From “Galla” to the Ghost of Menelik: The Oromo, the Harar Frontier, and the Imperial Paradox of Modern Ethiopia
Introduction: The Politics of Naming and the Recovery of Oromo Agency
“Galla” is not a neutral ethnographic label. It is an external name imposed on the Oromo by neighbouring societies—above all by the Amhara and Tigrayan literate traditions—and it is now widely rejected by Oromo people themselves as a pejorative. The politics of this naming already reveals something essential: Oromo history has long been written through the eyes of others, their expansion recorded as “invasion,” their political institutions excluded from the narrative of the “state,” their very identity defined by the vocabulary of those who claimed civilizational superiority over them. The term itself carries the weight of centuries of derogatory usage, a linguistic marker of the subordinate position into which the Oromo were placed by the Ethiopian imperial project. To recover Oromo history is therefore not merely an exercise in empirical correction but a fundamental challenge to the epistemological framework through which Ethiopian history has been constructed.
To understand the long arc from the sixteenth-century Oromo population movements to the contemporary career of Abiy Ahmed—including his pursuit of sea access and the contested status of Somaliland like Moyale, Jigjiga, and Dire Dawa—one must begin by restoring Oromo agency to a history that has been systematically misrepresented. The Oromo appear in the standard historiography as a disruptive force, a problem to be managed, a population to be administered. They rarely appear as political actors with their own institutions, their own conceptions of governance, their own historical consciousness. This essay seeks to correct that imbalance, tracing the Oromo experience from the foundational institution of gadaa through the crucible of the sixteenth-century expansion, the formation of the Harar frontier, and the contemporary entanglement of Oromo nationalism with the Ethiopian state.
The argument proceeds through several interconnected claims. First, that the sixteenth-century Oromo expansion must be understood not as a spontaneous eruption of primitive expansionism but as the release of accumulated institutional and demographic capacity into a window of opportunity created by the collapse of the regional balance of power. Second, that the frontier that emerged around Harar was not a simple conquest but a complex modus vivendi that transformed both Oromo and Somali societies. Third, that the frontier logic of the sixteenth century has been institutionalized in the ethnic federalism of the post-1991 Ethiopian state and has resurfaced with particular intensity around the urban nodes of Dire Dawa, Jigjiga, and Moyale. Fourth, that the contemporary campaign for sea access represents the projection of the lost frontier onto the regional stage, reproducing the imperial logic that the Oromo themselves have historically opposed. And finally, that the fundamental question raised by this history is whether a state constituted through the conquest of its peripheries can accommodate the political subjectivity of its largest peripheral people without reproducing the imperial logic.
Origins and the Gadaa Foundation
There is no scholarly consensus on a single Oromo homeland. One influential position places the ancestral Oromo centre in the southern Ethiopian highlands around Bale and the upper Ganale and Wabe Shebelle rivers; others point to a broader zone spanning Sidamo, Bali, and the southern Shewan plateau. Some traditions speak of a dispersal from a common point of origin, while others emphasize a gradual expansion over centuries from multiple centres. What is clear is that well before the sixteenth century the Oromo had developed the gadaa system—an age-grade constitutional order in which power rotated every eight years among elected luba leaders—and a mixed pastoral-agricultural economy capable of mobilizing population and military force in a coordinated manner.
The gadaa system represents one of the most sophisticated indigenous political institutions in the African continent. It was not merely a system of age grades but a comprehensive constitutional framework that regulated political succession, social organization, economic activity, and legal dispute resolution. Power rotated systematically among the five gadaa grades, each with its own councils and officials, ensuring that no individual or lineage could monopolize authority. The system included checks and balances, mechanisms for the recall of leaders who exceeded their mandates, and a complex legal code known as the sera that governed relations between individuals, families, and communities. The gadaa system also provided the institutional framework for military mobilization, with the gadaa classes forming the basis of age-regiment organization.
The significance of this institutional inheritance for the sixteenth-century expansion cannot be overstated. The Oromo did not expand as a disorganized mass of pastoralists driven by demographic pressure or ecological necessity. They expanded as a society with a sophisticated political order, a developed military organization, and a clear sense of collective identity. The gadaa system provided the coordination mechanisms that allowed diverse Oromo groups to act in concert, to integrate conquered populations, and to maintain social cohesion under the pressures of migration and warfare. The expansion was not a rejection of the gadaa order but its projection outward, a territorialization of the constitutional principles that had governed Oromo society for centuries.
