OROMIA REGION OF ETHIOPIA (post 2010).

MAP OF THE BALE PROVINCE of Ethiopia (1960s).

PREFACE

History is written by the victors.

Oral history is spoken by the people.

This book represents the voice of the people.

I WROTE THIS BOOK for three reasons.

First, I was dismayed and angry. There are virtually no documents or books that capture the Bale Oromo’s struggle. The few snippets I have been able to find are inaccurate and written from the perspective of the oppressor. I wanted to correct this injustice.

Second, I wanted to tell a specific story. My maternal uncle, Hangasu Wako Lugo, experienced the Bale Oromo’s struggle in many ways. His father, Wako Lugo, was an early architect of the Bale Revolt. His uncle General Wako Gutu was the supreme leader of the Rebellion. Hangasu was a young boy during the armed struggle of the 1960s, a leader and key contributor in the 1970s and 1980s, a witness to and participant in the elections of 1994. He is now in exile living abroad. His story provides a glimpse into the struggle of the modern Oromo people.

Finally, I wanted my children to know where we came from. My children are second-generation immigrants. Because they primarily speak English, they would otherwise have no access to this important history.

As one of the world’s ancient countries, Ethiopia (along with Liberia) maintained her status as the only historically independent African country (apart from a five-year occupation by Italy). Therefore, Ethiopia is considered Africa’s oldest independent republic. Ethiopia’s population is currently estimated at more than 110 million, making it the second most populous African country after Nigeria and the twelfth most populous in the world. Its modern ethnic composition includes: the Oromo, Amhara, Tigre, Sidama, Somali, Afar, Gurage, Walayta, Hadiya, and many other small groups. The Oromo people are the single largest ethnic group in the country, representing more than 40 percent of the population. The Amhara and Tigre are the next largest ethnic groups; combined they represent 32 percent of the population.

The Oromo people were invaded and incorporated into the modern Ethiopian Empire during the reign of Emperor Menelik in the late 1800s. The Oromo people resisted northern Tigre-Amhara rule at different places and times. This book focuses on the Bale Oromo People’s Struggle that took place during the 1960s. This ordinary people’s movement challenged the Emperor Haile Selassie’s government. Haile Selassie was deposed by his own military junta in 1974. The new Derg government fell under communist influence for seventeen years. In 1991, the Derg regime collapsed, and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which was dominated by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), took over the country.

First established in 1992, Oromia is one of the ten regional states that constitute modern Ethiopia. It spans the eastern, central, and western part of Ethiopia. The Oromia Regional State has twenty-one zones (the equivalent of provinces). The Bale and Borana zones account for almost 50 percent of Oromia’s total area. Madda Walabu, a district located in the southernmost tip of the Bale zone, is an important place in Oromo history: It was the center of the spiritual, cultural, and political system of the Oromo people.

To write this book, I had to go outside traditional research routes and find living witnesses, veterans of and eyewitnesses to the Bale Oromo’s struggle. Many of these witnesses are now in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, and their numbers are starting to dwindle. They had never been asked to share their stories, and they were more than willing to share. Their willingness to share inspired me to record their stories, and their testimonies and memories provide the main content for this book. Because this is primarily an oral history, I have not included footnotes. Because my people were predominantly pastoralists, they didn’t use the Gregorian calendar. Unless events took place at the same time as other world events, it was difficult to identify the exact dates for many of the events. Thus, dates in this book are my best estimates. Because I conducted the research and the interviews in Oromo language, translating the exact meaning and context into English isn’t always possible. I have done my best to faithfully capture the essence of what was said.

As I began to study our history, I realized how much more is yet to be explored, how many more stories of struggle, of the ways individuals and communities have overcome seemingly insurmountable difficulties, are yet to be written. My hope is this book will inspire others to write, build on this work, and lead the way in preserving history for the next generation.

CHAPTER ONE:

THE RESTAURANT

IN THE WINTER OF 2006, I was a senior at the University of Minnesota. One night, my uncle Hangasu asked me to give him a ride home from his work. Hangasu is more than my uncle; he is also a father figure, a mentor, and a friend. Hangasu worked a second shift in a restaurant on Lake Street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. During the first shift, he worked for St. Paul Public Schools in the food services department. Hangasu worked two jobs to put food on the table and pay the bills so his children could focus on school instead of work. Hangasu and his wife, Maryam, have eight children: three daughters and five sons. On weekends, Hangasu served and guided the American-Oromo Community of Minnesota’s board of directors.

