wild life is abundant in their homelands. Living in East African nations, the Oromo people are largely unknown to most of the world; this work lifts up the people, their culture and their struggles. Political turmoil in Ethiopia and elsewhere in East Africa has resulted in a large Oromo population dispersed around the world. It is a community bound together by a concern for their homeland -- Oromia. Book jacket.