New Forms of Oromo Popular Culture on the Internet

This topic was conceived after a few email exchanges with editors of Ogina, an online Oromo arts magazine. When the editors asked me to contribute an essay for their issue of Ogina magazine on how the Internet has been used to spread Oromo poetry and hip hop, I was surprised and amused and emailed them back saying, "I´m happy to contribute an article…, but I am not sure if Oromo hip hop or spoken word art exists as a genre".

For a decade now, I have been following up almost every Oromo-related issues online and offline, except not paying attention to hip hop and freestyle art forms. Maybe that is because I have not been in the Diaspora for too long as these forms of Oromo arts are newly emerging in the transnational Oromo public sphere. In my leisure, I sometimes plug in some online video and social networking sites such as You Tube and MySpace to tune into some Oromo songs, films, and clips that can be accessed for free. I do this not just for entertainment, but also to try to understand what is going on in Oromo cyberspaces. There are plenty of traditional forms of music of secular and spiritual types. But I was ignorant on the hip hop and free style forms before Ogina editors sent me a follow up email with links to some really fascinating hip hop and poetry websites. They are all run by Oromo youth stars from the Diaspora.

This essay analyzes the agency of Oromo young artists in Diaspora in creating and circulating these forms of popular culture transnationally on the Internet. I will highlight how this form of media text came about and why it was pioneered in the diaspora as opposed the distant home, Oromia. It would be interesting to look at this topic from the theoretical perspectives of identity and public sphere.

Historical background of hip hop

Hip hop music or rap music as a genre started in the Bronx in New York City in the early 1970s predominantly among African-American and Latino communities. Hip hop started to make a debut among Oromo Diaspora communities from the Horn of Africa living in the west, almost four decades later after the genre has been globally well established. Oromo hip hop borrows format and rhythm from the mother genre, albeit it has its own particularity because the genre mainly relays political social and economic repressions of Oromos in Ethiopia. Oromo hip hop maintains its ethnicity by mainly using Afaan Oromoo, a language of the majority population in Ethiopia. Sometimes, emerging artists use a mixture of Oromo and English. Although Oromo hip hop is launched from cities of North America, it maintains its Horn of African nationality because of using Afaan Oromoo to represent Oromo social realities.

The origins and main themes of Oromo rap music

The genre does not exist among the home society in Oromia in the Horn of Africa. The Oromo youth of North America reinvented the genre. You Tube search returns several dozens of results of Oromo hip hop stars broadcasting themselves. In their You Tube broadcasts, the artists recount the history of the Oromo people, their culture and hardships under successive, tyrannical Ethiopian regimes and so on. One rap video by a group of Oromo youth from Georgia in the United States has 11,259 hits and it has also made it to being viewed on the Eritrean Television Afaan Oromoo program, Qophii Gaaddisa Dhugaa, hence convergence between the new and the traditional media.

To examine the themes in detail, I will further give some examples from three incredibly talented Oromo hip hop stars: Boonaa Mohammed , Epidemic and O´Z UP –--all North America.

Boonaa Mohamed is pervasively present on the Internet through his website and MySpace page. Boonaa has released a CD for sale in 2007 and made several appearances on live spoken word poetry shows. His CD, Boonafied, deals with diverse topics which include ´sleep´, ´Canada´, ´Who am I??´. Boonaa provides these reasons for becoming a spoken word artist: "I´m just a super-spiritual revolutionary solider equipped with a quick wit and a big mouth who is down to fight for what´s right... My poetry is strictly a form of therapy that I use to express my inner thoughts, beliefs and feelings".

Like Boonaa, Epedemic and O´Z UP say they are activists rapping to help bring about the freedom of the repressed and unrepresented 40 million plus Oromos in Ethiopia. Love and relationship forms another sub-theme of their songs.

Negotiating multiple glocal identities

Young artists Boonaa Mohammed, Epidemic and O´Z UP keep Oromummaa/ Oromo identity as their primary identity, while also simultaneously occupying the terrain of the broader hip hop tradition. They generate their narratives from the stories of oppression and persecutions their immigrant parents told them they underwent in Ethiopia. Using creatively crafted narratives, they passionately advocate for the respect of human rights in the distant Oromia.

I have viewed their websites, MySpaces, pictures and multimedia content. The desire to express themselves to make a difference transpires from these. Hip hop-style dress codes, language use, bodily expressions, the beats and rhythms of music are among the tools these artists rely on to form identity bridges between the nascent Oromo hip hop culture and the developed global hip hop culture.

Delivery Technologies

Some of these artists heavily rely on the public spheres of online video sites such as the You Tube and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. This indicates the tremendous potentials of free expression and advocacy these tools offer. The artists have several hundreds of friends on their MySpaces and Facebooks. They seem to be getting their messages out mainly to the audiences in the Diaspora who have broadband internet access. The Ethiopian government also has a track record of blocking off these revolutionary technologies. Only less than 1% percent of the population has access to the Internet in Ethiopia. These factors make the nascent Oromo rap music a phenomenon largely restricted to the transnational Oromo Diaspora in the west.

On the other hand, the use of free online technologies to disseminate this art form not only structurally transforms Oromo hip hop as a transnational cultural commodity, but also helps the involved parties to overcome obstacles of time and space. This is true at least in the Diaspora.

While we know that Oromo hip hop and spoken word art are widely spread and well known to the Oromo youth in the Diaspora, it is hard to tell how these forms of arts are likely to be received by the older generation of the Oromo Diaspora and population at home. While some youth in urban areas will have some idea about rap music in Oromia, the older generation and the village folks will not have any idea weather this genre is a song or not. Regardless of anticipated resistance to this genre, Oromo hip hop artists must realize that they are doing excellent jobs in effectively communicating messages human rights advocacy that help in the search for justice and freedom in Oromia .