A book offering the oral chronicle of Boorana people has just been published. Chikage Oba-Smidt’s The Oral Chronicle of the Boorana in southern Ethiopia provides original texts of the oral traditions in the Oromo language, together with the English translations and commentary of the people who live in the semi-arid lands of southern Ethiopia. The author, currently a JSPS Research Fellow at Osaka Prefectural University, Japan, has completed her PHD in social anthropology at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Osaka, and was Assistant Professor at Mekele University. The book, well over 770 pages, is a revised and extended version of her doctoral thesis and translated from Japanese into English by Roger Prior and James Watt and edited by Dirk Bustorf, Eloi Ficquet and Wolbert G. Smidt.
Explaining why she has decided to study the history of the Boorana people, the author wrote that, “I once got hold of a cassette tape that was circulating among the Boorana. Recorded on it were narratives about certain prophets who used to exist among them. The very existence of these prophets were already something that was a mystery to me, and so I translated the tape right away, and as I was doing this I was drawn into the stories about the prophets,” she said. Soon after finishing the translation, she began inquiring about other oral tales concerning the prophets and discovered that, in fact, beyond these stories lay a vast historical narrative that went as far back as the fifteenth century, which she renders compellingly.
Thus for a total of 16 months, from August to December 2007, June 2009 to January 2010, and finally July 2011, the author trekked across huge areas of land to visit forty-six narrators of Boorana history in order to collect this huge set of oral traditions. “In order to find people who could narrate the Boorana history to me, I went around asking anyone –regardless of age or sex- if there was anyone who knew about the argaa-dhageettii of the Boorana. The argaa-dhageettii is a word in the Boorana dialect of the Oromo language that refers to the oral narratives about Boorana customs and history. Whenever I received information about people who were thought to have knowledge argaa-dhageettii, I would trek over to visit them,” she wrote.
The book is divided up into two sections, an oral section which comprises a wide variety of primary source materials, and an engagingly written analysis section in which those primary sources are examined in detail. The book is volume 4 in the series Northeast African History, Orality and Heritage; her tables, list of charts, map and chronological list of leaders of the Gadaa, a chart indicating the clans of the Boorana are also valuable components of a thoughtful consideration the people.
As the author points out, in recent years, as the number of people who can narrate oral traditions covering events prior to the twentieth century decreases in other Oromo societies, the Boorana’s historical narratives could become increasingly important, containing as they do a wealth of information from the fifteenth century to the present day, thus virtually constituting an oral chronicle.
Ezkiel Gebissa of Kettering University says, “In the last two decades, I have closely followed and participated in the scholarly effort to bring to light what was ignored about the Oromo and to refute distortions written into Oromo history. The result has been ruptures and continuities with Ethiopian history as well as revisions and new discoveries of Oromo history. A substantial genre of Oromo history that reflects an Oromo emic perspective now exists. This work by Oba-Smidt makes a notable contribution to this genre.”
“By presenting Boorana oral chronicle as accounts of what was heard and seen, Oba-Smidt has restored history to the Boorana custodians of that knowledge. She has done them proud,” Ezekiel concluded.
↧
The Oral Chronicle of the Boorana
↧