Page 66 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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The Oromo National Movement
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and productive structure to feed the needs of an intermediary Ethiopian ruling class
13
and dominant groups in the core of world capitalism.” Oromos have been resisting
two structures that are linked together by the global capitalist system—global imperi-
alism and Ethiopian settler colonialism.The Oromo collaborative class has served the
interests of each of these systems by facilitating the operation of both structures.
Most Oromos who fought against Ethiopian colonizers were either killed or en-
slaved or impoverished by the expropriation of their lands. Since the remaining Oro-
mos could not defend their homeland from European-sponsored Ethiopian settler
colonialism, they were defeated and turned into landless people or semi-slaves. In the
process of obtaining an intermediate status in the global capitalist system, the
Ethiopian colonial ruling class and its state expropriated three-fourths of the Oromo
lands and built garrison cities as their political centers in Oromia. From these centers
they implemented colonial domination through the monopoly of the means of coer-
14
cion,wealth and capital accumulation,and cultural destruction. By claiming absolute
rights on the Oromo lands and providing portions of these lands to its followers, the
Ethiopian colonial state consolidated itself. Oromos were forced to become slaves or
semislaves to provide raw materials that were needed in regional and international
markets. The colonial state controlled the process of forced recruitment of labor
through slavery and the nafxanya-gabbar system. Ethiopian colonialists frequently
15
raided Oromos to use them as domestic slaves or sell them as commodities. Slavery
existed in the Ethiopian empire until the 1930s, when Italian fascists colonized
Ethiopia and destroyed slavery and the nafxanya-gabbar system to get adequate cheap
wage labor for their agricultural plantations in the Horn of Africa.
As Ethiopian colonial settlers and their state controlled Oromian political econ-
omy, their European advisers and European, Indian, and Arab merchants controlled
16
commercial activities in Oromia. After the Second World War, Great Britain and the
United States both sponsored Ethiopian colonialism and facilitated the development
of colonial capitalism and extraction of Oromo produce. These two world powers
“modernized” the Ethiopian colonial state and enabled the intensification of colonial
exploitation in Oromia until the early 1970s. 17 Similarly, by replacing U.S. sponsor-
ship and involving itself in Ethiopia between 1974 and 1991, the Soviet Union fur-
ther consolidated Ethiopian colonialism and the subjugation of Oromos. The U.S.
returned to Ethiopia by assisting the emergence of a new regime which has claimed
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since 1991 that it would support the promotion of democracy. But in practice the
new regime has emerged as a Tigrayan ethnonational dictatorship,which has been able
to replace that of the Amhara only through the support of the West, particularly the
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United States. Oromo nationalism developed as a national liberation movement in
order to oppose all these colonial practices and the dehumanization of Oromos and
to promote Oromian self-determination.
Oromo historical and cultural foundations have served as storehouses for Oromo
nationalism. Oromos were independent people prior to their colonization by Ethiopia
and Great Britain.They were colonized and partitioned during the last decades of the
nineteenth century, when Africa was divided among the European colonial powers in
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“the Scramble for Africa.” Oromos were never dominated by other peoples prior to
the last decades of the nineteenth century; they called their homeland “Biya Oromo,”
21
and their culture was respected by their neighbors. The German missionary, geogra-
pher, and researcher J. Lewis Krapf called this homeland “Ormania” in the 1840s;
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Oromo nationalists named this homeland Oromia in the early 1970s. Oromos have