USING ETYMOLOGY AS AN IMPLEMENT OF SUBJUGATING “OTHERS”: RICHARD PANKHURST’S HISTORIOGRAPHY AS AN EXAMPLE Dereje Tadesse Birbirso (PhD) 1 College of Social Science and Humanities Haramaya University, Ethiopia Email: dttadesse@yahoo.com Abstract Abyssinianist historiography is notorious not only for its hypostatization, anachronism and de-Africanization of everything that is of Ancient Black African civilization but also that it leaves no stone unturned to make it so difficult and impossible for us to trace our (pre)history. Richard Pankhurst is one of the controversial Abbyssinianist historians known not only for their prolificacy but also fabrication of their own version of weird Ethiopian history. The aim of this paper is to critically analyze and show how Pankhurst uses etymology to dismantle and outsource the plausibility structure of the autochthonous people. The main focus is his article ‘Early History of Ethiopian HorseNames’, short but prototypical of his historiography depicting his representation (of Ethiopia), style, attitude and full-life scholarship. A Deconstructivist Locational Model was adopted as a guiding evolutionary social science perspective. Activity Theory was adopted as meta-theoretical framework. Critical Discourse Analysis method was adopted with the intention to unraveling and explicating fallacies underlying deep Pankhurst’s historiography. Explanations of the generative mechanisms, motivations and values of his Abbyssinianist scholarship are also presented. Finally, questions for further research on the Abyssinianist Model of ‘history’ are indicated for those interested in alternative 21st century perspective for Ethiopian Studies. INTRODUCTION Abyssinianism ‘scholarship’, at large, or ‘historiography’, in particular, designates two groups that can be seen as two faces of the same coin. One group claims that in the 4th A.D, unspecified tribes from Babylon or South Arabia, speaking Sabaean, Agazi, Ge’ez, or etc. (there is no agreement over this) cruised over the Red Sea and made their settlement at present day northern Ethiopia making Axum the capital of their “Abyssinia”. No sooner had they made their Ge’ez a lingua franca (some say after Greek lost that status in the 6th century AD) of Axumite than it disemerged or went extinct fortunately, however, giving birth two daughters, namely Tigriňňa (first-born in 11th century AD and spoken both in present day Tigiray and in the now independent country, formerly colony of Ethiopia, of Eritrea) and Amhariňňa (Jones & Morneo 1935; Ullendorff 1960; 1 Originally, presented on Annual Critical Reflection Conference of the College of Social Science and Humanities, Haramaya University, September 20, 2011. © Dereje Tadesse Birbirso. Anyone can use this with due acknowledgement. Marcus 1994). Another group claims the “re-establishment” or “establishment” (there is no agreement again) in the 13th century of the kingdom of the Biblical Solomonic Dynasty that mutated into a Kingdom of Abyssinia of Amhara and Tigire, a Christian island surrounded by permanent and bitter enemies, i.e., heathen “Pagan Gallas” and “Mohammedan Islam”. With the intention of civilizing the enemies, that enigmatic God-Chosen Island was militarily armed and diplomatically supported by colonial Christian Europe and Near East, marched southwards and after half a century, successfully exterminated and subjected and enslaved the survivals around 1900. Yet, changed her name to “Ethiopia”, she is still mutating herself as ever a “State at the Crossroads” (Lata 1999). Both groups agree that the Classical Axumite civilization and the “civilization” of the “modern” Ethiopia have been but due to that super-race that cruised over the Red Sea and settled among “inferior” Black Africans, being Non-Black themselves. Also, both leave no stone unturned to not only hypostatizee and deAfricanize everything that is of Ancient Black African civilization, but to also make it so difficult and impossible for us to trace our history. Professor Richard Pankhurst is an upshot, key engineer and, perhaps, one of the last orts of the above Abyssinianist groups. He was a prolific writer on Abyssinian ‘history’ throughout the second half of the 20th century. He had authored various ‘historical’ books, book chapters and journal articles which won him many awards from Ethiopian institutions, groups and friends. All his works had one central purpose, namely so that the Abyssinianist dogma perpetuates into the third millennium A.D., too. The target of this paper is his journal article “The Early History of Ethiopian Horse-Names”, published in the 1989 edition of Paideuma, 35, I: 97-206. In this article he discusses the traditional Ethiopian custom of calling chiefs, warriors and other persons of status after the names of the horses they rode. He claims that it is a supplement to a custom examined two decades before his by a strange “Ethiopian scholar” he called “Mahtämä Sellase Wäldä Mäsqäl” (Pankhurst 1989: 197). Unlike the latter, who relied “primarily on oral 2 tradition”, Pankhurst claims that his is based on “written record of earlier times” (Pankhurst 1989: 197). Nevertheless, it should be noted from outset that this topic is too redundant and well explained by Cerulli (1922), who has adequately discussed about the pivotal and age-old practice of Oromo horse naming, horse related wisdom literature, the role and skills of breeding and using horses for war (See Figure 4). In the 19th century, Wakefield (Ravenstein & Wakefield 1884) quoted 16th century travelers as well as witnessed for himself that: In war they [the Oromo] dodge the spears of their enemies by hanging down the off-side of the horse. They hunt on horseback, and when fortunate enough to kill a lion, zebra, or giraffe, they hang the mane of the slain beast as a trophy round their horse’s neck (Ravenstein & Wakefield 1884: 265). In the last quarter of the 19th century, Father Martial de Salviac described the extraordinary skills of Oromo horsemen that disbanded the Italian colonizer army at Adwa (de Salviac 2005[1901]: 319-323). The Oromo have especial and ancient reverence, ritual and law of horse as formulated by Makko Billii the Gada System designer (see Gidada 2006; Baxter 1991). Dr. Gidada (2006: 30-35) has documented the saga of Makko Billii, whom Antonio d’Abbadie, one of the early (1830s) European Missionary scholars who lived with, especially, the Wallagga Mačč’a Oromo, studied and produced countless and voluminous books, articles and lectures (d’Abbadie 1890 and unpublished or whose publication dates are unknown) described as “African Lycurgus” (Werner 1914b: 263; Triulzi 1990: 319). 2 Grant registered that “the most fundamental artistic representation on Oromo memorial grave art is the stylized figure of the deceased, often mounted on a white horse” (Grant 2006: 16). Even Oromo oral historians tell us that the Oromo used to bury their horses of their (great) men alongside the tombs of the owners quite similar to what Arkell (1955: 123-124) shows us: “the Nubian kings 2 Lycurgus (of Athens), said to have lived about 396-325 statesman, and orator. 3 B. C., was an Athenian financier, of the Kush” who “made fetishes out of horses” and, even, “buried” their horses “alongside the royal families”. PROBLEMS AND QUESTIONS Professor Ephraim Isaac, a professor of Semitic at Harvard University, recently wrote an important online short essay in which he regretted: ‘Unfortunately, not on account of their own fault, our young people are not up to date on the study of ancient languages and ancient world history, particularly their own. On the contrary, some half-baked foreign experts of Ethiopia and political philosophy condition them’ (Isaac 2013). One among these cooks is notably Richard Pankhrust, active and prolific since 1950s. Why does he re-write history of Ethiosemitic horse names and horsemen? Is there any real problem—any absence, material or conceptual? Any social evil to be absented? Obviously, any logical mind problematizes and researches to remove a socially undesirable phenomenon. Pankhurst’s consistently etymology and ethnology based historiography makes him stand unique among European Ethiosemitic writers. Etymology is the study of the origins and history of the form and meaning of words. In so far as it derives its methods from linguistics, especially semantics, it is a branch of historical linguistics (Crystal 2008). Though he rarely acknowledges the Cushitic etymons of Semitic words/concepts, Pankhurst uses comparative Semitic-Cushitic etymology to get across his argumentations as reflected in his various works. In other words, he exploits undialogical style of historiography: authoritatively speaks for others; produces impression of consensus; categorical claims without empirical evidence; exclusionary of other peoples’ voices/identity/history; unresolved issues are raised but assumed facts or left implicit, and so forth. For this reason, Pankhurst is a ‘hero’ to some section of Ethiopians, especially his (former) Addis Ababa University students of Abyssinianist ideology pursued by Amharic-Tigre ethnic groups and followers of Ethiopian Orthodox Church monastic teachings. 4 For others, perhaps larger section, Pankhurst is implausible, propagandist writer rather than academics, particularly to Oromo-Cush students and scholars who are not part of the mainstream Abyssinianist, monastic discourses. Unlike the former, this group identify themselves as part and parcel of the autochthonous Black Africans who later peopled Asia and beyond. Though marginalized or little discussed by the former groups, the Oromo-Cush people and scholars consider themselves as the engineers of the Ancient Cushitic Civilization, precisely as articulated by liberal historians of ancient history (e.g., Houston 1926) albeit only few or none of them know these international historians for two reasons. Firstly, their works are off publications. Secondly, even if they would manage to enter Ethiopia, they are put out of sight or destroyed by conservative Abyssinianist agents. Only histories of Abyssinian ecclesiastic, theocratic, hagiographic texts composed by foreigners like Pankhurst or, under their supervision, by local monks are indoctrinated in schools with some ‘refresher’ texts on wars of chiefdoms and ‘king of kings’. All in all, Abyssiniansts appear they never sleep if peace, prosperity, love, truth, pluralism, human or cultural freedom reins in the world. From their perspectives, none but Orthodox Christianity or an Ethiosemitic man or language is born to lead Ethiopia or Africa and that must be on the dead body of the “other” man, religion or culture. The aim of this paper is to critically analyze Pankhurst’s ‘Early History of Ethiopian Horse-Names’, a piece of work which is not only a prototypical of his infamous style, mode of thought, but also a prototype of Abyssinianist ‘historians’’ weird paradigm. Though the article is the central focus, other works of himself and his cliques’ are also referred to. From cultural-historical and etymological perspectives, his ‘Early Horse-Names’ is subjected to critical scrutiny: 1. How does Pankhurst present his case and why does he re-vitalize the early history of Ethiopian horse-names? 2. What form of scientific, if any, or ideological agenda underlies his work? How does he use etymology as a tool and to what end? 5 3. What elements of Black Ethio-African social history are included or excluded, and which included elements are most salient? 4. How are the contemporary Ethiopian peoples represented? Who are activated (as subjects)? Passivated (as objects)? Who are identificated/classified as ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘ours’, ‘mine’ and who as ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘others’? It is believed that this explanatory critique is significant for it reveals the generative mechanisms of Pankhurstian scholarship—the historical ground, motivation, value and the horizon. It would also unearth the anomalies that underlie Pankhurstian arguments, how and why he holds them and what produces them. More importantly, alternative resources or data and alternative angles or perspectives would be unveiled in the context of Ancient, Classical and Medieval ‘Ethiopia’, going beyond his parochial historiography. The analysis shall reveal significant insights into the nexus between etymology and ideology. THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS THE LOCATIONAL THEORETICAL MODEL A deconstructivist analytical framework (a form of textual-discoursal and philosophical analysis advanced by Jacques Derrida and that is concerned with uncovering strains and contradictions within arguments) is positionally and purposefully adopted. The general guiding approach adopted is the Locational Theoretical Model of history of philosophy and civilization advanced by Africologists (James 1954; Diop 1986 1975; Bekerie 1997; Asante 1992, 1994). According to this Model Africa not only the origin of world’s civilization, theology, philosophy, science, writing system but is also that of the so-called Classical Greco-Roman ones, albeit the general Indo-Europeanist or Eurocentric groups and the few Ethiosemitic circles vehemently deny this. They rather argue the reverse; that is Euroasian origin of Africa’s everything, including spears and domestic animals and crops. African myths, philosophy, history, cultural artefacts and material culture are “concerned with African people being subjects of 6 historical and social experiences rather than objects in the margins in European experiences” (Asante 1992: 40). Or, in Bekerie’s words they are “expressions” of “African people… of their cultural depth and identity and their sense of connectedness to the people of the world” (Bekerie 1997: 12). The Locational Model is a response to Eurocentric hegemonic model of epistemology whose fallacious features are decentering, dislocating, decoupling, and alienating the autochthonous Black Africans, who should have been praised, instead, as makers of history and civilization for themselves and the whole world. To this deconstructivist perspective, the activity theory built on Lev Vygotskian sociocultural theory must be added. Accordingly: [A]ctivity theory maintains that human activity is fundamentally artifactmediated and goal-oriented…people do not function individually or independently of others, but they mediate and are mediated by the social relationships they have with others….they pursue their goals through the use of culturally constructed physical and symbolic artifacts….human cognition is situated in and develops through activities unique to the societies in which they have been constructed during their collective histories (Johnson 2009: 78) . Johnson (ibid: 78-79) summarizes this “important explanatory tool for understanding any activity system”; that, every component of the activity system is generated, emerge and become stabilized through the community’s sociocultural history: the division of labor (who does what, how activities get done, and who holds power or status), the rules or social institutions ritualized through the evolutionary history, the artifacts (physical and symbolic, signs and rock arts), the object (is the “problem space”) and the outcome (could be perpetuation and/or revision of the whole system). The implication is the dialectical relationship of each component, that the social institutions/rules (e.g., the formal-semantic structures of horse description, categorization, or of horse symbolisms, rituals, laws), of the community codifies and is as much codified in the mediating artifacts (e.g., horse implements such as charms, saddle, stall), the objects (e.g., horse use, cultivation), the outcomes or divisions of labor (e.g., horse experts, horsekeeper, syce) in accordance to the sociocultural history of 7 the community, i.e., in all the shared formal (linguistic, institutional, cultural), symbolic (semiotic, literary, metaphoric), embodied (para- and extra-linguistic actions, arrangements, etc) and actional and cultural-material (cultural objects, insignia, simulacra, etc) constructions of the community. Withous such shared and sytematised social fabrics, it is impossible for a society to transmit or communicate a coherent social organizations, history, and identity. Figure 1: Human Activity System (Engeström 1987 cited in Johnson 2009: 78) Finally, in order to critically analyze, below, Pankhurst’s Abyssinianist historiography, besides the Locational Model of evolutionary social science and Activity Theory meta-theoretical framework, the Critical Discourse Analysis method advanced notably by Norman Fairclough (Fairclough 1992, 2003) is adopted to expose the hidden things (anomalies, obfuscations, values, etc.,) underlying his text ‘History of Ethiopian Horse Names’. In short, this method is summarized by Batstone: Critical Discourse Analysts seek to reveal how texts are constructed so that particular (and potentially indoctrinating) perspectives can be expressed delicately and covertly; because they are covert, they are elusive of direct challenge, facilitating what Kress calls the ‘retreat into mystification and impersonality’ (Batstone 1995: 198-199). ETYMOLOGY AND THE QUESTION OF ETHIO-“SEMITIC” In the first place, the traditional wisdom that there is a family of languages, separately from Cushitic, so-called Ethio-“Semitic” languages/people in Black Horn of Africa (in its narrower sense of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Djibouti) is more unconditionally swallowed than it is subjected to critical scrutiny. According 8 to the fable, in the 4th A.D, unspecified tribes made their settlement at Axum after they cruised over the Red Sea from their original home country somewhere in South Arabic (claimed by some white miseducators like Richard Pankhurst, Edward Ullendorff, etc.,) or somewhere from Babylonia or Mesopotamia area (absurdly claimed by their local miseducated characters, e.g., Sergew HableSelassie, Taddesse Tamrat, Tekle-Tsadik Mekuria from monastic education and college graduates like Merid W. Aregay, etc.). It must be understood that the so-called Ethio-“Semitic” is a transplantation of the racist Aryan Model of comparative linguistics into the heart of Black Africa. Fabricated 1840s, the brewing stage of European racist-cum-colonialist ‘epistemology’, the central dogma was that European languages/people are selfcontained emergent property and have no any ‘contaminative’ history with the rest of Black World; if at all they had, it must be with “Iranian” and “northern Indian” or, preferably, with “dead” languages (e.g., Hittite, Classical Greek and Latin). This myth was explicated by Merritt Ruhlen, one of the leading evolutionary/genetic linguists: … the central myth of twentieth-century historical linguistics [that] has been the belief that the comparative method is limited to a relatively short time depth—usually put at 5,000–10,000 years—beyond which all trace of genetic affinity has been erased by unrelenting waves of semantic and phonological change….What exactly are these guesses based on? And why do such “guesses” range from 3,000–10,000 years, and not, say 40,000–50,000 years?...The main reason, I believe, is the presumed age of the Indo-European family itself, which has traditionally been put very close to these stated limits of the validity of comparative linguistics. 3 This unfounded myth is used by the Indo-European colonial linguists to intransigently claim ‘the splendid isolation’ of the modern Indo-European languages—that Indo-Europeans have no any relations with the Black World, particularly Africans. 3 Ruhlen, Merritt (nd.) ‘Amerind MALIQ’A ‘Swallow, Throat’ and Its Origin in the Old World’, p. 243. This is a book chapter, Chapter 11, pp. 242-251 (Available at: www.merrittruhlen.com). 9 Unfortunately, the Aryan myth was copied and pasted to African Languages Classification by colonial linguists like Joseph Greenberg and his predecessors by means of the same two strategy, namely, “splendid isolation” of the language(s) of the ‘less’ dark from the ‘more’ dark and the ‘most’ dark people or, if this is not too clever enough and, hence, susceptible to sooner and easy challenge, by hypostatizing “dead” (e.g., Ge’ez, Meroitic, Egyptian, Ancient Hebrew, etc.). So much so, an unspecified Abyssinianist character of 16th century by the name “Hiob Ludolf” 4 (see Fig.3 F) fabricated, for first time, the myth of South Arabic origin of ‘Abyssinians’ (Crawfurd 1868). Crawfurd discusses: This theory [that Abyssinia was without inhabitants until peopled by Arabs from the Asiatic coast of the Red Sea] was started by [this] learned and laborious German scholar of the seventeenth century, who had not himself visited Abyssinia, but who had studied its languages with the help of a native Abyssinian (Crawfurd 1868: 302). Iterating the question “Who, then, are the Abyssinians, and the Gallas, and others, if these be of the same cognate race?”, Crawfurd responded: “I have myself no doubt that, when the indispensable inquiry is made, they will be found to be an indigenous race, as much aboriginal to the country as are Chinese to China, Hindus to Hindustan, or Australians to Australia” (Crawfurd 1868: 302). Crawfurd explicates that “Ludolf’s hypothesis is founded on the belief, that the languages of Abyssinia are formed in the same manner as the Arabic, and that they contain many Arabic words, while the Abyssinians in person have much likeness to Arabians” (Crawfurd 1868: 302). Crawfurd adds: There is no doubt, however, but that the two chief spoken languages of the Abyssinians contain a considerable number of Arabic words 4 Also known by “Job Leutholf”, this blonde-hair, neo-Nazi-like character was said to have born on 24 June 1624, Erfurt, and died on 8 April 1704, in Frankfurt on the Main, did countless achievement: founder of “Ethiopian” studies as an academic discipline; entered Erfurt University in 1639 and studied medicine, law, music, Oriental languages, literature, Ge’ez, Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic, Ethio-Semitic languages, Amharic, history, culture, literature and Christianity; travelled and taught noblemen and queens across Europe—Dutch, France, England, Oxford, Sweden, Rome; met many dukes, emperors, even Prester John of Ethiopia; Emperor Leopold I called him to Prague to try to achieve alliance with Ethiopia against the Ottoman Empire; produced countless works, even “Letter to the Ethiopian Nation” was written in Ge’ez, etc., etc. Achieved what none but Aristotle or Plato did! (see Encyclopedia Aethopica, pp. 601-3). 10 much mutilated. In the vocabulary of Salt 5 , which amounts to one hundred and eighty words, I find several,--in all perhaps not fewer than twenty. The examination ought to be of the Geez or dead language, from which the current tongues, the Amhara and Teegre, are said to be derived. I have not had, as yet, an opportunity of examining the dictionary and grammar of the Amhara, compiled by Ludolf; and of the Teegre, the Agow, the Galla , and above all the dead Geez, nothing is known (Crawfurd 1868: 303). The characers “Henry Salt” and “James Bruce” both collected names of flora and fauna from “Abyssinia”, but obtained them encapsulated in “Greek” and “Latin”. Each claims being an ancient historian (like German Barthold Niebuhr, 17761831), a botanist (like Swedish Carolus Linnaeus, 1707-1778, who wrote in Latin, Systema naturae, following his “Greek” predecessor Aristotle, another character, claimed to have authored Inquiry into Plants, trans. 