A History of Written Oromo Literature to 1991

Oromo belongs to the Cushitic language family. They have a single common mother tongue and form the largest homogenous culture sharing common descent, history and language in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. Nevertheless, they were denied any official status to exercise, develop and promote their culture, language and even to assert their identities under the past consecutive Ethiopian emperors. This was done for the purpose of Amharization policy under one culture, religion, language and minority dominated nationality. Any promotion done on the language was strictly inspected and forbidden in Ethiopia.Despite the efforts made by foreigners, religious men and Oromo scholars to study and develop it.However, these religious men and the Oromo scholars attempted to discover scripts suited for the writing of Afaan Oromo, collect a few words and develop sentences structures. It was through such distressing situation that, Afaan Oromo has managed to retain its coherence with insignificant dialectical limitation until it becomes the language of books, news papers, broadcasts, music, dramas, administration and instructional medias in schools.

Autorentext

Tesfaye Tolessa was born at Arjo, Wallagga in 1969 from a farming family. He studied History for his B.A degree at Bahir Dar University and M.A degree at Addis Ababa University. He published an article entitled "A History of Oromo Language Mass Media to 1991". Now, he is one of the foremost lecturers of history at Wallagga University.