“God speak to us”: performing power and authority in Salale, Ethiopia

Abstract

Using folkloric and historical approaches, this study posits that, in order to understand the choices people make, it is vital to see the world as they see it. In scholarship, I argue, we need to incorporate these perceptions of reality in our interpretations of the actions of those we study. Contrary to the sceptical postmodernist understanding that modernity is a period of decay and a move towards a final collapse and oblivion, traditionalism is revitalized in this article as a strategic primitivism, as a cultural resistance that continues to manifest itself and to relocate the past in the present. In the present study my aim is to examine Salale traditional legal performances as narratives of resistance against domination. Through the three theopolitical counter-discourses identified in this study, that is, guma (blood feud), araara (peace-making), and waadaa (covenant), the interaction between theos (god) and politics is apparent. Hence, the oath ‘God speak to us’ expresses a belief that nagaa (peace) is a presupposed will of God that humanity is privileged and obliged to guard. The study concludes that such oppositional traditional practices constitute the Salale cultural resistance against the mainstream culture and offer more hope for challenging the dominant social discourse and constructing a strong sense of Oromummaa, that is, Oromoness.

Keywords:

• Salale Oromo
• tradition
• authority
• Waadaaa
• resistance
• Oromummaa

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Dr Carli Coetzee of the JACS for her guidance and thoughtful feedback and to Mr William Padgett and his staff for the valuable final comments.

I would like to thank Prof Beverly Stoeltje of Indiana University for the inception of this project owes to her Graduate Class in Anthropology and Law, 2012 Spring, and to Prof John McDowell for his encouragement. And, last but not least, thanks to my Salale informants who showed me the way to this wellspring of Oromo wisdom.

Notes

1 Other equivalent words for waadaaa among other Oromo ethnic groups include: irbuu and kakuu, as among the Borana and Macca Oromo branches respectively.

2 This is an attempt to approach ‘revivalism’ as a strategic turn towards ‘tradition’, as a ‘conscious act motivated by the need of the group for self-definition … during social upheavals and when cultural boundaries are threatened’ (Siikala and Ulyashev 2011, 20).

3 Stephen Golub (2009, 105) presents the definition of legal empowerment proposed by the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor as ‘the use of legal rights, services, systems, and reform, by and for the disadvantaged populations and often in combination with other activities, to directly alleviate their poverty, improve their influence on government actions and services, or otherwise increase their freedom’. It is believed that this definition is favoured by the commission because it emphasizes, inter alia, that ‘legal empowerment can work through different legal systems (including traditional, administrative or judicial) to address various rights and issues’ (Golub 2009, 105). Hence traditional courts are encouraged since official laws can fail the poor. Golub notes two crucial ways in which law fails the poor: first, the inadequate law reform worsened by elite attorneys' ignoring or rejecting the actual practices of the disadvantaged and left excluded from legal protection. Second, ‘laws that actually embrace and seek to formalize those practices are not properly implemented’ (2009, 107).

4 For the Salale, waadaaa is a morally informed agreement and culturally engraved principle bound by voluntary consent (Informant: Gadise B; Abba Dalacha). It is established by mutual oaths or promises that involve a transcendent higher authority to witness, hence, the traditional judge and other ritual chiefs and headmen. Thus, waadaaa provides a foundation for the institutionalization of relationships based on mutual recognition and common good.

5 Thus at peace, the Salale trust in a divine judge; when in feud, and at war, as one young man told me, if he could not defend his home, literally, his homeland, by the ancestors' bones, he would lose his manhood, he swore! This is didhaa (swear), that to betray one's home is to step on the ancestors' bones. The Salale stories and songs are thus of heroes and heretics, of bandits and pundits, but the Salale also sing of honour to humanity, nature, God, law, and peace. See also the Church of God World Missions' Project currently among the Salale Oromo, Ethiopia: http://www.cogwm.org/upg/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=41&Itemid=59

6 The other two heads of homestead, Sime Adunya and Arado Tullu, repeated after the traditional judge in line with the proceedings, to further consolidate what the judge ruled and to bring the dispute to a conclusion through sound judgements.