1916) etc., etc. It is interesting to note that the earliest Geographical Societies were established only the hayday of colonialism: Paris (1821); Berlin (1827), Frankfurt (1836); Finnish (1888); British Royal Geographical Society (1830); and, the American Geographical Society (1851). In reality, these characters, “Henry Salt” and “James Bruce”, are 20th century Pankhurst-like arm-chair composers of “future” history of Abyssinia anachronistically. It only is because of the empowering Internet and, above all, thanks to the free nation of the United States of America, that today we know critical minds like Crawfurd, almost after 160 years of their ‘published’ works. Only recently, another Ethiopian critical mind, Dr. Ayele Bekerie (1997: 44) unveiled boldly to us that the “Hamitic/Semitic divide” that “Ullendorff the teacher and Sergew [Hable-Selassie] the student” are fancy of is “but a means to keep the Ethiopian people divided”. He adds that Ullendorff “the teacher” drew parallelism between “South Arabia”, the origin of Ethio-Semites, and “Aksum”, on 5 Henry Salt is English character by the name “Henry Salt” who claimed to have authored Voyage to Abyssinia (1816) during the first/second decade of the 19th century. He composed however “vocabulary” (sometimes ten entries) of several languages, from “dead” Ge’ez and Egyptian to Oromo and Amharic, from Mozambique and Swajhili to “Hurrur” to Nilotic and Southern Cushitic languages, etc. 11 the one hand, and “Wales” and “New South Wales” or “New York”, on the other. Here, we observe one of his skillful disentanglement of a good stuff of ridicule, which could have never been accessible to any positivist historian. Bekerie’s main effort is to falsificate the South Arabic origin of Axumite Abyssinia, an imaginary Christian country fabricated through the window of Eurocentric scholars. Bekerie (1997:34-35) lists critical questions which the Indo-Semitists, the “external paradigms”, and “the miseducated Ethiopians” should collectively take as their homework: What is South Arabia? What is the evidence for South Arabian origin of the Ethiopian Civilization? What is South Semitic?—A language? A group of languages? Writing system? Ethnographic or linguistic category? We can add more and similar critical questions: Who said Red Sea is a natural insulator between (to the north) African and the Arab/Asian lands? Who said Arabs are never Africans by origin? Who said Black Ethiopians/Africans never peopled South or North Arabic and beyond? Or, who said the reverse cannot stand—the Black African people/language/civilization/writing origin system? Who of South Arabic said Somali or Oromo language cannot be as equally/more genetically related to Arabic as/than Tigriňňa or Amhariňňa? Or, who said the Greenbergean Cushitic-Semitic-Omotic classification or the Cushitic-Nilotic ‘separation’ is alethic or blameless truth? It is important to raise, here, the kinds of historical documents that Pankhurst and his nearest and dearest would like to conceal. In his critical work, Mr. John Jackson (1939) reached the following conclusions about Ancient Oromo-Cush: 1. The system of writing which they brought with them has the closest affinity with that of Egyptian—in many cases indeed, there is an absolute identity between the two alphabets. 2. In the Biblical genealogies, Cush (Ethiopia) and Mizraim (Egyptian) are brothers, while from the former sprang Nimrod (Babylonia.) 3. In regard to the language of the primitive Babylonians, the vocabulary is undoubtedly Cushite or Ethiopian, belonging to that stock of tongues 12 which in the sequel were everywhere more or less mixed up with the Semitic languages, but of which we have probably the purest modern specimens in the Mahra of Southern Arabia and the Galla [Oromo] of Abyssinia. Clyde Winters informs us that Henry Rawlinson, one of the early Egyptologists (also British Army soldier), “used an African language Galla [Oromo], to decipher” not only Egyptian hieroglyphics, but also the so-called “Babylonian cuneiform writing”. 6 George Rawlinson (1862: 25) who deciphered in Babylonian or Mesopotamian tomb scriptures Oromo words such as “Guda” or “Gada” (also “Gudea” Diop, 1975: 60) decisively concluded: Its [Babylonean language’s] vocabulary has been pronounced to be “decidedly Cushite or Ethiopian;” and the modern languages to which it approaches the nearest are thought to be the Mahra of Southern Arabia and the Galla of Abyssinia. Thus comparative philology appears to confirm the old traditions. An Eastern Ethiopia instead of being the invention of bewildered ignorance is rather a reality… Rawlinson (1897: 314-315) adds about Ancient Egyptian “Under the Ethiopians” or, appropriately, the Cush: Among the various tribes there was a certain community of race, a resemblance of physical type, and a similarity of language. Their neighbours, the Egyptians, included them all under a single ethnic name, speaking of them as Kashi or Kushi—a term manifestly identical with the Cush or Cushi of the Hebrews….Their best representatives in modern times are the purebred Abyssinian tribes, the Gallas, Wolai'tzas, and the like, who arc probably their descendants. Willis Budge, the notorious Semitist encyclopedic writer and transl(iter)ator of Ancient Egyptian, acknowledged in his An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary: The ancient Egyptians were Africans, and they spoke an African language, and the modern peoples of the Eastern Sudan are Africans, and they speak African languages, and there is in consequence much in modern native Sudani literature which will help the student of ancient Egyptian in his work. From the books of Tutschek 7 , Krapf 8 , Mitterutzner 9 6 Winters, C. Genesis and the Children of Kush (Available http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=8;t=007102). 7 Grammar of the Galla-Language. Munich, 1845 ; and his Lexicon. Munich, 1841. 8 Vocabulary of the Galla -Language. London, 1842. 9 Die Dinka-Sprache in Central Afrika (with Worterbuch). Brixen, 1866. 13 at: and from the recently published works of Captain Owen 10 and Westermann 11 a student with the necessary leisure can collect a large number of facts of importance for the comparative study of Nilotic languages both ancient and modern (Budge 1920:IXIX-IXX). Indeed, like Crawfurd said, Afan Oromo is as much closer to Arabic as is Amharic or Tigre, if not more. Early European researchers in Africa concluded that Oromo is by far closer to Ancient Hebrew, if at all there was such a language of daily communication differently from Cushitic or Nilo-Cush (Ancient Egyptian) in East North Africa including the Nile Valley. Crabtree, an Egyptologist, once wrote in a letter to his Egyptology students: There is a very wide field for study which has been too curtly set aside, merely because the adjacent story of Egyptian has possessed written records whilst the [Oromo] story has none. The weaker is made to suffer by preconceived ideas based on an entirely one-sided view of the case--the Egyptian view point; and these remarks are an earnest plea for independent study from the African point of view (Crabtree 1924: 253-254). Crabtree stresses that “Oromo”, “contemptuously called Galla”, is “possibly the language of the Anti [‘ancient Egyptian’] or… possibly even Hittite” (Crabtree ibid: 255). This critical scholar goes on to problematize that “the Egyptian form Wawat”, which appears in record since the time of “Pepy I… 2650 B.C.” is “often asserted by Italians that [they] were ancestors of the Galla”. He emphasizes that, since time immemorial, Oromos occupied across “the Somali coast (Punt)roughly in a line Kerma, Napata, Meroe, Blue Nile, Shoa, Zeila” (Crabtree ibid). He further reminds us that, Oromos are whose great leader expelled “the Hyksos, circ. 1600 B.C.” and were known in the hitherto documents as “Hormeni” (Crabtree ibid). Crabtree emphasizes that, Afan Oromo, the language of the Oromo people, derives from unique and pre-historic “vocabulary--possibly the language of the Anti [Ancient Egyptian] or Hill-folk, possibly even Hittite” (Crabtree: 255). 10 Bari Grammar and Vocabulary. London, 1908. The Shilluk People : their Language and Folklore. Berlin, 1912 ; Die Sudansprachen. Hamburg, 1911; The Nuer Language. Berlin, 1912. 11 14 In 1847, Francis Newman comparatively analyzed Oromo Verb and Pronouns with that of Arabic, and concluded Afan Orromo structure is more similar to Old and Modern Arabic, Latin, Greek and “Hebraeo-African” than even “Of tongues hitherto recognized as Hebraeo-African, [namely] the Amharic [which] is geographically nearest to” and adds that Afan Oromo “has not borrowed from the modern Arabic” (Newman 1847: 125-126). It is also possible to conclude, thus, that the so-called “extinct Ge’ez” is just escape-goat; it was a fictitious text reconstructed from Cushitic. Genetic study shows, there is insignificant difference between the Cushitic and Semitic (Pagani, et. al. 2011). Ivan Van Sertima, a great scholar on ancient history, asks “But who was the Arab?” and goes on to discuss quoting other ancient history scholars D.D. Houston and W.E.B. DuBois: Arabia was first populated by black people, as Druscilla Dunjee Houston shows…. Arabia was the oldest Ethiopian colony. But there was an ingrafting of Semitic blood upon the older Cushite root. DuBois says ‘The Arabians were too near to the blacks for them to draw an absolute color line. The term Arab is applied to millions of people professing Islam. Much race mixing has occurred so that while the term has a cultural value it is of little ethnic significance and misleading’ (Sertima 2000: 12). Critical Ethiopian scholars, Professors Isaac and Fedler (1984 quoted in Bekerie 1997: 50-51) accuse Brucean (James Bruce, the eighteenth century Scottish traveler) Eurocentric scholarship for their “cultural and racialistic overtone” to “Caucasianize a major African Civilization”, to fabricate “Ethiopian civilization” was built into Africa by “superior Semitic colonialists.” Dr. Bekerie argues James Bruce was the pioneer looter of ancient Ethiopian “documents” (Bekerie 1997). But, should we believe this or he was just fictitious character? Ludwig Krapf, the 19th century German missionary, whom Pankhurst extensively cites, “had collected 70 and 80 Ethiopian manuscripts and sent them to Germany”, was known for studying Oromo, however, he was awarded a PhD for what he never documented, namely for “studies” in the so-called “Aethopic” (though he never used the term, this was later labeled “Semitic” and “Ge’ez”), an unknown ‘language’ said to have been used by unknown ‘people’ (Griefenow-Mewis 15 1996:166). Krapf, who lived with the Oromo, studied and spoke Oromo language, translated the Bible “to” Oromo language (in the 1830s), wrote Oromo Grammar (1840) and Oromo-English Dictionary (1842), and an English Dictionary of Six East African Languages (1850, one of them Oromo), came to the conclusion: “That the Amharic language itself is a mixture of Aethiopic and other languages…..these words [which are current in the Amharic dialect of Shoa] must be of true [Oromo] extraction, consequently that the [Oromo] influenced the Amharic, and not vice versa’” (Krapf 1842: ix). Kretzmann, who authored a book without date of publication, did not mention Ge’ez but “Ethiopic” which: Was known only by those who studied it, as Latin and Greek is with us. In this way it came about that the people of this church could not read their own Scriptures. This was just as great a misfortune for the people of this church as it would be for us if we had the Bible only in Hebrew and Greek …. But about one hundred years ago there lived in Egyptian an old Abyssinian monk, whose name was Abu Rumi. This man’s life had been saved by the French consul in Abyssinia, and the old monk considered himself under special obligation to his benefactor. The consul hit upon the happy idea of having this old man make a translation of the ancient Ethiopic version into modern Amharic, as spoken by the Abyssinian people today…This translation was seen by a scholar by the name of Jowett, of Cambridge, England (nd.: 85-86). Whether the French had “consul” in Abyssinia, a country of too odd people--who “could not read their own Scriptures”!!!--“one hundred years” before 1840, there has been no evidence to date or it is totally false. What is known is, they used Oromo wisemen clogged and exported to Europe brutally as slaves (see “Introduction” section of Tutschek 1842 Oromo-English-German Dictionary). The notable one is Abba Gammachu whose name was systematically changed to “Onesimos Nasib” (see Bulcha 1995). Even the friendly German Ludwig Krapf was “thrown out of Shoa in 1842 because of his interest solely in the Oromo” (Bulcha 1995: 39). It is simple to create an artificial Esperanto ‘language’ out of the natural language (a language that has emerged out of tens of thousands of years of social evolutionary process) inasmuch as the adult speakers and children of the natural 16 one, but “other”, are half-exterminated, enslaved, muzzled, repressed and subjugated for nearly a century and half, while establish, for “ours”, Amharic Academies, build schools, write curricula texts and distribute them to be banked on from kindergarten to higher institutions (though unevenly, by both “the others” and “the ours”). 12 It is a matter of applying the secretive kabalistic permutations and combinations of the different syllables and consonantals/radicals composing the words of the natural language with possible application of phonological theories by the German Jakob Grimm (1785–1863), i.e., “Grimm’s Law”. 13 ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION PANKHURST, HISTORIOGRAPHY AND EVIDENTIALITY Evidentiality is used here to refer to the author’s use of source of evidence for claims he/she makes, the extent to which she/he opens herself/himself to various perspectives (competing and alternative) and historiographic resources— social historical (written and oral histories), anthropological, cultural material, phenomenological, linguistic, literary, archaeological, and so forth. It is important to note that one of the styles of Pankhurst and his nearest and dearest is to never refer to or reveal or to conceal the works of early Egyptologists and Africolologists we referred to above (except their favorite Semitist Willis Budge). We shall begin with Pankhurst’s commitment to setting a chronological ceiling Ethiopian horse history. Pankhurst begins his argumentation informing us the very “early” time when his “Ethiopian” first began to fall in love with horse: Ethiopian interest in the horse can be traced to an early period. The chronicle of ‘Amdà Seyon (1314-1344), which describes that monarch’s victories on horseback, records that his steed bore a name--an indication, 12 The Abyssinian juntas were accusing one another for, even the meager schools that opened in non-Abyssin areas were consuming their previously abundant slave market as some children of the slave parents/tribes began to go to schools. 13 “Grimm’s Law” deals with three consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift: (a) Voiceless stops (e.g., /t/) change to voiceless fricatives (e.g. /s/); (b) Voiced stops (e.g., /d/) become voiceless stops (e.g. /t/); and, (c) Aspirated stops (e.g., /gh/) become voiced fricatives (e.g. / /), which in turn shift to voiced stops (e.g. /ɡ/), or to simply change ejectives/implosives to voiceless stop. 17 we may assume, of the esteem in which such beasts were regarded. It was called Haräb Asfäre, i.e. “One who Terrifies” (Huntingford, 1965: 90; Wallis Budge, 1928, 1: 295). ‘Amdä Seyon's great grandson, Zär’ä Ya'eqob (1434-1468), was likewise renowned as a horseman, and one of the gates of his palace at Däbrä Berhan was specially built so that he could ride in and out on his steed (Perruchon, 1893, 24) (p. 137 14 ). Even though his “Ethiopians” are not clear to us, didn’t Ethiopians make an encounter with horses before A.D. 14th century? Who exactly was that Ethiopian Negus ‘known’ by the syntax “Amda Seyon”? How ‘early’ is Pankhurst’s “early period” of “Ethiopian interest in the horse”? Clearly he is pointing to what commonsensical history—rather phantasm—regularly tells us, namely the era of Solomonic Dynasty, when, we are told, the Semites came from Jerusalem and established dynasty at the heart of East Africa. From that time on, he argues (p. 197-198): The chronicle of Emperor Yohannes I (1667-1682) mentions the existence at the then capital, Gondär, of a Beta Afras, presumably a stable (Guidi, 1903: 3) , in which that ruler resided at the time of his coronation, and states that he had learnt to ride while still little more than a child (Guidi, 1903: 1). Whenever Abyssinianist writers talk ‘history’ of the character Emperor “‘Amdà Seyon”, all the ambitions (coercive unification), the strategies (southward expansion), enemies (‘Pagans’ and ‘Mohammedan’), major events (war, conquest and defeats) all correspond to Menelik of the late 19th-early 20th centuries, while that of his “great grandson, Zär’ä Ya'eqob” corresponds to the Hailesillassie of the 20th century. Here, too, Amda Seyon’s horse name “Haräb Asfäre” and that of Menelek, namely “Abba Daňňe” both mean “One who Terrifies”. In fact, both come from Oromo lexemes: farra (farr(i)-sa, CAUSATIVE, reversed and pre-posited and borrowed into Amharic as As-färe; farra ǧi, NOMINATIVE-PARTICULATIVE, borrowed as it is into Amharic for ‘the Whites, Europeans’) ‘devilish, satanic’ (used for death and white color) and ’a-ɳɳā ‘the magisterial, awesome, divinely, unmoved mover (only used for Waaqa ‘the 14 Only pages are sometimes indicated for quotations from the article in focus: Pankhurst’s “The Early History of Ethiopian Horse-Names”, 1989, 35/I: 97-206. 18 Black-Sky-God’), ABSOLUTIVE from the polysemantic root ɗ’a ‘COPULA, BE; beat, smite, strike; make, do, design, create, imitate’), respectively. Though Pankhurst left implicit the element “Haräb”, we know that both “Emperors” aimed at terrifying the Oromo and Haramané ‘Pagans’, in the words/eyes of the Abyssins. We shall see similar and extensively used Ethiosemitic parasitism on Oromo sociolinguistic lexico-semantics, particularly: synonymy (meaning identity), antonymy (meaning exclusion), hyponymy (meaning inclusion), and dogmatic calques (syllable for syllable translations, usually reversing their sequence) grounded in Orthodox-Orientalism or Catholic-Eurocentrism, strategies obviously deliberate. Another adumbrated ‘historian’ and kindred of Pankhurst known by Mordechai Abir, tells us another unsubstantiated ‘history’—rather phantasm—as to when Ethiopians were “introduced” to horses by more civilized Euroasians: [A] group of Mamluk refugees under their Turkish chief Altenbugha (AtTabungha) reached Ethiopia in the 1420s. These helped Ishaq [a certain Ethiopian Negus, he claims] to organise and train his army and taught the Ethiopians the art of horsemanship. They introduced to Ethiopia the use of naphtha and built an arsenal which produced swords, spears, coats of mail and other weapons which were usually smuggled to Ethiopia because of Muslim prohibition on their exportation to that country (Abir 1980: 29; square bracket added). Why are ‘Amdà Seyon’ and ‘Susenyos’ not real anthroponoms/ethnonyms today anywhere in Ethiopia, against (their) African tradition of preserving their (great men’s eponymous) names for thousands of years? If the Bible is truly a Christian document, which Pankhurst quotes as his great (Ethiopic) resource, then preservation and reproduction of genealogical, onomasiological, and etymological knowledge of its population is the crux of the matter. Unfortunately, we observe none of these in Pankhurst’s studies as well as his favorite population history, i.e., Ethiosemites or Abyssinians. The influential and highly respected (at least by his students and readers) historian and former president of Ethiopia, Dr. Negaso Gidada convincingly showed in his PhD study that the so- 19 called Abyssinian Negus whom Pankhurst repeatedly mentions, namely Amdà Seyon (1314-1344) and Susenyos (1607-1632), are, in fact, corruption of Sayyoo Mačč’a, a classical era Oromo war chief from who the present day Oromo Sayyoo clan of the super-clan/federation of Mačč’a descended (Gidada 1984). Gidada reveals ancient and medieval texts (oral and/or written) entitled Oromo Mačč’a Genealogy while Triulzi (2006) reveals Boorana Geneology, among others, all of which were concealed or misappropriated privately in Europe. War, killings, victory, coronation, dynasty and so forth are all the favorite and mundane dictions of Pankhurst and his Ethiosemitist circle and again these recur in ‘History of Ethiopian Horse-Names’. His favorite resources are, as usual, chronicles, the Bible and unheard-off ‘holy scriptures’ some of which are “Ge’ez” versions of Classical Greco-Roman mythological documents, which themselves are, according to Africologists, dogmatic transliteration/translation of documents of Ancient Africans generally known as ‘Cushites’ by pre-ninetieth century scholars (Houston 1926), or ‘Egyptians’ by ninetieth century scholars (James 1954; Diop 1986 1975) or ‘Ethiopic’ by twentieth century Ethiosemitists (Bekerie 1997 2004). The trustworthiness of the story about the so-called Ge’ez ‘documents’ itself is subject to interpretation and needs critical scrutiny. Rita Pankhurst, wife of Richard Pankhurst, in her article on Ge’ez “Library of Emperor Tewodros II at Maqdala” said to had been stormed by the British expedition army in 1868, wrote that “the geographer, C. R. Markham” described it “as ‘a wretched place, without pictures or even whitewashed walls’” and Major H. A. Leveson, a British officer and journalist, described the so-called Ge’ez ‘library’ as “the hovel called a Church” (Pankhurst 1973: 15). But, professor Richard Pankhurst and his Abyssinianist colleagues frequently tell us their deep regrets of “lost” or “stolen” (by the British Army) Ge’ez documents. Harold Marcus, the conservative Abyssinianist and Colleague of Pankhurst, tells us regrets: 20 There were Ge'ez versions of the Old and New Testaments, which tradition claims were translated from the Antioch version of the Gospels during the period of the ‘Nine Saints,’ who came from greater Syria toward the end of the fifth century. Recent philological scholarship is skeptical about the role of Syriac influences in Axumite Ethiopia and finds no evidence of such a provenance (Marcus 1994: 8). The often-quoted, sole Ge’ez reference is Wolf Leslau’s Comparative Ge’ez Dictionary. Yet, the extreme Abyssinianist Wolf Leslau himself regrets about “loss” and, as a result, he got only “Bəluy Kidān (Old Testament) 1918 (=1925/26), Asmara edition” (Leslau 1992: XXXII). Regarding the so-called “Syriac”, we only began to see on the internet referencing by the same EthioSemitic clique of an “anonymously” written “Bible” called: “Anonymous (19051920). The New Testament in Syriac. London, British and Foreign Bible Society.” It is so funny to hear of a man who is ashamed of “words of God” and resorting to hiding his name! Recently appeared involve: Kefle, M. a. G., Ed. (1917 EC). መጻሕፍተ ሳልሞ ወሲራክ. Addis Ababa, ትኑሣኤ ማሳተሚያ ዴርጅት; Terfe, L. L. M., Ed. (1951 EC). መጻሕፍተ ሐዱሳት ሦስቱ. Addis Ababa, ትኑሣኤ ማሳተሚያ ዴርጅት. There had never been a Printing Press called Tensäə. If at all there is, it only appeared since the advent of the Second Millennium. In their article entitled “Some Amharic Sources for Modern Ethiopian History, 1889-1935”, Garretson and Pankhrust (1978), never mentioned a single printing press otherwise than the only known Bärhänännä Säläm (though they covered up facts, as if it was name of newspaper) which was established in 1925, the only one until 1990s, a reflection of Abyssinianist debauched mentality that a “king” or “president” or “prime minister” is God-selected, has to die in office, until that is to happen, no private or independent newspaper or media is to talk about him for it amounts to throwing a blasphemy or profanity upon ‘Son of God’. Therefore, it can easily be accurately inferred that his “Ge’ez” New or Old Testamens, “Nine Saints” from “greater Syriac”, etc., etc., are but 21st century arm-chair composition in the usual Abyssinianist historiography—phantasm, anachronism plus hypostasis. The consequence is simply to create Abyssinia/Ethiopia that is a bastard size to 21 Black Africa or bastard child of the fabulous Solomon of the Lion of Judea, or a poster child for sucking up to the colonial master, i.e., Western Europe. The French Catholic Father and scholar Martial de Salviac, a theologian and philologist from France, observed in the late 19th century “Abyssinian Christendom”: …such is the life of Abyssinia, turned over itself unknown to and ignorant of Christendom... they remain forcefully attached to the name of Christ that they adore not all recognizing his laws. Their political organization consists of feudal regime excluding heredity; their customs…reveal a shallow affinity with the multiple religious evolution of the oriental world (de Salviac 1901: 11). Long before de Salviac, in the Introduction section to Ludwig Krapf’s An Imperfect Outline of the Elements of the Galla Language (Krapf 1640: Xi), it was stated that, to bring Abyssinians onboard to Christianity was yet to be worked hard by Europeans: Their Missionaries hitherto endeavoured, by Divine assistance, to prepare the way for a reformation in the fallen 15 Church of Abyssinia; and, by diffusing Gospel light in that Church and country, to raise a Missionary spirit among the Abyssinians, so as to excite them to promote the blessed influence of Christianity all around them, and to come up to their apparent destination, to be the evangelists of Central Africa. How we succeeded in Tigre [Eritrea?] is partly known. Many hundreds, from all quarters of Abyssinia, were made acquainted with our object, and had the Gospel Truth held out to them: about 4000 copies of different parts of the Sacred Scriptures were distributed; and large numbers of Abyssinians would willingly have adopted the Truth as it is in Jesus, if that truth had not subjected them to the necessity of parting with error, which, however evident, was established: and their indolence was so great, that they would do anything, give assent and credit to anything, but not be persuaded to leave the way of their ancestors. 