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The Oromo Movement and Ethiopian Border-making using Social Media
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To cite: Arora, P. (forthcoming). The Oromo Movement and Ethiopian Border-making
using Social Media. In K. Smets, K. Leurs, M. Georgiou, S. Witteborn and R. Gajjala (Eds),
Handbook of Media and Migration, Sage.
The Oromo Movement and Ethiopian Border-making using Social Media
Abstract
The Oromo people have had a long and turbulent struggle in Ethiopia. This ethnic majority
have been persecuted over decades for sustaining their culture – their language, traditions, and
rituals, at times through systematic violence by the ruling regime. This has led to a large number
of Oromo people fleeing the country and seeking asylum across the world. The Oromos, while
restricted in self-determination in their homeland, have become visible through their activism
on social media sites, particularly Facebook and Twitter. This has led the Ethiopian state to
mark some of them as terrorists and block their online accounts due to their significant and
growing influence on social media today. Within this context, this chapter critically examines
the role of social media in the Oromo social movement and offers a framework to assess their
impact. This framework includes, 1) border-making within urban and digital geographies, 2)
networks of digital Oromo activism, and 3) the creative insurgency of the Oromo movement.
By applying this framework, we can assess the complexities surrounding the Ethiopian digital
political culture. The Oromo people have indeed reinvented themselves and their histories
through digital platforms, at times creating moral dilemmas about group identity that can serve
as a barrier to inclusion.
Introduction
In early 2017, I was invited to give a talk in Oslo on new media and social movements
by the Oromo Studies Association. The audience was unlike any audience I have experienced
before. They were surgeons, accountants, lawyers, botanists, physicists, artists and activists.
A few were academics. What they had in common was their passion for their Oromo culture.
They were the Oromo diaspora spread across diverse parts of the world, converging to
reconnect, revive and reinvigorate their Oromo identity at this annual gathering.
They were particularly enthusiastic about using digital platforms for political outreach
with their Ethiopian homeland. It was reminiscent of the nascent years of the internet where
people were euphoric about the potential of the internet to be a global village, a virtual
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community, a digital commons. A decade ago, this conversation would have been difficult to
have due to the massive digital divide outside the West, including in Africa. However, the
mobile phone and low-cost data plans have served as a game changer in these regions,
including in Ethiopia, which is witnessing an exponential rise in mobile phone subscribers in
the last few years (Kalo, 2015). While the internet penetration is still less than five percent,
the pace at which it is increasing and the persistent faith that the Oromo people place in these
tools, make this conversation more pertinent than ever.
We have come a long way from the time when Mark Pfeifle, the former US national
security advisor recommended ‘Twitter’ for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 – “when
traditional journalists were forced to leave the country, Twitter became a window for the
world to view hope, heroism, and horror,” he exclaimed (Arora, 2015). This captured the
common sentiment during that time where many tech enthusiasts believed that as our public
space got more restrictive especially under authoritarian regimes, social media could provide
an alternative public political sphere for free expression and collective action.
Fast forward to 2018. There are major discussions going on as to whether social
media is killing democracy. News about how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data
harvested under the auspices of an academic study to target millions of US voters based on
their psychological weaknesses, pervade the media discourse (Wong, 2018). Far from social
media as a liberating tool, many people now blame them for the outcomes of Brexit and
Trump as President. Facebook has come under fire for not moderating and flagging fake
news.
In authoritarian regimes such as Ethiopia, the situation is more blatant. It is the first
sub-Saharan African country to filter the internet (Mabweazara, Mudhai, & Whittaker, 2014).
They have instituted sophisticated spyware software technologies to enable the government
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to spy on their people. The state is recorded to have the worst internet freedom in the world,
as they block hundreds of websites and imprison numerous political bloggers on a regular
basis. Yet, as I mentioned at the start, social media continues to give hope to the vast Oromo
people as it still is a better alternative to the Ethiopian mass media systems that are heavily
controlled and censored by the government. As Dugo (2017) explains, “holding up a cell
phone in the sight of heavily armed military shooting at civilians posed greater risks to those
who did it, but they did put the cause above themselves” (p.50).
