1The Oromo, their origin and their expansion against the Christian Ethiopian State in the late 16 th and in the first half of the 17 th centuries play a particular role in the Ethiopian literature. I would like to discuss here different aspects of the wide literary corpus dedicated to the Oromo and the different points of view exploited in the literary corpus. The literature represents a special interest for the study of ethnography, history, and historical geography of Ethiopia and Ethiopian studies in general. A general historical presentation: appearance of the Oromo as a historical fact and their location. The people in question are spread across the vast territories of northeast Africa and apart from Ethiopia also live in the North of Kenya, in Eritrea and Sudan. The question about the place of origin of the Oromo is controversial. It represented a particular interest also in the time when the literary corpus I am writing about was created. The authors of the works dedicated to the question a substantial amount of valuable parchment. The point of view shown in the frame of the research is that as the existence of the Oromo is a real historical fact the information about them should be found in a historical documentation, reliable written fonts and traditions which deal with facts, not only in mystic local folklore, which is usually full of legends. Anyway, different attitudes in historical research exist. They have been the cause for creation of a number of hypotheses on the still actual question about the history, location, origin of the people and the way they accessed in the body of Ethiopia. Actually we have several different literary traditions that surely cannot pretend to be a source for a historical research. The common link is that most of them inform about a violent character of the first Galla, or actually one of their groups Borana, about their birth from one mother and an eventual contact of the Galla with the other people, probably the Amhara or generally Christians. Thus, I mean that in absence of other reliable sources, we have to try to use the information obtained from the available texts. Here I would like to note that various points of view also exist on the question of the origin of the Oromo. Two of them are the following. In the middle of the 20 th century the main theory, shared also by Haberland, was that the Oromo originated from the tableland of Bale in the West of Ethiopia. In more recent times this theory was reelaborated and deepened by Mohammad Hassen, who supposed that the famous expansion of the Oromo was in fact a way back to the territories that had already been occupied by them in the past (Bassi, 1996).

/pdf/the-oromo-as-recorded-in-ethiopian-literature-5r3066jgks.pdf

The Oromo as recorded in Ethiopian literature

“Ateetee kophaa dha,” “Ateetee is separate.” After a discussion with a woman about God and her own religious commitment as an Orthodox Christian, I asked the woman, what, or who, Ateetee was. Her answer implied that Ateetee, which could be understood in the Oromo language as either the name of a higher being or of a ritual, belonged to an independent ontological reality, apart from Orthodox faith or other creeds. The statement is central to the subject dealt with in this article. It addresses the problem of how competing commitments to faith are negotiated by practitioners of female ritual, and how commonality or alterity of different religious affiliations are framed in local hermeneutics. In central Ethiopia, most inhabitants profess themselves to be Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, acting and navigating in a pluralist religious setting, which includes the belief in spirits. Other answers I received from female practitioners of Ateetee to the same question were: “We anoint ourselves (with butter),” “It is a prayer (kadhaa),” “We say, ‘my lady’ (giiftii kiyya),” “No, it is no spirit (ayyaana),” and “I don’t know. But that’s how it is.” An Orthodox priest stated about the women who performed the ritual of Ateetee: “They have that thing, that necklace,” clearly disapproving of the practice that, in his eyes, did not “belong” to Orthodox faith. The phenomenon of Ateetee, when understood as a higher spiritual being, can be approached on several levels. For one, there is the question of how

Religious Transcendence in Oromo Women’s Rituals: Ateetee and the Spirits’ Practice

Dans l’eglise de Nārgā Śellāsē, construite dans les annees 1738-1750, une sculpture tres inhabituelle montre un homme qui fume. Cette representation est d’autant plus surprenante que nous pensons generalement que le fait de fumer etait fortement condamne dans la societe chretienne, comme en temoignent les textes qui proliferent a la fin du xixe siecle. Mais les images et l’archeologie donnent des informations contradictoires sur cette pratique, ce qui nous conduit a reconsiderer l’histoire des textes. Du xvie au xxe siecle, fumer a ete stigmatise comme une activite paienne pour montrer du doigt l’etranger, et par consequent, affirmer la domination de l’Etat chretien sur la region du Choa meridional. Enfin, la position de la sculpture de Nārgā au sein de l’eglise, en relation avec la liturgie, montre que l’image du « roi arrogant » a ete utilisee pour creer une representation religieuse du mal.

La tête qui fume de l’église de Nārgā. Histoire des mœurs et histoire politique du royaume d’Éthiopie du xvie au xxe siècle

Histoire amharique de Grāñ et des Gallas

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The Oromo as recorded in Ethiopian literature

Religious Transcendence in Oromo Women’s Rituals: Ateetee and the Spirits’ Practice

La tête qui fume de l’église de Nārgā. Histoire des mœurs et histoire politique du royaume d’Éthiopie du xvie au xxe siècle