Papers by Dr Asafa Dibaba
Humanities, Mar 31, 2020
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University of Illinois Press eBooks, Aug 15, 2021
Dibaba analyzes songs and personal experience narratives of suffering and loss due to a history o... more Dibaba analyzes songs and personal experience narratives of suffering and loss due to a history of territorial expropriation, environmental devastation, and the social exclusion of the Oromo people from their homeland. He argues that Finfinne, now known as Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, is a broken place, ravaged by war, famine, and pollution. Dibaba highlights the ways the Oromo understand their ecological reality and use expressive culture to sustain their emotional resilience. Recognizing that attachments to place involve memories and practices of human sociality as well as human-nonhuman experiences, he argues that reclaiming a broken place involves a form of socioecological rescue that heals and stewards both the land and the people, and he appeals to folklorists to study expressive culture in relation to environmental and social justice.
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Social Science Research Network, 2016
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Social Science Research Network, 2016
The underlying assumption in this article is that the root of Oromo Nationalism is Oromo Cultural... more The underlying assumption in this article is that the root of Oromo Nationalism is Oromo Cultural Nationalism. Thus the paper aims to relocate the arrested Oromo Nationalism back to its social base by casting light on the narratives of “long-distance nationalism”. To challenge some misconceptions about Oromo Nationalism, I follow an eclectic eticemic approach and integrate various folkloric, socio-cultural, and historical data into interdisciplinary approaches. Based on the available data, I argue that to fight against the political exclusion, economic exploitation, and cultural domination imposed by the neo-Abyssinian force on the Oromo, the bedrock for Oromo Nationalism has been Cultural Resistance. Here I claim that in spite of the longstanding Oromo history, the emergent Oromo Nationalism has been distanced from its social base of Oromummaa (Oromoness) — its guiding principle — and distracted by the protracted long-distance nationalism as by the divisions among Oromo political elites. The two concepts, namely, “long-distance nationalism” and “Oromummaa,” will make the conceptual framework used in this analysis of Oromo Cultural Nationalism.
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Social Science Research Network, 2016
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Social Science Research Network, 2013
This study has two aims to attempt: first, to revisit the historical background of Oromo folklore... more This study has two aims to attempt: first, to revisit the historical background of Oromo folklore research and ethnographic undertakings and, second, using historical and literary approaches to explore the individual (and group) folklore research endeavors with a special reference to the Oromo team of 1880s and ’90s at Monkullo, Eritrea, Northeast Africa. The rationale for focusing on the Monkullo team is the relative massive work of Oromo folklore collection for linguistic endeavors and bible translation by the former slave young Oromo evangelists. The examination of the history of Oromo folklore shows that in the beginning the preoccupation was with collection, which was made not by folklorists or for folklore scholarship. Hence, I posit, the folklore collection made by emancipated former slave young Oromo boys and girls with their mentors at Monkullo, Germany, and Lovedale in South Africa, has a pivotal role in the history of written Oromo language and Oromo folklore research. Towards this end, the archival collection of interviews in Shell’s Oromo Diaspora Narratives and other documents can be used for a broader study of Oromo folklore. The ex-slave young Oromo boy’s, Gutama Tarafo’s four-page essay, which he read to the Lovedale Literary Society in 1897, is a case in point. The essay is dense with primary information about the Oromo world-views, food-ways, traditional costumes, lifestyle, and marriage custom of the time. The core hypothesis of the present study is that Oromo folklore collection which began in the 19th century served as a wellspring, a repository, for other undertakings including lexicography, (bible) translation, and folklore study to the present.
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The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, 2013
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Humanities, 2021
Lake Qooqa in Oromia/Ethiopia started out as a man-made lake back in the 1960s, formed by the dam... more Lake Qooqa in Oromia/Ethiopia started out as a man-made lake back in the 1960s, formed by the damming of the Awash River and other rivers for a practical function, i.e., for hydroelectric power. The lake flooded over the surrounding picturesque landscape, shattered sacred sites and the livelihoods of the Siiba Oromo, and damaged the ecosystem in the area, which was later resuscitated to have an aesthetic function for tourists. Available sources showed that people used the lake for irrigation, washing, fishing, and drinking, while tanneries, flower farms, and manufacturing facilities for soap and plastic products were set up along the banks without enough environmental impact assessment and virtually with no regulations on how to get rid of their effluents, which contained dangerous chemicals such as arsenic, mercury, chromium, lead, and cadmium, giving the lake a blue and green color locally called bulee; hence, the name the “Green Lake”. In the present study, following a string of ...
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The Journal of Pan-African Studies, 2018
This study explores the phenomenon of resentment in Oromo culture by analyzing some texts. Thus, ... more This study explores the phenomenon of resentment in Oromo culture by analyzing some texts. Thus, resentiment (haaloo) is used to indicate a past of oppression and domination, a historical grief of loss, and resentment (quuqqaa) to discuss the political alienation, human rights violation, and the ongoing protest in Oromia. Using folkloric and historical data, the aim of this study is to provide empirical confirmation of the poetics of resentment from an Oromo perspective; to expand our understanding of what makes the people resilient to respond positively to the feeling of resentment in risk and adversity; and to initiate a greater involvement of native researchers to explore the problem from an interdisciplinary perspective, and to bring a nonlinear worldview to cultural resistance and resentment research. Based on personal experience and available data, the study posits that in spite of the adversities and injustices the people suffer, the idea of Oromo resistance is an ethical (ha...
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The Journal of Pan-African Studies, 2018
This study explores the phenomenon of resentment in Oromo culture by analyzing some texts. Thus, ... more This study explores the phenomenon of resentment in Oromo culture by analyzing some texts. Thus, resentiment (haaloo) is used to indicate a past of oppression and domination, a historical grief of loss, and resentment (quuqqaa) to discuss the political alienation, human rights violation, and the ongoing protest in Oromia. Using folkloric and historical data, the aim of this study is to provide empirical confirmation of the poetics of resentment from an Oromo perspective; to expand our understanding of what makes the people resilient to respond positively to the feeling of resentment in risk and adversity; and to initiate a greater involvement of native researchers to explore the problem from an interdisciplinary perspective, and to bring a nonlinear worldview to cultural resistance and resentment research. Based on personal experience and available data, the study posits that in spite of the adversities and injustices the people suffer, the idea of Oromo resistance is an ethical (ha...
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The Journal of Oromo Studies, 2013
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Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2014
Using folkloric and historical approaches, this study posits that, in order to understand the cho... more Using folkloric and historical approaches, this study posits that, in order to understand the choices people make, it is vital to see the world as they see it. In scholarship, I argue, we need to incorporate these perceptions of reality in our interpretations of the actions of those we study. Contrary to the sceptical postmodernist understanding that modernity is a period of decay and a move towards a final collapse and oblivion, traditionalism is revitalized in this article as a strategic primitivism, as a cultural resistance that continues to manifest itself and to relocate the past in the present. In the present study my aim is to examine Salale traditional legal performances as narratives of resistance against domination. Through the three theopolitical counter-discourses identified in this study, that is, guma (blood feud), araara (peace-making), and waadaa (covenant), the interaction between theos (god) and politics is apparent. Hence, the oath ‘God speak to us’ expresses a belief that nagaa (peace) is a presupposed will of God that humanity is privileged and obliged to guard. The study concludes that such oppositional traditional practices constitute the Salale cultural resistance against the mainstream culture and offer more hope for challenging the dominant social discourse and constructing a strong sense of Oromummaa, that is, Oromoness.
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SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013
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Papers by Dr Asafa Dibaba