The Oromo protests have a long and turbulent history in Ethiopia. The thirty-five
million majority in Ethiopia have been persecuted over decades for sustaining their culture –
their language, traditions, and rituals, through systematic violence by the ruling regime (Heur,
2006). This has led to a large number of Oromo people fleeing the country and seeking for
asylum across the world. However, the Oromo diaspora, while restricted in self-determination
in their homeland, have become visible through their activism on social media sites,
particularly Facebook and Twitter. This has led the Ethiopian state to mark some diasporic
members as ‘terrorists’ and censor their online accounts due to their significant and growing
influence on social media today (Dugo, 2017).
Within this context, this chapter critically examines the role of social media in the
Oromo political movement and offers a framework to assess their impact. This template
includes, 1) the politics of border-making of the urban and digital geographies, 2) the
networks of digital activism, where algorithmic data politics affects how group identities are
formed and sustained and, 3) the creative insurgency of Oromo’s digital political culture,
where political engagement manifests through cultural forms such as memes, language
choice, and traditional songs and clothing.
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By applying this framework to the Oromo movement, we can assess the complexities
surrounding the nature and evolution of their political activism, and particularly through the
border-making by the diasporic networks. To understand and shape social movements online,
we need to acknowledge that the digital and the urban provide multiple and intersecting
worlds, each with their own rules of engagement that are oriented to particular group
interests. Culture moves and reproduces over time but also across different contexts, traveling
dialogically between the physical and the digital. The Oromo diaspora have reinvented
themselves and their histories through digital platforms, at times creating moral dilemmas
about group and ethnic identity and belonging that can serve as a barrier to inclusion.
It is pointless to debate the intrinsic value of a technology as it only gains meaning
when applied to a context. It is less fruitful to speak in general terms of a technology’s
neutrality or bias without looking at its specific infrastructures and human usage.
Technologies are not permanent and fixed but evolving tools shaped by diverse social actors
such as activists, educators, digital platforms, the state, citizens and corporate agencies.
Hence, this chapter unpacks the digital political cultures of the Oromo movement by looking
at the physical and the virtual spaces that their people inhabit, the rules of engagement, and
the norms and values dictating their social interactions.
I. Border-making within urban and digital Ethiopian geographies
All social movements require points of departure and spaces of inhabitation to start
with. Social movements are shaped by its spaces of occupation. For the longest time, digital
space has been considered as novel, unique, unprecedented and radical in nature.
Technological determinism has long dictated our worldview. To capture the shift over the
decades on the debate on digital space, let us focus on two questions, one asked in the early
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years of the internet on ‘are we in an era of post-geography?’ while today we ask, ‘are we in
an era of hyper-geography?’
Let us take the first question of post-geography. In the 1990s, the popular view was
that the internet as a space transcended borders. The implications were tremendously exciting
for the times. Common metaphors used during those days give us an idea of how enthusiastic
people were about the digital sphere. People proposed that the internet was a ‘global village’
where regardless of caste, class, tribal affiliation, sex, and age, we could all come together
(Arora, 2014). Communities would be formed across the world based on shared values and
beliefs and age-old barriers and walls would become obsolete. The nation state would
become redundant. Another metaphor was the ‘wild wild web’ that leveraged on California’s
Wild West promise of egalitarianism where anyone with drive and effort could occupy and
take ownership of the vast and infinite space (Arora, 2012).
Today, the maturation of the internet has compelled us to move away from this
framing and ask instead - are we in an era of hyper-geography? Political events like Brexit
and Trumpian politics show that many citizens want to erect more barriers and protect
themselves from what they see as porous borders (Kagarlitsky, 2017). Nationalism is stronger
than ever before. Locality has taken precedence over the global. With new technologies,
reality is augmented to extend a political moment, an event and sustain its impact through
persistence of its circulation.
Given the urban-virtual flux, we could even accept that we are in a hybrid geography
where we are at once both online and offline, engaged in multiple political spheres of the
digital and urban kind. Through the mobile phone for instance, we are accentuating our
presence, protesting physically while engaging with the virtual protesting public through live
streaming (Neumayer & Stald, 2014). However, it is intellectual laziness to ascribe this to the
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notion of ‘blurring’ as we cease to examine the specificity of these urban-digital relationships
concerning the political event in question. The only way to tackle this is to root these
conversation in particular political movements.
