The Oromos' Cultural clash with the Semitic Amhara Abyssinian State Culture

The Oromos' Cultural clash with the Semitic Amhara Abyssinian State Culture and the Amhara Colonial Propaganda

By Prof. Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

The cultural clash between the Kushitic Oromos and the Semitic Amhara is so deep that the Amhara tyrannical minority of Abyssinia has to reinvent every now and then myths, bogus-historical interpretations, and desperate, ill-fated dogmas of official versions of Abyssinian History that are imposed at the level of Primary and Secondary education of this highly analphabetic country. In reality, there is not a single bond – be it ethnic, linguistic, historical, social-behavioral or cultural – to keep the Kushitic Oromos and the Semitic Amhara together in a country called either Abyssinia or Ethiopia.

Abyssinian – Amhara – culture is the expression of the Semitic people that dwells in the limited, marginal, mountainous area of Gondar around Lake Tana. The Christian Abyssinian kingdom of Axum pursued expansionist policies in the very beginning, invaded Ethiopia, that is present day Sudan, in 370 CE and destroyed its capital Meroe, where still today one finds many dozens of pyramids and mortuary temples for the 'Qore' and the 'Kandake", the Ethiopian kings and Queens.

Later and within the context of an alliance with the Eastern Roman Empire, Axumite Abyssinia attacked Yemen and attempted to find a way for its ally at Constantinople to contravene the Sassanid Iranian control of the Eastern trade (with India, Eastern Africa, and China). Of course, the Iranian supremacy was such that they kicked the Abyssinians out of Yemen, the Abyssinians’ original land to which they had returned as invaders, and annexed Yemen, strangling therefore the Eastern Roman Empire with heavy taxes and customs. Soon after that came the Islamic explosion. Not only Axum lost all its chances to come back to Yemen, but the Eritrean coast was permanently cut off, and the Abyssinian state was isolated from its derailed ally at Constantinople that had lost all its provinces in Africa and all its Asiatic possessions at the east of Taurus mountains (that separate Anatolia, present day Turkey, from Syria) and the upper flow of Euphrates.

To address the situation, the also isolated Christian kingdoms of the Sudan, Nobatia, at the North with capital at Faras near Wadi Halfa, and Makkuria at the center with capital at Old Dongola, 600 km in the south of Faras, merged. They were able to survive without many contacts with the Caliphate that controlled Egypt – first, in the 7th c., not further than Assiut in the south, and without any control of the Red Sea; the Saharan roads of trade with the Western Africa world around river Niger permitted unified Nobatia /Makkuria to stand until the 12th century. Contrarily to the Sudanese Christian state, Axum collapsed, since the vicinity of the coast, the Islamic supremacy in the coast, and the lack of connection with other parts of Africa predestined it to be doomed for many long centuries.

The transfer of the capital at Gondar, and the medieval rise of the Abyssinian kingdom came after a long period of decay. Even then the feeling of having lost to Islam, and of having been defeated and isolated, as the Western legend of the 'kingdom of Priest John' lets us surmise, created a cultural, behavioral system that has nothing to do with imperial behavior, abundance, knowledge, science, exploration, expansion, research, culture, wealthy life, spectacles, grandeur of art and of royal manners, and all the ensuing majestic environment.

Axum and Gondar Abyssinia was focused on a mere survival, a hard effort to preserve as a hysterical opposition to Islam the monophysitic perception of Christianity that was rejected by Constantinople and Rome with the same vigor by which also Nestorianism (the diametrically opposed to Monophysitism Christian theology) was denounced.

The conversion of numerous Abyssinians into Islam brought a long period of obscurantism and backward situation in the country. Most probably the outright majority of the intellectuals and artists, erudite scholars and learned wise men adhered to Islam early. It is quite indicative that, when the illustrious Caliph Maamun contacted kings throughout the world in the second half of the 8th century, in his particular effort to collect manuscripts and parchmins, and to make of Abbasid Baghdad the universal epicenter of the learned world, he did not contact anyone in Abyssinia. There was nothing important left there! By saying this, one does not imply that Gueze literature is insignificant, but asserts that the most representative specimens had already been taken away from Axum by the Abyssinian intellectuals who were converted to Islam.

