Introduction

Summary

The history, way of life, political and religious institutions, and even the name of the Oromo is in large part ignored in Ethiopian historiography. The source of such widespread neglect is partly due to lack of accurate information from the Oromo perspective. Since the Oromo, as a preliterate people, did not write about their encounter with the Christian society, existing records reflect the views of Christian monks and court chroniclers. These perspectives presented the Oromo as enemies of the Amhara and the Christian state. The magnified enmity between the Amhara and the Oromo was compounded by religious and cultural differences, thus perpetuating the negative image of the Oromo in Ethiopian historiography. It is precisely for this reason that the scholar Richard Reid wrote:

There can be few peoples in African history who have been as misunderstood, and indeed as misrepresented, as the Oromo – or pejoratively ‘Galla’ in the older literature. They have been, arguably, even more demonized by Ethiopian chroniclers of various hues and over a longer timeframe than the Somali, historically the other great rival ‘bloc’ confronting the Amhara in northeast Africa.

European travellers and missionary accounts since the sixteenth century took on the anti-Oromo perceptions of Ethiopian Christian chroniclers. As a result, the Oromo were ‘made scapegoats for much that was held to be “wrong” with highland state and society in the nineteenth century’. In other words, no systematic account of the Oromo was written by a first-hand unprejudiced observer before the 1840s. Even the monk Abba Bahrey, whose manuscript of 1593 is examined in Chapter 6, was not free from prejudice in his presentation of Oromo history. Earlier accounts were most probably compiled from hearsay by individuals with little or no experience of southern Ethiopia; by Portuguese missionaries who knew little or nothing about the region; by royal chroniclers who exaggerated Christian victories against the Oromo; or by Christian monks who connected the sixteenth-century pastoral Oromo population movement with the contemporaneous religious wars that nearly destroyed the medieval Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. In other words, earlier accounts about the Oromo were compiled by individuals who did not know the Oromo language, who were not familiar with Oromo history, and who had no experience of the Oromo way of life, political processes, or religious institutions.