Territorialization discourses of the urban/digital ‘Oromia’ – the homeland
We need to remember that space is territory and territory comes with its own
historical blueprint. Territory is deliberately constructed. Take the Oromo movement and the
fight for their own land - Oromia. Their ‘Oromo country’ is built on a contested history of the
sovereignty of Ethiopia (Jalata, 2015). The ongoing struggle for self-rule is one of the
defining features of this social movement. The adopting of the colonial discourse for this
movement provides an alternative narrative to the popular discourse that Ethiopia was the
only African nation that withstood colonization (Jalata, 2008).
The Oromo people argue that their homeland ‘Oromia’ was effectively colonized by
Abyssinia/Ethiopia and the Menelik (Amhara warlords), reducing the Oromo population from
10 to 5 million through their colonial violence. This converts state history into myth – a
history of century’s old peaceful coexistence of indigenous people as in the case of Ethiopia,
Rwanda and Sudan, Bosnia and many other similar nations, to be replaced by a picture of
territorial tensions between people.
Violence for territory is a violence on people and their cultures. For the longest of
time, Oromos were prevented from organizing themselves. They continue to be suppressed
and controlled by the state as they are systematically denied opportunities to develop their
own regional institutions and knowledge that would enable the transmission of their culture
and entrench their claim on the territory (Holcomb & Ibssa, 1990). However, displacement of
the people, the Oromo diaspora, found alternative inhabitations both of the physical and the
virtual kind. As the Oromo people seek for asylum across the globe, they re-place themselves
6
online through digital solidarity networks as well as engage with their new homelands. They
bring with them their socio-cultural narratives that shape how they communicate their cause
online, contributing to the architecting of their Oromo movement in digital space.
This puts the pressure on Oromo diasporas in their new homelands (Gagliardone et
al., 2015). For instance, the global Oromo community keeps the cause alive through a
combination of physical and intimate encounters alongside efforts for digital solidarity. They
initiate town hall meetings to keep the fervor alive on challenges facing their nation.
Demonstrations in their new lands serve as inspiration to their families and communities back
home still under oppressive conditions, reminding them that they are not forgotten. The more
restrictive one’s homeland, the more moral responsibility endowed on their shoulders. There
is pressure to continue lobby work in the adopted homelands for global intervention and here,
the use of blogs, online news magazines, and Facebook groups come to play to consolidate
the cause. According to BBC, the #OromoProtests was one of Africa’s top hashtags of 2016,
driven by the Oromo diasporas to spread the news of the protests and the massive atrocities in
the hands of the regime (Dugo, 2017).
Cosmopolitan and media infrastructures, imaginations and instigations of Oromia
Today, the colonizing through territory continues in the land grabbing efforts by the
Ethiopian State from the Oromo people (Jalata, 2016). They hand out the land to companies
from emerging economies such as China and India to grow and export grains to their own
home countries. This privatization of land diffuses responsibility beyond the Ethiopian power
centers and thereby, creates global complicity. Likewise, the privatization of the Ethiopian
telecom sector in the hands of the Chinese who are aligned with authoritarian style media
regulation enables these surveillance media infrastructures. The indigenization of global
actors diffuses and distributes authority. When that happens, it is difficult to hold one party
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accountable, making resistance harder as it is difficult to stand up against an abstract
consortium of local and global actors.
To consolidate this gate-keeping function, a number of media laws have been in place
that reinstates the control of citizen expression against dominant political parties. For
instance, we have the ‘mass media and freedom of information proclamation act’ from the
1990s to silence criticism as well as the ‘anti-terrorism proclamation’ in 2009 to criminalize
journalists and activists (Kalo, 2015). There is also the ‘charities and societies law’ that
blocks or restricts access of human rights activists and organizations in the name of national
security. This is compounded with the ritualization of media terror including the confiscating
of mobile phones of citizens protesting, jamming broadcasts, destroying cell towers near
zones of political activity, and blocking websites particularly during demonstrations. There is
evidence of how the Ethiopian government has installed malware/spyware onto computers of
Ethiopian journalists, including those in the Washington DC area for instance.