It was five minutes before midnight the night I drove on the snowy Minnesota roads to pick up Hangasu. I had not picked him up at the restaurant before, and I didn’t know what to expect. I parked the car on the street and knocked on the door. The restaurant had closed hours earlier. I looked through the window. Hangasu was the only person I could see. He came and opened the door for me. He was wearing a blue apron over his normal sweater, and he was holding a mop. Give me five minutes, he said. I’m almost done. He went back to what he was doing, mopping the floor. I could see he took his job seriously. He was obsessive about cleanliness, checking every inch of the floor to make sure he didn’t miss a spot. 

By this time, I was in tears. I couldn’t look at him anymore. I rushed out of the building and returned to my car. I cried. I knew he was working, but I had never asked what his job was. He was sweeping the floor so we could attend school. 

I wasn’t crying because there is anything wrong with mopping the floor. Hangasu knew what he was doing. He was investing in his children’s future. What shocked me was the chasm between the picture I had of Hangasu and the job he was doing at the time. In my mind, Hangasu was a pioneer Oromo leader. Yet, he swallowed his pride to enable his children to go further, and I admired him for that. He valued work and impact over words. He took a long-term view. As of 2020, in addition to his eight children, Hangasu had twelve grandchildren. When the family arrived in Minnesota in 2000, Hangasu made each child promise that at a minimum they would earn a bachelor’s degree. I too was part of this deal, and as a senior in college, I was very close to that goal. 

As I drove my uncle home that night, we didn’t talk much, mostly because I was hurting inside. The next morning I got curious. How did we get here? What life experiences shaped Hangasu to be who he is today? Why was education a priority for him? These questions propelled me to learn more about Hangasu and the circumstances that shaped his worldview.

CHAPTER TWO:

HANGASU

HANGASU WAKO LUGO WAS BORN in 1956 in Bidire, a small village in the Bale zone of modern-day Oromia. He was born in an area called Dallo, near the northern banks of the Ganale River. He grew up in a rapidly changing Ethiopia.

Hangasu has been a living witness of the Oromo movement since he was born. He literally grew up in the battlefield during the Bale Rebellion. Hangasu accompanied his father wherever he went, and that included the battlefield. When he was just 10 years old, he sat and listened in on exclusive executive meetings where major military decisions were made during the Bale Rebellion. He met Emperor Haile Selassie in person three times, and he argued with him about education twice as a teenager. He observed Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam up close at his house and struck up a casual conversation with him. In the early 1970s, Hangasu was the right-hand person for Magarsa Bari (one of the founders of the Oromo Liberation Front [OLF]). Hangasu worked with the Oromo elders and leaders such as Haji Adam Saddo and Haji Abdullahi Ganamo in the Bale prairies. He was held in one of the harshest Somali prisons along with Adam Jilo (a key figure in the Bale Oromo movement). After he was released from prison in 1983, he accompanied General Wako Gutu (the supreme leader of the Bale Revolt) in a military expedition and saved the general’s life. In the 1990s, after the communist regime was toppled, he ran for a House seat representing Dallo, his home district. He quickly learned the election was anything but fair.

Despite this background and his broad experience, Hangasu avoided assuming leadership positions, which one might expect of someone with his experience, insight, and foresight. He could have led any Oromo political organizations of his choice, but he didn’t. The only time he tried was when he ran for the parliamentary House seat in 1994, a race he lost.

After that there were many instances where he was the natural successor or was expected to take up the role. Every time, he turned down these opportunities and nominated somebody else. When General Wako Gutu died, many younger members of the executive committee insisted he accept the nomination to succeed the general. Some even threatened to leave the organization if he didn’t step up to lead it. Still he refused, saying there were people older than he who had spent much longer time in the field with the general than he had.

When I asked him why he never took on a leadership role, Hangasu told me he believed that power corrupts. Leadership requires fundamental toolsets: First, there must be a law that regulates everybody including the leader himself. The law must be democratic, and the law must specify that nobody is above the law, he said. Second, there must be an organization in the fullest meaning of the word. At the end of the day, everybody is required to protect the interest of the organization, not the interest of any one individual, and the organization must outlast its leaders. As far as I can see, we [the Oromos] lacked both of these fundamental tools. Without these tools, frankly, I wouldn’t trust myself to fulfill my duty.

In the meantime, I want to work in the background to help others, he continued. I want to focus my attention on humanitarian work in the area of education.

That’s how I know my uncle. Tirelessly focused on and working for the betterment of his community, his family, and his people. But the question remains, how could this reluctant leader, who had seen and experienced so much over his lifetime, now be mopping floors late at night in a Minneapolis restaurant?

