While the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia is probably familiar, at least in name, to most readers of this Journal, the Oromo are probably not. Numbering over thirty-five million, they are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa and inhabit areas of Northern Kenya, Somalia and, most importantly, Ethiopia. Indeed, they are the single largest ethnic group in that country (in the Horn of Africa as a whole). Culturally the Oromo differ from the Amhara and Tigreans who have dominated Ethiopia's history and historiography in several key respects. While the latter speak and write Semitic languages (Amharic or Amharinnya and Tigrinnya respectively), the Oromo speak Oromiffa, an until recently (nineteenth century) unwritten Cushitic language. While the Amhara and Tigreans were primarily agriculturalists, who left crafts and trade to minority groups including the country's Muslims, the Oromo were traditionally pastoral nomads herding sheep and cattle. While the Amhara and Tigreans have been hierarchically organised in a ‘feudal’ society with an emperor and nobles, the Oromo employed a highly egalitarian system of social organisation known as gadaa, based on age-sets which shifted every eight years. Finally, as the title of the book under review indicates, the Amhara and Tigreans were the dominant groups in an Ethiopian Christian Kingdom, which dates to the fourth century, while the Oromo until comparatively recently worshipped among others a high god known as Waqaa.

Ethiopian history has been written until comparatively recently from a ‘Church and State’ perspective which emphasised almost exclusively the achievements of the Christian monarchs and their followers. The Oromo and other smaller groups, particularly in the south of the country, received comparatively little attention. Known by the pejorative ethnic term ‘Galla’ (etymology uncertain), they were dismissed and even denigrated not only by the dominant Christians, but by scholars as well. As Edward Ullendorff, one of the twentieth-century's foremost authorities on Ethiopia, wrote in his popular general overview The Ethiopians, published in 1960: ‘The Gallas had nothing to contribute to the civilization of Ethiopia; they possessed no material or intellectual character, and their social organization was at a far lower stage of development than the population among whom they settled’ (p. 76).

The Oromo scholar Mohammed Hassen has been a pivotal figure in challenging this perspective. His 1984 SOAS dissertation was eventually published in book form as The Oromo of Ethiopia: a history, 1570–1860 (Cambridge 1990). It marked the first major attempt to write a history of an Ethiopian people outside the dominant paradigm.

It should be noted that the difference in his terminus a quo is quite important. If hitherto, even in Hassen's own work, the Oromo have been seen as a ‘johnny come lately’ in Ethiopian history, in the present work he argues convincingly that their known history dates to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Almost half of the present work (pp. 1–174) is concerned with the period prior to 1559. In these chapters Hassen musters a variety of primary sources to argue that the Oromo did not ‘suddenly appear’ in Ethiopia in the sixteenth century, but were in the country and interacted with its other populations from a far earlier date. In the succeeding chapters Hassen offers a revised discussion of the Oromo migration and provides a more nuanced perspective than the common ‘invasion- and destruction-’ based narratives of the past. Of special interest is his discussion of the Christianisation of many of the Oromo and their role in the religious wars of the Christian kingdom.

While in Hassen's earlier writing the polemics were largely between the lines, the present work confronts earlier historians head-on. This includes not only modern historians, but perhaps most interesting is his delving into the work of the ecclesiast turned ethnographer Abba Bahrey, who settled in the court of Emperor Sartsa Dengal as a refugee fleeing the migrating Oromo. Bahrey's Zenahu lagalla (History of the Galla) has long been the starting point for any discussion of the group. Rather remarkably, Bahrey eschewed theological explanations for the failures of the Christian kingdom and instead offered an insightful social analysis of the Oromo's strengths, which he correctly connected to the gadaa system. In particular, he stressed its egalitarianism and that all men devoted part of their lives to membership in a warrior age-group. To his credit, while acknowledging Bahrey's anti-Oromo credentials, Hassen fully acknowledges his beautiful prose and a gift for social analysis centuries ahead of his time.

It is a pleasure after a quarter century to finally see Mohammed Hassen's mature reconstruction of Oromo history. For those interested in ecclesiastical history, much of the detail of this book will be of limited interest. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating attempt to write the history of a people who have for far too long only been viewed from the perspective of and in the shadow of a dominant Christian polity.