Comment on Melbaa Gadaa’s book on Oromia

Comment on “Melbaa Gada”, Author of “Oromia:An Introduction to the History of the Oromo People”.

by Tefera Dinberu

This comment is in regards to Melbaa Gadaa’s book on Oromia that was published in Minnesota in 1988 on the history of the Oromoo people. The objective of my comment is to help Melbaa and other thinkers like him see history with all its vices and virtues and intellectually project the destiny of Oromoo people in the future in relation to the rest of Ethiopians and what we can contribute for justice to prevail for the well-being of all peoples in that part of Africa.

The book is his second edition. The author has gathered information from many different sources – oral, his own experience or observation, professional/historical sources, and non-history sources. Melbaa relied more on some foreign sources and seems to have refrained from referring to domestic sources that he must have been familiar with. Any ways, I will try to dwell on the general scheme of his book as a whole by specifying some major points entertained in the book as follows:-

Regarding the source of Oromoo people, Huntingford says, “It is clear that the first African homeland of the Galla was what is now British Somaliland and northwestern Somalia, to which their own traditions bring them … It was the Somali settlement that drove the Galla to the west and south west” (Huntingford 19). Melbaa used this book as a reference; however, he did not mention this point. He holds that Ethiopian governments used to believe that Oromoo people were foreigners who migrated to this country. And he also says, “… Oromoo have a long history of presence as a community of people, in this part of Africa” (Gadaa 11-13). He cites Wainwright and Greenfield archaeological traces (phallic stone remains),

Decorations of stone bowls from Zimbabwe include pictures of cattle with long “lyre-shaped “horns such as raised by Oromoo. According to these scholars, this and the phallic stones found in Zimbabwe are traced directly to Oromoo land linked to their early settlements there and the Zimbabwe civilization. (Gadaa 22)

It is not clear if Melbaa is justifying that Oromoo came from another part of Africa and whether or not that agrees with his other statement that Oromoo was colonized by “Abyssinia”? Ethiopian history writers did not say that Oromoo people came from a foreign country. The only puzzle was how they could migrate or raid and occupy a very large area of the country in a relatively short period of time (16th to the early 19th centuries). I have enumerated my answer to this question down below; however, Melbaa probably rather unintentionally told us that the Oromoo people had their early settlements in Zimbabwe and lived in Ethiopia “as a community of people”. Read more…

posted By Daneil zeleke