HANGASU’S FATHER WAS Wako Lugo. Wako Lugo was 6 feet tall and had a strong build. His face always looked serious; his eyebrows were dark and dense. An assistant to Wako Lugo, who’d spent many years with him in the 1970s, described him as a lion nobody messed with. Despite his outward appearance, his people remembered him for his wisdom and generosity to all.

Wako Lugo Usu was born in 1905 just after Dallo had been forced to join the Ethiopian Empire. His uncle, Waayyu Teesso, was one of the first of the southern Oromo to accept Islam. Hangasu’s grandfather was the last of an ancient line of religious leaders practicing a faith that predated both Islam and Christianity in Dallo. The father of his father’s father led an Arsi Oromo pastoral society.

As with Hangasu’s relatives, many of his children, nieces, and nephews would live lives as refugees. The Oromo diaspora followed the political turmoil that came when Ethiopia transitioned from an empire to a communist state and a system dominated by northerners, who were apparently indifferent to the rights of the Oromo people in the south.

Wako Lugo had two families, a biological family and an adoptive one. At the start of the twentieth century, Lugo Usu—the last known Qaallu, or spiritual leader, of Rahitu in Dallo—and his wife, Elemo, had a daughter, but they wanted a son. Everything they tried failed. As was customary in those days, Lugo Usu appealed to his friend and clan member Gada Warache. Gada had four boys and two girls. Gada gave his 7-year-old son, Kadir, to Lugo to adopt. Kadir refused and ran back to his mother’s house. When his father reproached him, little Kadir cried fiercely and refused to return.

Lugo Usu came up with another proposal. He told Gada, I want your unborn son from your wife Qumbi Wako Bonayya. This was not a typical request, even for that period. Gada saw the desperation in his brother, gathered himself, and said, You don’t know if it will be a boy or a girl. Lugo replied, I will beg God to make this baby a boy. Gada agreed to the proposal.

When Lugo went back to his wife, she immediately announced to her friends, "Akka Waaqaa hin beekanii, haadha Waaqoo naan jedhaa. Simply translated, this means, You don't know how God works, just call me the mother of Wako." Apparently, she had named the unborn baby Wako.

A few months later, in 1905, Qumbi gave birth to a boy. Gada and Qumbi quickly transferred the baby boy to his new, eager parents. Elemo and Lugo confirmed his name as Wako. Thus it was that Wako Lugo Usu would grow up in the house of Qaallu. Wako Lugo would inherit the legacy of resistance from his adoptive father, Lugo Usu, and emerge as the leader of the Bale Oromo Revolt, a legacy that Hangasu would continue and built upon by connecting the Bale Oromo’s cause with the national Oromo struggle.

CHAPTER THREE:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE

OROMO PEOPLE

THE OROMO PEOPLE WERE invaded and incorporated into the modern Ethiopian Empire during the reign of Emperor Menelik in the late 1890s. The Oromo people resisted the northerners, Tigre-Amhara rule, at different places and times. For example, Arsi Oromos in Arsi province resisted the Menelik conquest militarily, but they were overpowered because the emperor was backed by the colonial powers who put modern weapons at his disposal. After he won militarily, to deter those who resisted him, Menelik mutilated the hands of their men and the breasts of their women. He gained the rest of the territories unchallenged.

In 2014, the Oromia regional government erected the Anole Monument as a tribute to those who were brutally massacred and mutilated. It took 120 years for the Arsi Oromo to openly speak and display this tragic Ethiopian history. Some unprogressive Ethiopians still deny the event took place. This denial to confront the harsh history is one of the impediments to the country’s progress in the present day.

The Oromo people live in the central and southern highlands and constitute the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia—estimates range from 40 percent to 45 percent of the population—in an ethnically diverse country. There are more than eighty ethnic groups speaking more than eighty languages. The Oromo and Amhara have been the largest groups, with Amhara making up most of the ruling class.

It is difficult to know the true population of the Oromo; successive imperial governments attempted to downplay the country’s ethnic diversity. The Amhara had alliances with Shawa Oromo elites through faith and marriage. These assimilated elites participated in the country’s administration and military affairs. The only way an Oromo could integrate into the Ethiopian government was to convert to Christianity. Therefore, a large number of Oromos in the north and central highlands accepted Orthodox Christianity as a means of integration and as a way for the elite collaborators to ally with the northerners. Hangasu’s southern Oromo ancestors lived outside the northern establishment.