There was no domain of knowledge left in the tiny state of Abyssinia after the rise of Islam. What were left there were a limited political continuity, and an insistence on religious traditions that had been shaken by the explosion of Islam, and by the conversion of many Abyssinians to the faith that challenged Christianity.

It is obvious that the state of Abyssinia, controlled by the Semitic Amhara and Tigray, needs to end up this cultural clash, and on this purpose they permanently come up with confusing interpretational schemes according to which the Kushitic Oromos and the Semitic Amharas may be …. 'one people'!

Typical propaganda and bogus-historical dogma stipulate that "few Amharas have no trace of Oromo or other African people", insist on that "the Amhara 16th century emperors in Gondar are rumored to have Oromo trace". Funny theories – tools of anti-Oromo colonization – go that the Amhara people were formed from Oromo and Tigray armies of the ruling class in the late 13th century as a result of Oromo rebellions against the latter.

An Amhara propaganda story goes that the Amharic language was created to confuse the ruling class in this rebellion. In the early 1990s, some Amhara scholars including Professor Mesfin Woldemariam argued that there are no people called Amhara! This is a worldwide unique case of a people's self-abdication from its historical past and true identity in the effort to preserve its colonial rule over another people!

According to unbiased modern scholarship, there is no proof for an artificial construction of the Amharic language. Both, Tigrinya and Amharinya (Amharic) emanate from Gueze but with several differences due to diverse intermingling, and to the isolation phenomenon. Tigrinya and Amharic are as equidistant one from another as Portuguese and Spanish are; yet before 1000 years there was neither Portuguese nor Spanish in the Iberian Peninsula. In the same way, before 1000 years there were neither Tigrinya nor Amharic in the Abyssinian plateau, but the earlier stage of both Gueze was evolving to take the linguistic forms of these two languages. There was certainly an intermingling with other people, Afar, Oromo, etc. But it was very limited, and we have so little information about this eventuality that we cannot deduce concrete, imperative conclusions.

Needless to say it, Prof. Woldemariam is a fully accredited member of the Amhara ruling class. As such, he expresses – through his papers and contributions – the Amhara political, cultural, ideological and financial interests.

To pretend that Amhara and Tigray peoples are Kushitic, so therefore Khammitic and not Semitic, is an aberration. There is no case to convince any serious specialized scholar in the world by saying this. What happened to these supposedly Kushitic peoples and they speak suddenly today totally Semitic languages as Amharic and Tigrinya? Who semitized them linguistically and later … disappeared? None, of course! It would be even worse error to say that Axumite Abyssinians and Gueze speaking people were Kushitic as well!

All this testifies to Amhara ruling class paranoia and incommensurable fear of losing the political – financial – ideological control over a country that apparently is not theirs, and a vast area of which they have been 150-year occupying tyrants. It is a provocative alteration of History that all specialists and scholars have to denounce as a colonial scheme. This Amhara Abyssinian scheme can be briefly presented as follows:

A) The name 'Ethiopia' represents an older, greater, more enlightening, more appealing, more meaningful to Westerners, and better documented past than the name 'Abyssinia'.

B) The real rightful users of such a name are the oppressed Kushitic peoples of Abyssinia, the Oromo, the Sidama and others

C) So, ‘we’ (: Amhara ruling class of bogus-Ethiopia) will eradicate the name of Abyssinia, and we will diffuse the theory that Amhara are Ethiopians as well, renaming the country as 'Ethiopia'.

Amhara Abyssinian political and 'academic' class is not to be accredited with the originality of this thought! This colonial perversion belongs exclusively to French, English and Italian historians, in their efforts to address demands of their colonial diplomats and politicians. But the Amhara people’s uncultured and uneducated political rulers fell victims to such a trap!

