Waaqeffanna

Waaqeffanna is unusual among the traditional religions of the region in how firmly it holds to one god. Waaqa is the sky and is the whole of the divine, not the head of a pantheon; there is no second god, no image, and no myth of a divine family. Prayer is direct, made standing with the palms up, often at first light, and Waaqa is addressed as the one who sees. Because there is no image and no temple, the religion has left comparatively little for archaeology to find, and most of what is known about its older forms comes from the language and from the institutions that carried it.

The concept that keeps the one god from being remote is ayyaana. An ayyaana is the divine quality by which Waaqa is present in something particular, and Oromo speech attaches ayyaana to rivers, to mountains, to a place, to a gadaa generation and to a person. Lambert Bartels, working among the western Oromo, described it as the way the one god is refracted rather than divided. To describe the ayyaana as spirits, and then to describe Waaqeffanna as polytheistic, is to mistake the grammar of the religion for a pantheon.

Safuu is the other half. It is the moral order understood as distance, the principle that things which are different ought to be kept in their proper relation to one another and not collapsed together. A person keeps safuu with their parents, with the land, with the dead, and with Waaqa. Wrongdoing in this system is less a matter of breaking a rule than of failing to hold a distinction that should have been held, and the language of pollution and of setting things right again follows from that. It gives the tradition an ethics that does not depend on a list of commandments and does not need a judgement after death to make sense of itself.

What makes Waaqeffanna hard to separate from Oromo public life is gadaa. The system sorts men into generation classes that move together through a fixed sequence of grades, each with its own duties, and it transfers political and ritual authority from one class to the next at set intervals in a ceremony that has been performed for centuries. The men holding office at the top of the cycle legislate, judge and lead ritual for their term and then hand over. It is a religious institution and a constitutional one at the same time, which is why UNESCO inscribed it in 2016 as an indigenous democratic socio-political system rather than as a rite.

The qaalluu is the religious office proper. A qaalluu is a ritual leader of hereditary standing whose shrine is a place of pilgrimage and arbitration, and whose blessing carries weight in matters gadaa does not settle. Under the imperial and later administrations the office was pressured and in places reduced to a formality.

Irreecha is the tradition at its most visible. It is a thanksgiving, held as the rains end, at running or standing water; the best known gathering is at Hora Arsadi in Bishoftu, though it is kept at many waters and on mountains. Participants carry fresh grass and flowers to the water, give thanks to Waaqa for having brought them through the season, and ask for the one to come. Since the early 1990s the festival has drawn very large crowds, and published attendance figures vary so widely that the atlas records them as contested rather than repeating any of them. Irreecha has also become political ground: in 2016 a confrontation between security forces and the crowd at Bishoftu ended in a lethal stampede, an event that is now part of what the festival means to many of the people who attend it.