Oromo

The Oromo are the largest ethnic nation in Ethiopia and are also present in northern Kenya, a Cushitic speaking people whose sixteenth century expansion across the Ethiopian highlands and Horn of Africa is documented in Mohammed Hassen's history of the period from 1570 to 1860. That expansion was organized through the gadaa system, an age grade structure that moves every Oromo man through eight year stages of herding, warfare, government and elder counsel, with a Luba grade holding executive power for a single eight year term before handing it on.

Gadaa assemblies, above all the one held at Gumii Gaayoo, made law, judged disputes and could depose an abba gadaa who governed badly, a check UNESCO's 2016 inscription of the system describes as a rare indigenous constitutional order rather than a monarchy. Ethiopian imperial conquest under Menelik II in the late nineteenth century absorbed Oromo lands into a centralized state that suppressed gadaa governance and the Oromo language in public life for a century afterward.

Zemene Mesafint era rivalries, forced settlement and land dispossession under successive Ethiopian governments left a legacy of political grievance that shaped the Oromo protest movements of the 2010s. Gadaa assemblies still meet among the Borana Oromo of southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya, and the practice has drawn organized revival efforts elsewhere since Oromo language rights expanded after 1991.

Waaqeffanna, the indigenous Oromo religion, addresses a single sky god, Waaqa, whom Lambert Bartels' fieldwork among the western Oromo describes as remote, all seeing and morally demanding rather than approached through a pantheon of lesser gods. Ayyaana, a term covering both personal spirit and cosmic order, links Waaqa's will to the fortune of individuals and clans, and offense against the moral order, safuu, is understood to draw Waaqa's displeasure more than ritual failure does. The qallu, a hereditary ritual specialist distinct from gadaa political office, communicates Waaqa's will and blesses the community, while diviners and rainmakers hold narrower roles.

The best known public rite is Irreecha, a thanksgiving festival held at Lake Hora Harsadi near Bishoftu and at other sites, where Oromo gather in white cloth to thank Waaqa for the harvest and the passing of the rainy season, a rite Waaqeffanna practitioners and many Oromo Muslims and Christians alike still observe as a marker of Oromo identity.

Islam and Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity became the majority faiths of most Oromo from the nineteenth century onward, often absorbing Waaqeffanna vocabulary and practice rather than replacing it outright. Waaqeffanna itself, reduced to a minority faith under imperial and later socialist era pressure, has seen organized revival since the 1990s, with formal associations now seeking legal recognition alongside Ethiopia's older religions.