Of course, media infrastructures are only part of the story. The mediation of one’s
political imagination is just as relevant. Media institutions and the content they produce that
influences Oromo political thinking needs examining. We need to look closely at the nexus
between their old and their new media systems. There is more enthusiasm for new media as a
stimulant of political diversity as the producers of content are far less restricted compared to
the old media empire. Ethiopia’s old media systems of the television and the radio are still
influenced by the ideology of media development from the 1970s where media systems were
meant to contribute to the exercise of nation building (Gagliardone, 2014). Ethiopia is not
alone as many nations in the Global South around that time were using mass media
strategically to build national identity emerging from centuries of colonial rule. However,
today, as free press strengthens nations, the old ideologies continue to persist, disabling the
progress of a nation.
8
Besides Ethiopia having one of the most state controlled media systems, they also
have a very small journalist cohort. A study done in 2013 estimated that there was about 1400
journalists providing information to a population of about 90 million people. A ratio of one
journalist per 65,000 people (Dirbaba & O’Donnell, 2016). With social media where citizens
become amateur journalists, documenting and commenting on political events, it expands the
sphere of influence that the average person has over the political imagination.
Facebook ‘free basics,’ the offer of limited free internet in exchange for data
harvesting, have risen to prominence, promising a vibrant alternative digital political sphere
(Arora, 2016a, 2016b). After all, it is seemingly controlled by an external corporate entity
with a libertarian ideology to media censorship. Furthermore, its free access to select sites
mitigates the digital divide. Looking closely however, this infrastructure is not free from
national political control. Facebook is a business after all. It has an alarming track record of
cooperating with authoritarian regimes, obliging governments with data requests on their
citizens. Facebook's Free Basics is an African dictator's dream (Nyabola, 2016).
Facebook did shut down the most popular Ethiopian page, Mereja, claiming that it
caused people to “like or engage with it unintentionally in a misleading way” (para 3). In
early 2018, it temporarily blocked Jawar Mohammed, an influential Ethiopian political
activist over so called hyperactivity. Their official reason for this decision despite his verified
profile was, “it looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast.” (Shaban, 2018).
Facebook has a similarly troubling record on privacy in the United States where they yielded
results for 80 percent of government requests. They have also cooperated with location-based
services such as Geofeedia, enhancing the surveillance of protesters. While Facebook has
become one of the key instruments in the shaping of the global political mediascape, they
continue to claim that they are not a media organization (Roberts, 2016). This allows them to
9
escape responsibility on the kind of content they promote and their outcomes on our political
processes.
To conclude, when we speak about the territory of digital political space, we cannot
assume that this is by default a global realm. It is hybrid in the sense that the Oromo
movement is still rooted in the geography of Ethiopia and the meaning of land. It is global as
solidarity networks are formed among Oromo diasporas and Ethiopian locals working
together to construct a collective voice in the face of tremendous opposition. A plurality of
actors of both the private and public kind, and the external and the internal does not
necessitate choice that is more democratic. As the Facebook example illustrates, the
libertarian ideology subsumes to the authoritarian ideology as commercial interests prevails.
In this sense, Facebook is just as intensely local as the Ethiopian media system.
II. Networks of digital Oromo activism
Gayatri Spivak, in one of the most influential postcolonial essays in 1988, ‘Can the
subaltern speak?’ brings up the notion of the marginalized voice represented by Eurocentric
concerns (Spivak, 1988). Assuming anonymity and muteness, the worlds most oppressed
have been spoken for over these decades. However, if we are to go by the last decades of
social media activism and the low barriers of entry in communicating political thought, we
can at last say that indeed, yes, the subaltern can speak. However, we cannot assume that
while they do speak, that they actually get heard. To be heard, they need to adopt what
Spivak calls “strategic essentialism,” a kind of temporary solidarity by deliberately
simplifying their group identity. This reductionism makes the social cause more palatable and
accessible to the non-oppressed audience, which in turn, could possibly lead to social change.
