Yonas Biru
In my article “Oromummaa is a Lie: Gadaa is Part Democratic and Part Apartheid,” I argued that the ideology of Oromummaa rests on a three-pronged myth-making:
- Romanticizing Gadaa as a sanctified egalitarian democracy anchored in safuu (moral order and accountability) and nagaa (peace and reconciliation).
- Whitewashing Oromo atrocities during Gadaa, including coercion, mutilation of resisters (dead or alive), slavery, and ruthless military subjugation.
- Framing Ethiopia as a genocidal empire while presenting Oromos as eternal victims—a narrative symbolized by the Anole statue (the mutilated breast) used to portray Menelik as a war criminal.
The first two myths were shaped largely by Asmarom Legesse, an Eritrean anthropologist who presented Gadaa as a morally elevated egalitarian order. His account intentionally downplayed the harsher realities of Gadaa—mutilation, enslavement, and violent conquest of non-Oromo peoples.
Asmarom also contributed to the third myth, though the heavy lifting was done by another Eritrean, Tesfaye Gebreab. His fictionalized narrative first appeared in 1999 in የቡርቃ ዝምታ (The Silence of Burqa) and planted the Anole mutilation story into public imagination as history. Before 1999, not a single written source had ever documented it.
Tesfaye’s book itself is based on an Oromo folklore about a river that disappeared underground from shame because the Oromo failed to win their freedom. As Tesfaye tells it, the river vowed never to reemerge and flow overground until the people of Oromo win their freedom. The people of Oromo have won their freedom, but the fictional river is nowhere to be found.
Taken together, the works of Legesse and Gebreab fed into Eritrea’s longstanding strategy of keeping Ethiopia in chronic internal conflict. Eritrea needed Oromo grievance narratives to weaken the Ethiopian center and ensure a fragmented neighbor. Scholars of the Horn, including Alex de Waal, Roy Pateman, David Pool, among others, have documented this strategy: “federalizing conflicts,” “opening new fronts,” and “weaponizing the national question.”
To understand how this myth-making became politically useful, one must first understand the Gadaa system itself and how Legesse chose to portray it.
A Brief Anatomy of Gadaa
Gadaa is a traditional Oromo governance system organized through age-sets, rotating leadership (Abba Gadaa), assemblies (Chaffe, Gumi), and ritual institutions.
There was no pan-Oromo Gadaa nation. Anthropologists agree that there were four autonomous Gadaa polities, each with its own distinct practices, rituals, and political culture:
- Borana – ritual purity and ceremonial authority
- Arsi – militarized polity
- Macha – dominant expansionist power
- Tulama – expansionist polity
Each had its own Abba Gadaa, assemblies, and territorial jurisdiction. None was subordinate to a central Oromo authority. The system was decentralized, diverse, and autonomous.
Each polity had its own Abba Gadaa, assemblies, and territorial jurisdictions. They were not subordinate to a central Oromo authority and did not form a single Gadaa empire. The system was diverse, decentralized, and autonomous.
Asmarom Legesse’s Selective Lens
Legesse’s major works—Gada: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society (1973) and Oromo Democracy (2000)—focus almost exclusively on the Borana Gadaa. This allowed him to highlight the ceremonial and ritual purity of Gadaa while avoiding the expansionist societies (Macha and Tulama) where invasion, subjugation, and enslavement were commonplace.
He also systematically avoided discussing Gadaa’s punitive violence, including the practice of clubbing and spearing gabbaros (tribute-paying serfs) who tried to escape. Clubbing meant execution with heavy wooden clubs; spearing meant execution with a spear.
Punishment in Oromo society operated on two tracks. For pure Oromos, sanctions were typically decided through councils of elders or Gadaa assemblies. In contrast, for gabbaros, including those who were incorporated into the Oromo tribal structure at the bottom of the social hierarchy, punishment required no deliberation. Those who violated Gadaa’s social stratum codes were executed on the spot by Gadaa warriors.