During the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, although there were at least as many Muslims as Christians in the country, the total Muslim population in Ethiopia was virtually unknown. Although Haile Selassie preached religious freedom, his policies and actions contradicted this. In the Ethiopian media of the time, Ethiopian Muslims were referred to as Muslims in Ethiopia, as if they didn’t belong. Because the media was controlled by the government, it was only reinforcing the will of the emperor. Under Emperor Haile Selassie’s Amhara hegemony, it was a crime to write in Oromo, all Oromo print media were banned, and the Oromo language was banned from being used on the radio (it was said to break the radio and was therefore not fit for radio broadcast).

In the rural, pastoral south, there was no mixing of culture and no intermarriage with the north. Since the early twentieth century, rural towns in the pastoral south have been predominantly Muslim. Very few Muslims assimilated to get an education and advance their lives. To gain higher education,one had to give up the Oromo language—Afan Oromo—for Amharic, the only recognized state language.

The northern Amhara and the southern Oromo were in constant conflict. The southern Oromo opposed just about everything the northerners stood for. The northerners cared about expanding their influence, controlling the population, and exploiting resources from the south. The southern Oromo continually resisted, striving to control their own destiny and live with dignity on their ancestral land.

The Oromo system of governance was known as the Gada system. In the late nineteenth century, before the introduction of Islam and Christianity in the south, the Arsi Oromo followed the way of life and governance of the Waaqeffannaa and Gada (or Gadaa), the equivalent of church and state.

In the Waaqeffannaa belief system, the people believed in one god—Waaqa—the creator and sustainer of all things. They prayed to Waaqa for all their needs. The people had a small number of principles for interacting with others. They believed in justice and fairness. They believed in avoiding chubbu, which means sin or wrongdoing to others. The Qaallu was the spiritual leader of the community. The Qaallu had a principal wife, chosen from a specific tribe. Only children born of the principal wife had the purest blood and were deemed qualified to inherit Qaallu.

Gada was an egalitarian, democratic system of governance that had been practiced for hundreds (and possibly thousands) of years. Every tribe had a Gada Council that managed its affairs. Every male who was of age had full rights to elect and to be elected to the Gada Council, which functioned like town hall meetings in New England. The Gada leaders, Abbaa Gada, managed the affairs of all tribes collectively. Between tribes, the Gada leaders would discuss all matters and reach a consensus. The Gada leaders recognized people in the community who demonstrated exemplary acts of service and punished people who didn’t live up to expectations or committed crimes.

In Waaqeffannaa and Gada system, people were required to follow the decision of their tribe. In exchange, the tribe provided protection and insurance to its citizens. While the Abbaa Gada presided when the Gada Assembly met, the Qaallu was the spiritual leader but also played a political role. Although the Qaallu institution no longer exists in its original form today, the Oromo national flag (black, red, and white) was adapted from the Qaallu turban.

The Qaallu was the most honorable and most fair person in the community. No major decision could be made without his approval. The title of Qaallu was passed down to the spiritual leader’s sons. The Qaallu had high status, was considered pure, avoided sins, was always careful, and spoke only the truth. The Qaallu did not participate in wars and was not even allowed to carry metal because it could be used as a weapon for hunting and warfare. The Qaallu was not allowed to raise cattle, farm, or do business. These activities were done for Qaallu. The Qaallu would bless and preside over local gatherings and would declare the consensus of the community’s final decision.

Before the invasion of northerners, the Oromo people governed themselves through this Gada system—locally and regionally. However, the northerners’ conquest disrupted this life. The Oromo institutions were systematically weakened and replaced by the Amhara rule.

Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia implemented his Amhara rule through Melkanyas. Melkanyas were northern settlers sent by the emperor to administer the native Oromos in the south. They were also referred to as neftenya, which means rifleman. Their job was to execute the emperor’s orders in partnership with northerner civilian administrators. Natives were obligated to build shelter for and provide provisions to these Melkanyas. Every major tribe leader’s house was assigned a Melkanya. Practically, the Melkanyas were the landlords, and the natives were their slaves.

Empowered by the emperor, the Melkanyas looted the natives’ properties and raped their women. They disrespected the native population, including their leaders. The natives had no means to fight back. At the same time, the natives could not accept living under this kind of humiliation.

MIDMORNING IN A PASTORAL society is a busy time. Pastoralists milk cows around 5 or 6 in the morning, then let them out for grazing, and bring them back around for the second milking midmorning.

One morning while the Qaallu, Lugo Usu, sat outside his humble mud hut watching over his cattle and his wives busy milking them, the Melkanya assigned to Lugo’s house came.

The Melkanya walked right past Lugo without acknowledging him. To Lugo’s surprise, the Melkanya entered his main house. To Lugo,