16 15 Never have we been told, by Krapf or any, as to why, who, when and where of the falling or reformation, physical or conceptual. Nor do we know what “by Divine assistance” means. 16 This suggests that the Abyssinians were hitherto living “the way of their ancestors”, i.e., “indolence” and non-Christianity worldview and life. The Evangelist Father Ludwig Krapf and the Catholic Father de Salvia bore witness to the morally-ethically straight marriage and life praxis of the Oromo under their Qaallu-Gada theologico-philosophico-political system. 22 Pankhurst cites frequently, the Ethiopian Ge’ezologist ‘historian’ Tekle-Tsadik Mekuria, who, however, is his and colleagues’ own make-up. The critical Ethiopian historian, Ayele Bekerie, categorizes Mekuria as one of the “miseducated” Ethiopians who first fall prey to the European colonial “hegemonic epistemology” (Bekerie 1997: 35-42). Moreover, of paramount importance to Pankhurst are secretive documents ascribed to Abyssinian dabtaras a term that encapsulates ‘Orthodox Church monks, wizards, sorcerers’, namely Bahrey (who claimed to be author of 16th century document entitled History of the Galla [Oromo], but unknown before 1920s), Zärä Ya’eqob, Mahtämä-Sellase Wäldä Masqal and, we are told, their contemporary 16th century, Portuguese Catholic monks who travelled across Abyssinia, namely, Manoel de Almeida, Francesco Alvarez and others. 17 In actuality, these are compiled, most probably also authored, by his own Eurocentric colleagues such as Beckingham and Huntingford (1954, 1961), who cite Willis Budge (Budge 1928), a guard of the British Museum, notorious for storage of Africa’s stolen documents and artifacts. One can find it so hard to imagine how a museum guard, Willis Budge, owns such an encyclopedic knowledge and authorship over countless Ancient Egyptian and Ethiopian histories!! In his paradigm-shifter work, the great scholar George James (1954, Stolen Legacy: The Greeks Were Not the Authors of Greek Philosophy, but the People of North Africa, Commonly Called the Egyptians), similarly wondered how a single person by the name “Aristotle” could manage to author over a thousand philosophical books—an incredible achievement by a single person, achievement that took a society thousands of years and personalities!!! Or, it suffices to go through the work of the moderate Semitist Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The 17 As far as we know from lived experience and regular Abbyssinian discourse, Catholic and Protestant are considered archenemy of Orthodox and Ethiopia, far bitter enemy that Islam and indigenous “pagan” worshiping of Waaqa. That was, indeed, the cause of Ludwig Krapf’s expulsion in 1842 from Showa, the newly Abyssinian stronghold on Oromoland (Bulcha 1995: 39) and “March 1838 Expulsion of the Protestant Missionaries by prince Ubie” from Abyssinia proper (Griefenow-Mewis 1996: 68 ) 23 Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, the Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1965 (1987). The Aristotelians of Abyssinia—the or Budgeans--the notoriously racist writers C. F. Beckingham and G.W.B. Huntingford, are also known for their translations of various secretive documents, especially (1) Some Records of Ethiopia 15961646 and (2) Historia Gentis Galla/History of the Galla People (both printed in 1954 in London but no publisher(s) was indicated). Both documents are said to have originally been chronicled in 16th century by, respectively, the Portuguese Jesuit monk Manoel de Almeida’s (as Historia de Ethiopia Alta) and an unexplained (both by space/nationality and time/bio-history) monk by the name “Bahrey”. But other racist Italian, German and French ‘writers’ (pseudonym?) are also mentioned for the same/similar document by Bahrey (for instance, the Italian Guidi, I. 1907. Historia Gentis Galla, Corpus ecriptonim orientalium, Scriptores Aethiopici). 18 The great liberal Italian scholar, Cerulli (1922: 67), described these fictitious and racist documents as “outrageous”. A critical discourse analysis by d'Alos-Moner (2007) has disclosed that Jesuits Portuguese 16th century presence in Ethiopia and these so-called “chronicles” were but fabricated since the second half of 19th century by British, Italian and French colonial governments and their “colonial intelligentsia” anachronistically. 18 The Italian I. Guidi, like his contemporaneous Willis Budge, is known for countless ‘authorship’ over Ancient Ethiopic and Egyptian historical books and articles, across two centuries, from the last decades of 19th century to the last decades of the first half of 20th century. 24 Figure 2: Publications on ‘Portuguese and Jesuits in Abyssinia’ (Source: d’Alos-Moner 2007: 76) An insult to both the “Abyssinian” people and the rest, the book anthology The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541-1543 published by the British Hakluyt Society and edited by certain “Whiteway” (Whiteway 1901) puts on its cover page a quotation from Edward Gibbon, one of the colonial intelligentsias, as follows: “Ethiopia was saved by four hundred and fifty 19 Portuguese, who displayed in the field the native valour of Europeans”, from “Mohammedan” and “Galla” heathens. One of the secretive documents most quoted by Abyssinianists, including Pankhurst, is the so-called Kebre Nagast ‘Glory of the [Abyssin] Kings’. Let’s know that, symptomatic of this sinister project, the document is recorded as follow, vaguely, by the above mentioned British Hakluyt Society’s Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541-1543 (Whiteway 1902: CXIX, Appendix): Falmla de Rcgina Sabae apud AEthiopes. [An extract from the Ethiopic Chronicle: Kebra Nagast] Dissertatio inauguralis quam . . . defendet . . . F. Pretorius. Eth. and Lat. pp. x. 44. Halis, [1870.] 8°. (754. b. 4,) [The copy of Kebra Nagast, written A.D. 1682-l706, British Museum, Or. MSS. 819, was generously restored by the Trustees of the British Museum to Prince Kasa, afterwards King John of Abyssinia, on Dec. 14 1862.]. 19 According to Whiteway and his friends, Bermudez, who led the Portugues army, wrote “Before their defeat by the Gallas there were only one hundred and fifty Portuguese” (Whiteway, 1901: 255, Footnote). 25 The so-called “King John” was installed to power around 1874 by the British after they killed the so-called “King Theodros” in 1868. Thanks to d’Alos-Moner, it is possible to plausibly argue that, in actuality, the so-called Kebre Nagast and other Abyssinian ‘chronicles’ were doctored and re-composed from Oromo Gada System Laws and social moral philosophy the Capuchins and Lazarist monks such as Guiglelmo Massaja (1809-89) and Giustino De Jacobis (l800-60), who were hosted by, lived and ate with the Oromo whom they called “Galla”. Let’s note here that Guiglelmo Massaja’s and others works with and on Oromo language, literature and culture (unfortunately known by the reductionist misnomer “Abyssinian”) were not only “popular” literature in the first half of the 20th century Europe but were ‘food of thought’ for the influential Italian social theorist Antonio Gramsci, who once read and wrote in his prison cell: Yet even when the geographical adventure novel was in its heyday, the Catholic version of this literature was mediocre and in no way comparable to its French, English and German secular counterparts. The most remarkable book is the story of Cardinal Massaja's life in Abyssinia (Forgacs 2000: 369). Pankhurst’s key resource is the Above James Bruce known for his Trvels to Discover the Source of Nile (Bruce 1790), who, in other words, “discovered” 20 River Nile (in 1770s or some say 1760s, as there is no agreement) on the land his ancestors roved over since time immemorial (some say he was “traveler”, others say is “naturalist” scholar, some still say a “diplomat”, etc). Bruce tells us too bizarre, conflicting stories that compel us to question truth of his claims. It suffices to consider his story that the local people feasted upon cats, crocodiles, 20 Note that the notorious C.F. Beckingham, friend of Pankhurst, did “select” and “edit” or compose for himself Bruces Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, Edingburgh University Press, 1964. Furthermore, Pankhurst (1976: 171-173) himself knows well, it was an Oromo “slaves” from Wallagga, Limmuu, by the name “Gabao” [Gabayo] “Waré” [Waaree] were taken to Paris by “French geographer Edme-François Jomard” and the Abyssinian official human trafficking agency in 1830s that gave “evidence, almost the first geographical information on this area”, namely “Habahia” [Nile] and its tributary “Didesa”. “Ware also supplied Jomard with economic, social and cultural information” and about “1,000 Oromo words”. Another British traveler and extensive writer on Oromo, Charles Beke produced his works on the French Antonio d’ Abbadie: Beke, Charles. 1851. An Enquiry into M. Antoine d'Abbadie's Journey to Kaffa . . . 1843 and 1844, to discover the Source of the Nile. Journal of Madden, 2: xvi-63. London. 26 river-horse and that they ate collops cut, with their teeth, from live animals palpating to death. However, eating these animals has never been a custom of (Horn of) African people. Indeed, a big size of Ethiopian society eats k’uruťi or k’uťťii (literally “chopped, cut”) warm, uncooked red meat from special cuts of the (buffalo) bull, but, as the literal meaning of the word shows, it is eaten chopped with a knife, as any dish. Although today it is consumed by any wo/man (except children), wise men of the past tradition tell us that originally it was “only the food of the brave men”, i.e., hunters and warriors who stay for weeks or months away from residence. For Ethiopians—at least for Cushite stock--it is unethical to eat alive animals to death—whether we have only changed since Bruce discovered us, we have no data. We know from some friends who had been to Europe and happened to witness some Spaniards or Portuguese eating fresh raw red meat (of pork?) like Ethiopians! Interestingly, revealing Irish/British-Portuguese competition, Bruce lashes out the 17th century Portuguese monk, if we should believe, called Jerome Lobo 21 as ‘cannibal himself, too, as were ‘Abyssinians’’. One critical scholar (Leask 2002: 59) shows us that Bruce’s Voyage in Abyssinia is another version of James Macpherson, a “putative ‘translator’ of the ancient Gaelic epic Ossian”. Macpherson is a compatriot of Samuel Johnson, the so-called compiler of Bruce’s. Johnson ‘authored’ for himself Rasselas meaning ‘prince of Abyssinia’ is unknown in any Ethiosemitic language or tradition. They use the word messafint 21 Jerome Lobo (the first is known by many forms: Jebonimo, Jeromino, Jeromio, etc) who wrote A Voyage to Abyssinia (translated from French to English in 1889 by the famous Samuel Johnson) is said to be another Portuguese monk who lived and wrote about Abyssinians and Galla (Oromo) long before Bruce, in 1620s, and talked with “the Abyssinian Emperor Segued” (also described as “Sultan Segued”) on the issue of converting them “from a form of Christianity peculiar to themselves, to orthodox Catholicism” (p. 5) because “Though they [Abyssinians] know the words which Jesus Christ appointed to be used in the administration of baptism, they have without scruple substituted others in their place, which makes the validity of their baptism, and the reality of their Christianity, very doubtful” (p. 90). It is likely that the strange name of that strange “Emperor”, Segued, is distortion of Oromo Abba Gada or the specific Gaddičča. Also “Emperor Sabagadis” is common in Abyssinian travelers ‘books’. 27 for ‘prince’ and 18th century Abyssinia is known by them as Zemene Messafint ‘Era of Rivalry among Princes”, if we should believe is true history. 22 By making this wildish statement, Bruce, who tells us that in Abyssin lubo means ‘wolf’ 23 , might misrepresent the Oromo Goromtii Oriisaa ritual: A young cow or goat was set free in a field where the Luba of the region had assembled. Every Luba, big and small, ran after it with his knife and tried to cut small pieces from the animal which ran here and there for its life. Because this animal was considered impure (irmii), the pieces of the meat were only touched with one’s teeth and thrown away. Everybody who had touched the meat with his mouth also had to spit out the saliva (Gidada 1984: 148-149). James Bruce relied on the character Ludolf, the 16th century unspecified monk mentioned above. The usual way to intra-textual quoting of one another’s hypostatization, Pankhurst quotes James Bruce on his another article in which he showed moderation of his stereotype perhaps because his Abyssinianist state building agenda was proven bankrupt: “The Scottish traveler James Bruce reported that during the reign of the half-Oromo Emperor Iyo’as 24 (1755-1769), 22 We don’t know why and how come that Samuel Johnson, whom the world know rather as a writer of English dictionaries/lexicographer, before Bruce’s wandering to ‘discover’ the source of Nile, “composed the fable The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) in about a week” (Mahoney, John L. “Samuel Johnson.” Microsoft® Encarta® 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008; Bold-italic added for emphasis). Note that raǧí, plural raǧá é, is an Oromo term for ‘prophet(s)’ and irreʂa/irreʂa( é) for ‘prince/princes (religious)’ (de Salviac 2005[ 1901] treated well about these). 23 Lubo has never been Ethiosemitic lexicon. Ethiosemitic for “wolf” is either tekula, and the Oromo for “wolf” (variety) is bandó (Viterbo 1892: 15) which Ethiosemitic twisted for themselves to mean “traitor and agent for the enemy”. Luba (Lubo, ANIMATE.VOCATIVE) is a sophisticated Oromo Gada System ontogenetic/sociogentic concept. It is denominative form of the always gerundive/participial proto verb/concept lubuu/ uppú ‘heart, soul; being physically existing, cognitively conscious and aware-in-the-world”. The rhotacized and allomorphic category of Luba is Raba “Senior Warriors” which is “Grade V” of Gada System, when those men “are of the appropriate age…to marry. By “appropriate age” I mean those who are in their twenties or early thirties. The marriage of these men constitutes a rite de passage for all the members of the class” (Legesse 1973: 65). The insignia of this agge-class is rooppii/roopp’a “hippopotamus, waterhorse”. Jerome Lubo himself claims his name is “Wolf”. The interjection is to counterfeit the Latin lupo/lobo “wolf” in Abbyssinia. 24 Iyo’as is too strange a name impossible o articulate/pronounce to not only for the Oromo but also the rest of Ethiopians. They tell us also another name of this character, namely Lubo, a common Oromo name and Gada System socio-political age-class discussed above. He is given by them the role Däǧǧazmač, an Abyssinian for a certain military rank, now unproductive. Never does the age-old, highly complex and democratic Oromo Gada System liaise with Abyssinian 28 “nothing was heard at the palace but Galla,” and that “the king himself affected to speak nothing else” (Pankhurst 1998b: 82) and, adds Professor Pankhurst, “Amharic was, however, soon reinstated as the “king’s language””. He is alluding to the other fiction that his South Arabic émigré came to Africa with unidentified “Sabaean” in the 4th A.D. before it was replaced sooner by Greek, the lingua franca of Axumite until 8th A.D., which itself was replaced by another mysterious “Ge’ez” ‘language’, immediately replaced by Amhariňňa (and Tigiriňňa?) in the 11th/12th century A.D. until it was iniquitously kicked off by the “vassal” Afan Oromo in the second half of 18th century but, as luck would have it, recovered its heaven-sent role of “king’s language”, without further ado. Following Bruce, the aforementioned character by “Henry Salt”, who was also claimed to hve been a British “consul in Egypt 1816-1827 and pioneer egyptologist” (Bosworth 1974: 69) and argued to have “found and translated Greek inscription on stones at Axum” (Ullendorff 1960: 81-83), was there at Axum and Makalle because he was “concerned to correct some of the inaccuracies in Bruce’s” (Bosworth 1974:73). Visiting only “northern Ethiopia”, “never acquir[ing] any knowledge himself of the Ethiopian languages”, and being very much “interested in linguistic matters”, Salt however, did wonderful job: With the help of local informants collected lists of the basic vocabulary of the two main spoken Semitic languages of Ethiopia, Amharic and Tigrinya, and, furthermore, of such non-Semitic languages as Agaw, Galla and Somali… brought back with him a letter from the Emperor of Ethiopia to George III, written in classical Ethiopic or Ge'ez; this was sent on Salt's advice for translation by the Rev. Alexander Murray of Urr in Kirkcudbrightshire, the editor of Bruce's Travels, a scholar in both Ge'ez and Amharic, and subsequently Professor of Oriental Languages in the University of Edinburgh (Bosworth 1974: 76). In sharp contrast to this claim, one reviewer of Edwin C. Foot’s Galla-English and English-Galla Dictionary of 1913 (a dictionary never unveiled to Oromos or any Ethiopian library and we have access today only due to the Internet and dictatorial, absolutist theomonarchic-dynastic system, if at all they had a political system before 1850s. This also reminds us the character Jeromeo Lubo. 29 generous people who posted it online) by veiled name A.W. (most probably a female by the name Alice Werner who produced numerous vital articles on Boorana Oromo of Ethio-Kenyan boarder as well on Swahili and Massai cultures/languages) unveiled the following: It is interesting to note that the Galla Vocabulary given in Salt's Voyage to Abyssinia is found (when one has penetrated the disguise of the grotesque spelling) to correspond, on the whole, with the speech of the Southern Galla. This is apparently what Mr. Foot means by “Boran” (Borana, Kofira, and Barareta speak practically the same dialect)… Altogether, Mr. Foot's little book supplies a long-felt want (A.W. 1914: 333). Yet, Salt 25 retained Ludolf’s South Arabic origin of the Ethiosemites, a ‘hypothesis’ which many have explained away. Ullendorff, Pankhurst’s fellow countryman and duplicate, tells us Ge’ez replaced Greek as a lingua franca of Axumite only in the 7th/8th century A.D. and died away in the 11th/12th century giving rise to Amhariňňa-Tigreňňa. Pankhurst argues, however, “Amharic began to replace Ge’ez in importance [written?] in the nineteenth century. This development becomes particularly evident during the reign of Emperor Téwodros II (1855-1868)” (Pankhurst 1998b: 83). This position that a speech community (i.e. his Abbyssinians) carried out written and oral communications in two different media (the former in dead Ge’ez while the latter in live Amharic) in simultaneity for around a millennium is utterly bizarre argument that violates universal human communication. Had there been any language death or language shift, it would have been but a Cushitic language, not the language of the new ‘superior race’: Language shift and death are overlapping terms used to describe situations in which a language ceases to be used by a speech community. Language shift occurs when a new language is acquired by a community with the concomitant loss of its erstwhile primary language. If that community is the 25 This lunatic character fabricated a name called “Hurrur” for ‘Harari’ who the Oromo call “A aree” language and stripped the Oromo off words of such basic words for “cow”and “God” and gave it to the former as Christmass postcard. The earliest European missionaries and scholars, Krapf and Isenberg described Harar and surrounding state as “the kingdom of Hurrur (Horror)” (Krapf & Isenberg, 1884: iv; brackets are original). Wakefield (Reverstein & Wakefield, 1884: 257, 261) used the terms “Harar, the old capital of Adae” and “Athāri (Adari), a large town, which is evidently Harar” (Oromo retroflex/implosive / ’ consistently correspond to European th/θ). 30 last (or only) one to use the obsolescent language it is possible to speak, in addition, of language death. Language death may also describe a situation in which a language is lost without a new one replacing it. This is occasioned by the destruction of the speech community itself (Mesthrie 1999: 42). Hence, we can ask: Which/What was that “new” language that began to be “acquired” by the the Ge’ezites? Or, by whom was “the destruction of the [Ge’ez] speech community itself” (probably) “occasioned”? By the speakers of the “king’s language”” (Pankhurst 1998b: 82), i.e. Amharic speakers, who “soon reinstated” it, kicking the “Galla” off the “palace”? We should recollect that no sooner had the ‘new’ and ‘superior race’ arrived than they killed (organized under their general they call “Kaleb”) the Meroe/Meroitic by completely annihilating them, we are told. Anyway, the timing, the reign of Emperor Téwodros II (1855-1868), is important; it is the time of British “looting” of “the” Ge’ez Library of Emperor Tewodros II at Maqdala”, when, in fact, no trace of Ge’ez document was found, contrary to the claims. It is in this second half of ninetieth century up until decolonization of Africa in the 1960’s that a fabricated ‘history’ of Semitic, Solomonic Ethiopia was composed. One great scholar (Vaughan 2003) described this in the longer quotation as follows: Woven around this hegemonic cultural core, a reinvigorated series of myths of origin and legitimacy of the state was now fashioned from the ‘ancient’ fabric of the conquering polity’s long ancestral lines on the highlands. Where its resources proved threadbare, traditional warp was supplemented with elaborately manufactured new strands of weft. It was around this time, for instance, that the narrative of the Solomonic origins of the imperial dynasty in the Kebra Negast (‘Glory of Kings’) was revivified, and reworked to stress the primacy of Shoa. All manner of imperial paraphernalia was introduced in the period in question, including much now commonly regarded as ancient in origin, including for instance, the adoption of ‘the the lion of Judah […] as part of the Imperial styles, [which] is of no great antiquity’ (Ullendorff (1968:11), drawing on Rubenson (1965)). Such refashioning and fabrication has, of course, complicated contemporary perceptions of historical continuity (Vaughan 2003:113-114; second insertion is original). 