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The Oromo people have their own unique understanding of our world.
Like all known ancient cultures, the Oromo people have their own myths relating to creation. The Babylonians, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Hebrews, and many others had their own transcendental feelings about the cosmos in which they lived. All ascribed the genesis of the world to a supernatural cause.
In the beginning was chaos and abyss, the Greek myth ran. Out of the abyss emerged three primordial elements: the earth, a cave-like space under the earth, and Eros; from these came the sky. The earth and the sky mated, and their union produced the gods, the Titans. Prometheus, son of Zeus, created men from clay in the image of the gods; another son of Zeus created a woman of great beauty, Pandora. In the Hebrew tradition, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Yahweh created the first man in his own image from dust and breathed into his nostril the breath of life, and the first woman from Adam’s ribs.
For the Oromo fathers of the distant past, merely perceiving the external world did not satisfy their curiosity about the essence of it. They thus constructed a ‘Concept’ of God in order to be able to categorize and order the multitude of things they encountered. In the beginning was the Concept, and the Concept was with Man, and the Concept was God.
The Concept was a device to center our thought, the beginning of wisdom, in the psychological sense. Epistemologically, the Concept is regarded as the first principle, the axiom. In the realm of faith, it is an entity with its own divine agency. In other words, the Concept allowed them to impose form and meaning on a world that otherwise had appeared as formless and meaningless chaos.
The Oromo invented the Concept based on their own collective reason, guided and shaped by their tradition of reconciling faith and reason. For the Oromo, faith and reason are not epistemological opposites. The Oromo do not see faith as coming into existence without reason, or reason standing without the complementary role of faith. The synthesizing approach has helped the Oromo to never wildly oscillate in the past between faith and reason.
For the Hebrews, it was Yahweh; for the ancient Greeks, it was Zeus and Prometheus; the Babylonians had Marduk as God predating the act of actual creation. For the Oromo, it was Waaqaa. Waaqaa is a monotheistic Deity, Waaqaa Tokkicha. Although worshipping Waaqaa was an ancient tradition among the Cushitic-speaking peoples of northeast Africa, it seems to have the strongest hold on the Oromo.
The conception of ‘one God’ does not entail a negative opinion about other belief systems. It does not stand for the proposition that “your God is not a good [one], unless it is the same as my God.” It stands for the single supreme principle and primary cause of the universe. Waaqaa represented both transcendence and immanence.
In the Oromo tradition, God is a Black Deity, Waaqaa Gurracha. The notion of blackness in the Oromo theogonic myth does not refer to race. Rather, it denotes the unfathomable mystery of the created universe, as well as the ineffable darkness that preceded it. Just like the so-called world religions, Waaqaa Gurracha divided the world of phenomenon without ambiguities and offered a powerful explanatory and predictive paradigm. It provided a logical way of ascribing a source to what is beyond all understanding.
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The notion of unfathomability and the notion of the non-exclusivity of Waaqaa allows for a variety of interpretation of the “what” and “how” of the universe. Besides, there is no single theological publication on the Oromo religion, Waaqeffannaa. It is thus not uncommon to see the infusion of ideas and structures of expressions from the Abrahamic religions into the recounting of the symbols and deeds of Waaqaa. The notion of blackness, however, precludes the possibility, otherwise common practice, of assigning gender to Waaqaa.
Waaqaa Gurracha is believed to reside and be manifested in all elements and aspects of creation through ayyaana, the energy that determines the essence, development, expression, and destiny of things and beings created. The ayyaana in each human person is envisioned to lay the ‘spiritual’ foundation upon which human beings can coexist peacefully and resist destruction of self as well as persecution of another. The Concept is within you. Ayyaana confers dignity on each and all persons.
Waaqaa Gurracha (and/or Waaqaa Tokkicha) of the Oromo is not a synthesis of other religious myths. Neither does the religion of Waaqeffannaa pass judgment on the validity, equality, historicity, or truthfulness of other religions. The Oromo tradition recognizes and respects the fact that different religions suit different aspirants, times, and places.
The Oromo were not converted toward the worship of a single God. Neither did God reveal himself to the Oromo as the Hebrews asserted “He” had done to them. The Oromo had decided early on to refrain from employing revelation as a way of establishing a relationship between transcendence and immanence.
Reverend Martial De Salviac of France wrote venerably in 1901 about the Oromo faith in Waaqaa:
The Oromo abhor idolatry. Even more, they have not raised any temple to Waqaa, nor to awulia; they repudiate all anthropomorphic representation of the Divinity…their sacrifices are always innocent, even the ones which we see to sanctify the cradle of humanity, that is to say, the first of the fields and the primes of the herd. They ask only of the giants of the forest or the most beautiful neighboring tree of their village to shade, with its luxuriant trees, their prayers, and their immolations.”