In layman’s terms, we need to ask ourselves honestly whether this trade of is worth the
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outcome - is propaganda compatible with activism? Does the means justify the ends? And is
there value to victimhood?
With the Oromo diasporas spread across the world much like other diasporas, some
have advocated ethnic essentialism as a strategy to create an united moral front. To do so, you
need to deploy a cultural revival to create communal bonding. You also need to simplify
historical narratives that underplays past violence by the group and emphasizes victimhood
instead. It is important to have an authentic moral high ground to make oneself heard.
Multiculturalism gets replaced by a singular, clearly defined group identity. The construction
of the homogeneous Oromo identity is designed to be ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ in the making,
all dedicated to the same cause (Laache, 2017).
In reality, the Ethiopian diaspora represents a variety of political orientations at times
conflicting with one another on issues of ethnicity, gender, statehood, and religion. As
Adamson argues, “diasporas seek particularism rather than universalism – even if their basis
may be a universal ideology such as nationalism” (Adamson, 2008). The further the distance
from the homeland and the longer the political battle, the more pertinent these strategies
become. The alternative is where multiple separate organizations of activism get set up, each
with their own agendas, diluting the mission and possibly leading to self-destruction of the
larger cause of the Oromia statehood.
The revival of the gadaa system, Oromo’s centuries old indigenous democracy
tradition is one such strategy (Sorenson, 1996). However, within this cultural revival, the role
of the women may become marginal, relegating them to domesticity. Gender inequality is
subsumed to the larger ideal of Oromo self-determination. Using this narrative of cultural
revival to consolidate authenticity among a variety of activist groups online can come at the
price of exclusion. Myth becomes reality. We need to be careful what for you ask for. We
11
have to be careful when constructing community networks online as revival of historical
practices can sacrifice inclusivity. Who gets represented impacts belongingness and thereby
participation. The question is, going by Spivak’s recommended strategy of temporal strategic
essentialism is that often, these struggles are far from temporary and become a permanence in
one’s group identity, and potentially impossible to revert in the future.
Having formed these networks, it is also worth looking at the circulation of their
communicative practices. In which case, we cannot avoid computational politics here. We are
in a data rich-data poor society where a few organizations have control of our datasets while
the many are subjected to the invisible rules of a platform’s algorithms (Andrejevic, 2014).
Building trust is more effective when people are harnessed to be distributors of content.
Companies like Facebook profit from the trust we have of our personal networks. Creating
intimacy is a strategy politicians deploy to engineer consent and even fandom through
personalization. For instance, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi has one of the
largest twitter following among all politicians, even more than any mainstream news media
channel or journalist in India.
However, it was discovered that a tremendous number of them initially did not have a
profile picture, had never tweeted and their twitter IDs carry numerals, all indicators that they
were spam bots to create the illusion of political popularity (Arora, 2018). However, the fake
became the real as this led to a network effect of more followers due to the algorithmic bias
to those with the most following. People believed in his popularity through these numbers,
which extended his appeal. So the already data rich get richer. Political capital plays the same
game in today’s platform era. A new political underdog requires ingenious ways to gain a
following in a system that is stacked against him or her.
III. Creative insurgency of the Oromo movement
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The body has served as a powerful instrument for the political cause (Kraidy, 2016).
How we use it to express our politics can manifest in numerous ways. For instance, music can
be a contentious expressive medium. The Oromos have been denied the right to organize
cultural groups, such as musical groups, and are forbidden from talking and singing in their
own language (Jalata, 2008). The Ethiopian government showed little tolerance for the
existence of the Arffan Qallo and the Biftu Ganamo musical groups because they expressed
themselves in the Oromo language and culture.
Sometimes, even a simple item like clothing comes to the service of politics as it
makes the cause more visible and penetrates our imagination on a daily basis, normalizing the
cause. Take for instance Oromo clothing, a symbol of self-expression and identity (Einashe,
2016). Wearing beads on the neck or a bracelet or the colours of a skirt speak volumes. These
are easily compressed political messages that can be circulated both through urban and digital
networks. Expressing Oromo culture and heritage through the simple act of clothing is
viewed as an act of defiance and dissent. It is no wonder that people wearing traditional
Oromo clothing have been arrested at Oromo traditional festivals. In 2016, during a widelyattended Irreecha (Oromo Thankgiving) festival, the military killed over one thousand Oromo
civilians, 700 of them in one day (Dugo, 2017).