31 Earlier, we referred to Antonio d’Abbadie, the French scholar who most probably applied ethnography for first time as research methodology in his study of Oromo culture and language, from 1830s to 1880’s. Antonio d’Abbadie pursued the scholarly work of his older brother Arnauld d'Abbadie that died of a disease he acquired while with the Oromo. The Italian scholar Alessandro Triulzi who produced an interesting article entitled “The Saga of Makkoo Bilii: A Theme in Mac'a Oromoo History” following the footsteps of Antonio d’Abbadie on the ancient Gada Law maker Makkoo Bilii, the “African Lycurgus” wrote: Let me start first from the original evidence itself [d’Abbadie’s]. [His] “Sur les Oromo” was obviously based on the copious oral material the French scholar had collected mainly from the Gudru Oromoo living south of the Abbay [Nile River], in today's eastern Wallagga (Ethiopia), in the years 1839-1848 and carefully annotated in his Journal. D’Abbadie’s carnets de voyage, still unpublished but available for research in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (BN, ABB 265, 266, 267; NAF 21300), are a rich mine of in- formation for mid-nineteenth century western Oromoo society, and it is in this mine that close digging may be usefully started (Triulzi 1990: 319). Shrewd, colonial “historians” spoiled lots of Antonio d’Abbadie’s genuine field data. They anachronistically manufactured false Abyssinian “chronicles” or “manuscripts” as though they were captured in Medieval Era (especially, 12th 17th) by unnamed or anonymous “travelers” chiefly Portuguese /Jesuits monks (like ‘Manuel de Almeida, Francisci de Almada, Abba Bahrey, etc.) and distributed falsities. Werner (1914: 263) was one of early writers who speculated how d’Abbdie’s data were “borne out by the Abyssinian chronicler.” In addition to the false “manuscripts” we saw above, researchers on Ethiopian/Abyssinian false historiography might be interested in: (1) Vida de Takla Haymanot Pelo Manuel de Almeida, De Companhia de Jesus Publicada Por Francisco Maria Esteves Pereira, Lisboa Imprensa Lucas 93--Rua do Diario de Noticias—93 (1899) (Available at www.gutenberg.net.); (2) Manoel de Almeida, The History of High Ethiopia or Abassian, which, in actuality, was composed by the shrewd Abbysinianist self-proclaimed “historians” C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford, in their Some Records of Ethiopia 1.593-1646, London: The Hakluyt 32 Society (1954); and, (3) the list of allegedly pre-15th century books on Ethiopia attached/ascribed to the work of the German scholar on the Oromo: Dr. Philipp Paulitschke, Die Afrika–Literatur in der zeit von 1500 bis 1750 N.Ch. Wien: Brockhausen & Brauer (1882). No doubt, these are good examples of distorted versions of the real French scholars Arnauld and Antonio d’Abbadie. PANKHURST AND HEGEMONIC EPISTEMOLOGY ‘Hegemonic epistemology’ combines three mutually exclusive blinders: it elevates a single perspective, while it silences or obfuscates (potentially) alternative perspective(s), and, in tandem, exploits argument from silence i.e., the interjection that “if something has not been found, it cannot have existed” (Bernal 1987: 9). The critical discourse analysis theorist Norman Fairclough (Fairclough 2003) explication of features of ‘undialogized texts’ can also be adopted to disentangle undialogical scholarship such as of Abyssinianist hegemonic epistemology: • Authoritative: Speaks for others and produces impression of consensus; • Absolute: Non-modalized or categorical; • One-sided: Exclusionary of other’s voices/identity/history; • Incomplete: Unresolved issues are raised but assumed facts or left implicit or, statements of fact and of possibility are mixed up; • Abstraction: Issues are (over-)generalized and specific processual or circumstantial questions are evaded: Why? Who? When? With who? By what means? What causatives? No surprise, Pankhurst is crippled, in front of data, by his one-sided and closedsystem frame dismissive of alternative sources and perspectives. It is necessary to quote him at length (p. 198): One of the Gondär rulers of this period is said by local tradition to have erected a mousoleum to his horse. The monarch’s identity is, however, uncertain. The three more likely names mentioned in this connection are the city's founder, Emperor Fasilädäs (1632-1667), his son Yohannes I, and, perhaps the most probable in view of the building’s style, Iyasu II (1730-1755) whose horse is said to have been given the Biblical appellation Sub'él. This name does not, however, figure in Iyasu’s 33 chronicle which states on the contrary that the king's steed was called Qälbi (Guidi, 1912: 124), apparently the Afan Oromo or Galliñña word qälbi, for a ‘Cautious One’. His ‘adversaries’ are especially Oromo, whom he would like to call in his pejorative, imposed Abyssinianist syntax “Gallas”. He would like to quarantine them away south from Meroes, Nubians and Ancient Egyptians let alone accept that they ruled Gonder until 1850s: The modern Ethiopian historian Täklä Sadeq Mäkurya (1966: 118), however, argues, apparently with good reason, that the practice was first developed by the Oromos or Gallas, who later introduced it into the rest of the country. In support of this view it may be recalled that Iyasu I’s horse had, as we have seen, an Oromo name, and that Oromo names, as we shall see, were given to many other steeds of later times. It may also be noted that Iyasu II, the most probable builder of the equine mausoleum--if such indeed it was, married an Oromo woman from Wällo called Wäbi Amito (Guidi, 1912: 175), and that as a result of this union there was strong Oromo influence at his court. Several Oromo chiefs soon acquired powerful positions in the city. Bruce (1790, II: 667), who arrived at the capital shortly afterwards, goes so far as to assert that during the reign of Iyasu’s son, Emperor Iyo’as (1755-1768), ‘nothing was heard in the palace but Galla’, and ‘the King affected to speak nothing else’ (p. 198; Emphasis added). As much as possible, he would spare no time to portray Oromos, like his kindred, for instance, the widely quoted Ullendorff (1960: 73, 76) and Beckingham and Huntingford (1972: 111-139), both of who categorically claimed that Cushites contributed nothing to the “Ethiopian Civilization” for they are “barbaric” and possessed no “significant material or intellectual culture”. Nevertheless, long before these and himself, Krapf (1840: 2), for instance, was convinced of two facts for choosing Latin script over Ethiopic to translate the Gospel into Oromo: “first I do not think this [Oromo] language to be an alien to the Jephetitic idiom”, and “because I am convinced that the light of the Gospel and Science will be kindled first among the Gallas [Oromos], and thence proceed to the Abyssinians, who have nothing but the name of Christ”. Unlike his predecessors, Pankhurst is quick enough to distrust any history inasmuch as it is of Oromo: “Horse-names had, as Krapf (Isenberg and Krapf 1843: 322) suggests, even greater currency 34 among the nineteenth century Oromo rulers of Wällo--which if we accept the supposed Oromo origin of these names” (p. 201-202: Emphasis added). At times he feels, I feel, so angry that Biblical words and concepts, unfortunately, point to Oromo, infiltrating into an only and protected Semitic territory (p. 203): Horse-names were similarly in common use south of the Blue Nile in Gudru [an Oromo ethnonymy/toponymy], where Consul Plowden (1868: 300) [who studied and lived with Oromo] as an honoured guest, was given a horse apparently called Nafs, as a result of which he was, he explains, often referred to as ‘Naphsee [i.e. Nafs], or ‘Life’, signifying that I was the saviour of their lives.’ Soul would however be a more accurate translation (Guidi, 1901: 407, Foot, 1913: 41). After discussing and citing resources that confirm the purely Oromo history and onomastics, Pankhurst still doubts : “If horse-names were, as we are here supposing, in fact introduced into eighteenth century Gondar by the Oromos that city could well have been the focal point for their subsequent diffusion throughout the entire Ethiopian realm” (p. 201). It is a brut historical fact that Oromos populated far beyond his Gonder up until the Mediterranean Sea, despite they were overrun by cultural/linguistic/religious invasion, self- reconstitution and final conversion, but Pankhurst never dares to submit himself to truth. So tactful and insidious, Pankhurst is aware that to legitimize the false perception that he is neutral and free of bias, he thanks Oromo scholars whose voice was muted by his fascist Semitist regime of the time: “I am indebted to Professor Tilahun Gamta and Dr. Negaso Gidada for identification of several Afan Oromo or Galliñña words” (p. 197). Nevertheless, the fact was that by and since 1920s Oromos were left with three ‘options’ as one official document registered: enslavement, expropriation, or Amharization (Zewde 2002: 132). Too positivist and blinded, Pankhurst’s framework couldn’t enlighten him the fact that Professor Tilahun Gamta and Dr. Negaso Gidada were under slavery of his “Great Abyssinia”: this is no less than using torture to extract ‘data’ and leaving the 35 tortured in the room bleed to death and, as if everything is okay, thanking the ‘informant’ in front of international media long awaiting for press conference outside the torture room. DESTROYING PLAUSIBILITY STRUCTURE OF THE OROMO TO COUNTERFEIT SEMITIC ORIGINALITY As usual, Pankhurst conjures up European people and culture in Medieval and Ancient Africa: “Another person of this period whose horse is known to have had a name was the Scottish traveler James Bruce. It was called Mirza which he describes as “the name of good fortune” (Bruce 1790, III: 98, 98, 146, 187, 2023)” (p. 198). 26 It is good to add one more ridiculous ‘history’ (p. 198): [N]ote that Bruce, who arrived in Ethiopia in 1769, stated that it was customary after a battle in his time for a victorious soldier to brandish his spear, and repeat ‘in a seeming rage’ what he terms ‘a rant of nonsense’ which admitted no variation’, and, he says, went something as follows: ‘I am John the son of George, the son of William, the son of Thomas; I am the rider upon the brown horse’ (Bruce 1790, IV: 177). Pankhurst would have liked the counterpart of Apartheid South Africa established in the Horn of Africa (p. 200): [Once] the British envoy, Captain Cornwallis Harris (1844, II: 243), who reports that at King Sahlä Sellase’s palace at Angoläla the monarch’s “three favourite war-steeds” had mangers in close proximity to the royal couch. The ruler was in fact often seen in the company of these animals. Harris (1844, II: 220) observes that the king’s “dappled war-steed, bedizened with chequered housings of blue and yellow, was led prancing beside him, bearing the imperial shield of massive silver, with the sacred emblem of Christianity in high relief…. If Europeanizing becomes too revealing of his too wildish arguments, Pankhurst (p. 202) wisely prefers Arab as a destination: “The British envoy Harris (1844, II: 353) likewise mentioned ‘a Wollo Galla of consequence’ whom he referred to 26 In Oromo rhetorical practice “Mi ira oo!” ‘Luck!; Fortune!; Am Prideful!’ (AORIST REFLEXIVE AFFIRMATIVE from mi ira/mu ira ‘be bride, bridegroom’) is ejaculated before breaking the fortuity news to a partner one is bumped into. The news is only told if only the friend is hard-boiled and, hence, swiftly, unconditionally, and loudly responds “Şira uu!” ‘Be straight!; Am straight up!’ Its socio-cultural origin is hard to explain, but it is clear that it is deontic, ideological and a test of well-bredness (see also Tutschek 1844: 171). 36 only as ‘Abba Munsoor’, the latter being presumably the Arabic word Mansur, or ‘Victorious’, who lived in the district of Dibbi between Šäwa and Argobba”. In order to further send the so-called Travelers’ account to negative critique or falsification let’s note this. The so-called Jerome Lobo (whose Voyage in Abyssinia was first translated into English in 1728 by Samuel Johnson, quite oddly, from the “French”, when Lobo couldn’t have defended himself for he was already deceased) tells us: Among a prodigious number of trees which fill them, there is one kind which I have seen in no other place…This tree, which the natives call ensetè… its leaves, which are so large as to cover a man, make hangings for rooms, and serve the inhabitants instead of linen for their tables and carpets. They grind the branches and the thick parts of the leaves, and, when they are mingled with milk, find them a delicious food. The trunk and the roots are even more nourishing than the leaves or branches, and the meaner people, when they go a journey, make no provision of any other victuals. The word ensetè signifies the tree against hunger, or the poor's tree, though the most wealthy often eat of it. If it be cut down, within half a foot of the ground and several incisions made in the stump, each will put out a new sprout, which, if transplanted, will take root and grow to a tree. The Abyssins report that this tree when it is cut down groans like a man, and, on this account, call cutting down an ensetè killing it (Lobo 1887: 149; Emphasis added). McCann (1995: 54), who rightly argues that this crop is neither culture of ‘Abyssin’ nor cultivated by them, also reminds us in his Agricultural History of Ethiopia that: Seventeenth-century Portuguese accounts, and later James Bruce, described ensetè cultivation on the northern highlands especially around Gonder and in Gojjam. Almeida described it as “a tree peculiar to this country [i.e., northern Ethiopia] so like the Indian fig that they can be distinguished only from very near,” but Lobo offers great detail in describing its preparation and vegetative propagation (Square bracket is original; Emphasis added). These are not only good samples of Pankhurstian biased historiography of how etymology is abused, but also how misnomer and distortion of culture are all insult to the mind of the reader. The entire story is reflective of Oromo-Cush 37 culture, food and calques, never Ethiosemitic. The so-called Amharic ensetè is recently created misnomer, by suppressing the original Oromo-Cush qaa ō (also accented as qoo ō in other areas). As the writers repeatedly suggested through repletion of the word “tree”, ensetè is meaningless (i.e., never connects to history or ontology or, to use semiotic term, referent) because it is overnight mutilation-and-paste from the other Amharic enč’ete for ‘tree’, in actuality, an affront to not just the crop, but, more importantly, to the consumers. Some refer to this sacred crop as “plantain” or “winged-plant” but never mentioned that it is a metonymic-homosemic-homophonic expression, in ancient formulaic rhetorical style, of the Oromo qaa ō/qoo ō ‘wing’. The broad and tick leaves, which are like the wing of big bird of prey, is used for multiple purposes: indeed, used as ‘umbrella’ or “hangings for rooms” in light rain or scorching hot sun, “serve the inhabitants instead of linen for their tables and carpets”, an, in general, to enwrap everything and preserve it longer, including in the underground. For instance, in the preparation of ţamboo/ţimboo ‘solid tobacco bread’ for āyā ‘smoking-pipe’, the Oromo first ‘burns’ (with red-hot special gravels) the heap of tobacco leaves in a deep, wide hole in the ground (kinó) carefully coated with layers of qaa ō leaves. When the hole is half-filled with strata of admixture of the tobacco leaves and extremely hot stones dropped with especially designed tall wood tongs, it is left for a day or so to get cooler. Then after, the hole is again covered by another layer of qaa ō leaves in such a way that the whole chime is enwrapped, the remaining cool stones added until the hole actually appears a ‘grave’. It can stay buried for fermentation as long as the person wants to keep it there (months and years) before the next step. True, the Oromo would use qaa ō leaves as “linen for their tables and carpets” in the past, but used “thick parts of the leaves” for food only if Lobo is referring to its stump. Indeed, the Oromo use qaa ō/qoo ō for food. This food-plant stores lots of water and, hence, is resilient to lengthy drought times. Moreover, Oromos know that it “attracts rain mostly in highlands” (Kelbessa 2001: 42). For this reason, it is used as a key coping-strategy food-plant. In other words, it is preserved for 38 critical time (waakkii), hence called mi ’aan bara beelaa ‘food/crop for time of hunger/famine’. Definitely, this unique crop, whose young stumps are “transplanted” and “sprout” (yaa, ɨyā), technically by grafting, when it is cut, “groans like a man” (iyaa, ɨyā) but above all the water it stored drips like teardrops (ɨyā), which arises in the Oromo a compassion towards it, not least because the Oromo revere water and humanity. Taaddasaa Birbirsoo Mootii, my own father at Wallaggaa, Sayyoo, used to plant, protect and treat this plantain crop uniquely as it is one of the most sacred crops of Ga a Laws, particularly for its “wing” is as dense as that of ġuʥii ‘ostrich’. 27 For all the above reasons, an Oromo farmer of qaa ō does not “cut” it, but, literally, he/she ēsa/ ēsti ‘kills, fells’ it. Furthermore, the Oromo hypocoristically refer to this crop-plant as wark’é, literally ‘gold, gold-like (not color, to be explained)’ and its leaves baa a wark’é, denotatively ‘leaf of gold’, but connotatively ‘leaf of pretending poverty’, for this crop is cultivated business as usual even during abundance, no-drought or no-hunger times for adaptation reason or for ‘just in case’. There is inedible variety of this edible crop-plant, despite they are look-alike except that very skilled people identify “the leaves of the inedible one is more whitish” and when it is ‘killed’ the inner “viscera” of the stump is “empty” (only fibers) unlike the edible one full of “solid breads”. The Oromo of western Wallagga (most probably the one Lobo spelled “Olaca”, p. 40) call this variety ā oo literally meaning “abject, callous; whitish, sun-like”. 27 28 Gada ceremony of Baallii Walirá Fú ’a is both literally and symbolically means/performs “Power Exchange” or “transfer of ostrich feathers” (Legesse 1973:81-82; 2006:125). Baallii u ii ‘ostrich feather’ is representation or isgnia of density ( u a), stability ( adooma) and equity (qitťa) of Gada. Some historians tell us this crop-plant was known in Ancient Egyptian. In the hieroglyphica of Egyptians “When they would symbolise a man who distributes justice impartially to all, they depict the Feather of an Ostrich; for this bird has the feathers of its wings equal on every side, beyond all other birds” (Horapollo, 1840: 215), and Pthah “occasionally wears a disk with the lofty ostrich feathers of Osiris, and holds in each hand a staff of purity, in lieu of the emblems of stability and life” (Wilkinson 1840: 252). 28 Note that Wallagga or Wollegga is a recent, late 19th century fusion (by assimilation of the lequids /l/ and /r/ into geminated /ll/ followed by de-ejectivization of /q/ and germination into /gg/) from Worra/Warra Leeqaa ‘the Family/House of Leeqaa’ who was one of the sons of Mačč’a, the ancient moiety, and an agnate from who the current Leeqaa big clan of descended. Father 39 When he wrote his Oromo-English Dictionary, Foot (1913: 56) was not wrong when he defined the two enteries (quite in Amharicized accent or spelling) werke ‘gold’ and werke ‘male plantain’ mainly because the latter might be barren because it cannot cross-fertelize (itself). Or, maybe, as the Oromo say, too, the real, edible qaa ō crop-plantain must be the female one. Sketch of Qaa ō/Qoo ō allegedly Sii aa/Sooddu ‘Megalith’ of Buttaa aarraa taken by James Bruce (1970) Figure 3 Either unacquainted with the anthropoetymology or caused by deliberate obfuscation of facts, Lobo wrongly calqued on foregone form-semantic when he told us about “the meaner people”, which is designated in Oromo by wak’ata/wakkata “frugal, penurious person, pretending poverty; miser, mean person” (Foot 1913:55) or war rakata ‘people who are poor, wrenched people’, though it is true that “when they go a [long] journey”, for it stays resistant to bacterial infestation for days, the Oromo “make no provision of any other victuals” but qaa ō bread. More interesting mystified mystification is revealed by van Wyk KLambert Bartels makes plausible comparison between Leva/Levite of the Bible and Leeqaa of Oromo worldview and rituals. 40 Smith (2006) when fleshed out that the so-called “travelers”—rather cheaters— like Jomard (1858: 44–48) and anonymous characters like “Youssouf Kamal” (Kamal 1926–1951, vol. 4 part 2, 1287)” told us that they found “an inscription on the Pizigani map of 1367” that gave them “some indication of the extraordinary fantasies that had by then come to be associated with Ethiopia”: In Ethiopia is much gold, as a priest from Ethiopia tells. The great men cover their houses with roofs of sheets of gold, and the interiors are decorated with gold worked in many ways. Soldiers make their arms of gold because of a shortage of iron here. When they go to war and the sun strikes them, they will appear so brilliant that one cannot look at them (all cited in van Wyk Smith 2006: 69; Emphasis added). Let’s compare this with the following experience of Charles Beke who, while travelling in Abyssinia, witnessed evil Abyssinianist ‘business’: On the road to Dembecha, I passed several parties of merchants proceeding on their way to Gondar and Massowah (by the Abyssinians called Matzuwa), with slaves [“from the Galla country”], ivory, coffee, &c. The slaves go along without the least restraint, singing and chatting, and apparently perfectly happy.… They are mostly well dressed, and many of them wear canonical caps of plantain-leaves [=baa a wark’é] to protect them from the sun. The girls, almost without exception, have necklaces of beads. In fact, it is not to the interest of their owners to treat them otherwise than well; for as more than one merchant has said to me at Yejubbi [Biå Yejju, in Wallo], when asking for medicine for them, “they are our property (kabt, literally cattle), and we cannot afford to lose them.” They generally invest the best-looking of their female slaves, in most cases a full-grown girl, with the title of wife during the journey…. many are children of eight or nine years at most—are the concubines of their master and his servants during the journey (Beke, 1844: 19-21; square brackets added). It can be speculated that the so-called “Ge’ez Library” of Tewodros is precisely located in Biå Yejju, in Walloo, and it is rather an irony for concentration camp of these beautiful “Slaves” and the British prisoners that the British Army librated. 41 An Oromo girl by the name Borrilee or Bilillee meaning “belle”, sold by Abyssinians in 1830s as a “slave” to an Arab friend who changed her name to “Mahbuba”, but rescued by Germans and latter married to a German Prince Figure 4: Oromo belle “slaves” Let’s use Lobo and Bruce’s wrong/false narratives to say a few words about the unique Oromo metonymic-homosemic-homophonic systematization style. Oromo rhetorical organization has preserved the feature of “ancient texts” (Sumner 1996:19) that exploits “intimate link…between form, content and concrete situation in life” (Sumner 1996: 17-18), “formulaic texts” (Triulzi & Bitima 2005: 132-136), rhythmatic verses styled by “the usual” and “artful sound parallelism…forming a kind of parallelism of sounds or images” (Cerulli 1922: 21, 87, 67, 69, 96) or, as another scholar expresses it, forming “parallelism of sounds” and “image” in “vocalic harmony” (Bartels, 1975: 898), and a “series of short sententious phrases” that are “disposed to help memory” (de Salviac 2005 [1901]: 285). Enno Littmann, who led the “German archaeological-scientific expedition” to Ethiopia in “1906” (Toggia 2008: 327) and, subsequently, wellacquainted with Oromo wisdom literature, concluded that this is a feature “surely has developed within the [Oromo] language” and “is also only imaginable in a sonorous language such as Oromo” which “as a prerequisite, [has] a formally highly developed poetical technique” (Littmann 1925: 25 cited in Bartels 1975: 899). 42 As a result of Pankhurstian argument-from-silence, countless errors and misunderstandings similar to the ahistoricization of “ensetè” can be enumerated in Ethiopian ‘history’, none of which, unfortunately, we can entertain here due to space constraint. Pankhurstian etymology, in particular, and Abyssinianist historiography, at large, has strong fear of knowledge. On the one hand this autochthonous plant was domesticated, engineered indigenously and has been in use since antiquity, “conceivably” around “of I5, 000 years ago” (Ehret 1979: 175). Secondly, this sacred plant is painted or engraved on the “pre”-historic, majestic and ceremonial sii aa/sooddu farewell/relief’) or ’aaba ā ‘megaliths’, literally, ‘pillar of a aa ǧ’irračča ‘monoliths’, literally, ‘stone of flux of life-in- spacetime’ (both erected as memorabilia during and at the sites of Buttaa/Ğaarraa Rituals) and a aa t’iyyâ ‘stones of edge/arrow’ (also T’iyya is person-female name) in many parts of Oromia/Ethiopia, though they are less loudly ‘spoken’ by Abyssinianist historians and archaeologists (Fig. 3 Right). Both pre-dates the emigration of the Solomonic or Babylonian or South Arabic hypothetical tribes, a migration to Africa unsuspectingly declared to be only ‘recently’ i.e., early Christian era in the 4rth century. This never supports their zealous hegemonic epistemology whose fundamental and ultimate aim is, to be sure, deliberate, i.e., to dismantle the plausibility structure 29 of the original and natural people, divide them, fight them one against the other and divide-and-rule them. That’s why Pankhurst evades data that pre-dates the aforementioned migration to Africa. PANKURST: MYSTIFIED MYSTIFIER? Let’s consider Pankhurst’s sources and the related fallacies that reveal that the transl(iter)ator of the original text is unacquainted with the import of the original genre (p. 201): Däjazmac Sábagades, the subsequent ruler of Tegré who held power from 1818 to 1831, likewise had a ‘vaunted’ horse-name, which was 29 Plausibility structure is used here as equivalent to Social praxis, a society’s diachronically constructed truth system: the whole linguistic, cultural, socio-political, social epistemological, philosophical infra-/intra-/superstructure. 