Page 134 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements
same time, these mobilization processes are clearly collective, rather than an individ-
100
ual phenomenon.”
Although comparable conditions facilitated the emergence and
development of these two movements, the duration and the way these two societies
developed their collective identities, political consciousness, nationalism, human agen-
cies,and outcomes varied because of their respective social and political environments.
The foundation of African American consciousness and nationalism was laid by slaves
and later by some former slaves and their freeborn children between the American
Revolution and the American Civil War. But for African American nationalism to de-
velop fully new historical conditions that would change the status of enslaved Africans
were required.As explained, the historical contradiction between the core capitalism
of the North and the peripheral capitalism of the South resulted in the Civil War,
which created conducive social structural and conjunctural factors that later con-
tributed to the development of African American nationalism.
Oromos have been under Euro-American sponsored Ethiopian settler colonialism
for almost a century. Oromo nationalism developed faster than African American na-
tionalism. But the development of Oromo nationalism was slower than that of other
Africans who were colonized directly by the European powers at the same period
Oromos were also colonized. Oromos were colonized by minority settlers that aimed
to destroy Oromo peoplehood through ethnocide and selective assimilation. Despite
the fact that the settlers were successful in gradually coopting some Oromo elites and
in destroying Oromo political, religious, and cultural institutions, they could not de-
stroy totally Oromo culture and language.But the development of Oromo culture and
language has been stagnated.The effective imposition of colonial institutions, the de-
velopment of an Ethiopianized Oromo collaborative class, and the denial of formal
education hindered the development of Oromo nationalism until the 1960s. While
African Americans have been dominated by the Euro-American majority, Oromos
have been dominated by the numerical-minority Ethiopian settler colonialists. This
happened because of the support Ethiopians have been receiving from the capitalist
world system.
Technologically underdeveloped and organizationally suited to a different mode of
production, the Ethiopian colonial settlers established their main geopolitical centers
in Oromia, through which racist and colonial policies have been formulated and im-
plemented to keep the majority Oromos as second-class citizens and to exploit their
economic and labor resources by denying them access to state power.These geopolit-
ical centers are garrison cities surrounded by the Oromo rural masses who are denied
health, educational, and other social services, despite the fact that these colonial set-
tlers and their collaborators depend on the economic and labor resources of the
Oromo majority. For instance, in the early 1990s, one source estimated that less than
0.01 percent of Oromos received modern education out of the total population of
about 30 million Oromos. 101 These garrison cities were geopolitical headquarters
from which Ethiopian soldiers were dispatched to impose colonial rule through en-
slavement, subjugation, and expropriation of the basic means of production, such as
cattle, land, and other valuables.Through these centers expropriated goods flowed for
local consumption and an international market. The Ethiopian state introduced the
process of forced recruitment of labor via slavery and the nafxanya-gabbar system.“The
gun (from Europe) and the gun carrier (from Abyssinia) arrived in the colonies as one
unit,” Holcomb and Ibssa note,“and this unit basically expresses political alliance that
created the neftenga-gabbar [sic] relationship, the relation that lay at the heart of the