A good comparable example is the Palestinian kufiyya, a cotton head/neck scarf. It
became a symbol of Palestinian nationalism in the 1980s and an icon of global solidarity
(Schwartz-DuPre & Scott, 2015). In the last decade however, it became a victim of its own
efficacy. In the media, we got to see Sting, Sarah Jessica Parker, Justin Timberlake, Snoop
Dogg, and Kate Moss adorn the kufiyya, casualizing politics. Even stores such as Urban
Outfitters started to carry this piece of clothing for the rebellious youth in the West. Of
course, this got caught up with a media blowout when one of the pro-Israel activists
complained about the company showing sympathy for what they called ‘Palestinian
13
terrorists.’ Quickly, the company apologized and withdrew this item of clothing from their
stores.
The price of visibility can be commodification. This transnational mobility of a
cultural item that is politicized can just as quickly become commercialized through the very
same effort. Social media groups such as “Palestinian scarf: Understand it or don’t bother
wearing it” and “I refuse to let the kufiyya become a high fashion statement” have sprung up
to contain the narrative, to control the political message but the reality is that items of
activism, once out in the public, gain their own life.
Concluding thoughts
At the Oromo Studies Association conference in Oslo in early 2017, I was fortunate to
have some rich and unforgettable conversations with the Oromo people who attended. Some
were students in The Hague, and many were professionals who spoke about their grassroots
activism in Ethiopia and a few even had scars from their past days of torture. A few shared
stories of being followed by government officials when they visited their families back home.
Some of these people told me that they were on the Ethiopian ‘terrorist list’ for just
expressing a negative comment or even liking a post that was anti-state.
I met Jawar Mohammed, a young and dynamic man with a vision for this movement.
He was a complete tech enthusiast in spite of Facebook blocking his profile. We clicked a
selfie together. The audience joked that I will not be able to visit Ethiopia as Jawar
Mohammed was officially labelled a terrorist and I by default was now part of his network. I
was swept by the passion of Professor Ezekiel Gebissa, the past president of the association
who reaffirmed the role the OSA diaspora had in this long standing movement. My talk was
Facetimed live, drawing an online audience of about 40,000 people with about 400 comments
within an hour. This kind of digital activism, participation and emotive drive within an
academic setting was an unprecedented experience for me.
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It makes you question about deviance and the norm. The state is a powerful force,
which can relegate even the majority as marginal. This is not necessarily new. Historically,
laws have been constructed to legitimize those in power and criminalize dissent. The media
apparatus has long served as a propaganda tool to reinforce nationhood. The myth that social
media is hard to control has been dissipated with the current pervasive and intrusive
datafication of our everyday lives. Yet, when social activists of the Oromo movement take to
the digital life to fight for their cause, they do so despite the hyper-surveillance. This is less a
testament to the medium and more to the human collective spirit that drives people to sustain
their struggle generation after generation.
The social actors that shape this movement morphs over time. For instance, Chinese
media, Indian telecom companies and multinational tech giants like Facebook are new
interventions of complicity that can be targeted by the diasporas in their respective home turfs
as well as on the global stage as hashtag politics enable the globalization of causes.
Building nationhood –their homeland Oromia, is as much a feat of the imagination as
it is of territorial right. We need to recognize that culture moves and reproduces differently
over time but also across diverse contexts, a dialectic of the physical and the digital. The
Oromo movement confronts opportunities to reinvent itself with each new platform,
especially as the physical spaces of protest become more restricted and impractical with the
global spread of the Oromo diaspora.
The strategy of ethnic essentialism and revival of traditional and at times misogynistic
practice to underline ‘authenticity’ can be costly, as it can systematically exclude vast
sections of the Oromo people. In these acts of reproduction, we are at the crossroads of moral
dilemmas of re-creating a homogeneous group identity for unity to speak on a global stage
versus the reality of complex and multiple interpretations of what it means to be an Oromo in
today’s global and digital age.
15
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