43 recorded by Pearce (1831, 1: 169; II: 193) as either ‘Abba Garre’ or ‘Abba Garre Bar’ and, was taken, he explains, ‘from the first horse’ the chief ‘rode to war in his youth’. The animal was, it would appear, named gaari, the Afan Oromo word for ‘Good’ or ‘Well Mannered’. Pankhurst confuses gaari ‘fine, well, civilized, learned’ with the Gada System age-class K’erroo ‘early age, 13-16, of warship curricula and horsemanship; tiger-age’ or warfare concepts aarii/qaarii ‘cart, chariot’ and abba qara ‘man/horse of war/chariot’ (also qara ‘war, weapon, blade’). Let’s also draw our attention to the Semitist Martin Bernal challenging Eurocentric scholars and arguing Classical Greek concepts are but stolen from Afroasiatic family. The concept in focus here is “kantharos”, “Kentauros” or “centaur”: The familiar image of a centaur is of the kindly hybrid horse-man Kheírōn, the instructor of Aesculapius in the art of healing….In Homer the centaurs were simply a savage race, known for their ferocity and their enmity to mankind and above all for their scattering after unsuccessful battles with the Lapithai…Kentauros had other meanings: “brutal paedophilia” (Bernal 2006: 256-257). It is essential to take a look at the probabilistic question marks (p. 201): Other Tegré chiefs whose horse-names have been recorded, by Pearce (1831: I, 58, II, 94, 111, 192-3), were Ras Mika’él Sehul’s grandson Hezqueyas who was known as “Abba Cu-loc” (?)…and Gäbrä Mika’él, a nobleman of Tamben, who was spoken of as Abba Gurga (?)” (Pankhurst 1989: 201). It is easy to guess safely that neither Pankhurst, nor whom he quotes have cultural lexicon to understand the original text; if it was a field data, it could have been explained by the respondents. The only option they have is dogmatic translation usually through calques. An additional informative text is this (p. 202): Däjazmac Ahmade 30 , the ruler of Tähuladärä 31 , who was called “Abba Shawul”, the latter possibly a contraction of the Amharic Si Awel, i.e. “May 30 Amadee and Mammadee look Muslim anthroponym, however, these are pre-Christian, preIslam Oromo person-names whose religion is the Waaqessa/Waaqeeffanna, the belief in monolithic Waaqa ‘God, Devine, Supreme Being (also means ‘sky, heaven’). 31 Tähuladärä is not only strange toponym but also inexistent in reality. Any logical mind should wonder why so many places and place names in Abyssinianist/Ethiopic texts exist only at phantasmagoric level. Or, do the Ethiosemitic languages appear and disappear in one generation’s lifetime only? 44 You lead A Thousand through the Day”, and two chiefs who were referred to only by their horse-names: a lord of Borána 32 called “Abba Damto” 33 , actually Damtäw, literally in Amahric “Destroy!”, a name also much used in later times, and one of Adara Bille’s governors who was spoken of as “Abba Goalit” (?)”. DuBois (cited in Bekerie 2004), the great African-American scholar, unveiled “ancient Egyptian documents and artifacts” in which “significant Oromo conceptual terms [are] found”, one of which is “the term Auqas, a name of the divine ferryman. The Oromos call their God Waqaa and Waqeyo is one of the most popular names among the Oromos” (Bekerie 2004: 116-117). Secondly, the multitudinal Boora-n (which interchanges with the agnate ‘Oromo’ interchange with ‘Hoorro’) is an ancient Oromo moiety (Oromo gave birth to Raia/Raya and Boora); eponymous, today Booran/Boorana (-na, multitudinalplural-aorist marker) is the largest Oromo super-clan or confederation, whose origin is Baa ‘Emergence, Genesis; East, morning twilight, primogenitor; gray, black-gray’, hence, Beera (Beeroo, plural) ‘The Great Man, Elderly, Prime, Primogenitor(s)” (Cerulli 1922: 12; Legesse 1972, 2000). Hassen (1994: 16) states “In the interpretation of the [Gada] law, the new Abba Gada was supported by legal experts who were old, retired judges. Because ‘old age in general was a sign of wisdom and associated with peace the retired judges contributed’ to the maintenance of peace among the part of the whole.” Literally beeroo means ‘those who are knowledgeable, seasoned, elderly (gender neutral)’, barra ‘era, time period, reigning time’, bara ‘to know, to be enlightened’ (baroo/boroo is ANIMATE plural). Hence, for a Beeroo Gadaa ‘Senators of Gada’, knowledge and barr’u ‘beauty, palm of the hand’, barrii ‘to dawn; morning twilight’ are one and the same. We are told that ‘Pharaoh’ comes from Egyptian Pera’a ‘Great House’, but it rather means, without need for distortion, ‘Great Men’; also, in both 32 Borana is an ancient Oromo moiety, today the largest Oromo clan; it is also eponymous to many Oromo place and personal names; the first meaning is cosmogonal: ‘East, morning twilight, gray, primogenitor, upper-caste’ (Cerulli 1922: 12; Bartels 1983). 33 D’amota is Oromo word for ‘alpine and cold climate area worth living for man; stems (genealogical)’. 45 Oromo and Ancient Egyptian beeroo/boroo means ‘hedge, residence of great men’. Neither Eurocentric Egyptologists, nor their southern counterparts, namely Ge’ezologists like Pankhurst, could risk an iota of evidence-based debate, but can only blindly make big claims. Sometimes, Pankhurst straightforwardly rubbishes the Oromo great men (of history) while praises that of Amhara, using semantic deterioration of the Oromo terms (p. 204): Several less important personalities with horse-names are mentioned in the travel literature of the period. They include a certain Abba Magaal, whose name, as already noted, signified a Dark or Copper-coloured Horse, and one Abba Bokka, whose horse, as we have seen, meant "Rain" (U Abbadie, 1983, III: 2234, 277-8). Mention is also made of three other men: "Abba Dubissé" (D’ Abbadie, 1983, III: 246-51), perhaps Dubbisee, i.e. "One who Entertains", from the Afan Oromo dubbisuu, "to greet" or "to entertain" , Abba Neečca (D' Abbadie, 1983: 250), from Neenča (or Leenča), the Oromo for a "Lion", and "Abba Morki” or Morki (D' Abbadie, 1983 [must be 1893], III: 267), from the Afan Oromo morkachuu "to dispute", i.e. One able to Dispute or Compete. Similar names were reported in Gomma and Kuča. The early nineteenth century Oromo ruler of Gomma was thus called "Abba Rebo", while that of Kuča was, according to Harris (1844, III: 59, 77), "surnamed from the title of his war steed Aba Wábotoo, 'I am he who siezes'" (The horse had in fact an Oromo name: waabutoo (i.e. waa, or "something" and butuu, "to snatch") (First line emphasis and square brackets added). In actuality, “Abba Bokka” is twisted from Abba Bokkuu “(Man) of the Scepter/Power” or Abba Gada the President (for bokkuu scepter is exchanged between the in-coming and the out-going Abba Gada and bokkuu also means “power”), “Abba Dubissé” must be Abba D’ebbisaa “that Rolls Back (enemy)”, “Abba Rebo” must be corrected as Abba Raabo (vocative-animate of Raaba, discussed elsewhere in this paper) “that Hews, Slashes” synonym of Abba Kuča “that Mutilates/Amputates” from the symbolic animal rooppii/roopp’a “hippopotamus, water-horse”. The so-called Harris’ Aba Wábotoo is mutilation of Abbaa Buttaa (normally in Oromo system Abba should be written with final very long vowel “Abbaa”) which means “that Tears Appart/Cracks” (after buttaa or the nominative buttii ‘anaconda, puff adder constrictor or “snatcher” and Buttaa Ritual of Victory, held the day that follows Gada Power Exchange). 46 In addition of the above mystification, there is no reason, but the usual agenda of systematic distortion of Oromo for ‘lion’ (leenca [leenč’a]) in the following excerpt: In Lasta the local ruler Ras Ilu, again according to Pearce (1831, II: 193), was called “Abba Lincher”, i.e. Abba Leenča, the Afan Oromo for a “Lion” (Gragg, 1982: 263), a name also reported in later times (Mahtämä Sellase, 1869: 297) (p. 202). Lambert Bartels, the Catholic Father and great scholar on Oromo myth, religion and culture, has documented well that there is ancient mythological interlink between Oromo religion, the Booran upper social-caste among Oromo clans and booraa ‘male lion (figurative)’ ( eenč’a, ye a ‘lion’). Most importantly, Pankhurst wisely circumvented “Ras Ilu”. I u (also ḫɨlú) is a historic and legendary Oromo word/concept; its first meaning is, with augmentative-complimentary notion, ‘son, hewer; hare, clever’. Today, I u Abba Boora is a vast country in Western Oromia (Ethiopia), a toponymy after an ancient Oromo Abba Gada called I u (meaning ‘son, seed, fruitlet’), and his horse name Abba Boora ‘horse having brownish/yellowish color, morning twilight, East’ from which comes the ancient moiety Boora and the eponymous Booran super- tribe/federation, well saved and documented both in oral history and archives (OCTB 2006). But, see Table 1 Column 1 last row. The form Aba/Abba ‘man, husband, father, proprietor of’ permeates the (original) biblical texts, be it in its original lexeme or as a calques in later translations. The Orthodox Christianity that Punkhrust’s Ethiosemitic introduced to Africa/Axum in the 4th century A.D., if we should believe, is so most conservative version that it “forbids the worship [sic]” of “three-dimensional icons” (Bekerie 1997: 25). Hence, it also forbids zoophilism (devotion to and respect for animals), zoomorphism (use of animals in arts) or zoomorphologization (i.e., idea-naming after (name of) animals) or zoosemotactic (i.e., symbolization, figuritivization or signification of semantic and social institutional structures by animal anatomy or their simulacra) for it is “pagan” and “worship of idols”. Symptomatic of its foundationless, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church which claims has lost its classical language Ge’ez 47 calls this kinds of icons or “pagan worship” of these ťa ot, but this plagiarism of Oromo ṯa ota ‘characters, makeups, representations’, a plural, marked by – (o)ota, from ṯaʔ/ ṯaâ ‘to be, to become; is, AUXILIARY VERB’ or ‘mimeses, calendar’, from ’o’a a ’á ‘to observe, imitate, mirror, pursue (natural governments)’; beat, hammer out (Gada laws)’ from ’a ‘bind, strike; COPULA’. Neither Ge’ez nor Ethiosemitic has word for ‘God, Devine’; they use recently coined, derived or periphrastic forms like Igzia-Beher ‘‘?’ (beher Amharic for ‘nation’), Amlak ‘Devine’ or Feťari ‘Creator’. 34 So, Pankhurst has to prove: How come Orthodox Ethio-Semites, if we should believe, symbolize/name their great men and gods with/after horses? See Table 1 for comparison of some, according to Pankhurst, Ethiosemitic “horse” or “sovereign” names, forms which are, in actuality, so strange, hence, not in use in any Ethiosemitic language/culture, and the Oromo equivalents based upon not only field data from Oromo informants in use of all the terms, but also on previous documents by, among others, Krapf (1842), Tutschek (1844), Viterbo (1892), Foot (1913) and Cerulli (1922). Table 1: Horse/Sovereign names Ethiosemitic Oromo Summat ‘Appointment’ Šúmi ‘Governor’ Abba Bulla ‘bay-coloured Abba Boora ‘Gray Horse’ Abba Bulee ‘Grey-reddish’ Abba Garre/Abba Garre Bar ‘vaunted’ Abba Garri ‘Whitish-Fine Horse’ Abba Č’ollee ‘Runner, Courser’ Abba Fatana ‘Alarming, Anguished’ Abba Daak’a ‘Grinder’ Abba Daamaa ‘Handsome reddishblue horse with a star’ Abba Deguu ‘My Milestone, Reliable, Trust’ Abba Mačč’a ‘Inebriated-horse, Abba Cu- loc ‘?’ Abba Fetton ‘Speedy’ Abba Dagat ‘Father of Height’ Abba Demanner/Dämmäna ‘Cloud’ Abba Diego’a ‘?’ Abba Mänja ‘He who Pushes Forward’ All of them adapted by alchemization and phonemic change (using Grimm’s Law e.g. /dh→z, b→f) from Oromo-Cush, Ga aa Boora ‘The Hallowed Law of the Barons’ or iiqee Beeraa ‘Sacred Law of Women/Baroness’, Malkaa ‘Sacred Depression with Water and Greenery as Deliverer of “Milk of Life” (symbol or manifestation of the immaculate maternal ancestral spirits)’, A baarii ‘Sacred Cradleland on Highlands with Sycamorus Trees (symbol or manifestation of the immaculate paternal ancestral spirits). The Oromo-Cush for ‘Black Sky-God’ signified by Waaqa/ Ak’a is as old as Black Africans religious system. The Oromo-Cush for ‘Black Sky-God’ signified by Waaqa/ʔAk’a is as old as Black Africans religious system and well documented in early Ancient Egyptian texts (Bekerie 2004: 116 based on W.E.B DuBois ). 34 48 Abba Bora/Boroo ‘yellow or coffeecoloured Horse’ [Ethiosemitic: bič’a ‘yellow’] Treader ’ Abba Boora ‘Brownish-; Morning Twilight’; Abba Bulee ‘bluish-coffee colored’ It is Oromo ethical philosophy to call a man who has already fathered child(ren) with the syntax: {Abba + FIRST-BORN CHILD’S NAME}, or {Abba +HORSE NAME}, or {Abba + WORRAA/MANAA+ WIFE’S NAME}. 35 It is socially taboo to call a father/mother of a child by his/her first or second or whatsoever name most probably because he/she is at one with his/her children and hence multitudinal— children morally belong to no single individual/father/mother but to ‘I-WE’. For this philosophical reason, the Oromo adage goes: Farda fi nîʈii ’ān maqaa nama ’aani ‘It is by the name of the horse or the wife, that the man/husband is called/addressed’. For similar reason, the polysemous words a ’a ‘mother, wife of’ (a ’é/a ’oo, vocative) and abba/ßaa ‘father, subject, owner’ (ßoo/abbo, vocative) both equally designate ‘begetter of, owner of, leader of, dispenser, guardian, origin, absolutive-genitive case’ (Bartels 1983: 372). Gidada (1984: 128) documents: The respect given to him [the Father, the Patriarch] was symbolized in the way he was addressed by them [all members of the family]. His children, apart from calling him father, i.e., aabboo, or baabboo [-oo ‘vocative respectfulness], had to refer to him in the third person pronoun isin, meaning “You” (respectful) instead of sii (you, singular) and isaan, meaning “He” (respectful) instead of isa (he, third person)…Sometimes he was also addressed as abbaa ‘So-and-So”, the attribute being the name of a son, of a horse or the main trait in his character. Primarily let’s note that the generic word/concept korma/sanga designates all the following inasmuch as they have the traits {MALENESS + VIRILITY combined 35 The interchangeable neuter-gender worra-a and mana-a mean, respectively, ‘head of family of’ and ‘headman of house of’ and each can be used for a husband or a wife. The sequence Abba + Worra-a literally translates/calques the Biblical expression “husband wife (of)” or Abba + Manaa+ WIFE’s NAME “husband man (of)”. Several similar Biblical calques on Oromo idioms can be listed from the King James English version, but for limits of spacetime we can only add: ‘Mr. X carried away the daughter of Mr. Y’ (designated by the verb fuu ’a ‘carry away, marry (male only)’; ‘Mr. X carried away all his cattle’ (bá ’sa ‘carry away, get cattle graze’), ‘X touched the hollow of his thigh’ ( u eefu a ‘seize/touch between own thighs; be bulwark to, adopt a child AUTOBENEFACTIVE’), etc. See Bartels (1984) and de Salviac (1901) for more Biblical cultural idioms calqued on Oromo. 49 with intrepidity}: manly man, son, boy, lion, tiger/leopard, horse, buffalo, bull, ram, bird of prey. The bull is selected because, as Baxter (1979: 71, 82-84) deciphered accurately, in Oromo culture “big game hunting for trophies [were] considered as a pursuit that fostered “manly” attributes; successful hunter was, like a good warrior or a prolific father, d’iira “male, masculine, intrepid, virile”, aba “tough, bullock” or korma “bull”, which means a “successful warrior”, for he has “become responsible for the nation”. For this reason, if a father did not father a son but only daughter(s), he must be called after his horse-name {Abbá + HORSE’S NAME} because the steed or male horse is like the son: a bulwark of his life, family and nation. As Gidada accurately pointed out, the horse’s name follows the syntax: Abba ‘proprietor of’ + what it CAN DO (to our perception and/or in its unique capacity, action). In a similar way, ilma abba, “son of father” means “noble” (Ceruilli 1922: 45), for khorma ‘horse-bull, buffalo-bull” are symbol of tough, brave macho-man Baxter (1979: 71). A certain Frenchman by the name de Barenton (1936) was hunting ancient knowledge, as I understand from his book L’Origine des Langues des Religions et des Peuples. He compiled vocabulary from Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic, aboriginal African languages that includes Oromo and FrançaisRoma and many others. He correctly co-related the etymology of the following Oromo lexemes: aba, seigneur, gouverneur; abara, imprécation, malediction; êba, bénédiction; présent nuptial; êbiza, bénir, remercier; ifa, faire clair, briller; ifte, filet, réscau; hibo, énigme, charade (chose à deviner, trouver); hofu, ainsi soit-il, formule qui termine les prières; hofolza, protéger (de Barenton 1936: 9). Moreover, according to the Oromo Gada System, a cosmological-social-political system, all the ministers/sovereigns are called by the honorific-structural title {Abba + a (nearly) homophonic and/or double-semantic word that simultaneously designate his DUTY and INSIGNIA}, for instance, Abba Gada ‘the President’, Abba Dŭɭá/D’îɾã ‘the Minister of War’ (Dŭ á=SPEAR), Abba K’o ó ‘the Magistrate’ (K’o ó= SLEDGEHAMMER, ADZE), Abba Sâã ‘the Minister of Attention/Finance’ (Sâã= BULL), Abba Bokku ‘Minister of 50 Justice’ (bokku= SCEPTER (with knobs on both sides)’, Abba Qallačča ‘Spiritual Father of the Nation’ (Qallačča= PHALLIC-OBJECT (forehead-gear) and so forth. For hundreds of such sociopolitical positions with their respective LEXEME-cumINSIGNIA, it suffices to see the entry {Abba+…} in the works of the Italian missionary Father Viterbo (Viterbo 1892) or the Italian scholar Cerulli (Cerulli 1922, especially glossary section). Note, however, that Cerulli is much ‘spoiled’ by Orthodox Christianity tradition that he interpreted as if Abba was honorific title for Orthodox dabtara “sorcerers” without admitting that it was plagiarized and twisted. One cannot blame Cerulli because of his own socio-ideological origin, not least that during his visits to the Oromo country, the people have had fresh reminiscence of genocides, forcible conversion to Orthodox Christianity worldview, and had already lost their Gada System, all of which Pankhurst and his kindred welcomed with triumphant mood. One among the Oromo sovereigns is Abba Far a ‘Sheriff’ (as in American English), whose insignia is farada/far a ‘horse’. During the old days of government by the people—Gada System--he used to move around his community on horseback and solve, for instance, land boundary disputes (see Foot 1913: 19 and Gidada 2006: 99). The Boorans, as well as all the Oromo sub-tribes, say ‘Far i abba!’ or ‘Far i nama “Horse is (human) being”, i.e., is so intelligent, amicable and mannish! Any elderly Oromo recites ‘Far i arooma! Yoo abbaan irraa kufee ka’uu a ’abe bira ’abbatee imimmsaa oolee bula malee gatee hingalu!’ “Horse is a wise nice ‘man’. Just in case the rider falls off and loses consciousness, he never comes home abandoning his man, but he stays with him neighing tearfully days through nights” (see also Wami 2014:140-142). For this reason, the form Abba repeats itself several times in a sovereign’s name (who automatically is skilled in horsemanship and owner of a horse with extraordinary skill for warship), for instance, Abba Jiffar Abba Fo ii Abba Mačč’a. This is, because it is the custom of Oromo to have oneself named as much after one’s most celebrated ancestor’s name as after one’s mannish, vanguard horse is considered reflexivity and 51 reflection of ‘true Oromohood’ (note that mačč’a designates ‘name of an ancient moiety, great son of man, inebriated-horse’). This was well studied by Cerulli (1922) who based his study on19th century French and Italian scholars on Oromo tradition and culture. Pankhurst is well acquainted with these studies but he chose to evade just for his Semitico-centric and Oromo-dismissive position, illustrated as follows (p. 203): …the modern American social anthropologist Herbert Lewis (1965: xviixix) observes, “young boys [of Oromo] are given Muslim names”, but are “renamed by the time they get married”. Their “mature names” (which were in fact non other than horse-names) were, he explains: “generally composed of the word abba ‘father’, ‘owner of’, plus a word descriptive of a horse….In order to identify a person more certainly the Galla refer to him by his own ‘horse name’ followed by that of his father: Abba Garo-Abba Bok’a, Abba Jiffar-Abba Gommol, and so on” (Emphasis added). Calqued and dogmatic or systematically distorted translation is observed in: “according to the British envoy (Harris 1844: II 384, III, 40), was the ruler of the Gallas of the Muger area, and was surnamed ‘the Great Beggar in the West’.” It is the characteristic feature of Pankhurst’s style to use agent-less construction and hence we cannot know who surnamed and why. The so-called “the Great Beggar in the West” must be corruption of Abba Gadaa Abba Gudata ‘the Great man of Gada whose name is Gudata (lit., one who is man of consequence)’ for Gudata seems kad’ata ‘beggar’ and gada-ta ‘down-AUX’ 36 i.e. dusk. Long before Pankhurst’s falsities were issued, a certain allegedly Portuguese Jesuit monk they named as Manuel De Almeida “chronicled” in 16th century a “manuscript” Vida de Takla Haymanot 37 in which such semi-White Habesh or pure-White European or unexplained Abba’s travelling on their horseback and teaching the sacred Christianity religion to the heathens are mentioned at the heart of Abyssinia: Abba Joann, Abba Jesus, Abba Michael, Abba Christo Bezanā, Abba Mascalmoā, Abba Antonios, Abba Macarios, etc, difficult to 36 37 AUX=auxiliary. Vida de Takla Haymanot, Manuel de Almeida (Available at: www.gutenberg.net.). 52 pronounce for any Ethiopian. How come that Prof Pankhurst didn’t know these “noble men”? ETYMOLOGY WITHOUT COMMUNITY OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL AGENTS? For Darwinean evolutionary ‘law’ never allows, anyone must find it hard to teach a language that never existed, no matter how some might claim existence ‘once upon a time’. No one but the poor teacher grappling with ‘teaching’ the so-called Classical Greek, Latin or Ge’ez, must speak. The leading evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins made fun out of this and described “waste of time”. No surprise, Pankhurst, too, never told us the Abyssinian words for tools of trapping, embellishing, etc., horses, but only tells us fairytales, as usual, with his mundane and empty verbiages, of which a good example is (p. 198): Later, during the reign of Emperor Iyasu I (1682-1702), the French traveler Charles Poncet described the royal horses as “richly harnessed and covered with costly stuffs of gold hanging down to the ground, over which were the skins of tigers, extremely beautiful” (Foster 1949: 118,127). Professor Richard Pankhurst cannot allow disenclaving himself out of his comfort zone, namely, the colonial era Indo-Ethiosemitic texts. If truth be told, nor do Ethiosemitic languages have ‘texts’ (expressions or concepts) for horse categories, technologies, body parts. They have to borrow from Oromo-Cush. Oromo categorize horses not only based upon color or capacities, but also upon their mythical and social values. Horses are also categorized as those for \the elderly men’ versus ‘for the elderly women’, ‘for wedding ritual’ versus ‘for burial ritual’, ‘for war’ versus ‘for reconciliation’, ‘for race’ versus ‘for hunting’, and so forth. Other ways of categorizing horses are: abba bok’a ‘horse with white mark on forehead’; abba qallačča ‘horse with white patch on back of the head’, both seen as good omen; abba muḏa/muʈa ‘horse having four white legs and white tip to the tail’; abba dannaba ‘turbulent/trophy horse’; abba mokorra ‘horse for race’ (we shall explicate the mythical symbological detail ahead). 