The mixed pastoral-agricultural economy of the Oromo provided the material basis for this expansion. Pastoralism gave the Oromo the mobility and military capacity to move quickly across large distances, while agriculture provided the surplus necessary to sustain larger populations. The combination of the two created a flexible and resilient economic system capable of adapting to different ecological zones. As Oromo groups moved into new territories, they could adopt the agricultural practices of the populations they encountered while retaining their pastoral traditions, creating hybrid economic systems that facilitated integration.
The Sixteenth-Century Breakthrough: External Opportunity and Internal Capacity
The great Oromo expansion of the sixteenth century was not a spontaneous eruption but the release of accumulated demographic and institutional capacity into a window opened by the collapse of the regional balance of power. The jihad of Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim, Ahmed Gurey, (1529–1543) devastated both the Christian highland kingdom and the Muslim Adal Sultanate. The warfare, famine, and epidemics that accompanied and followed the jihad depopulated the Harar and Charchar regions and sent populations fleeing, creating a vacuum into which Oromo groups advanced. The destruction was not merely demographic but institutional: the collapse of both the Christian and Muslim state structures removed the political barriers that had previously constrained Oromo expansion, while the flight of populations opened up lands that could be occupied.
The jihad itself was a transformative event in the regional history. Imam Ahmad’s campaign against the Christian highlands was one of the most devastating conflicts in Ethiopian history, involving the mobilization of large armies, the destruction of churches and monasteries, the slaughter of populations, and the disruption of agricultural production. The Christian kingdom was brought to the brink of extinction, saved only by the intervention of Portuguese forces in 1541. But the victory of the Christian kingdom came at enormous cost, and the Adal Sultanate, exhausted by the war, disintegrated into competing factions. The resulting power vacuum was unprecedented in the region’s history.
Into this vacuum moved the Oromo, whose expansion was facilitated by the very destruction that had devastated the older powers. The Oromo did not simply fill a demographic void; they brought with them their own political and military institutions, their own social organization, and their own vision of territorial order. The expansion was not a chaotic migration but a coordinated movement of populations organized through the gadaa system, directed by elected leaders, and sustained by the institutions that had governed Oromo society for centuries.
The eastern Oromo of the Baarentuu confederacy—specifically the Ittu, Anniya, and Afran Qallo—moved into the Harar region, occupying land up to the Harar plateau and coming into direct contact with the Somali and the Harar city-state. In 1575 the Oromo defeated and exterminated an army sent against them by the Amir of Harar; in 1577 they killed Mansur ibn Muhammad of Adal, forcing his successor to abandon Harar and take refuge at Awsia. By the late 1570s Oromo forces had besieged Harar itself. These were not the actions of a disorganized rabble but of a coordinated military force capable of defeating the armies of established states. The Oromo had become a major regional power, capable of challenging the remaining state structures and imposing their will on the urban centres of the region.
Over the following generations the Oromo consolidated control over the eastern highlands, pushing the Somalis and Afars back toward the lower Awash and cutting Somali access to Harar by the late seventeenth century. A great portion of the Somali population adopted the Oromo culture and language to remain in their territories extending from the Harar Plateau to the Moyale region. This process of assimilation was not simply a matter of conquest but of cultural and linguistic transformation, as Somali groups integrated into the Oromo social order while retaining elements of their own identity. The frontier was not a sharp line but a zone of interaction, intermarriage, and cultural exchange.
The Harar Frontier: Coexistence and Transformation
What emerged around Harar was not a simple conquest but a complex modus vivendi. The Harari elite and the Oromo Afran Qallo confederations developed personal, political, and economic arrangements that encapsulated the city and began transforming the Oromo from independent pastoralists into agricultural peasants. The city of Harar, with its ancient walls and its distinctive culture, became a node in a network of relationships that linked the urban elite to the surrounding Oromo populations. The Oromo provided military protection and agricultural products; the Harari provided access to trade networks, Islamic learning, and urban culture. The relationship was asymmetric but not simply exploitative: the Oromo gained access to the wider world of the Indian Ocean trade, while the Harari gained security and sustenance.
