THE OROMO IN EXILE: CREATING KNOWLEDGE AND PROMOTING SOCIAL JUSTICE Asafa Jalata, Ph.D. University of Tennessee – Knoxville The 2010 Annual Meeting of the Association for Humanist Sociology, Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 3 to 7

INTRODUCTION  Four central points: (1) Introduction - the Oromo people and their gross human rights violations  (2) The Oromo struggle to liberate Oromia and my involvement in this struggle  (3) The contradiction between the knowledge for domination and knowledge for liberation  (4) The Struggle of Oromos in the Diaspora for recognition and social justice

ITRODUCTION - MAP OF OROMIA

THE OROMO: From Freedom to Victimization  The Oromo lived under the gada system before their colonization in the last decades of the 19 th century; leaders were elected every eight years  This system enabled the Oromo to maintain their sovereignty and freedom several centuries  The system was egalitarian and democratic  The gada government had systems of checks and balances – executive, legislative and judiciary branches

Odaa (sycamore): Symbol of Oromo Democracy

EUROPEAN IMPERIALISM AND ETHIOPIAN COLONIALISM  European imperialism and Ethiopian colonialism – terrorism; genocide; expropriation of lands; reorganization of society; cultural destruction  The establishment of colonial structures: global structures and elites, Ethiopian state elites, and an Oromo collaborative class  Ethiopian colonialism and global hegemonism- UK, former USSR and US

THE EMERGENCE OF THE OROMO NATIONAL MOVEMENT  The emergence of an educated class: collaborators and revolutionaries  The formation of a national self-help association in1960s; political repression  The transformation of the association to a national movement: from reform nationalism to revolutionary nationalism  The emergence of the OLF – the struggle for national self-determination, statehood, and multinational democracy

THE OROMO STRUGGLE AND MY INVOLVEMENT  The Oromo national struggle and political repression by successive Ethiopian regimes  State terrorism, clandestine genocide, systematic political repression  The emergence of the Oromo Diaspora  My involvement in the struggle in Oromia in the Diaspora  The Oromo national movement in the Diaspora – formations of unions, scholarly and community associations, etc

THE ROLE OF THE OROMO DIASPORA IN THE OROMO STRUGGLE  The Oromo Diaspora for the first time openly and freely articulated the Oromo national struggle  (1) The Oromo were hidden and removed from the global community; (2) lived under political slavery without the rights of self expression and organizations; (3) they were isolated from the world and from one another  In the Diaspora, they overcame these political problems

THE OROMO DIASPORA  The repression of the Oromo struggle in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s increased the number of Oromo political refugees in the West  These political refugees came together in the world beyond Oromia where communication was unrestricted  Results – the formation of the Union of Oromos in North America (UONA) in 1974, the Union of Oromo Students in Europe (UOSE), the Oromo Studies Association, the Oromo Relief Association, etc

MY INVOLVEMENT IN THE OROMO DIASPORA STRUGGLE  As an activist-scholar, I joined the Oromo Diaspora struggle; I joined the UONA and later participated in the formation and development of OSA  With other Oromo activist-scholars, we started to develop knowledge for liberation to challenge knowledge for domination  We activist scholars challenged the intellectual paradigm of Ethiopian and Ethiopianist knowledge elites

ACTIVIST OROMO SCHOLARS IN THE DIASPORA  The Ethiopian knowledge elites and some Ethiopianists treated Oromos as objects of history; they called Oromos Galla to deny them a historical space  The Oromo knowledge elites dismantled the knowledge for domination by using OSA as an intellectual platform  They have published books, refereed articles, in several international and regional journals, particularly in the Journal of Oromo Studies

ACTIVIST OROMO SCHOLARS IN THE DIASPORA  Oromo activist scholars in the Diaspora successfully dismantled the monopoly of knowledge by the Ethiopian colonial elites and developed an Oromo-centric knowledge  They have successfully demonstrated the main deficiencies of Ethiopian studies  The Oromo knowledge elites have developed a new intellectual paradigm for studying Oromo social and cultural history and has transformed the colonized Oromo from objects to subjects of history

ACTIVIST OROMO SCHOLARS IN THE DIASPORA  These Diaspora Oromo intellectuals have challenged those scholars who have downplayed the Oromo struggle, culture, and civilization; they have enhanced the growing awareness of the problem  These scholars have become the spokespersons of the Oromo nation on global level  They produced Oromo-centric knowledge that has become the foundation of the Oromo national self- determination

ACTIVIST OROMO SCHOLARS IN THE DIASPORA  The Oromo-centric knowledge is helping to refine and adapt some elements of gadaa principles in developing Oromummaa (Oromo culture, identity and nationalism) for achieving national self- determination, statehood, and democratic governance  The Oromo liberation knowledge is also helping in developing national and global Oromummaa based on gadaa principles