Oromo’s religious conversion in Ethiopia: Historical perspective
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Date
2021-06-28
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Ankara Üniversitesi
Abstract
The Oromo are one of the indigenous peoples of Ethiopia who lived in the country for time immemorial. Nowadays, most of the Oromo are Christians (Orthodox, Protestant) and Muslim. Still, some Oromo adhere to their indigenous religion called Waqefanna. After the coming of Christianity and Islam, however, the Oromo abandoned Waqefanna and embraced either Christianity or Islam. The Oromo has undergone a major religious conversion over the past 150 years. While Oromo’s history has undergone a remarkable phase of study in recent years, it has remained quite impervious to the anthropological field. Specifically, issues related to Oromo’s religious changes have not been sufficiently studied, debated and historically reconstructed across many disciplines. The main purpose of this article is to document and overview the process of religious conversion in Oromo and how they were positioned in Ethiopian history until 1974. The current religious study, therefore, adds to the existing body of knowledge by presenting an outline of the Oromo religious conversion and its place before 1974. It discusses the Oromo religious conversion in Ethiopian history using oral and secondary sources. In fact, oral sources formed an integral part of the research due to insufficient written material on the previous history of Oromo until recently. The article shows that the religious conversion in Oromo took place as a means of resistance against the Ethiopian central government administration.
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Religious conversion, Islam, Christianity