Power in this system remained essentially in Oromo hands until the Turco-Egyptian conquest of 1875. The Oromo did not simply conquer Harar and then abandon their institutions; they maintained their gadaa system, their military organization, and their collective decision-making processes while incorporating the city into their political order. The Harari emirs ruled at the pleasure of the Oromo confederations, paying tribute and providing military support when required. The city itself became a site of cultural synthesis, where Oromo, Harari, Somali, and Arab influences mingled to produce the distinctive culture that continues to characterize Harar today.
This frontier order was not static but dynamic, constantly evolving in response to demographic change, economic opportunity, and political competition. The Oromo expanded their territory, integrated new populations, and developed new economic activities. The Harari adapted to their subordinate position, developing new strategies for maintaining their cultural identity and economic position. The Somali, pushed to the margins, developed their own strategies of resistance and accommodation. The frontier was a zone of creative tension, producing new forms of social organization and cultural expression.
The Issa and the Memory of Ali Kala Geeye
On the northern edge of this frontier, the Issa, a northern Somali clan of the Dir family, occupied the land corridor between the Red Sea coast and the Harar foothills. Their oral tradition preserves a central narrative of domination and liberation: the legend of Aale Boore and Cali Kalageeye. Aale Boore is remembered as a pagan tyrant whose power stretched from the Red Sea coast to the Harar escarpment and who imposed a tribute of milk and meat on pastoralists. Cali Kalageeye, combining cunning with courage, organized a stratagem that tricked the tyrant’s warriors and culminated in the beheading of Aale Boore himself. The victory is till today commemorated in the wilwile war dance.
This legend cannot be read as literal chronicle, but it is an invaluable historical ethnography. It records how the Issa encoded foreign domination as pagan tyranny and their own resistance as righteous liberation, thereby sustaining political identity and territorial claim in a frontier zone contested between Oromo and Somali power. The legend provides a window into the collective memory of the Issa, revealing how they understood their relationship to the Oromo, to the Harari, and to the wider regional order. The figure of Aale Boore may represent the Oromo confederations that dominated the region, or the Harari emirs, or even the Christian highland kingdom; the legend does not specify. What matters is the structure of the narrative: a foreign tyrant, a cunning hero, a decisive victory, and a lasting liberation.
The relationship between Oromo and Issa was never one of simple conqueror and conquered: it involved war, infiltration, intermarriage, clientage, and the repeated redrawing of ethnic boundaries. The Issa occupied a strategic position between the Oromo highlands and the Red Sea coast, controlling access to trade routes and pastoral resources. They were sometimes allies of the Oromo against common enemies, sometimes rivals for control of strategic territory, and sometimes subjects of Oromo confederations who paid tribute and provided military service. The relationship was characterized by shifting alliances, periodic conflict, and gradual integration, as Issa families moved into Oromo territory, adopted Oromo customs, and intermarried with Oromo families.
The Contested Triangle: Dire Dawa, Jigjiga, and Moyale
The frontier logic of the sixteenth century has not disappeared; it has been institutionalized in the ethnic federalism of the post-1991 Ethiopian state, and it has resurfaced with particular intensity around three urban nodes that Oromo nationalist discourse claims as integral to Oromia: Dire Dawa, Jigjiga, and Moyale.
Dire Dawa occupies a singular place in this contestation. In late 2025, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed told parliament that Dire Dawa “was under the Oromia region in the constitution,” and that the arrangement placing the city under federal administration with rotating Oromo and Somali administration was an EPRDF invention not grounded in the constitution. The remark provoked protests in Dire Dawa, where young Somali men who publicly rejected the claim was defended by residents who insisted that “Dire Dawa has never been the Oromo region or administration.” The city’s demography is layered: Oromo residents include both Muslim and Orthodox Christian communities, with internal distinctions between “balegari” Oromo of Shewan origin and Oromo families long established in the vicinity of the city, while Somali residents assert their own historical presence. Dire Dawa is thus a city with a single rightful owner but a living archive of overlapping claims—precisely the kind of urban space that ethnic federalism has transformed into a battleground for competing sovereignties.
The constitutional question at the heart of the Dire Dawa dispute is not merely legal but existential. The 1995 constitution established a federal system based on ethno-linguistic territories, with each regional state corresponding to a designated “nation, nationality, or people.” Oromia was defined as the territory of the Oromo people, Somalis as the territory of the Somali people. But Dire Dawa, a city of mixed population and strategic importance, was placed under federal administration with a rotating presidency shared between Oromo and Somali. For Oromo nationalists, this arrangement is an anomaly, a violation of the constitutional principle that territory should correspond to ethnicity. For Somali residents, the arrangement is a guarantee, a recognition that Dire Dawa is not exclusively Oromo territory and that Somalis have a right to live there as equal citizens. The dispute is not simply about administrative boundaries but about the nature of the Ethiopian state and the rights of its constituent peoples.