53 Let us briefly see some concepts of technology and domestication, in its broadest sense, of horses. Because it is too many and of various utilities it is difficult to translate horse equipments terminologies: kira ‘horse’s house’, gola farda ‘stall for a horse in the house’ č’ama ’a ‘to ensnare, put in horse or oxen’ (from č’ama ‘calm, calm down’); fuuloo ‘part of bridle’; č’anč’ala ‘a part of a bridle so that it rings’; mokora ‘horse race’; gulufa ‘horse game’; kooraa ‘saddle; to mount and set down on saddle’; loogama ‘curb-bit of the bridle; horsekeeper’; faanoo ‘pedal’; me ’i a ‘charm hung round the neck of a horse’; alan ee ‘whip for horse’; angato ‘rope or raw hide round the neck of a horse’; me ’iča ‘cultural symbolic object hung round the neck of a horse’; á an ‘horseman’s shield with logo aḏaa/qaťťa mŭraa ‘crisscross, war strategy’; and, horse embellishment kits elelaan, gishee, gilaasii and so forth (Figure1 A; see for more words/concepts associate to horses). For it is born of society that never existed, hence cannot organize elements of Social Activity Theory Model (Fig.1), Ethiosemitic also must borrow from Oromo, directly or by the commonest way of twisting, terms for horse body parts and training, for instance: gama ‘mane’; ǩo é/kottee ‘hoof, horseshoe’; gulufa ‘to gallop horses’; gugsa ‘to train horse” and so forth. Pankhurst never tells us the fact that these are borrowed to Ethiosemitic. Nor can he tell us horse classification lexicons, except the color-based one because truth betrays him. In contrast, we can consider some Oromo lexicons: biǧiree ‘horse of poor social value’ (because it is naturally physically small); ga ñaa ‘restive horse (ass)’, halalee ‘sexually the most active’, man adi ‘a sorry old, retired horse’ (literally, ‘retired Gada man’), batati ‘an old worn-out horse’, ’alee ‘mare’, and so on. During the last decades of the 19th century, Father Martial de Salviac described the extraordinary skills of Oromo horsemen that disbanded the Italian colonizer army at Adowa (de Salviac 2005[1901: 319-323). Father de Salviac described the Oromo horsemen dexterity: The true Oromo horseman knows neither the bridle nor the saddle….They throw and dexterously wards off the inoffensive javelins that vibrates passing each other. The supreme skill consists of picking them up from the 54 ground galloping, the leg hooked onto the dorsal spine of the horse and the hand lost in the waving mane of the horse. They thus stretch out in a wink of the eye and rise up at the same time, ready to throw forward again the arrow they have just caught. This makes up the terrible bands of northern Oromo horsemen, mounted without saddle, which disbanded the Italian regiments at Adwa, persisted in the pursuit of the fugitives (de Salviac 2005[1901]: 319; See Figure 5D). A (Oromo Horsemen) B (Laga Oda horse motif, Červiček, 1971) C (Laga Oda; also Červiček 1971 Fig. 35) D (Oromo Warrior, Rochet 1841) 55 E (Cover page of Arab Faqīh 2003) F (Hiob Ludolf 1624-1704) Figure 5: Equestrian Artifacts A stark contrast is observed between Figure 5 A, B, C, and especially D (Rochet’s sketch of Oromo warrior on his inebriated (maččaa) horse, with his weaponry shield ( a ana) and spear (ébō)) on the one hand and, on the other hand, E (Cover page of Arab Faqīh’s Futū Al- abaša/The Conquest of Abyssinia (2003), a 16th century chronicle translated by P. L. Stenhouse with annotations by Richard Pankhurst) and F (a sketch of an unspecified Germancum-Abyssin character Hiob Ludolf). Both E and F are imagination or irrealis seraphs existent only in the illusory mind of Richard Pankhurst and his kindred and indeed they have tortuously admitted the falsity when they published The Conquest of Abyssinia at “Hollywood”, center of fabulous creative, fictional works. The rest are real cultural history, from time immemorial to here and now— real social activity ‘theory’ with all its components (Fig.1). Rochet (1841) lived with the Oromo and observed and captured field data from Oromo life experiences and social praxis. During his archaeological survey, Henze (2005) found in the Arsi Oromo land, presently Islamic religion followers, a “monument” he described as follows although he curtails the temporality into recent times for his usual biased Indo-Semitist or Abyssinianist attitude: [T]his monument features a mounted figure on top holding a spear or club in his right hand and a shield in his left. The bottom third has a large lion with a curved-back tail. A smaller slab, about a meter in height, leans against the larger one. It, too, is carved on both sides. On one side a figure wielding a stick or club stands on top of a four-footed animal apparently meant to be a horse. On the reverse a long-horned bull and a shield are carved. When I stopped to photograph these monuments in 1993, a local man told me that 56 the monument marked the burial place of Washok Kerasso, who had been a prominent local citizen ‘well before the change’ (Henze 2005: 180). Possibly, Henze is ‘speaking’ about Fig 5 (left) that one scholar (Waamii 2014: 38) estimates to 29, 000 years BP. Monument of an Oromo Qoro ‘Noble” Kerasso Monument of a Meroe Qore ‘King’ Silko (Arsi K’arsa) (Edwards 2004: 198) Figure 6 Any visitor to Pankhurst’s Abyssinian land—if I understood the location—would find no living horse today, nor has there been culture of designing the horse implements hence there is no single Ethiosemitic word for these otherwise than borrowed from Oromo. Entirely, Ethiosemitic adopt or borrow the languages of horseback riding, warfare as well as general warfare from Oromo-Cush. The only observable ones are mules in the western areas of Amhara region or Gojjam, bordering with Oromiya, an area which 19th century European travelers observed as Oromo speakers. The barren environment, dry ecology and the antizoophilous Orthodox culture of Abyssinia, which “has traditionally despised manual work” (Norberg 1977: 36), are all hostile to rearing horses as well as children. Confirming the aforementioned slavery progect, the Orthodox culture was ‘good’ only for one thing; its “code of law, the Fetha Negast, forbade Christians from selling slaves, one of the most lucrative items of commerce, but imposed no such prohibition on non-Christians” (Norberg 1977: 37). The Xerox 57 below in Figure 7 is a genuine Xeroxed copy of ‘Abyssinian Orthodox Church document’, a racist artifact demonizing the innocent human beings, another support for Norberg’s discussion of a devilish culture. Figure 7: Cultural Stereotypical Artefact This is an Ethiopian Orthodox Church document entitled “St. Mary’s Revelations”, claimed to have been published in 1908 Julian Calendar (=1900 Universal Calendar) but, written, apparently, in contemporary ‘urban’ Amharic accent, claims that Virgin Mary ‘saw’, “a Curse” on the Christian Ethiopia/Abyssinia soil as it unfolds: “the ill-formed Islam [=Somali and all that follow Islamic religion], Galla [=Oromo and other Cushites], Shanqilla [=Omotic and Nilotic peoples such as Anyuak, Nuer, Gumuz, etc.] and Fallasha, all having sexual intercourse with horses, donkeys, camels”, “copulating earth/ground, cracking it in the shape of a vulva”, as well as, word-for-word translation, “ their male men copulating their male men” …. Otherwise than throwing out odium like Fig.6, never ever--it is important to note here—Pankhurst, or any Abyssinian/Ethiopian self-imposed “historian”, disclosed the fact that “horsemen” were involved in the magnificent A áƀa/Adowa victory over fascist Italian army only because they were Oromo. In sharp contrast, the earlier figure by the name Henry Salt, if we should believe, tells us gloomy story, that he: Saw [at Axum and Makalle] warrior chiefs with the genitalia of slain enemies dangling from their arms, such mutilation being a custom noted previously by Ludolf amongst the Galla and one still practiced by the Ethiopians during the warfare of 1895 against the Italians (Bosworth 1974: 73). 58 Horapollo, the “last” compiler of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics doctrine, said ‘when they would symbolise a man that is weak and persecuted by a stronger, they delineate a BUSTARD and a HORSE; for this bird flies away whenever it sees a horse’ (1840: 147). Above, we said horse-bull (khorma) is a symbol of brave, tough macho-man. In Oromo, although the author has no folkloric or literary symbolism data presently, the non-literary or linguistic forms for varieties of “bustard” are laakema, hanqaabii and kerkarumé (Stegman, 2011; Foot, 1913: 66). By the usual systematization of the semiotic triangle, the Oromo expressions for the kind of weak and cowardice person that Horapollo is talking about is significated: laak’emaa, rooqaa, ɾooqamaa; hanč’aabii, kan č’abii, hanqaabii, hanquu; kerkeroma, romm’aa, kerkera. The notion that underlie all these lexeme is is what that animal, bustard, arises to cognition or percept, i.e., rage (object of fad), shake or palpitation. A verse from the Oromo epic war song reminds us Horapollo’s allegories: “…even the horses, on seeing Kumsa [a warrior], have evacuated the worms living in their [enemies’] bellies!” (Cerulli 1922: 65). To unravel how Pankhurst makes advantage out of etymology to achieve his insidious racist agenda, it is good to bring in a sample from another of his article: Leprosy was, on the other hand, frequently referred to more explicitly as qumtena, an Amharic word derived from the verb, to amputate. This served to describe persons who had lost limbs, either on account of the disease, or, in former days, as a punishment for serious crime. A similar concept probably lies behind the Galla, or Oromo, word for leprosy, kurchi, the etymology of which poses linguistic problems but may well have its origin in the verb, to cut or break (Pankhurst 1984: 59). The underlying implicit message is not least faking and deepening the OromoAmhara division. The hidden agenda is to ascribe the skill and history of surgery to his favorite super-race “Semitic” Amhara, whereas leprosy to Oromo. Nevertheless, given the contemporary geo-linguistic or population facts, this social-evil—the disease leprosy—has unfortunately been common in his “Semitic” areas and ‘historically’ known to have been originated in the specific area of Lallebala (also refers to Ge’ez/Orthodox Church/Amhara style/culture of shouting and begging across homes only early morning), from Oromo lallebala 59 “leper” (also lammiťii ‘leper, sclerosed’, literally lami-miťi ‘descendant-NOT’ i.e. not of their (Oromo) kind) (see Foot 1913).The truth of the pharmacology/medicine/etymology was registered, unfortunately, in the 19th century by European themselves. Tutschek (1844: 49, 50, 66) defined the primary Oromo verbs of surgery: k’ua ‘to amputate, cut away’, k’ola ‘stitch, embroider’, ošu ‘mutilation, amputation’, ua ‘to decay, dry up, to be dried’, kurt’i ‘flesh (slaughtered)’, and k’unťiča ‘butcher’. This is not mere linguistic but real praxiological medical history of surgery. The Oromo are known for their treatment of such disease through ƙooba/ uƀa ‘acupuncture’ from uƀa ‘to cauterize, brand, heat’. Werner (1915: 21), for instance, registered the special ancient surgical equipment of Oromo, namely k’uʋa (also uƀa), a small iron spike with wooden handle which is used not only for human and animal surgery and acupuncture but also for marking semiotic signs on animal bodies, rocks, wooden tablets. The pictogram of this equipment is left on the Laga Oda pre-historic rock paintings in Hararghe region of Eastern Oromia or Ethiopia (see Figure 6B; also, Červiček 1971, Fig. 35 right). William Cornwallis Harris, a possibly fictitious ‘traveler’, wrote as follows: Oromo of the Ittoo [Itťú] tribe had undertaken the removal of severe rheumatism, contracted on the road from Hurrur[Harar]… Armed with a sharp creese he then proceeded to cut and slash in every direction, from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot… the skin had so contracted over the gaps whence the flesh had been scooped (Harris 1844:125). Earlier we raised Christopher Grant’s observation of Oromo grave arts, rock and stone slab arts. Let us quote him here at length: All [the six] memorial grave markers are of the standard form described in the available academic sources. They are all of cement construction and feature bas-relief with portrayals of the deceased mounted on white horses. Each figure is holding a rifle, most commonly in the right hand. Although dating is not possible for all six graves at Batu, there are various schematic and color themes. None of the graves demonstrate identical color usage however a sea green is the base color of several of the memorials (Grant 2005: 24). 60 Pankhurst and his European Abyssinianist friends consider this social semiosis, as commonly known, as, inconsistently, either un-Christian and pagan or as images of Biblical or some mythical seraphs—e.g., an earthly God flying deep into the sky on the wings of flying, white horse. Grant is right when he speculated “color themes”. To help him understand deeply, one needs to know the Oromo social semiotic technique of systematizing/similarizing the semiotic triangle (wolu, wallu 38 )—the portrayed sign/word phonology, the signified/semantic/meaning and the symbolic object/significated social concept/institution/structure. In Table 1, we saw a type of horse named Abba Garri which come from polysemous word aarii ‘wagon, chariot; white; fine’. We should also know parallels of Oromo agebased Gada ontogenetic-sociogenitic political classes/parties and color words/semantic/symbology (also discussed by Grant 2005): qaallu/qŭllu ‘black; being/to be graining, absolute, pure, child, God’(qulqullu, intensification), arrii ‘maroon; nubile, unmarried wo/man around age 13/14; being fine, good; leopard, tiger’ (ANIMATE, qeerro); ama/ îma ‘blood-red; becoming/to be stemming (transitive), frolic, restive, macho man’ ( î(m) îma, intensification); boora/boru ‘grizzly-yellow; becoming knowledgeable, baron, ruler’, a i/a owa ‘white; becoming/to be white hair, consummate, seasoned, aged; death, corpse’ and others. We also need to iterate that abba means ‘man, the most high, father; owner, proprietor, masculine genitive marker’ (for woman/feminine a ’a/ha ’a, or the diminutive plural a ’olee/ ’aalee, also mean ‘the baroness, mares, those who have given birth; heirship (female that achieved age of)’. 39 Therefore, for the deceased that was Qaallu ‘Priest (generic)’ or Abba Qallačča ‘a specified Spiritual Father of the nation’ is erected (statue) or painted (on the tomb) abbaa 38 Wolu/wallu is gerundive from the reciprocal verb wal/wol (also war/worr, by rhotacization) ‘to be next to/with/for each other or one another, to be a family (of)’ from which come the causativeANIMATE literary term wollisa/wallisa/walalesa ‘ make/maker of poem, verse, song, solo, metaphor, etc.’ 39 There are synonymous forms with the same underlying notions, e.g., halllu ‘blood red’ and halalu ‘being adulterer, frolic’, halalee ‘stead, ass for copulating with female horse to give birth to mule’. 61 qallačča ‘a horse having blue-black color and/or white patches on the back of his neck’. The Qaallu man is also Abba Muḏa/Muťťa ‘(the most high) Father of Unction’ 40 , hence is painted/built on his grave abba muḏa/muťťa ‘horse having four white legs and white tip to the tail’, etcetera. Good evidence African Oromo-Cush zoomorhic, high adoration of horses is the pre-historic rock paintings at Laɡa Oda (Figure 6). This site is abounded with evidence of the “earliest domestication” of animals and “a backed-microlith industry…established at least 16,000 years ago” (Phillipson 2005: 125; See also Phillipson 1993; Ehret 2002, 1979). The full name of the Laga O a site, with its river-depression (laga) and forest of (previous times) the sacred Oda ‘Ficus sycamorus’ (see also Cervicek 1971:121) is Laga O aa Ga oofataa, which translates “the United Kingdom Self-governing by Gada System Whose Headquarter is Laga O a”. As usual, the homophonic anagram is so deceptive to somebody without adequate analysis of the lexicogrammar in its socio-cultural context. Appending the (auto-)benefactive marker –(ú)fa ’/ʈ or –(ó)fa ’/ʈ to either of the following etymologically related non-finite root can come with related semantic field: ga hoof, cave’, ˀ- ‘bond, fetter; to go a warlike adventure’, ǩo -/ o - ‘(to) foot, u -/ ŭ - ‘tie, bind, bundle, knot, govern, oblige; squat, congregate’, gu ň- ‘recoil, contract, oblige, adopt, persuade; hold a newborn on own chest with two arms’, u - ‘be/become great, big, full, multitude’, goo - ‘reinforce’ all of whose underlying semantic is totality, unity or state formation. One outstanding style in Laga Oda pictures is “the fore-legs and hind-legs [of the cattle] are pooled to one thick line respectively” (Cervicek 1971:130). Yet, the most interesting motif at this site is the one Cervicek (1971:132 in his Fig. 25; here, see Figure 6C) describes as “horseshoe-like representations” which look a congregation or “group of symbols… omitting entirely the head, 40 From muḏa/muťťa ‘to anoint, butter, lubricate, smear; to be variegated, stripped; to shade, mutate, change (soul after death, skin, e.g., snake); awl, punch; snake skin’; mutaraa ‘a being, one body; statuette’; mūttii/mootii ‘baron, sovereign (deceased)’. These complex and interrelated semantic-semiotic-institutional concepts must explain the semiotic triangle of or intentionality behind building variegated, stripped, snake-like obelisk or stele. 62 horns and the tail of the animals.” This carefully styled motif speaks to the autobenefactive syntactic structure of ǩo efar ā which means by language game (1) ǩo (e)-far ā ‘shoe-horse, horse-hoof’ or (2) ǩo (e)-far ā > ǩô ôofa ’a, literally, (auto-)benefactive ‘adopt a child; squat, tame, be circumspective, come together; to congregate, mass’, appropriately, a call for unity and state formation. The use of the sign/lexicogrammar faɾ a ‘horse’ for auto-benefactive marker -fa ’a with the usual epenthetic liquid consonant (ɾ) is worth noting. Beyond syntax, the role of horses in war or defense of the nation and horses’ groupdefensive strategy (congregating, facing off their foreparts towards different directions while facing their rears inside) make them not only brute necessity but also cognitive/imagistic possibility for humans. Equestrian symbolism is also captured in the following ethnomathematical formula coding social memory (Wener 1914b: 272, everything is kept intact including likely misreading on the part of Werner; we cannot also go to details here despite field data is available since these are in use across Oromolands): Tokoch kes harea, tok kesa kuwol = One is the hoof of the donkey Laman much hretia = Two are the teats of the goat Sadien kubdurea = Three is [a kind of ornament worn by women] Arfa much hoyoa = four are the teats of the cow…. Shan agicho nama = Five are the fingers of man Jan lawon herima = Six are the marriage cattle Toib ban imbulte = The Seven stand on one side Sadiet dal sara = Eight is the bringing-forth of the sara (a fabulous animal) Salar hariedi wantoko = Nine is not counted Kur sir sadiek = Ten ....... ? Dib ilkole dadua = A hundred are the strings of the sack (dadu) Kum mil kankares =A thousand are the legs of the millipede In fact, Werner only literally translated Tokoch kes harea and left tok kesa kuwol without translating as well as cared not about the complex Oromo wisdom literature style of exploiting polysemy and paronomasia in simultaneity (see de Salviac, 1901). The Oromo for number “1” is takka/ aǩa and for the (pro)nominal/adjectival “one” is tokko/ oǩo while tokocha/ oǩîča translates “that who/which; the one that”. Thus, Werner’s Tokoch kesa kuwol means all the 63 following: (1) one is kaôlii / iîló ‘dark and ferocious equid’ (or the variant k’ooli/kuula ‘shell, horseshoe, dark and nice thing’), and/or (2) one is ka Olii ‘one is the Above’, i.e., the Monolith Sky-God, and/or (3) ʈaka kessa ka wol ‘inside oneness, is there each and every one of us’, a reference to the philosophy of dialectical universalizabilty and concrete singularity of a manness. The equids are referred to as ǩo é ú ’á ‘round-hoof, bound-hoof, full-hoof’, a symbol of ū ’a / ū ’-čča ‘holism, back-ups, density, multitudinality, strength-in-unity’. The idiom ǩo é wol k’aba ’a, literally ‘hold the hoof/claw of each/one (an)other’, means ‘to wager, pledge solidarity’ (see also Tutschek 1844: 47, 35) as well as enacted bodily by hooking/clasping fingers on Gadaa System ceremonies. For Oromo and, possibly other Cushites, horse is just worldview—power, aesthetic, legend, art, history, topography, typography, zoologico-calanderial, moral philosophy, etc. Oromo dance called Ragada is an imitation of galloping horse; its rhyme is abstracted from the sound its hoofs produces (onomatopoeic) while its rhythm is abstracted from the way it ‘dances’ or gallops (physic or biomimetic). Many Oromo place-names/toponyms are derived from congruence of phenomenology landscape and imagery/appearance of horse (far a): his mane/nape (Gama Fardaa) of horse’s ‘topography’ or appearance, for instance, its back (Dū a Fardaa/Boora), its ear (Gurra Far aa), its mane (Gama Far aa), its way of walking (Šaggar) and so forth. So bitter for him to swallow, Pankhurst had to but admits that the name Abba Gommol is “related to the Afan Oromo gommolo, ‘lanky’ or ‘stooping’” (Pankhurst 1989: 204). Abba Gommol is one of the last (1800-1825) Oromo leaders of the confederacy of the medieval era known as Limmu-Ennaraya (Hassen 1994). It is so unfortunate of him that ommola derives the Oromo îmalú ‘camel’ (also Tutschek 1844:61). Wolf Leslau (Leslau 1991:194) one of Pankhurst’s kindred, still tries to deceive us that the “Greek kamēlos” and “Cushitic gāmela” are “taken from Semitic” without any explanation but play with vowel sounds. Rearing and using horses, particularly for war, is purely as much ancient Oromo culture as it is today, as far as East Africa is concerned. 64 The so-called Ge’ez afras for ‘horse’ can never be Semitic but 1840’s alchemy of the Oromo and the East Africans for ‘horse’ (Krapf 1842: 20): Kiswahili ‘férasi’; Kinika ‘ferasi’; Kikamba ferasi; Kipokō ferasi; Kihiáu ferasi; Kigalla (Oromo) féra a; Somali faras. De Barento (1936: 19), who was apparently looking for Global Cognates from Ancient Egyptian to 20th century Français-Roma, included correctly under Oromo entry farasi ‘cheval’. One might be tempted to thinking the latter was Amharic, a recently constructed language by repressing and twisting Oromo lexemes, semes and cultural sememes. Leslau (1991: 804) safely concluded that the Semitic root for ‘horse’ is something like sūs. Oromo far a (also accented féra a, farṯa), comes from two morphemes: the onomatopoeic ƒŭrrª ‘to swirl, sprint, wheeze; to blow nose; a communicative sound to ‘call’ equids’ and the primary definitive-auxiliary-article particle -ṯa/-ḏa whose meaning is ‘of character, is like’ and function is similar to the English –er as in sprinter. Christopher Ehret, one of the leading scholars on the historical linguistics of Africa, reconstructs the Proto-Cushitic roots *fuur- ‘to puff, blow’ (Ehret 1987: 53) and *bar-/*bur- ‘to blow (wind)’ (Ehret 1987: 14), and *par-/*pur ‘to fly, jump’ (Ehret 1987: 26), highlighting the common interchangeability of word initial /f/, /p/, and /b/ in Cushitic family. A strong emotional and historical attachment of Oromo to horse is expressed in Socrates-/Christ-like discourse of an ancient Oromo Abba Gada, namely Makko Billii, one of the engineers of the theologico-politico-moral philosophy of Gada System (Gidada 1984: 34-35; Triulzi & Bitima 2005: 120). After he was captured in a long and devastating war which uprooted and caused exodus to his people, Makko Billii asked his enemy or captors to once and for all allow him make a farewell speech to his fleeing people. At the heart of his sagacious speech is recommendation to continue to abundantly cultivate horse for it was a key to vanquishing or escaping enemies. There is also strong tragic parallelism between Makko Billii and the Last Pharaoh of Egyptian as well as Jesus Christ, parallels which we have to leave for future studies. 