A glimpse at Gada System of Oromo people

 

(COMPILED BY LEULSEGED WORKU)

The Oromo people, like the other peoples and nationalities of the country, have immense tangible and intangible heritages which have been created over centuries in the interactions of the people with natural and social environments and which stand as the manifestations of the identity of the people.

They share common language, history and descent, and once shared common political, religious and legal institutions. The Oromo people are known for their hospitality, tolerance and wisdom. Oromo culture is based on its authenticity and integrity that is engrained in the lifestyle, landscapes, nature, history and heritage and in its unique hospitality towards each other and their neighbors.

Today, the Oromo people are living widespread in the Horn of Africa along with other nationalities and particularly, in Ethiopia inhabiting in the largest of the ten regional states of the Ethiopian federation, in Oromia, and elsewhere in the country. Oromia is truly a land where one can experience nature and humanity in unity.

The Oromo recognize the Gada System as part of their cultural heritage and as a contemporary system of governance that functions in concert with the modern state system. The Gada Sytem is crucial organizing structure among the Oromo people and its social, political, ritual and legal aspects and provides the framework for order and meaningful social life..

The Gada System is an all-inclusive social system in which every member of the society has specified roles and duties during one's life course. This begins when sons join the system as members of Gada class forty years after their fathers’ ascendance to Gada and continues passing from one Gada grade to the next every eight years.

Gada functions as a system of cooperation, social integration, enforcement of moral conduct and principle of peaceful co-existence with other ethnic groups. Gada is an indigenous system of human development on the basis of which the Oromo welfare system is institutionalized, communal wealth is distributed, rules of resource protection and environmental conservation enforced and through which all their aspirations are fulfilled. 

An Oromo cannot imagine functioning as a human being or living in a community apart from rules of behavior preserved and protected in the Gada System. Even the governing agencies of the Oromiya Regional Government derive from the traditional institutions of the Gada System Gada egalitarian ethos and communal solidarity. 

 

The knowledge and practices of the Gada System have been transmitted from generation to generation in various ways. At a household level, parents transmit orally knowledge about the ethics, practices and rituals of the system and socialize their children into Gada culture. Then, after sons joined the Gada System and collectively pass through the five grades (Daballe, Junior Game, Senior Game, Kussa, Raba Dori).

In the meetings that take place every eight years to re-examine the existing laws, the seniors reiterate them in public and legislate new laws, demonstrate and share knowledge about the operation of the Gada System. As a result, when the group enters the Gada Grade (Luba), they will have acquired all the necessary knowledge to handle the responsibility of administering the country and arranging and presiding at the celebration of rituals.

In a very simplistic approach, Gada is a generation-set system that divides the (male) population of the Oromo into eight grades that follow each other in fixed intervals of eight years. Every male (and derived from their status, females, especially when married) as a member of society has to belong to a generation-set and undergo the proper ritual initiations and in the process learn about the rules and laws connected to it. In essence, however, the Gada system is impressive in its complexity and requires specialist in indigenous knowledge. It is a complex system that governs every political, social, economic, cultural and ritual aspects of the Oromo society since antiquity. As one of its political aspects, Gada is a system by which political power is transferred from one Abba Gada to other every eight years through competitive and democratic election assuming the form of “consociation” democracy of the modern governance system.

(Source: Oromia Culture & Tourism Bureau)