This led them to hate themselves and their own identity, the Abyssinian identity from which they – by themselves – have been stripped off! To western rationalistic eyes, this would look as a terrible case of self-inflicted disaster.

On the other hand, the Oromos were not fooled by this ludicrous argumentation! Because the Amhara rulers are besotted enough to think that it is possible to press a button and become Chinese, or Kushitic, this does not imply that they have the right to rule a country of which they do not represent more than a sectarian 20%! It is as provocatively idiotic as it would be for 1 million Mongolians to announce "we are Chinese" and to demand "let us rule 1 billion Chinese now"!

There is an essential question one may advance at this point; why did the invading Abyssinians of the 19th century not try to expand Amhara culture, Abyssinian culture, among the people they invaded? Well, they attempted it through the imposition of Amharic as the only official language in the country, but they failed and they realized their failure. This phenomenon is due to the fact that Oromo culture and Sidama culture are more original and authentic than the Amhara culture that has been preserved until now.

Truly speaking, Amhara – Abyssinian – Axumite culture is dead; what one may see among Amhara and Tigray Abyssinians is the permanence of some stereotypic elements of the Abyssinian culture that are the 'crumbs' of Axum. In the case of Oromo, the traditional pastoral system that was formed after this Kushitic people settled in the pasturelands of the Oromo country survived to far greater extent.

Another common point of Amhara efforts to de-Semitize the Amhara Abyssinian history and culture and to disconnect them from Yemen, their land of origin, takes us to comparisons between numbers of populations! They attempt to make an equation, i.e. 20 million Amhara and Tigray people originating from Yemen vs. 20 million Yemenites, and then ask how Amhara and Tigray represent the same number of population (as the Yemenites), since Amhara and Tigray in their origin were just a small tribe that left Yemen at a time it did not constitute even 10% of the Ancient Yemenite population. This argument is absolutely refuted by simple undergraduate readings in History; things that happen in History are very different from Mathematics indeed.

A similar question would be 'why Tunisians, who are the descendants of Carthaginians, who in their turn left their city, the famous Tyre of Phoenicia, being just a tiny part of its population, outnumber the present day Lebanese, who are descendants of almost all the Ancient Phoenician cities – states, not just of Tyre (present day Sur)?'

The difference is due to the various trajectories followed by two different peoples. At the eve of WW I, Germany had 88 million people and France 44 million people. Why now, only 90 years later, Germans are just 82 m and French are 60 m people? The answer is easy: 'different trajectory'. Greece had the same population as Yemen in 1960, but now Yemen has almost double the Greek population!

To focus on the population comparison (Amhara and Tigray vs. Yemenites), one should remind the false propagators that it is impossible to compare the isolated in the Abyssinian inland Amhara and Tigray with the exposed Yemenites, famous seafarers on the shoulders of whom lies all the legendary Islamic maritime tradition from trade to tale. From the Eastern coast of Africa to India, Sri Lanka, Indochina, Indonesia and China, plus the entire Red Sea area when we are talking 'Islamic thalassocracy', a phenomenon that lasted many centuries, we mean mainly Yemenites, and to lesser extent – and in later periods – Persians.

In the same way, in the Mediterranean, Phoenicians, Alexandrian Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, and Greeks converted to Islam (rather known as Turks, since very few Muslim Turks arrived in the 5th Islamic century to the area of Anatolia, present day Turkey that is the Asiatic part of the Eastern Roman Empire, and it is mostly the local Greek speaking population that adhered gradually to Islam) affirmed the Islamic maritime superiority for more than 1000 years.

Spaniards are just 40 million people but how many millions of Latin Americans are the descendants of Spaniards, who left Spain and settled in the 'New World'! Yemenites are present in significant numbers in Abbasid Baghdad, Iran, Arabia, the Indian coast, and Eastern Africa; even in China there was an 'Arabic district' in several historical harbors, and when we say 'Arabic' in this case, we mean exclusively 'Yemenite', since Arabs never had maritime tradition.