Page 137 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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national movement has been an underground movement in Oromia while that of
African Americans was legal and open. Comparatively speaking, the course of the
Oromo struggle has been more difficult and dangerous, with several thousand leaders,
activists, and sympathizers killed or imprisoned since the 1960s. African American
scholars had intellectual freedom to write several books, newspapers, magazines, and
journals that later helped build African American cultural memory and popular his-
torical consciousness.These scholars laid the foundation for Black cultural national-
ism, the Civil Rights movement, and revolutionary nationalism. They produced an
alternative knowledge that laid the foundation for an Afrocentric paradigm, the para-
digm that helped develop Black cultural nationalism by challenging Eurocentrism.Al-
though they have some weaknesses, Afrocentric-paradigm scholarship and research
have challenged the racist and Eurocentric intellectual paradigm.With democratic or
revolutionary Euro-American scholars and other intellectuals, some African American
cultural nationalists, Civil Rights activists, and revolutionary scholars played a leading
role in critical cultural studies that helped challenge the knowledge of domination.
The African American Civil Rights activists and revolutionary nationalists formed
various organizations during the first half of the twentieth century to marshal Black
human, financial, and intellectual resources to fight for Black freedom by dismantling
American apartheid.This development began in urban settings.
The majority of African Americans moved to cities and became members of the
urban working class during the first half of the twentieth century.This created con-
ducive conditions for the development of Black institutions and organizations.The in-
digenous organizations and institutions became the foundations of professional social
movements and political organizations. As a result, the African American movement
blossomed in the first half of the twentieth century and began to galvanize the African
American people for collective action.With the freedom of the press, association, or-
ganization, and communications several Black leaders and organizations emerged and
openly articulated Black consciousness and nationalism and began to fight for the
rights of the Black people. On the other hand, because Ethiopia itself is so underde-
veloped, there is little infrastructure in the empire. Oromos still lack opportunities that
African Americans have had, since they are geographically dispersed and impoverished
rural people, and since they do not have political freedom to organize and express
themselves. More than 90 percent of Oromos are poor farmers and herders. In garri-
son cities in Oromia, Oromos are in the minority, since Ethiopian settlers dominate
these cities. In addition to the suppression of the Oromo institutions and organiza-
tions, these conditions created serious obstacles for the development of Oromo na-
tionalism and collective action. Because of the lack of modern communication and
transportation networks, and domination of the media (television, radio, newspaper)
by the Ethiopian colonial government, Oromos have limited communication among
themselves. Oromos are even denied operation of their own independent media.The
Ethiopian colonial system did not leave any cultural space in which Oromos could de-
velop their institutions and educate their children—in the same way that the Ameri-
can racist system denied a cultural space to the enslaved African population. But the
latter left a limited cultural space for former slaves and their children to develop their
institutions and educate themselves, even though they were denied public resources
that were necessary to facilitate institutional growth.
Those few Oromos who had an opportunity of formal education were forced to
be Amharized or Ethiopianized and to reject their Oromo identity.Those educated el-