7 Of silence and undisputed concession to the waadaaa, I should add the following. Unlike an express covenant between parties where one expresses openly ‘I oblige’, ‘agree’, or, ‘I bind myself to pay so much’, in an implied covenant such as waadaaa of guma, ‘the law intends and implies, though it be not expressed in words’, but accepted in silence (see ‘Covenant’ on Lectric Law Library's Lexicon: http://www.lectlaw.com/def/c323.htm). However, the amount is generally agreed upon and customarily demarcated for human, animal, or similar damages categorized as guma. As silence rules on both parties, the traditional judge overrules the silence and the unheard voices, meticulously turning the grudge and grief into peace and forgiveness. By the Salale epistemology of non-violent resistance, evildoers are not evils but victims. Hence, forgiveness rather than revenge, peace rather than conflict, rule the ontological daily life experience of individuals both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Like among the Hopi Indians, interaction ‘marks the horizon of belonging’ and ‘locates the power’ ‘out there’ as Waaqa (God) rules throughout such serious matter as guma from the onset up to its coda. Silence on the side of the victims when politely asked by the traditional judge ‘eew jedhaa’/please say “yes” to show consent to the “blood price”’ they deliberately keep quiet as this is a norm. Here the refusal to speak is not ‘a failure to communicate’, unlike in Richland's Hopi case (2008, 2). The traditional judge approvingly agrees to their silence as ‘consent’ and he moves on to make decision.

8 The traditional judge speaks often by making direct reference to tradition through terms and phrases such as ‘Caffee/Court’, ‘Seera/Law’, ‘Dhugaa/Justice’, and mainly ‘Waadaaa/Covenant’, which are difficult if not impossible to directly translate into English without risking their embedded contextual meaning(s).

9 Among the Hopi Indians in the US, Justin Richland (2008, 56) observed that ‘the instances of talk about cultural identity and tradition that emerge in … interactions reveal a wide diversity of form, content, and distribution of speaking rights (who can say what, and how, about Hopi tradition)’. Similarly, in the discourse of the Salale Traditional Court discussed in this article, the traditional judge controls the pace of the proceedings to give no chance to any distractive attempt whatsoever and uses repetitions, refrains, norms of salutation, and conversation, and apologetic formulas and repeated references to traditions from the onset through the procedures up to coda. The emphasis is made to achieve a harmonious norm (‘harmony ideology’) and encourage pro-social behaviour called safuu through internalizing it as the everyday means of social control. The assumption is that based on such a voluntary compliance as a democratic orientation, people turn to norms of social control operative in the community against external pressures and internal degeneration. Hence, waadaaa (kakuu)/covenant allows a ritualistic affirmation of community. However, the mainstream liberalist values underpinning the litigative process of the official (federal) law are disruptive of social expectations, and have the potential to exacerbate rather than relieve social tensions. Hence, the reason for banditry/resistance among the Salale Oromo, like many other oppressed peoples in the world, is to defend oneself, one's family, and one's community and safeguard the waadaaa principle as a symbol of sovereignty (see also Duska 2008).

10 At this point the Traditional Judge apologetically spoke to me twice to step back while recording: once at the beginning and again at the end. The main reason, then I thought, was to keep on track the hearing and make decision before performing the ritual, and in part this was true. However, as I talked later to the traditional judge, I was told that no effort had been made to represent the Salale law and (resistance) culture by ethnographers who conducted research in the region and rather the Salale history and life had been left tainted by misappropriations and misrepresentations. The degree to which the Salale Oromo felt exploited by such practices, I inferred, must have left them indifferent and skeptical whether any research work should cease altogether unless it can respond to the specific concerns of the people.

11 It is important to note that the decision was made but the ritual was not performed because the compensation was not finalized until some bureaucratic procedures, like an insurance claim on the mini-bus, were complete. However, the record of the proceeding of the day was taken by a local official. In my assessment, the record revealed rather fussy and unclear data out of the well patterned and structured proceedings and narratives ruled by the meticulous, articulate traditional judge. In this case, it appears that the offenses and ordinances enforced by the local traditional courts are not free from the regional and/or the federal scrutiny. I thought that the presence of the local official at the traditional court and documenting the hearing was to make sure that the traditional proceedings were on a par with laws set out in the Code of Federal Regulations and Regional States.