SONGS OF STRUGGLE: THE MUSICAL CONSTRUCTION OF OROMO IDENTITY, HOMELAND, AND MEDIA SOVEREIGNTY IN ETHIOPIA

Abstract

This study explores the nexus between music, media, and collective memory in knowledge, meaning, and place-making within social movements. The dissertation combines digital ethnography and in-depth interviews to qualitatively analyze 100 Oromo political songs from Ethiopia produced and disseminated through electronic media between 1930 and 2018 and shared on YouTube by singers, songwriters, and individual archivists. The primary purpose of this study is to understand how the Oromo people, a largely oral society—lacking a written language, access to formal schooling, and access to traditional media; dispersed across a vast territory; organized through complex clan divisions; and subject to systematic marginalization and cultural erasure—constructs collective identity, imagines a common homeland, expresses refusal, and creates, preserves, and transmits Indigenous knowledge. It does so by examining how music and songs became a form of movement media in a restrictive environment, serving as a platform for collective identity, meaning, knowledge, and shared place since the 1930s. The research proposes an Indigenous theoretical framework centered on the Oromo concept of Argaa Dhageetti as a wholistic way of seeing, hearing, and knowing the world. Argaa is what is seen and experienced in the present, while Dhageetti is the hearing of the wisdom of ancestors and prophesies and predictions about the future. In Oromo cosmology, both time and stories spiral back and forth to create knowing and being. Among the Oromo, learning begins at the hearth fire (sunsumaa in Oromo) and is done through storytelling in songs and other Indigenous media. The dissertation adapts the three pillars of sunsumaa as Argaa Dhageetti, the researcher, and the researched to interpret the songs and stories in their historical and cultural contexts. Furthermore, as signifying agents with interpretive authority, singers and songwriters mobilize collective memory, historical trauma, ancestral myths, and traditions to construct a collective national identity and sonically map a common Oromo homeland. I view the communities constituted by memory work as mnemonic publics, and music as a mnemonic record of physical, structural, and epistemic violence. The songs are interpreted within the social, political, and technological milieus within which the Oromo struggle for freedom and self-determination unfolded across the last three Ethiopian regimes. The findings demonstrate how marginalized social groups utilize Indigenous media, particularly songs, to communicate politics, construct and transmit knowledge, resist epistemic violence, and create discursive areas for oppositional counter-discourses. The analysis shows that in a context where traditional media are weak, unavailable, or tightly controlled by the state, music and songs enable marginalized groups to exercise media sovereignty, defining themselves on their own terms and contesting how they are portrayed in official narratives and the dominant public sphere.