Such resistance was viewed as a violation of safuu, the moral framework regulating harmony between community, ancestors, and Waaqa (Oromo God). Legesse not only treated this as legitimate moral order, but he also elevated it to the centerpiece of his narrative.
In Oromo Democracy, he wrote: “Incorporated communities (gabbaro) occupied the lower rungs of the ritual hierarchy. Their subordination was integral to the balance of the moieties and the preservation of social order.”
Mohammed Hassen’s Contrasting Account
Ten years after Legesse’s 1973 book, Oromo historian Mohammed Hassen published The Oromo of Ethiopia, 1500–1850 (1983). His work directly contradicts Legesse’s romanticized portrayal.
Hassen documented Oromo expansion with unflinching clarity:
“The Oromo warrior classes terrorized the populace. The vanquished people were subjected to slavery and servitude… People who had submitted with little or no resistance found themselves slaves, used as gifts or commodities for sale.”
And describing Gadaa’s conquests:
“When new areas were attacked, the men were killed, and animals were captured… Enslaving the vanquished people was an economic as well as military necessity.”
Demonizing Menelik II: Legesse’s Double Standard
When discussing Gadaa’s expansionist campaign, Legesse uses vocabulary such as “egalitarian,” “democratic,” “guided by safuu,” “integrative,” and “organic.” He frames Oromo conquest as natural political processes, defensive necessity, absorption, and mechanisms of integration.
But when discussing Menelik’s expansion, he switches to a dramatically different vocabulary: “destruction,” “asymmetrical power,” “cultural annihilation,” “colonial imposition,” “religious displacement.”
The double standard is stark. He portrayed Gadaa’s gabbaro system, as a stabilizing social hierarchy that preserved social order. He explained it, stating: “The presence of client groups contributed to the equilibrium of the system by reinforcing the political and ritual authority of the dominant clans.”
In contrast, he described Menilik’s Gabbaro system as an oppressive subjugation. “The Gabbar system was a system of forced labor and tribute that was imposed on the Oromo and other southern peoples after their conquest by the Abyssinian state. The Oromo were forced to work the land for their Abyssinian conquerors and to pay them tribute in kind. The Gabbar system was a form of slavery.”
This cannot be dismissed as mere scholarly oversight. It is a politically driven project.
Falsely Accusing Menelik of Abolishing Gada
In Oromo Democracy, Legesse wrote: “The Oromo had a complex and sophisticated system of democracy that governed their lives for centuries before their conquest by the Abyssinians and the subsequent abolition of the Gadaa system by Emperor Menelik II. … the Gadaa system, was suppressed and replaced by the hierarchical and authoritarian system of the Abyssinian state.”
The well documented fact is that Gadaa collapsed two centuries before Menelik’s soldiers ever entered Oromo territory.
Hassen summarized Gadaa’s decline: “Gadaa warriors’ sixteenth century capacity to terrorize was second only to their inexhaustible talent for self-mutilation during the seventeenth and subsequent centuries… The conquered people, whose pride was humbled in the dust of slavery, and whose number was reduced through sale realized that the only hope of safety was open rebellion against their arrogant masters… Consequently, gada governance was not able to resolve its internal contradictions, which, for example, led to the gabbaro uprising of 1618.”
Professor Endalkachew Lelisa Duressa, another Oromo Historian echoed:
“Due to the geographical expansion of the Oromo territory and increasing population, the central Gadaa government declined beginning in the mid-17th century…”
Even Asafa Jalata, architect of Oromummaa ideology, admits that Gadaa collapsed because it lacked a strong central government and was not competent to manage an expanding society. He wrote: “The nonfederal nature of the Gadaa System, lack of Strong Central government, lack of regular meeting of Gadaa official and long distance of Gumii (assembly) from political center made Gadaa system less Competent”
Menelik reigned in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. How could he “abolish” a system that vanished on the 17th? Whatever was left of it after the 17th century was nostalgic tradition that was observed in pockets of areas without military power or governance mandate. Accusing Menelik of killing what is practically dead is a hyperbole, not an objective scholarship.