65 POST-MODERN CONCEPT IN AND SINCE ANTIQUITY: ‘LAW OF THE HORSE’ The Oromo are possibly one of the few societies in the world (if not the only) who have Zoological Law, Zoological Ritual and Zoomorphic Stellar Calendar in which every day of the 27-lunar-days of a month is named after their respective animal (see Haroo 2014; Haaji-Aadam 2010; Wako 2011; Kabbadaa 2012). One among these animals is the horse. The fifth day of the 27-lunar calendar is Ayyana Far aa “the (Holy) Day of the (Holy) Horse” or Ayyana Sor(e)sa “Holy Day of the Noble Man/Horse.” Tablino (1994: 192), who studied deeply and critically the Booran Oromo calendarial time-reckoning around “since time immemorial” (p. 194), understood that “some days bear the name of a star or a constellation: the day of Sorsa (the Borana name of the star Aldebaran, alpha Tauri) is propitious to horses and people born on this day ride very far without getting tired”. Scholars have confirmed that the Booran Oromo of Ethio-Kenyan borderlands have had advanced and ancient lunar-calendar system that used to trace stars with giant stone pillars (Bassi 1988; Beyene 1995; Bagaja & Harsama 1996; Legesse 1973). Despite scholars delimit their reports to the Booran Oromo of this area, until the last phase of the pre-colonial times (roughly around 1840), the Oromo society was unified and cohesive from the Border of Sudan in the west to that of Greater Somalia in the east, and from Northern Kenya in the South to Raya-Azabo of the present Tigré Region of northern Ethiopia (this is without referring to the pre-1800 Oromo-Cush broader society). For instance, Metaferia (1979) confirms that the pre-Islam Hararghee Oromo, the agents of the amazing Laga Oda and numerous “pre”-historic rock arts/paintings, have had advanced ethnoastronomical calendar system that proved commonalities with their aforementioned friends (the southern Sabbo-Goona Boorans) as well as their Arsi or Siikko-Mando friends in the south western (see Haaji-Aadam 2010) and their western Mačč’a-Tullama extending until South Sudan (see Bartels 1983). The other principle in respect of honor of the horse is interesting. If and when a homicidal act was committed, the seasoned, dignified Oromo old-men of the 66 community go in a group to the home of the family of the victim, during early morning twilight, riding their purposely and uniquely muzzled horses (lo amaa, whose other symbolic-intersubjective social message and literal meaning is ‘cajolery, sweet-talk’), a kind of horse used for this social purpose (namely far aa araaraa, a double semantic, ‘horse of peace/reconciliation’ and ‘horse of blood-red color’), including the one with blood on his hands. Outside the fence, they descend from their horses and literally ‘cajole’ the victim’s family falling on the ground reciting in chorus their ancient and formulaic language and symbolic actions whose crux is to rein in peace. It is so moral-ethical philosophy of the Oromo that the victim’s family, however painful it is, cannot not say ‘No!’—“at very least for the sake of the horses that are muzzled and standing there for too long!” Symptomatic of the ancient sociocultural and emotional attachment to the horse, the Guji Oromo “have a halusisisa ritual for the horses” (Baxter 1991: 210 citing Leus 1988). Literally meaning ‘that makes and enables humans make a secure course’, halusisisa refers to ‘the horse’. The Boorans, the brothers of the Guji, have annual ritual of horses in accordance to the antique and unique Seera Far aa ‘the Law of the Horses’, for horse is so especial out of all the ǩo é ú ’á ‘equines, round-and-compact-hooves’. In his online essay, Cynthia Salvadori 41 observed the Booran Horse Ritual: One clan in particular, the Macitu, is known as the repository of knowledge about these laws (while individuals who know a great deal about horse management have as special title, boqu farda). There special meetings held ad hoc to discuss horses, kora farda, and these are always held at the village of someone who belongs to the Macitu clan, who serves as the moderator of the meeting. Such a meeting will be held when it becomes known that someone is mistreating his animals. The Oromo never use horses for ordinary transportation purpose but for chiefly for war; they never use, normally, horse for farming but with gelded bull. Although there is no any Oromo memory of using horse for farming, there is common 41 Cynthia Salvadori (www) ‘Hope for Ethiopian Equine: the Borana laws for horses’. 67 proverb that it is used for this, but in crisis times and so painfully: Farr aan qonne, yaa onne “We ploughed with horse; oh, painfully heartbreaking!!” Finally, Pankhurst himself had no other avenue but to gingerly conclude (p. 205): The use in many parts of the country in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries of Afan Oromo names for horses, and the special prevalence of horse-names in Oromo areas, where they sometimes tended to replace or overshadow other names, would support the contemporary view that the practice of naming noblemen by relation to their horses was of probable Oromo origin (Emphasis added). These noblemen and expert horsemen are designated qaallu, boqquu, sor(e)sa, or mačč’a, abba/abbičču 42 , all of which are simultaneously, significations for ancient Oromo moieties, hyper-clan names, and title for political-theological dignitaries. Somewhere in his article, Pankhurst justifies his work that “The present study seeks to supplement [with] the written record of earlier times…the traditional Ethiopian social scene” which “was the custom of calling chiefs, warriors and other persons of status after the names of the horses they rode” (p. 197). He adds quoting his own previous work (p. 187): The theory, long propounded by the savant Stephen Wright, that the Ge'ez word bisi (“powerful” or “dominating”) used on ancient Aksumite currency for the designation of rulers “might well" have been "used in relation to the King’s horse in the same way that the Ethiopians of much later times used the word Aba” has not found much favour. See Pankhurst (1961: 30). Pankhurst as well as his friend “Stephen Wright” already knew from Tutschek (1842: 128) the Oromo bae a/baessa “chief, righteous” from bai “one who goes before the army to protect them” and bâ “to go out” and their Axumite “Ge’ez word bisi” is what they faked (see also Note 31 below). 42 “The existence of such words as hippeús “horseman” based on híppos, the Greek word of Indo-European origin, shows that the suffix was active during the Mycenaean period (Bernal 2006: 157). The Oromo suffix –čča/ - a/- a means “the man or the one who” and the etymon of the “hotly debated” (Classical) Greek suffix –ευς “the one or the man who” (Bernal ibid). Note also that the Oromo warfare class Roppalee/Robalee is deadjectival/classifier from ropp’ii ‘waterhorse, hippo’. The Gada System generation-/age-classes Mudana, Robale, and Harmifa were mentioned by the character so-called Bahrey in 1530 (Legesse 1973: 138). 68 One interesting Oromo zoological philosophy is its negative view of aŋ ō ‘mule’, as the literal meaning of the word also suggests: ‘dry, barren; bent, hoop, circle, recursive’). This has big impacts on mule for it is governed by the Law of Hora Obaa ‘the hierarchical and sequential law of (spring-)watering all the tame, big animals (usually far away from residence)’. Accordingly, an excerpt from the law goes: ‘ aŋ ōn adaa hinqabdu, far a ǧalaan bašaan uy i’. It is a polysemantic witty saying, which means either or all of these: • “We have no prerogative/law for mule to drink water before a horse; the • reverse is rather the law”; • of a horse is she realized (i.e., procreated)”. “Mule has no womb/uterus, so only through the bottom/behind (i.e., vulva) “Mule has no law of special honor, unlike horse.” Likewise, Oromo Law of Son of Man or social philosophy prohibits: However thirsty he might be, even amidst a war, no man/husband is allowed to drink water before a thirsty woman/wife because woman is (like) ‘water’, i.e., life deliverer. 43 Ancient Egyptians, “when they would symbolise a barren woman, they delineate a Mule; for this animal is barren because its uterus is not straight” (Horapollo 1840: 139). 44 To save timespace, we have to add few from Oromo Law of the Horse and its place in the age-based political democracy of Gada System which scholars and wise elderly Oromos reckoned back in the advent of European new millennium (around 2000) to be eight ǧaatanii (one ǧaatanii is 360 years) and one komoora (i.e., 2880 years), which means 880 BC: 45 By complex metaphoric-metonymic complex: ƀâça-n/bîša-n ‘water, amnion, milk; deliverer, generator’; -n ‘invariable marker’; bāça/ bā a ‘to cause to emerge, generate; deliver, liberate, save’ from bā ‘go out, rise’. Hence, are ancient queen and, today, female (marked by –tu) names: Baççā, Baçātu, Bašātu , etc. 44 The Ancient Egyptian by the name Horapollo supposedly made the last compilation, around the fourth century AD, to preserve his people’s Hieroglyphical doctrine; it was in 1505, but only as an appendix to Aesop's Fables, and translated into Greek (the earliest copy of it dates to the fifteenth century AD). By 1840, there were already thirty-five different editions of the text available, in several languages including English. 45 There are no translations for these Oromo words; both are denominative from ǧaatana and komoora (also ’ooqa) with similar spaciotemporal semantic all: “to move or travel slowly, lankily, 43 69 • To qualify a Luba (40-48 age) ‘the stage of political and ritual leadership’, an Oromo man has to, inter alia, be an owner of a horse. Respect a • horse! On Baallii Ceremony of Power Handover, the outgoing Abba Gada must also hand over/award the new Abba Gada, inter alia, ‘a gelded horse with full kit’, especially amulets strung onto a robust string made from giraffe • hide to be hang on the horse’s neck (See Figure 6 A). Respect horse! Any Oromo that comes across a tagged/branded 46 horse (whose semiotic semantic is “it is already a possession of another man”) and drives it home • is punished by a serious crime of “pilfering”. Respect horse! Despite every animal-category has patterned sequence and fixed time/hour/day for watering hoora ‘spring water’, it is, however, allowed for horse, even if he/she drops in on, to drink it anytime, irrespective of whose ownership he/she might be. Respect horse! Taaddasaa Birbirsoo Mootii, an old wiseman of Sayyoo, Dambi Dollo town of Wallagga (my own father) once told me an ancient oral history that, among others, generated Oromo horse-zoophilism: Once, an old Oromo man lent his closer friend his pregnant mare for he had to travel on horseback for a day. The innocent lender painfully gave the early pregnant mare cautioning the borrower that he took care of her. Eating his words, the man not only travelled for more days, but also loaded her heavy packages. This caused miscarriage upon her somewhere during the long travel. The man buried the fetus out of possible sight of humans but, unwittingly, under the mum’s watch. When the man returned her, he only told the owner hat everything was fine, concealing the facts. Dissatisfied at the story, the owner brain reads the perplexed mum. He unfastened and released her. She began the long travel. The owner only followed her. After a full day travel, she bore the deep hole in the forest hideout with her hooves, recovered her fetus, literally ‘wept’ and ‘showed’ it to the owner and came home with him (Personal Communication, Sept. 2009) and hollowly (with difficulty)”. According to Oromo calendar, one a na/ a a “one year” comprises 360 days, unlike the European 365/6 days. 46 The Oromo still preserve the ancient tradition of branding animals by various techniques. Werner (1915: 22) observed for herself that in Booran Oromo “every clan has its own mark for cattle, usually a brand ( uʋa [ uƀá] which is the name of the instrument used, an iron spike fixed into a wooden handle)”. 70 WORD-BUILDINGS FOR NATION BUILDING BY ILLUSION BUILDING? Richard Pankhurst, the extreme Abyssinianist propagandists, frequently tells us that a Christian “Amhara Emperor” by the name “Galawdewos (Claudius)” attempted to secure Harar town from enemies before he “was hit by a bullet” on his head and “then killed by spears of Harari cavalry in 1559” (Pankhurst 1998a: 98). According Pankhurst, it was right at this time that the Oromo were, for first time, introduced to horse and using horse for war, thanks to his Christian Amhara and their King. His lunatic friend Mordechai Abir agrees: “Adapting themselves to the use of horses, weapons and tactics more suitable to fight the Ethiopians, the Galla became more than a match for the individual governors and Chewa 47 commanders who attempted to block their way (Abir 1980: 65). This adumbrative guy adds (p. 198): By the outset of the seventeenth century the Galla had adapted themselves to the use of the horse and their cavalry was far superior to that of the Ethiopians. They began to fight in large formations strategically placed on the battlefield. The sheer weight of their forces, their mobility and the fear which their dedicated warriors inspired made them nearly invincible as far as the professional mercenary Ethiopian armies were concerned. But, why are Pankhurst and his coterie are fancy of fixing the spatiotemporalities of Oromo ‘introduction to horse’ to 16th century Hararqee, and the introducers/agents as “Amhara”? This is neither true nor unsystematic falsity. The vast land of Hararqee is significant not only because of its pre-historic rock paintings (that involves horse motifs) but also because of wild horse know as 47 He defines everywhere this word, Chewa /č’awa/, as ‘regiments’ but productively this word is used for a person in the sense ‘well-mannered’. The fact is the secret ‘etymology’ of mutilating the Oromo mačč’a ‘army of, flood of ; troops, soldiers (marching); people, multitude, Nation, Confederation (from ancient agnate Mačč’a)’ hence Ilmaan Mačč’a is equivalent to the Biblical “Children of Israel” while Gooftaa Mačč’aa translates “Lord/God of Israel”. Abir and his clique know that this Oromo word is etymon of “Egyptian mš “troop of soldiers, gang of workmen” which later became the Demotic mšj and Coptic meeše “people, multitude, army” (Bernal 2006: 515). Even they already knew that Sigmund Freud explicated that in fact the Biblical “Moses” ends in Egyptian consonantal sound “š” which must not sibilant but ejective like Oromo /č’, čč’/ hence he defined Moses as ‘child, son, boy’ precisely as Oromo muč’ā ‘child, infant, boy’ (muč’iča, particulative), muč’āyo, female (muč’āťi, particulative). 71 far a kandido or in short ka(n)diidó, literally ‘those horses who refused taming’. 48 Pankhurst and his Abyssinianist colleagues tell different stories about these wild horses. Some tell us that they were descendants of threw-away horses that the fabulous, blood-thirsty Islamic general ‘Ahmed Grañ used for invading “Ethiopia” in the 16thy century. Trimingham, a colleague of Pankhurst, argues Oromos began to form their “famous cavalry by acquiring horses from the Somali in the 16th century, only after the ‘bloodthirsty’ (with no real purpose 49 ) ‘Ahmed Grañ devastating invasion of Abyssinia’ about 1540” (Trimingham 1965:93-94). Caulk (1977:371) described the Hararqee Oromo as “raiding bands” and “migrant” who “hemmed in the city” of Harar town, for they “were expert horsemen” (experts designated by bokkuu in some Oromo dialects and qaalluu by others), while he yet quoted Egyptian census data that by “the end of their occupation [18751885], the Egyptians claimed to be taxing 200,000 of the one million Oromo they had estimated in 1875 to be surrounding some 30,000 Harari [town]” (square brackets added). Herbert Lewis, whom Pankhurst hailed above as “modern American social anthropologist”, in fact his guru, tells us these conjure-ups: “It is the thesis of this paper that both the Galla and the Somali…lived only in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya until their migrations [northwards] began about 1530” (Lewis 1966: 27). Why did they migrate while they live on green fertile land? Who migrates—the one who lives on unproductive, barren land or the one who lives on green, fertile land? International scholarship shows us the Cushites and their Empire/Lands, rather, shrunk through and through. 48 Similar concept, form-semantic are hare(k)diidó, literally ‘assess (that) refused taming’, i.e., zebra; saré(ka)didó, ‘dogs that refused taming’, i.e., ‘wild dogs, wolves’. From: ka ‘deictic’, kan ‘that which,’ i ’ ‘to kick off, say ‘no’, refuse; flee away to place-of-no-one; (transitive i ’ima ‘ebb away, miscarry, flux (liquid)’) di ā ‘stubborn, mulish, obdurate, feral’, and -ó/-oo ‘pluralizer of adjectives’. Any reader might be surprised when she reads that Egyptians depicted a picture/hieroglyph A MARE KICKING WOLF to denote a woman who miscarries (Horapollo 1840: 142). 49 We’re told this man mobilized over 400, 000 cavalry and bathed in blood with the Christian Abyssinia travelling across thousands of square kilo meters simply for “plunder”, and “destruction”. We’re also told that this man is “kind”, “sympathetic”, “just”, “rightful”, and “blameless” (Arab Faqih 2003: 22). See also Gnamo (2002) who subjects to critical questions about the story of this bloody war. 72 Furthermore, we cannot understand how Pankhurst (1998a) can convince us that his Amhara and Harari armies (both Semitic but enemies) were armed to their teeth in the 1500s with 21st-century-like rifles and bullets, while the Oromo were even infants about horsemanship? Even his “Great Brittons” themselves were only introduced to the sign not yet to the referent, for, we are told, etymologically, ‘bullet’ entered the English lexicon in the 16th century via French boule ‘ball’, if we should believe. In fact they used both “hit by a bullet” on the head and kill by “spears of Harari cavalry in 1559” (Pankhurst 1998a: 98; Emphasis added). Any layman might wonder whether Abyssinians were manufacturing Kalashnikov-like weapons, long before Europeans. His Ethiosemitic never have culture of metallurgy. The Oromo have ancient tradition of iron smelting from Hararqee to Wallaga, by the experts ťumťu/ umʈú ‘smelters, blacksmiths’ 50 (see Gidada 1984; Burka 2009). In telling us about phantasmagoric telltale that “Galawdewos (Claudius 51 )” “was hit by a bullet” on his head and “then killed by spears of Harari cavalry in 1559”, Pankhurst must be fabricating parallelism between the so-called Ge’ez ‘arar’ for ‘lead’ (see Leslau 1992: 71, 474) and Harar-i town/people. As Leslau himself agreed, in fact, the so-called Ge’ez ‘arar’ is misappropriation of the general Cushitic lexeme and the Oromo arrari ‘bullet, ball’ (Krapf 1842: 4). 52 Mordachai The Oromo word ťumťú / umʈú comes from the base ťuma/ uma ‘hammer out, forge, pound, hoe; metallurgy’ and ’ā ‘smite, beat, strike, imitate’ appending -t'u/-ʈú ‘-er, -ant’. 51 The European etymon of this word Claudius is unknown. Klein (1996: 296) gives us obscure claim that it is “name of two Roman gentes” (who??) and related to “claudus, 'lame'”. It is so intriguing that Klein has no idea about Greek origin while in his Cratylus, Plato tells us Greek kollodes ‘gluey’ which precisely corresponds to Oromo ko aa ‘glue’; ko a ’aa ‘gluey, lame, leaned’ and khala aa ‘spur (of donkey), clout’, koroo oo ‘spur (chicken, cattle, goats) kabeeloo( a) ‘lame, clout, forked’ (see Birbirso 2014; Foot 1913; Stegman 2011). 52 According to Plato’s Cratylus, the Classical Greek rho for their letter ρ /r/ designates the notion of “motion, emotion”. We can consider also the Oromo: râ ‘set in motion’, ar-fa ’a ‘rushREFLEXIVE’, rā/ra’u ‘jolt, sex’, rara ‘hang, oscillate’, ra-sa ‘churn’, ara ‘move, (e)motion, anger, smoke’, arr-e a ‘hasten-BENEFACTIVE’. We can also consider the Oromo military and related imagistic terms: lala ‘aim, fire, gun, rage’’; aleela “hew, onslaught’; halalee ‘steed, donkey that copulates horse to bear mule”; alaloo ‘penis (of bull, steed); spear’; aria/ hariya “hew, chase”; harii/aarii ‘rage, white hair (head)’. It appears, Pankhurst and his kindred are making too childish play on words. 50 73 Abir, Pankhurst’s closer friend, spewed out the following baseless as well as contradictory ‘histories’ on the same page of his work: Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Galla tribes in the region of Harar were still slowly expanding their territories at the expense of their neighbours…. They completely overran the region between Harar and Showa [Central Ethiopia], which was considered the property of the Amir [of Adarē]….Many Galla tribes in the Harar district adopted Islam at an early period and settled down on land which they conquered or received from the Amir. The growing sedentary element among them was called Qottu, while those remaining nomadic cattle breeders were called Prontuma. The Qottu Galla, who lacked central authority and who were an easier prey for the Amir’s army, tended to recognize the authority of the Amir (Abir 1968: 10; Emphasis added). Abir is hypostatizing the mirror image of what happened to Oromos towards the end of 19th century, when they had fallen prey, thanks to European ammunitions and advisors, to the brutal colonization by the Orthodox fanatic and fascist Menelik of Abyssinia up until to the downfall of the other Orthodox fanatic and autocratic monarchist Hailesillassie in 1974. Indeed, the Oromo-Cush peoples were expropriated of their lands, then turned to serfdom and slavery on their own ancient lands, and shackled and ruthlessly exported as commodities/slaves during these times. These ‘achievements’, rather social evils, definitely gave uncontrollable ecstatic upbeats to Abir and Pankhurst. Earlier, we raised the fact that Abyssinianist circle are known for faking a Medieval Era fictitious history with 20th century person or event in mind, for instance Italian invasion of Ethiopia during WWII is redressed to hypostatize the character Ahmed Graň or Jihadist invasion of Abyssinia in 16th century, Hailesillasie of 20th century to fake the Medieval Era character “Lebne Dengil”, etc. Again, Abir’s statements must remind us what they call gult system of land that began, according to them, during sixteenth/seventeenth century Abyssinian (referring to Ethiosemitic lands in the contemporary northern Ethiopia). Gult system refers to serfdom system in which the vast majority of the population has nothing (serfs) but users of the land for farming yet they pay almost everything they produce as a tribute to few feudal landlords who own all the lands. The term 74 gult has no meaning as well as etymon in Ethiosemitics. Although Oromo know no serfdom/slavery system, Booreetuuma/Barentumma 53 they have had the Moral Philosophy of obliged the ethics or rituals of Moggaasa, Gaaddisa, Balča, Gubbissa, or Gudeeffačča 54 wherein, out of compassion and accommodation, they shared their lands to galtu ‘aliens who have newly come, fleeing social evils such as destitute and war, to settle as dependents’ (from galtu ‘enter/come-ARTICLE PLURAL’). This is the origin of the Abbysinian ‘word’ gult, but by distorting and deteriorating the original positive semantic, another manifest of the Abyssinianist tradition of criminalizing the victim and demonizing the blameless. Ethnologists on Oromo have, indeed, confirmed that their oral histories, wisdom literature and various media of social memories show they have historical anguish that they were cheated by a certain sycophantic (gabbaroo) known by the code-name Na’aa Doro or Na’oda (literally, “never tell never ask about”) whom they shared lands and treated well as galtus but later in the 16th century turned “cancer”. That was, they “burned Oda Bisil” one of the five axes of their nation under Gada System, whose consequences was civil-war, massive population displacement, beginning of conversion to Christianity and acceleration of embracing Islam, beginning of disintegration of the democratic and egalitarian Gada System and the last phase of separation among the Cushite stock 53 The Oromo are divided into two ancient moieties/deities, Boora/Booran, the western, paternal/patrimonial spirit and Booreetuu/Barentu, the eastern maternal/matrimonial spirit (he could refer to Cerulli 1922; Legesse 1973). Booreetuuma/Barentumma (not as Abir wished to deliberately distort to “Prontuma”)is a doctrine that sets social moral-ethical standards. One among these is Boorammadu/Biirmaduu which governs the Oromo relations with the non-Oromo, literally ‘succoring, emancipating, bailing someone out’ (from bor/bir/mir-ma- ’a ‘free-transitivebenefactive’), but sociologically it means booran u ‘booranization’ or orom u ‘oromization’ since, for an Oromo, both lexemes, boorana and oromo mean ‘free men, liberal sons of men’, without hegemonic semantic (Gidada 2001: 102; Foot 1913: 78, 68). To kill one who is Biirmadu is an horrendous crime or murder. Within Oromo, the social decorum involves: obo-č’oro disaccustomization of marriage between below-7-generation relatives (literally ‘the exteriorinterior’), avoidance (lakkii / la ii) and so forth 54 All literally share the semantic ‘to incubate, to wing, to be bulwark for’ (the vulnerable, image of the symbolic giant u ii ‘ostriches’ and oon ‘bovines’) yet vary according to age of the adoptee and purposes of adoption (unlike the English term adoption/adoptee which imply only child). 