Page 86 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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The Oromo National Movement
Mamo’s predictions were partially fulfilled; those who sentenced him to death were
killed by the military regime in 1974.Although the liberation of Oromos has not oc-
curred, the Oromo movement has been transformed into a mass liberation struggle.
Haile-Mariam Gamada, the secretary of the association, who eventually was tortured
to death, also said:“Neither the imprisonment and killing of the leaders nor banning
of the association will deter the [Oromo] nation’s struggle.What we did is like a snake
that entered a stomach.Whether it is pulled out or left there, the result is one and the
174
same. It has spread its poison.”
Oromo nationalism has become poison to the
Ethiopian empire, as this prominent leader predicted. Realizing that a peaceful and
open movement was not to be allowed in this empire, revolutionary Oromo nation-
alists who were schooled in the Macha-Tulama Association and other nationalists cre-
ated the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) in the early 1970s to engage in armed
struggle.
The Birth of the Oromo Liberation Front
After the Ethiopian colonial government denied Oromos any channel through which
to express their ethnonational interest, a few Oromo nationalist elements established an
underground political movement and transformed reform nationalism into a revolu-
tionary one.When Oromo nationalism aimed at reform was forced to go underground
through the destruction of the Macha-Tulama Association, some nationalists joined the
Bale Oromo armed struggle while others fled to Somalia, Sudan, and the Middle East
to continue the Oromo struggle from a distance. The nationalist elements who re-
mained in Oromia established a clandestine movement and organized secret political
study circles.They produced political pamphlets such as The Oromo:Voice against Tyranny
and Kana Beekta?The central mission of this underground movement was expressed as
a national liberation struggle. 175 Voice states that an Oromo nationalist is “ready and pre-
pared to pay any sacrifice and oppose any person or groups that in any way hinder his
mission for liberation from all forms of oppression and subjugation.An Oromo has no
empire to build but a mission to break an imperial yoke, that makes this mission sacred
and his sacrifices never too dear.” 176 For the first time, this underground movement
started to use the name Oromo in writing, instead of Galla (the name of contempt and
derogation), thus defying Ethiopian and Ethiopianist historiography. Besides restoring
the original name of the people, this underground movement continued to expose the
distortion of Oromo history in its writings. Its members and those Oromo students
who were influenced by them began to study and reconstruct Oromo history accord-
ing to an Oromo perspective.“For the peoples and nations in struggle for their effec-
tive liberation,” C.Wondji asserts,“history provides a valuable understanding of earlier
patterns of development in these societies; it thus clarifies the problem of development
in the present as well as analyzing of the past.” 177
These Oromo nationalist elements understood from the beginning the impor-
tance of the reconstruction of Oromo culture and history for the survival of the
Oromo national identity and for the development of Oromo nationalism. There-
fore, they influenced young Oromo nationalists to engage in an Oromo cultural re-
naissance by challenging the Ethiopian and Ethiopianist scholarship that attacked
Oromo peoplehood, culture, and history. The emergent Oromo studies have re-
placed colonial history with a history of liberation and have refuted historical
myths that had been produced to justify Ethiopian colonialism. Since the theories