The Oromo Movement and Imperial Politics

Focusing on the issue of the Oromo national struggle for liberation, statehood, and democracy, The Oromo Movement and Imperial Politics: Culture and Ideology in Oromia and Ethiopia critically examines the dialectical relationship between Ethiopian colonialism, Oromo culture, epistemology, politics, and ideology in the context of accumulated collective grievances of the Oromo nation. The book identifies chains of sociological and historical factors that facilitated the development of Oromummaa (Oromo nationalism). Asafa Jalata demonstrates how the movement is challenging and transforming Ethiopian imperial politics, as well as different forms and phases of the movement and its future direction. Currently, the Oromo are the largest ethno-national group and political minority in the Ethiopian Empire; they were colonized and incorporated into Ethiopia as colonial subjects in the last decades of the nineteenth century by the alliance of Abyssinian/Ethiopian colonialism and European imperialism. Since then, they have been treated as second-class citizens and have been economically exploited and culturally and politically suppressed. Despite the fact that the Oromo resistance to Ethiopian colonialism started with the process of colonization and subjugation, organized efforts by Oromo nationalists to liberate the Oromo people only began in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, and presently are at the center of Ethiopian politics.