The Oromos: Abyssinia's oppressed majority in search of Post-Colonial Historiography

The Oromos: Abyssinia's oppressed majority in search of Post-Colonial Historiography

By Prof. Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

For whatever goes beyond the horizon of the year 1500 CE little is known about the Oromos, a Kushitic people that forms the largest ethnic – linguistic group in today's Abyssinia. In this article, we intend to illuminate key issues related to modern historiography, and to our approach to Ancient History.

The impact of the Antiquity
For the countries, the peoples, and the ethnic groups that have a part of History that antedates their Christian/Islamic Ages, automatically that part becomes the most authentic, the most genuine, the most determinant, the most preponderant part of their entire History.

The reason behind this reality is not an overstressed interest in Ancient History. In reality what happened in the Antiquity, from Sumer to Rome, en passant by Egypt, Phoenicia, Anatolia/Turkey, Iran, India, Yemen, Sudan, Greece, NW Africa, Eastern Africa, is that the local civilization in every case developed characteristics that were very genuine and very particular to every people. During those days, there was certainly an influence, an impact of one people, culture, civilization, on another. At the same time, there was also a very strong character of proper and adequate incorporation of the various new elements that were coming from outside. This is due to the fact that nature was an important ingredient of the composition of the civilization to a great extent. We cannot imagine Mesopotamia without vast surface between and around the Twin Rivers of Euphrates and Tigris. But Egypt is very different; it is narrower and longer. Anatolia and Iran mean mountainous plateau and cold winter. Greece means view of a few islands from the continental coast, or from an island. How many coastal places do you know in Greece from where you cannot see an island at all, and your view is lost in the horizon? Very few! But from the coast of Lebanon your view is lost in the western horizon! So, these environments made the Greeks different than the Phoenicians, the Egyptians different than the Assyrians. The more we study the topography of two ancient civilizations, the more we identify reasons for further variety, and differentiation.

Hesiod truly copied the Assyrian/Babylonian epic of the Creation (‘Enuma Elish in Assyrian/Babylonian means ‘when high’ and the epic starts by these two words) in his Theogonia (Genesis of Gods) but, if you read Theogonia, you recreate an Ancient Greek environment, not Mesopotamia; this means adequate incorporation of a foreign element, adaptation. During those times, the basic perception of the world was mythical, and the mythical expression respects the natural environment much more than the rational expression.

The systematization of thought and myth: the Gnosticisms of the Late Antiquity
When at the times of the Late Antiquity the Mankind reached at the level of systematization of religions, cults and ideologies into rational/mythical systems of thought, the so-called Gnosticisms, it was then achieved for the first time to diffuse a concept, an idea, and an ideology in another country and among other people without adequate incorporation into the new environment. In such case it remained as projection of the original environment. Christianity emanated from the environment of Gnosticisms. Islam presents striking similarities with a Gnostic system, Hermetism. Accordingly, Christianity and Islam brought the natural environment of the deserts of Judea and Arabia to Europe, India, everywhere they were spread out.

Through this approach, you can understand that what is authentic as character for a Turk today is the Hittite/Anatolian behavioral system, for an Iranian it is his/her Achaemenid – Sassanid past, for a Greek it is Ancient Greece, and for an Egyptian the Pharaonic periods.

The Judeo – Christian - Islamic past does not go beyond 1200 BCE, covering therefore just 3000 years. What do we know of Abraham? A few pages of text, be it Coranic, Evangelic, or Old Testamentary. This line however represents a very wrong schematization of the Oriental History.

Without the Assyrian Babylonian Ut Napishtim, there would never have been the Biblical – Coranic Noah. There is so much of Ancient Egyptian monotheism and aniconic ideology in the Bible and the Coran that no one can interpret today the three aforementioned religions properly without Egyptology, to give you just one example. Without Akhenaten’s religion there would never have been a certain Moses – Musa.