Jigjiga, the capital of the Somali Region, appears in Oromo nationalist discourse as territory detached from Oromia by the Tigrayan-led regime’s policy of “territorial fragmentation.” This claim is articulated most forcefully on partisan forums rather than in official documents, but it reflects a broader current within Oromo nationalism that regards the post-1991 federal map as an unjust truncation of Oromia’s historical extent. The Somali region’s own trajectory—from irredentist claims toward Somalia to a post-1991 accommodation within Ethiopian federalism—has positioned it as a “peripheral nationalism” in contrast to Oromo nationalism’s “center-seeking” character, an asymmetry that shapes how territorial disputes between the two are framed and pursued.
The history of Jigjiga illustrates the complex interplay of frontier dynamics and state formation. The city was founded in the late nineteenth century as a military outpost by Ras Makonnen, the father of Emperor Haile Selassie, during the Ethiopian expansion into the Ogaden. The surrounding population was predominantly Somali, but the city itself became a site of Ethiopian administrative and military presence. During the imperial period, Jigjiga was part of Hararghe province, administered from Harar, which had a substantial Oromo population. The post-1991 reorganization placed Jigjiga at the centre of the Somali Region, a designation that Somali nationalists welcomed but Oromo nationalists contested. The city’s demographic composition, with Somali, Oromo, and other populations, reflects its history as a frontier settlement, a meeting point of different peoples and cultures.
Moyale, on the Kenya border, represents the most volatile of the three. In October 2026, a dispute over the raising of the Somali regional flag in the town escalated into sustained armed clashes involving Oromia and Somali regional security forces, spreading across seven districts and displacing tens of thousands across the Kenyan border. The deeper history includes the 1897 and 1907 Anglo-Ethiopian treaties that respectively divided the Somali and Borana Oromo between Ethiopia and Kenya, and the post-1991 administrative reorganization that placed Moyale in a dual-administration arrangement and, according to Borana accounts, facilitated the capture of two of the nine sacred Borana wells by Somali groups backed by the central government. For Oromo nationalists, Moyale is a lost district; for Somali residents, the flag dispute was a defense of administrative presence; for the Borana, it is a question of water, identity, and survival.
The Borana Oromo, who inhabit the area around Moyale, practice a form of gadaa that has preserved many of the ancient traditions, including the sacred wells that are central to their pastoral economy and religious life. These wells, known as tula, are not merely sources of water but sacred sites that anchor Borana identity and social organization. The capture of two of the nine sacred wells by Somali groups represents not just an economic loss but a spiritual and cultural wound. The conflict over Moyale is thus simultaneously a dispute over administrative boundaries, a competition for pastoral resources, and a confrontation over sacred space.
Abiy Ahmed, the Sea, and the “Menelik Syndrome”
From the sixteenth-century Harar frontier to the twenty-first-century contest over Dire Dawa, Jigjiga, and Moyale, the structural tension between frontier and centre has now acquired a new dimension: the question of sea access. In October 2023, Abiy Ahmed declared that Ethiopia would secure “sovereign access to the sea by any means necessary,” framing it as an existential imperative and stating that Ethiopia would not remain a “prisoner of geography.” The claim was amplified by the President of the Oromia region, who declared that the Irreecha festival would be celebrated on the Red Sea coast, and by military officers who displayed maps incorporating Eritrea’s southern coastline. The Eritrean government has documented a sustained campaign of rhetoric and military signaling around the port of Assab, including Abiy’s February 2026 reference to Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights as a precedent.
This maritime ambition is inseparable from the domestic territorial question. The same political logic that seeks to reclaim Dire Dawa and Jigjiga for Oromia—the logic of restoring a lost greater Oromia—animates the claim to sea access. Critics have called this “Menelik syndrome”: the reproduction of the imperial logic by a leader who hails from the very population that Menelik II conquered. The reference to Menelik is not incidental. Menelik II was the emperor who, in the late nineteenth century, expanded the Ethiopian state to its present borders through a series of military campaigns that subjugated the Oromo, the Somali, and other peoples of the south and east. The “Menelik syndrome” describes the tendency of successive Ethiopian leaders to pursue territorial expansion as a means of national aggrandizement, regardless of the cost to the populations being incorporated.