75 (Hassen 1994: 63-65; Gidada 2002: 30-40; also see OCTB 1998). 55 The Mačč’aTuulama Oromo’s age-old rhythmical proverb about their lost country, to their northwards, goes: Hintaane Kiristinnaan Ba ’aa-nɨ “The Christianization of our northern Ba ’aa highland country has only worked against us through and through” 56 (Some deciphered Ba ’aa-nɨ as person name: Ba ’aanee). Furthermore, Abir, who wished the Oromo to be weakened to the level of being beggars of lands to settle (galtu), must understand that the Oromo BooranBarentumma mythological story is as old as Ancient Black African peoples’ historical consciousness. Also, Abir’s reference to Hararqee Oromo by “Qottu” is too strange to the Oromo, neither ethnonym nor toponym. Indeed, qottu is Oromo for ‘farmer’, a nominal from qoťa ‘to farm, cultivate, plough, plow, dig, excavate’. 57 But, he and his colleagues like Pankhurst prefer the stereotypical 55 Note that “Oda” designates not only the sacred ‘(forest of ) Ficus Sycamorus’ under which the hammering ( ā, åuma) and proclamation (oda) of Ada-Boorana ‘Custom/Laws of the Booran’ (‘Boorana’ usually substitutes ‘Oromo’ when political sociology is the focus) are carried out, but also designates axes or centers (with all its features of oda trees) of federal states of the Oromo nation. This symbolism of crises parallels with the Biblical story of expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise for they abused a ‘tree’ confusingly modified: “Tree of Life”, “Tree of Field/Garden”, “Tree of Knowledge”, “Tree of Deborah”, “Tree of Righteousness”. Note also hat the sacred, giant, branching, tick, leaved, ‘milky’, evergreen Oda tree is figuratively called Muka Waaqaa ‘Tree of God/Ancient’, Muka Hidda “Tree of ‘Veins’/Genealogy”, Muka Maeça ‘Tree of Righteous (values, nature, etc)’, Muka Booraa ‘Tree of the Barons/Seasoned/Knowledgeable’ (from bora↔bara ‘to become dawn, morning, seasoned, new year/era/epoch; to know, learn, ʔ enlighten’; ßaqa ‘to sieve, sift, unveil, enlighten’; in ‘Oda Bisi-l’ the particle -l/-lé is COMPLEMENTATIVE, hence we can consider change from the base bassa ‘to generate, breed, give life to, quench, satiate, emancipate’ used, inter alia, for biça-n ‘water-INVARIABLE’ and to which missii ‘semen’, bissii ‘blossoms (of barley, wheat, rice, ťéfi ‘Eragrostis teff’), māssi ‘fertile land, garden’, miša/maeça/baéssa ‘good, right, righteous, cheerful, chief’, missooma ‘production, cultivation’, misseensa ‘cord (genealogical), generation’, etc., are all related etymologically. 56 Figuratively, we are told the legend that Queen Sheba went to visit Solomon not only to seduce him, but also to amputate her lower legs which were “horse-hooves” or “horse-shoe” though she was so beautiful woman in her upper body-parts. Above we discussed the symbolic meaning of “horse-hooves” or “horse-shoe” motifs. Scholars must read this legend critically. 57 Also example derivatives are qotťoo ‘adze, axe, hatchet, hoe’, qoťiyo ‘plow-oxen’, etc. Abir is surely aware of two important related facts. One is Abyssinian/Ethiosemites have as much pejorative attitude to crops farming profession as do they have to farming/rearing animals, while, quite oddly, they praise Lallebala, the Orthodox Church doctrine and practice of begging in groups moving across residences, crying in chorus loudly (now have began to use megamicrophones). Second, quite contrary to propaganda that Abyssinians introduced arming to African nomads, he might well know the fact that they borrowed all the terms for farming technologies and products from Oromo-Cush in the usual ways of systematically changing the phonological (especially vocalic) and semantic structures of the original. 76 “Qottu” because that suits their agenda to alchemize (word syllables/sounds), create a counterfeit and ultimately destroy the ancient and very advanced plausibility structures “Ga a” and “Qaallu”(q~g, ll~ ~tt, a~u). Pankhurst and his allies like Abir might continue to cling on colonial era hegemonic texts that preach horses were introduced to the “inferior” Black Africans by the “superior” semi-white Asian domesticators, or during Arab invasion of northern Africa in 7th century A.D. One great scholar explicates the strategies of Pankhurstian scholarship. One is faking the “sagas of exploration” of Africa by superior whites of colonial Europe: J. Bruce’s expedition into Ethiopia in 1770 and Mungo Park’s journey to the river Niger in 1795. The novel text which emerges from these expeditions is not fundamentally original (see, e.g., Hammond and Jablow, 1977). It reveals characteristics already well circumscribed and established….[These] Explorers just brought new proofs which could explicate “African inferiority.” Since Africans could produce nothing of value; the technique of Yoruba statuary must have come from Egyptians; Benin art must be a Portuguese creation; the architectural achievement of Zimbabwe was due to Arab technicians; and Hausa and Buganda statecraft were inventions of white invaders (Davidson, 1959; Lugard, 1905; Randall-MacIver, 1906; Sanders, 1969; Mallows, 1984) (Mudimbe 1998: 13) Indeed, these colonial propagandists have as much friends as they have ‘enemies’, i.e., scholars devoting their time, mind for advancing human knowledge and freedom. The archaeologist Desmond Clark is one of the Abyssinianist friends of Pankhurst who use the other technique--field data but distorting it. Two French botanists, A. Chevalier in 1938 and R. Portères in the 1950s, suggested that the African continent could have been a very early locus of plant domestication (see e.g., Portères, 1950 and 1962). On the basis of linguistic data, the anthropologist G. P Murdock expounded a similar proposition and postulated a “Sudanic complex of crops” (Murdock, 1959). These hypotheses were dismissed, and today “by far the most popular view of the origins of cereal-crop agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa is that it was the product of human migration or some form of culture diffusion or stimulus deriving from south-west Asia” (Desmond Clark and Brandt, 1984:111; see also Reed, 1977) (Mudimbe ibid). 77 Third strategy can be added. That’s locally producing two types of their duplicates, namely Orthodox Church dabtaras ‘monks, sorcerers’ 58 and the “double-miseducated” ‘scholars’ originating from grammar schools headed by the dabtaras. 59 Both have no intellectual capacity to make such an obfuscations of greater magnitude upon Ethiopian school and university curricula and students (e.g., ‘Islamic Ahmed Graň Jihad’, ‘Oromo migration/invasion’, ‘Queen of Sheba’ fictions, etc., etc.), let alone break off the narrow, one-sided and demi-real sacred-zone created and overprotected by the white European colonial intelligentsia such as ‘Professor’ Richard Pankhurst. Thanks to great archeologists, linguists and historians, horse and other animals domestication by Cushite Africans pre-dates the usual Asiatic ambiguous ceiling of ‘before 10, 000 BC’ (Imfeld 2007). Drusilla Dunjee Houston, whose great works on the Cushitic origin of human civilization are put out of our knowledge, emphatically wrote long before these fabricators of Ethiopian ‘history’. She quoted another scholar preceding her on the domestication of horses by Cushites before any humans: Donnelly points out that in the thousands of years since the domestication of animals, the historic nations of our times have tamed one bird. In the light of these facts, is it helpful to our development, that we blazen forth the boast that from later races has come the sum total of civilization? Ancient Africans yoked the wild ox, tamed the cow, the horse and sheep. This is why animals play such an important part in the old Cushite mythology. Africans subdued the elephant as early as the Cushites of Asia. Ancient sculptures show the African lion tamed (Houston 1926: 30). 58 Examples: Atsme Giorgis. n.d. The History of the Galla, 2 vols. Unpublished manuscript. Addis Ababa; Tamrat, T., 1972. Church and state in Ethiopia, 1270–1527. Oxford: Clarendon; Kifle, K.W., 1956. Amharic-Ge’ez dictionary. Addis Ababa: Artistic; Mekuria, T., 1959. A history of Ethiopia: Nubia, Axum and agwe (in Amharic), Tinsae Ze’gubae, Addis Ababa: Artistic; Mekuria, T., 1961a, A history of Ethiopia from Emperor Yekuno Amlak to Libne Denegel (in Amharic). Addis Ababa: Artistic; Mekuria, T., 1961b. A History of Ethiopia from Emperor Libne Denegel to Tewodros (in Amharic). Addis Ababa: Artistic. 59 Example: Bahru Zewde . 1991. A history of modern Ethiopia, 1855-1974. London: James Currey. 78 The Pankhurstian technique of anachronistically writing ‘future history’ is a culture of Abyssinianist ‘historians’ (see Legesse 2006, ‘Introduction’ for detail). The motive is not simple Equestrio-politics; it is also playing with a racist biopolitical card. This is better explicated by one influential scholar as follows: Successive Ethiopian state elites have used the discourses of civilization, race, culture, and religion to justify and rationalize the colonization and dehumanization of the indigenous Africans, such as Agaos, Oromos, Ogaden-Somalis, Afars, Sidamas, and Walayitas, and have selectively utilized the politics of Africanness or Blackness without actually practicing this aspect of Ethiopianism….Although phenotypically and culturally Africanized, the Habashas have suppressed their Africanness or Blackness by linking themselves to the Middle East and by considering themselves a Semitic people, claiming to be racially and culturally superior to indigenous Africans (Jalata 2009: 190-191). Symptomatic of their Indo-European racist agenda we touched earlier, Pankhurst and friends have fabricated enough phantasmagoric histories. Their initial attempt, which ended in bankruptcy, was to cheat the international community with a fairytale of “purely white” Pharaoh civilization in North East Africa (“Egyptian”) and “whitish” Abyssinian/Ethiopic State (with white Negus 60 like “Prester John” of the Abyssinia) in the Horn of Africa. That phantasmagoric Whitish “community” is referred to by a ‘fluid’ and various syntax, selected inasmuch as it pleases the Indo-/Ethio-Semitic group: from earlier to present time order--“Caucasian”, “Greek”, “Sabaean”, “Judean”, “Agazi”, “Ge’ezite”, “Abyssin”, and since decolonization of Africa, preferred to be named “Ethiopic”. 60 As usual, Pankhurst’s etymology is devoid of history and semantic referent or it is simply empty balloon floating in a vacuum. Here, Negus is claimed as Abyssinic for ‘King, Emperor’, but in actuality, it is borrowed with some distortion from Oromo-Cush person-name and honorific title Na assaa or Na eesso, literally, ‘Peace-Deliverer, Order-Maker’ from na ā ‘peace, order, stability, structure’, a word known well in Meroitic and Egyptian texts and toponyms, too. Security, as a matter of fact, was the fundamental generative mechanism for human formation of states, kingdoms, empires under their chiefs, kings or emperors. 79 A Mačč’a-Tuulama (Shawa) Oromo Woman Sketched by Rochet (1841) Figure 7 What’s so surprising was that initial attempt was to ‘whitize’ or Europeanize not the “Ethiosemitic” but the Oromo, whom the German travelers described, in terms of both genetic linguistics and physical posture—tall and strongly built body—as “Germans of Africa” (Krapf 1840, 1842) and the French depicted as the “Gael of Africa” (Rochet 1841; de Salviac 1901). See Figure 2. They later shifted to Ethiosemite only because the Oromo, unlike the former, are too conservative and hardly negotiated on their indigenous “pagan” theologico-political QaalluGada System, a fact which did not suit to European Christian-cum-colonial tactic. The same justification is given by historian of philosophy as to why and how Ancient Egyptian state disintegrated. No matter how, an orthodox society that insulates itself off the rest of the world—instead of interacting with all in order that it increases the complexity and sophistication of its own learned/structurated system—is doomed to dis-emergence. The orthodox and dictatorial regimes of Ethiopia and Africa have, unfortunately, never learned and appear never ready to learn, as well. They are only ‘good’ and proactive collaborators in destroying the 80 autochthonous, pre-Colonial African democratic, scientific, theological, cultural, and philosophical structures. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS No theory but Abyssinianist ‘seduction to royalty’ and ‘fear of knowledge’ can explain the generative mechanisms of Richard Pankhurst’s weird ‘scholarship’. In his critical philosophical book titled Fear of Knowledge, Boghossian (2006) writes the core meaning of his work: “If we can be said to know up front that any item of knowledge only has that status because it gets a nod from our contingent social values, then any claim to knowledge can be dispatched if we happen not to share the values on which it allegedly depends” (p. 130). To elaborate, Pankhurst fears Oromo-Cush ancient to classical history, for it is so powerful in the history of civilization. Cushites played incredible role in peopling of the three continents— Africa, Asia and Europe. Above all, Pankhurst is well cognizant of the role of ‘horse use’ in history of pre-history: in addition to the fact that “the spread of crops and agricultural techniques, pastoral methods, the invention and spread of iron-working…the use of the horse and the development of ontological notions of the pantheon of the gods” are key concepts for historical linguistics and (glotto-) chronology (Diagne 1995: 247). Hence, Pankhurst had to play tricks in etymology. For him, as well as his EuroAbyssinianist circle, etymology cannot execute its disciplinary mission (explanation of how words and their underlying meanings and realities worked), but as a private tool to, in the accurate words of Professor Asmarom Legesse, “fabricate” and “celebrate” the “Royal Seduction and Mythological Legitimacy” (Legesse 2000: 14-15). Pankhurst has only one avenue, namely a temptation to dismantle the plausibility structure of Oromo-Cush on the one hand, and, on the other, essentialize his favorite, namely ‘Ethiosemitic’, a language or society, which, against his wishes, is, in actuality, African and never had it been (South) Arabic as was explained well by critical scholars. 81 A recently recovered document (Triulzi 2006) shows how (de-) formation of historical texts (linguistic and non-linguistic) and state (de) formation are intertwined in Abyssinian historiography. Professor Truilzi and Professor Ta’a recovered an Oromo written document (perhaps around 1894), itself a codification into written form of a genealogical history preserved hitherto only in oral text. Overwhelmed by the fear that the then guests, namely Abyssinian “King” Menelik and his army was to overtake the Oromo lands, for in Oromo tradition genealogical-tree formation/identity determines land settlement pattern/appropriation, the then Wallagga Naqamtee chief Kumsaa Morodaa caused his agents to produce, secretively, such historic documents, inter alia, as “Boorana Genealogy”, “Naqamtee Genealogy” and “History of Wallagga Naqamtee” (Triulzi 2006: 50-51). When Truilzi and Ta’a “examined in 1998” the “five leather-bound ledgers (mäzgäb) of Amharic documents,” the latter two “were not to be found…, nor were they to be found in the country any longer” and when the former was found the “very shifting of meaning from the original ‘Boorana’ to the ‘Galla’ Genealogy, which was inserted in the later copying of the Ms in the early 1930s”. Later, Truilzi found the missing two in Rome, distorted and ascribed to Amhara ‘history’ and deformed as though it was an Ethiopian Orthodox Church document. Triulzi is honest when he, thus, warned: “the Ms is an interesting interpolation of an oral testimony composed under the guise of a written claim of legitimacy following the style of composition of Church documents of the time” (Triulzi ibid: 51). 61 It is important to disclose the devilish acts of Abyssinian “King of Kings”: The refusal of the central government to authorise the printing of the Genealogy was immediate. According to Qanyazmach Abdissa Musa: “When Dajach Gabra Egzi’abeher sent the document to be published, Atse Hayla Sellase is said to have immediately banned the publication. 61 Since it was the beginning of Abyssinian colonization, it was officially imposed that they had to speak and write in Amharic. Yet, since Amharic had no its own concepts/words to enfold reality, for it never passed through natural evolutionary process, it had to create them by systematic, Hebrew-style permutation Oromo words. No surprise, mäzgäb had to be permutated from Oromo bā a qômo, literally, ‘the linguistification of kinship/pyramid/breastplate’, i.e., genealogical document. Monks errors and colonial texts by people like Pankhurst commonly tell us about texts/documents on/of “breastplate”, for they had no idea of the ancients’ metaphoric/semiotic technique of representation of belongingness to common race/kinship by anatomy/viscera. 82 This document must not be published! It makes no sense - he said - it is a devilish work. This is what I heard” (Triulzi, ibid: 49). An Oromo proverb goes: Maraatutu muč’aa namaatiin kooti ğa ’a, ‘It is only a lunatic that claims fatherhood/motherhood over a son/daughter of another man/woman’. It is relevant to quote the Afroasiatist Semitic scholar Martin Bernal known for his trio Black Athena books with emphasis on his explication of the “Indo-Aryan” fallacy of “argument from silence”: It seems to me that if “being right” is not merely the result of a fluke but has become habitual then one should question why the conventional “reasons” could have led to the wrong conclusions. I believe that the answer is quite simple. Where I have merely aimed at “competitive plausibility” conventional scholars in these fields have required “proof.” Specifically they have tended toward minimalism in both time and space. This tendency leads to an acceptance of the argument from silence. On questions of time they assume that a phenomenon was not present until shortly before it is first attested. Spatially, they have given the privileged position to isolation and required proof of contact between different cultures and societies (Bernal 2006: 2). Organized projects to carry out cultural-historical genocide upon aboriginals might have worked well in the young continents of Europe, the Americas and Australia, but very hard to achieve in the Oldest Continent, Horn of Africa, the epicenter of homo sapiens and civilization, harder when the originators are numerous and conservative about their traditions and hardest particularly when the agent of the destructive project is itself stooge and toothless. Throughout all his works, Pankhurst’s agendum is one and clear—to preach Oromo’s “coming to Ethiopia” and “migration in the 16th century”. Indeed, he has been quite successful. Since 1900, the current and fake Ethiopian regimes have been playing Pankhurst’s and his kindred’s drums, right from primary school to university “Ethiopian history” curricula. The current regime which feels proud of re-owning Ethiopian nations and nationalities since 1991 managed only to replace the word “migration” by “expansion” but the left the content as made-up as was before. To iterate the fundamental questions: Why would the Oromo 83 migrate while they live on land which is green, fertile, rainforest land (Ba ’aa) towards the barren, infertile, rocky mountains of Abyssinia? Who migrates—the one who live on barren land or green, fertile land? International scholarship shows us that the Ancient Empire of the Cushites fragmented from Europe through Asia and the remaining African Cushland has been getting compressed through and through, since the advent of Pankhurst’s era of Virgin Mary, Mother of God, whom his Abyssinians later and gradually began to taste in their ‘sacred’ texts such as “Organ of the Virgin and Praises of Mary” (Jones & Monroe 1935: 54). In stark contrast, the Oromo, even those turned Christian priests, resisted (even today) talking big the adage: Ilmi č’ap’anaa Waaqa hintaatu ‘Never can a son of unmarried girl be a Devine/God/Supreme Creator!’ In the worldview of the Oromo, the Christianity doctrine was absurd not only from cosmogonic, ontological, or theological perspective, but also from democracy or rights of women/girls. For Waaqeessa doctrine or a Waaqeeffata Oromo worshipping Waaqa ‘the Supreme Being; Black Sky-God’, the qoollo ‘pristine cosmos’, a creature of Waaqa, was, is and will remain just as ‘it is’ although in constant yet cyclical flux. No man has direct precept of Waaqa that remains, hence, in human perception/language/grammar, non-finite (non-languaging, non-perfective, nongendered, non-numbered, etc.). Once created from the primordial ‘water(s)’ (which includes H2O, spring water, semen, amnion, blood), man is created creature of itself since primogeniture. Morally, never conceivably can unmarried girl (who is, by default, not mature enough) give birth to a son/daughter unless it is under immoral, undemocratic circumstance which, if happens, leads deontologically to gudeeffačča/guddiffačča ‘adoption’ but, unlike the English, in the sense national and collective bulwarking for his/her free, full and equal life and work. 84 In general, if there was any migration, it was earlier and southwards, to their fertile southern brethren, from their no-more-fertile “Axum” area, as one great American geo-archaeologist apparently plausibly explained: Intensified land use led to mass movements in slope soils before A.D. 300, but a range of clayey stream deposits also implicates strong periodic floods and season- ally abundant moisture. The paleoclimatic ensemble suggests that stronger and more reliable spring rains allowed two crops yearly without irrigation, compared to only one with modern summer rains. Trade declined after 600 and Axum was essentially landlocked by 715. Intense land pressure and more erratic rainfall favored soil destruction and ecological degradation during the seventh and eighth centuries. Largely abandoned by 800 [AD]…. to the more fertile lands of humid central Ethiopia (Butzer 1981: 471). Therefore, until scientifically plausible data will come, if there is any new comer to the land of Ancient Ethiopia (properly K’ee A ’abaa the undifferentiated land of dear Forefather-Mother, of Fertility and Edification, it must be Pankhurstian “South Arabic tribes”. For true scholars, the purpose of philosophy or science (social or natural) is presumably to empower and liberate human being, irrespective of pigment, geography or religion. It is good to further explore how what the moderate Semitist Martin Bernal (1987) calls “Semitist writers’ cultural and geographic inferiority complex” operates because Pankhurst and his Abyssinianist lookalike friends appear victims of this disease, a kind of disease which, as a chain reaction, has left generations of Ethiopians in an endless quagmire of social evils. For now, our African advice to the bankrupt, purposeless ‘scholarship’ of Pankhurst and his fanatic Abyssinianist posse who kill all their lifetime fabricating falsities and instigating conflicts among Ethiopian people goes: “Myths 62 solve 62 A bit differently from Yerby, by ‘myth’, here, I assume not the evolutionarily built plausibility structure of a society, but falsities, illusions, phantasms fabricated anachronistically by individuals like Richard Pankhurst, hypostatized by his/her mistaught followers and then subjected to racist, ideological narratives, and used as implements of dismantling and misappropriating the plausibility structure of the “other” peoples they subjugate. . 85 nothing, arrange nothing” (Frank Yerby 1971, The Man from Dahomey, ‘Note to the Reader’). REFERENCES A W 1914. A Galla-English and English-Galla Dictionary by E. C. A: Review. J. Royal African Society, 13/51: 333-334. Abir M 1968. 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