Legesse Cannot Hide Behind an Anthropological Façade
Some defend Legesse by saying he studied the Borana as a case study, not all Oromo. But Legesse himself closed this escape route through the political use of his work—his persistent anti-Menelik framing and his selective moral standards.
He judged Oromo conquest with a relativist, functionalist anthropological lens (“how did the system maintain order?”), which sanitized its violence. He judged Menelik with a modern moralizing, anti-colonial lens (“how does this violate contemporary justice?”), which magnified every abuse. In sum, he judged Gadaa by its ideals, ignoring and/or excusing its brutalities. In the meantime, he judged Menelik by his worst actions, ignoring and/or erasing his positive contributions in state building and modernization.
Conclusion
Asmarom Legesse’s work on Gadaa is not merely romantic anthropology. It is a political project.
By idealizing Gadaa, minimizing Oromo conquest, ritualizing subjugation, and selectively moralizing Ethiopian imperial history, Legesse constructed a double-standard historiography that has fueled ethnic polarization for decades.
What he presents as “Oromo democracy” is, in truth, a selectively curated Borana ritual model elevated into a pan-Oromo myth. The omissions are deliberate. They align with a broader Eritrean strategy—well documented by scholars—to fracture Ethiopia through ethnic grievance.
In contrast, Mohammed Hassen presents Gadaa in full: its democratic ideals alongside its coercive machinery; its ceremonial beauty alongside its violent expansion; its age-set order alongside its enslavement of conquered peoples.
The question is no longer whether Asmarom Legesse misunderstood Gadaa. He understood it perfectly. He simply chose to tell the half that served a political purpose.
His legacy is not anthropology. It is myth-making. And Ethiopia has paid and continues to pay the price.
Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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Thank you Dr. Yonas! EPLF, TPLF and OLF founders and sympathizers are the individuals (groups) for our misery in the HOA. They don’t repent what they have caused us in life lost and a depressed society who could have otherwise contributed to humanity as did our forefathers. Thank you again for exposing Asmerom Legesse who must be agent of EPLF.
A potent statement to debunk “OLF’s Gada mythology”
Is it ” Burga campaigne or Burga silence ” ? The book’s title ???
Please post my comments–even if you don’t approve of.
I use the Oromo proverb to address Yonas Birru’s “Gowwaan garatti badde warra seeti” (literally, means the fool thinks where he lives is his home)—which perfectly captures the underlying reality of Yonas Birru’s recent commentary on the Gadaa system and the legacy of Professor Asmarom Legesse. While Birru presents his writing as a sophisticated, objective intellectual critique, a decolonial analysis reveals that it is driven by a hidden ideological agenda aimed at undermining indigenous institutional history.
Here is how my proverb maps onto the reality of his articles:
1. The Deception of “Academic Criticism” – Birru steps into the public square acting as a rigorous reviewer of anthropology, but his text contains a deep internal ruin: a complete lack of empirical evidence and a total reliance on anachronistic, Eurocentric buzzwords. He assumes the public cannot see the political motivations driving his attack on Legesse’s seminal work. Like the fool in the proverb, he believes his true intent is well-hidden behind a facade of scholarly concern.
2. Projecting “Political Hackwork” onto Others – In his piece, Yonas Birru accuses Professor Legesse of “political hackwork.” Yet, his own argument relies entirely on selective historical extraction and polemics rather than sound methodology. He ignores the foundational pillars of Gadaa system, such as rotational power, strict term limits, and Ilaafi Ilaamee (deliberative consensus) and instead focuses on historical distortions to pathologize Oromo institutions. He assumes the reader will not notice that the “hackwork” he claims to expose is actually the defining characteristic of his own writing.
3. Exposure Through a Decolonial Lens – A decolonizing pedagogy easily unmasks this dynamic. By bringing hidden biases into the light, it reveals that Birru is operating under a state of cognitive captivity, using the master’s tools to judge and invalidate an organic, democratic African governance system.
What Birru thought was safely hidden in the “belly” of his rhetoric is completely laid bare: his arguments do not withstand true academic scrutiny, and his attempt to de-legitimize the Gadaa system only serves to expose his own ideological biases.