As Merera Gudina put it, “anybody who sits on the Menelik throne is infected by the imperial spirit.” The paradox is structural. Abiy’s Oromo origin makes his claim to embody the Ethiopian state contradictory: Ethiopian nationalism was historically built on an Amhara-Tigrayan cultural ethos against which Oromo nationalism defined itself. To govern from the centre, he must simultaneously satisfy Oromo demands for self-determination and the centralist expectations of the imperial state apparatus. He must be both the champion of Oromo rights and the heir to the imperial tradition that denied those rights. The contradiction is not merely personal but structural, built into the nature of the Ethiopian state.
The contest over Dire Dawa is the clearest illustration of this contradiction. When Abiy asserted that the city constitutionally belongs to Oromia, he was speaking as an Oromo leader reclaiming lost territory. But the response from Dire Dawa’s Somali residents—that the city has never been Oromo—exposed the impossibility of satisfying one frontier claim without generating another. The same dynamic operates in Moyale, where the assertion of Oromo administrative presence has produced armed conflict with Somali regional forces, and in the sea-access campaign, where the reclamation of a “lost” coastline requires the negation of Eritrean sovereignty.
The sea-access campaign has regional implications that go beyond the bilateral relationship between Ethiopia and Eritrea. It has alarmed Egypt, which fears that Ethiopian control of Red Sea ports would threaten its access to the Suez Canal and its position as the dominant naval power in the region. It has complicated Ethiopia’s relationships with its other neighbours, including Djibouti, whose port of Doraleh handles the vast majority of Ethiopian trade, and Sudan, which has its own ambitions on the Red Sea coast. The campaign has also revived the historical memory of Ethiopian expansionism, reminding Eritreans of the decades of conflict that led to their independence in 1993. The “Menelik syndrome” is not merely a metaphor; it describes a concrete pattern of behaviour that has shaped Ethiopia’s relations with its neighbours for more than a century.
Conclusion: Frontier and Centre in Reciprocal Formation
Across five centuries, the constant is not any inherent expansionism in one people, but the reciprocal formation of frontier and centre. The Oromo expansion reshaped the demographic and political map of the Ethiopian highlands; the Harar frontier forged durable identities and coexistence techniques between Oromo and Somali; the post-1991 federal map institutionalized those frontier relationships as constitutional disputes over Dire Dawa, Jigjiga, and Moyale; and the contemporary campaign for sea access projects the logic of the lost frontier onto the regional stage. The argument over Abiy Ahmed’s imperial ambitions exposes a deeper unresolved problem: whether a state historically constituted through the conquest of its peripheries can accommodate the political subjectivity of its largest peripheral people without reproducing the imperial logic.
This problem is not unique to Ethiopia. It is the central problem of post-colonial states everywhere, which inherited from colonialism the borders, institutions, and ideologies of the imperial powers they replaced. The solution cannot be found in the simple reversal of historical wrongs, in the reclamation of lost territories, or in the assertion of ethnic sovereignty. It requires a structural reckoning with the imperial inheritance and a renegotiation of the boundaries of the political community itself—boundaries that run through Dire Dawa’s streets, Moyale’s wells, and the Red Sea coast.
The Oromo experience offers both a warning and a resource for this reckoning. The warning is that the logic of empire can be reproduced by its victims, that the pursuit of liberation can become a new form of domination. The resource is the gadaa system itself, with its principles of rotation, checks and balances, and collective decision-making. These principles offer an alternative to the centralized, hierarchical, and expansionist model of the imperial state. They suggest that political community can be organized around consent rather than conquest, around dialogue rather than domination, around shared sovereignty rather than exclusive possession.
Whether Ethiopia can draw on these resources remains to be seen. The country stands at a crossroads, facing simultaneous crises of political legitimacy, economic development, and regional security. The choices made in the coming years will determine whether it becomes a genuine federation of its peoples or a new incarnation of the imperial state. The history of the Oromo, from the sixteenth-century expansion through the Harar frontier to the contemporary contest over Dire Dawa, Jigjiga, and Moyale, offers a guide to the possibilities and pitfalls of this transition. It is a history that must be told, not as the chronicle of a “problem to be managed,” but as the record of a people’s struggle to maintain their institutions, their identity, and their place in the political community—a struggle that continues today.