Page 130 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements
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liberation blossoms forth again.” Although there were house slaves and field slaves,
and later there were a few African elites who were compromising with the world-
view of the White establishment,American society could not until recently produce
an effective collaborative class like the one produced by Ethiopian colonialism.The
organized destruction and repression of the cultural elements of the two societies
could not prevent the struggle for cultural revival and nationalism. Based on the col-
lective struggle of former slaves,“an ethnic identity grounded in a common mythic
African heritage welded from a blend of autobiographical and generational memory
emerged and crystalized. For African Americans, that identity anchored a cultural
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world separate and apart from the nation that oppressed them.” Elizabeth Bethel as-
serts that when the majority of African Americans were slaves, those few who
achieved their half-freedom in the urban North crafted “a metaphorical homeland
within the nation of their birth and [constructed] a civic culture that buttressed the
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Similarly, Oromo ur-
daily realities of social, economic, and political oppression.”
banites formed self-help associations and musical groups in the 1960s reflecting on
Oromo collective grievances and cultural memory.The idea of developing Oromo
political consciousness and nationalism appeared subsequent to the 1960s with the
emergence of Oromo political and cultural organizations.
Without totally killing the colonized or enslaved population, the force of domina-
tion cannot have complete control over the spirits and the minds of the subordinated
population. This population maintains its existence through cultural memory and
popular consciousness and the hope of freedom. Richard Couto suggests that “the
community of memory nurtures individuals by carrying on a moral tradition that re-
inforces the aspiration of their group....The test of community is its sense of a com-
mon past. . . . There are stories of suffering ‘that sometimes create deeper
identities. . . . ’These stories approximate a moral tradition and turn community of
memory members ‘toward the future as communities of hope.’ Such communities of
hope sponsor transforming social movements.” 84 Subjugated peoples like African
Americans and Oromos have faced tensions between a lost past and uncertain future
that forced them to forge popular historical consciousness through common forms of
rituals, symbols, historical sites, and so forth. The lost past is preserved in ancestral
memory in skills, rituals, habits, religion, and other forms of cultural memory. Torn
away from their ancestral past,African Americans and Oromos constructed and cele-
brated a mythological past by imagining a preslavery and a precolonial era.
African Americans had forged an ethnonational identity from common mythic
African heritages, collective grievances, and autobiographical and generational mem-
ories that passed from generation to generation mainly through oral discourse. Partic-
ularly, freed African Americans and their descendants in Northern states organized
local churches, mosques, schools, and mutual aid and fraternal societies by proclaim-
ing their mythological ancestry in the name of their institutions and organizations,
such as African churches,Free African schools,and African Benevolent Societies,when
the majority of their sisters and brothers were suffering under racial slavery in the
American South. In 1830, forty self-selected delegates from these elements of African
Americans met at Bethel Church, Philadelphia, and formed the National Convention
Movement, the original civil rights movement in the United States. Explaining how
African Americans survived under racial slavery and segregation, Lawrence Levine ex-
pounds that “in the midst of the brutalities and injustice of the antebellum and post-
bellum racial systems black men and women were able to find the means to sustain a