Without the concept of Etana – Messiah of the Assyrian/Babylonian sources, and without the identification of Assurbanipal of Assyria (669 – 625) with the Messiah – Mahdi, as a first appearance heralding a second, ultimate one, there would never be so many Messiahs, Christs, and Mahdis…

What is the longer and more original text about the fight between the Messiah and the Anti-Christ at the End of Time? Certainly it is the lengthy Hieroglyphic composition of the temple of Horus (the Egyptian Messiah) at Edfu, Upper Egypt. The book of the Revelation, if compared to these texts, looks short, abridged…

In addition, this Book of the Revelation almost copies word-by-word expressions of the Hittite Book of Revelation that described the Ultimate Fight, Tasmisu against Ullikummi. The ‘Beast rising from the Sea’ is the first reference within the World Literature to the Hittite Anti-Christ, Ullikummi, 1400 years before John is bestowed with the keys to the originality of the secret Hittite thought to which modern decipherment offered us access again! Ullikummi antedates his latest copy, i.e. Masih Dajjal, the Islamic Anti-Christ by 2000 years. That is not ‘yesterday’, you know.

Even more, in Egyptian and Assyrian/Babylonian sources of theological contents we have more literature on a more … difficult subject that Judaic, Christian and Islamic philosophy and theology tried not to tackle: What was God doing before the Creation? How was it then?

Colonial History and Humanities
To go through such criticism of the World History, one has first to reject the Colonial Dogma of History. Large part of the world is currently under colonial domination, exploitation and manipulation, without any chance of disentanglement, innovation, and reassessment of the past and the present, without any truly free, unbiased, choice for the future. The colonial rule lies on large part on a perverted manipulation and subtle maneuver through which the 'third world', the domain of the engulfed and exploited masses of Latin America, Africa and most of Asia, sticks to its traditions, while trying to mix part of them with a badly understood and perceived modernity. This is precisely the trickery. Though the western disciplines of Humanities the colonial rulers are easily maneuvering the situation without the colonized masses and governments, academia and intellectuals understanding!

In reality a tradition emanates from an entire cultural environment to which this tradition consists in an indispensable, organically linked, part. But this entire cultural environment as a living expression of living human beings changes, undergoes various reassessments, can reach a universal peak in its rise, or can get disintegrated totally and irreversibly; this last situation means that the civilization in question ceases to exist. A civilization can also undergo a long lasting decay. When the decay is there, the various elements of the 'entire cultural environment' cease to have a real meaning, and they become meaningless acts and/or beliefs without any real value. This is the Physics of the Civilizations. Nothing can revivify a disintegrated, meaningless, act or belief in such a case; it is a clinically dead element.

Now, if a foreign power manipulates the administration of a people in decay in a way to lead the unfortunate decadent people to stick to the dead element, any sort of traditional act or belief, it is guaranteed that the people in question – or the intellectual class of this people, or at least some of that class' members /elements – loses completely the last chance of distancing from the marshes of cultural stagnation and decadence, and of reassessing /reconsidering the entire situation.

By sticking to the dead element, the people in question cannot revivify either the element itself or the original 'entire cultural environment'. Simply, these people are stuck more and more to the marshes of decadence, becoming therefore a pathetic imitator of foreign elements, cultures, behavioral systems, civilizations. The situation becomes worse when the thought surfaces among the decadent and besotted – through the foreign cultural and educational interference – that a successful marriage of its own culture with the colonial expanding culture can be carried out! The ensuing barbarism consists basically in an obnoxious and uncontrolled mixture of
a. a collapsing culture of which none among the people it expresses has a mastership, understanding and real assessment, and
b. an expanding, and yet not truly understood, foreign, colonial culture that is used as a means of domination by the colonial country over the decadent people.

In such a situation, the tradition we started speaking about, the dead element that originates from an earlier 'entire cultural environment' that does not exist anymore, must be deleted, eradicated and forgotten.