Another Frenchman, a lay apostle, Antoine d’Abbadie, who visited Oromo country on a religious mission in the first part of the 19th century, asked an Oromo local leader, “If I were to bring one of my countrymen to you to bless and to teach you the Christian religion, how would you find it?” The Oromo leader responded in the name of the elders who made up his council, “We will have them stay in our homes; we will defend [them] with our spears…I will give [them] good land, houses and servants, under one condition – [they] teach us and bless us.” Reverend De Salviac testified that the Oromo have never expelled their missionaries.
Similarly, Islam was spread in Oromo country by Ulama and Islamic education. Abba Jiffar, an Oromo Muslim leader, made an analogous response to the question of welcoming foreigners: “I will give a house and a piece of land to all foreigners who know how to read and write on condition that they believe in only one God.”
The Oromo have also been making a deliberate effort to break externally introduced taboos and beliefs that may undermine the unity and peaceful coexistence of the various religious communities. For example, Oromo political organizations and civil associations start their meetings with prayers and blessings led by elders irrespective of their religion. The Macha-Tuulama Association, at one of its grand gatherings in the 1970s, at Itayya, in the region of Arsi, in Oromo country, fed its members meat from bullocks that were slaughtered, some by Christians and some by Muslims. “Muslim meat” was no longer “impure,” and “Christian meat” was no longer “not halal.” The Oromo Identity demonstrated its trans-religious appeal. ‘Oromoness’ superseded religion.
The Oromo do not hold that “Blessed are those who believe without seeing.” This is because the Oromo are not willing to discard such central concepts in Oromo thought as causation, evidence, proof, and the laws of nature. The Oromo never sought refuge in an arbitrary dictation of authority, divine or otherwise, until the coming into contact with the Abrahamic traditions.
In the Oromo tradition, Human-God relationships were to be established by identifying the laws of creation (natural law, seera uumamaa) and subordinate social laws (man-made laws, seera namaa). The Oromo derive their moral philosophy (safuu) and customs and laws (aadaa-seera) from divine laws, seera Waaqaa, through empirical observation and deductive and inductive reasoning. Whether it is God, Allah, or Waaqaa, the Word or the Concept is to be accepted by a personal and existential decision made in faith.
The Oromo were never obsessed with miracles, exaltation of the other world at the expense of the worldly, or about the divine vengeance. As such, the Oromo Civilization does not provide a pasture to extremists of all stripes who wait “the rupture.” Instead, the Civilization promotes the idea that virtuous deeds are rewarded, and sins are punished here while the subject is alive.
The Oromo cosmogonic myth identifies water as the primary substance out of which Waaqaa shaped the universe. The primordial water, Walaabu, is the “shared matter out of which everything arises.” This cosmogonic myth has played a foundational role in the articulation of the Oromo system of knowledge and in their vision of the world.
The historical settlement pattern of the Oromo as well as their politico-religious centers clearly indicate the Oromo’s desire be in close proximity to the source of life. The concept of water as a life force pervades many ancient creation mythologies. For example, in the Hebrew mythology, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and earth…And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Riverine civilizations of the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamia, and China shared similar perceptions of the vital importance of water.
The Oromo Civilization is a riverine one that made use of the perennial water supply from lakes, rivers, creeks, and streams. This probably explains the reason for the Oromo having never suffered from a “schizophrenia of the soul.” For the Oromo, water is a central, critical force to which they never allowed human impediment. As hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, or agriculturalists, they hold water sacred and protected it with life. Considering the now established fact that our body, like the surface of the earth, is more than go percent water, that life first emerged first in water, the incorporation of water in the Oromo myth creation, without the benefit of modern science, demonstrates the collective intelligence of the people.
One explanation for water being common across the mythologies of various cultures is the spread of the myth by diffusion from an ancient center, East Africa, and moving along the shores of the Indian Ocean to Australia and South China before expanding to Eurasia and the Americas some 5,000 years ago. (Whether the Oromo are the ‘East Africa’ originators of the myth is an intriguing thought and a daunting but rewarding intellectual project for the inspired.) Of course, some myths have an extremely limited geographical distribution while others, like that of the Hebrew’s, have a very wide distribution. The distribution of myths is a function of practicality and expediency, and not of the inherent validity of the myth.
Myths have meant different things at various times to different peoples. For some, myths are euhemeristic and aetiological account of particular experiences. For others, they are imaginative reporting of imaginary events.
The Oromo were wise before their time. Racists might scoff at the Oromo sapience. The Ethiopian intellectual tradition with its characteristically cynical reasoning and negative hypothesis would find it impossible to perceive the novelty of Oromo achievement. In fact, some may even fulfil the urge to raise hell in order to bleach it out.
Regardless of the divergence in views, myths invest everyday life with meaning for ancient people. Myths are vehicles of meaning. They also serve as allegorical vehicles for intellectual thought. They speak to our universal experience. As such, myths seem to have had special congeniality to the human mind.
The Oromo mythology express the particular experiences of the Oromo people. Yet, it contains kernels of truth about human experience that transcend space and time. Faith and reason are the generators of the Oromo Civilization. The Oromo concept of Waaqaa Gurracha provides a logical model to look into the transcendent mystery.
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This is the author’s viewpoint. However, Ethiopia Insight will correct clear factual errors.
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