The encyclopedia Wikipedia for instance portrays Irreechaa as Thanksgiving Day celebrating the end of the rainy season in Oromia, where the people observe Irreeechaa to thank the Waqqa or the Creator for the blessings and mercies they received throughout the previous year. However, this portrait of Irreechaa does not fully describe the celebration. With time, the significance of Irreechaa has grown in scope and purpose. It is attended by people with different ethnic backgrounds living throughout Oromia region although the main events take place in the budding Bishoftu town some 47 km south of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
Irreecha is a truly popular event, massive in its size, and attended by people speaking different languages, and having different ethnic backgrounds although the majority of them are Oromos. It is celebrated with songs, dances and various performances in honor of the creator of the water world of the mythic Bishoftu lake where the main events took place.
In the past, hundreds of thousands of people (some put the number of attendees to more than one million) gathered in Bishoftu town days before the actual celebrations take place. Last year, Irreechaa was attended by an estimated 5000 people due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Men and women wear traditional clothes, and adorn themselves with colorful beads and traditional necklaces and other decorations while young and old display equal enthusiasm and energy throughout the days preceding it and on the actual holiday.
Smiles beams on all faces and the joy of making it to the new year energize the crowds. The very fact of being alive on Irreecha day has a tremendously positive impact on the throngs of people crowding the streets, hotels and the vacant spaces of Bishoftu, often dubbed in tourist posters as “the town of the seven lakes”.
The actual day of thanksgiving is a moment of massive outpourings of joy as crowds travel to lake Bishoftu from the center of the towns and gather around the lake that is adorned with green grass and the placid waters of the Hora Arsedi. There songs mix with dancing and ululations as richly adorned women and girls in traditional garbs accompany the elderly who hold handfuls of grasses that are wetted in the water of the lake and then sprinkled on the people standing around the respected traditional elders. Animal sacrifices are performed on the shores of the lake and various rituals are performed before the day ends with blessings from the elders, prayers to the Creator and hopes of enjoying life until the next round of irreechaa next year. Then the crowds return to the centre of the city where the music dance and other traditional performances continue throughout the day and night until the following day.
Lake Bishoftu has its own creation myth. Once upon a time there was a primeval battle going on between the armies of angels and demons in the invisible and boundless space up in the sky. The angels won the fight and threw the demons down toward earth. Upon landing on the dry land, they dug one of the biggest craters in the area that were filled with water. The biggest lake was in fact Lake Bishoftu that gave its name to the town.
The demons continued to live down on the floor of the lake and could not come out of the deep hole. From time to time they vented their anger by claiming the lives of young swimmers. It was also said that sacrifices took place on the shores of the lake to appease the anger of the evil spirits of the lake. This may be taken as a kind of popular interpretation or imagination of Lake Bishoftu’s creation myth.
There are a number of creation myths around the world and water is considered one of the principal elements that went into the creation of life on earth. The other elements are earth fire, wind and so on; Life cannot be imagined without water. “Creation mythologies explain the actual formation of the world by a variety of processes. These processes include the sacrifice of a primal being (for example, a giant or serpent); a struggle between supernatural powers; the blending or coalescing of elements, particularly water and earth.”
Irreecha is also conceived as a festival of the people, as faith in the universal creator and as a celebration of life as it emerges from the tunnels of darkness of the three months of May, June and July and to the sunshine of September and October.
Irreecha is not a religion in the modern sense of the term. Yet it is a faith beyond faiths and a belief transcending all beliefs. It is a kind of religion without written rules and commandments, something that binds people beyond religions.
It would be cliché to say that Ethiopia is the land of all the major religions. Yet none of them fuses all faiths more than Ireecha without referring to religious texts. Irreecha is a kind of oral faith that binds all faiths together and breaks down all linguistic and ethnic barriers. It is neither a religion nor a culture but a kind of collective prayer or blessing to the god that has created the new world of blessings and abundance.
What fascinates us most is that Ireecha is also celebrated by Christians, Muslims, and also by members of other religious denominations. Perhaps this is possible because the rites and rituals of Ireecha are observed without anyone preaching them in public places or writing a set of rules for the faithful. Followers of the major religions base their faith on written texts while those celebrating Ireecha refer to their collective faiths and spirits that grasp the grandeur of the moment. This is because Ireecha binds people beyond faiths, languages and ethnic identity. Ireecha is beyond identity because it appeals to the deepest and most divine instincts of the people.
Ireecha has no language of its own because it speaks in the language of the collective experience. The greatness of Ireecha is that it does not appeal to human reason but to human spirit, the fundamental instincts of worshipping the beauties of life, fertility and continuity. Yet Irreecha is not the ‘god of fertility’ in the sense that the ancient Greeks identified some of their gods.
The celebrations reflect collectivity, fusion, naturalness and togetherness. Water is the great natural purifier and Irreecha is a kind of purifier of both body and spirit. It fills people’s spiritual spaces with love, happiness, compassion and hope. Water has no form of its own but takes the forms of our spiritual spaces and does the work of purification through our souls. Irreecha is such a moment of ecstasy and prayer and epiphany. It is the embodiment of hope, the glue that binds us together as nothing else but as human beings irrespective of the languages we speak, the gods we worship and the waters we drink and bath in. As such Irreecha has no specific identity of its own but assumes the identity of people sharing the same spiritual and temporal space.
Irreecha may be born in a specific geographic locality; but it has no definite linguistic, cultural or spiritual boundary. It is a free space where free spirits come together to worship the god that has made all these wonderful things possible, marvel in his wonderful creations, for giving us life that is renewed every year and assumes new dimensions.
As such, Irreecha belongs to all people; believers and non-believers alike, because it does not bind them to their birth places, their languages or their ethnic identities. Irreecha is beyond language and ethnicity and beyond territory or geography. It is both a religion and not a religion, a belief and a non-belief. It is fluid and not rigid or dogmatic and without rigorous rules or hierarchies and organizations.
We can thus divide Irrecha celebrations into two main phases. The first phase may be the emergence of Irreecha as a popular event probably growing out of the village confines into the wider world. The second phase may be the time since its emergence as a major public event until the modern times when Irreecha ceased to be an isolated, marginalized and smaller event and grew into a mass popular festival without spiritual boundaries or territorial limitations and without linguistic barriers or ethnic manifestations.
As it grew with time, Irreechaaa also underwent inevitable changes. Twenty years ago, Irreechaa was smaller in attendance and popularity, In the recent past, it became a massively popular tourist attraction drawing thousands of foreigners to the event. The town of Bishoftu and its residents benefitted from the positive economic impacts of foreign visitors. Now, these positive signs are not visible as the pandemic has made it impossible for tourists to travel to the place and share this once- in- a- lifetime experience.
Irreecha has even outgrown its original boundaries as a local festival of thanksgiving and had started to manifest its inherent potentials as a heritage worthy of international attention. Irreechaa, with the democratic nature of the Gaddaa system of self-rule unique to the Oromo people are some of the most obvious contributions the Ethiopian people have made to global cultural or anthropological heritages. Many studies have been conducted tracing the origins and development of public rituals like Irreechaa that have shaped the lives, outlooks and spiritual nature of many past and present generations.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD OCTOBER 1/2021
