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Social Forces 81.3 (2003) 1060-1061



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Fighting against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements. By Asafa Jalata.Palgrave Publishers, 2001. 216 pages. Cloth, $49.95.

Asafa Jalata was born and raised in Oromia, Ethiopia, and came to the U.S. as a political refugee in the early 1980s. In this, his third volume about the Oromo people, Jalata brings his own personal experience as a colonial subject of Ethiopia, as well as the perspective of a critical social scientist, to a comparative analysis of the Oromo national movement with that of African American nationalism in the U.S.

Using an analytical framework that draws on theories of world systems, globalization, and social movements, Jalata attempts to show how an increasingly complex global structure changed the lives of both peoples and facilitated the emergence of struggles for self-determination. While Africans were enslaved and shipped to America through the joint efforts of African and European slave hunters and merchants, Oromos were enslaved by the combined forces of Ethiopians and European colonialists. However, Jalata argues that it was the same racialized global capitalistic processes that subjugated both peoples and denied or limited their access to cultural, political, and economic resources within their respective countries. National consciousness emerged, however, only when certain changes and social conditions helped to mobilize the resources necessary for the movements to develop.

Students of African American history and the civil rights movement will find challenging and enlightening material in Jalata's well-documented discussion of black oppression and the emergence of black nationalism in the U.S. He traces its roots to the 1700s, although most of his attention is directed to the twentieth century. Jalata provides an excellent overview of cultural nationalism (reflected in Garveyism, Pan-Africanism, and the Harlem Renaissance), as well as the many phases of the civil rights movement from the formation of the Niagara movement, the NAACP, and the Urban League in the early twentieth century to CORE and SCLC at the midpoint of the century, to its eventual transformation into a revolutionary nationalism. Jalata includes all who struggled against American apartheid as nationalists, arguing that it is wrong to consider only those who fought for separation or cultural autonomy.

In comparison, the ruling classes of Ethiopia subjugated the Oromian people in the last decades of the nineteenth century for their labor and resources. They were helped by European colonial powers, which gave technology, armed forces, and administrative expertise in exchange for raw materials. Although pockets of resistance appeared over the next several decades, it was not until the 1960s, Jalata points out, when a revised constitution — which allowed greater Oromian participation in schools, the army — and government administration — [End Page 1060] encouraged the formation of a self-help association. Many Oromos began to realize they shared a common culture and values as well as many humiliating experiences at the hands of the ruling regime. The association began to articulate the dissatisfaction of the Oromian people with both the government and their position in society. Recognizing that a peaceful movement would not be allowed, the Oromos turned in the 1970s to a more radical alternative in the formation of the Oromo Liberation Front. Today, with financial and military assistance from the U.S., argues Jalata, the current colonial regime continues to suppress the struggle of Oromos for national self-determination and democracy.

Jalata points out that while rights and political expression were denied in both the Oromian and African American populations, human agency emerged initially through cultural traditions and popular historical consciousness. With the help of various political and economic changes, along with the emergence of an educated class, movements for self-determination began to evolve. They did so, however, in somewhat different social and political environments. Whereas Africans in America lost many of their previous social bonds and networks, they were allowed to have separate religious, economic, cultural, and educational institutions that laid the foundation for African American nationalism. Oromo nationalism, in contrast, developed in...

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