COMPILED BY LEULSEGED WORKU
The Oromo people, just like the rest of peoples and nationalities in the country, have immense tangible and intangible heritages which have been created over centuries in the interactions of the people with natural and social environments. Such heritages stand as the manifestations of the identity of the people.
The people share similar language, history, political, religious and legal institutions for long. The Oromo people are known for their hospitality, tolerance and wisdom. Oromo culture is based on its authenticity and integrity that is engrained in the lifestyle, landscapes, nature, history and heritage and in its unique hospitality towards each other and their neighbors.
Today, the Oromo people are living widespread in the Horn of Africa along with other nationalities and particularly, in Ethiopia inhabiting in the largest of the ten regional states of the Ethiopian federation, in Oromia, and elsewhere in the country. Oromia is truly a land where one can experience nature and humanity in unity. The Oromo recognize the Gadaa System as part of their cultural heritage and as a contemporary system of governance that functions in concert with the modern state system.
The GadaaSytem is crucial organizing structure among the Oromo people and its social, political, ritual and legal aspects and provides the framework for order and meaningful social life. The Gadaa System is an all-inclusive social system in which every member of the society has specified roles and duties during one’s life course. This begins when sons join the system as members of Gadaa class forty years after their fathers’ ascendance to Gadaa and continues passing from one Gadaa grade to the next every eight years.
Gadaa functions as a system of cooperation, social integration, enforcement of moral conduct and principle of peaceful co-existence with other ethnic groups. Gadaa is an indigenous system of human development on the basis of which the Oromo welfare system is institutionalized, communal wealth is distributed, rules of resource protection and environmental conservation enforced and through which all their aspirations are fulfilled.
An Oromo cannot imagine functioning as a human being or living in a community apart from rules of behavior preserved and protected in the Gadaa System. Even the governing agencies of the Oromiya Regional Government derive from the traditional institutions of the Gadaa System Gadaa egalitarian ethos and communal solidarity.
The knowledge and practices of the Gadaa System have been transmitted from generation to generation in various ways. At a household level, parents transmit orally knowledge about the ethics, practices and rituals of the system and socialize their children into Gadaa culture. Then, after sons joined the Gadaa System and collectively pass through the five grades (Daballe, Junior Game, Senior Game, Kussa, RabaDori).
In the meetings that take place every eight years to re-examine the existing laws, the seniors reiterate them in public and legislate new laws, demonstrate and share knowledge about the operation of the Gadaa System. As a result, when the group enters the Gadaa Grade (Luba), they will have acquired all the necessary knowledge to handle the responsibility of administering the country and arranging and presiding at the celebration of rituals.
In a very simplistic approach, Gadaa is a generation-set system that divides the (male) population of the Oromo into eight grades that follow each other in fixed intervals of eight years. Every male (and derived from their status, females, especially when married) as a member of society has to belong to a generation-set and undergo the proper ritual initiations and in the process learn about the rules and laws connected to it.
In essence, however, the Gadaa system is impressive in its complexity and requires specialist in indigenous knowledge. It is a complex system that governs every political, social, economic, cultural and ritual aspects of the Oromo society since antiquity. As one of its political aspects, Gadaa is a system by which political power is transferred from one AbbaGadaa to other every eight years through competitive and democratic election assuming the form of “consociation” democracy of the modern governance system.
(Source:Oromia Culture & Tourism Bureau)
The Ethiopian Herald October 7/2021
