Asafa Jalata: They Tried to Erase His Scholarship. Instead, They Enshrined It

Excerpt

The attempt to erase Professor Asafa Jalata’s scholarship has achieved the opposite. By attacking decades of rigorous research on Oromummaa, Amhara extremist elites have elevated Asafa Jalata into a historical league of scholars once vilified for naming injustice. Suppression has not weakened the Oromo claim; it has validated it. When scholarship is silenced rather than debated, it is not the scholar who is exposed—but the fear of those who cannot tolerate truth.

#Amhara Elites, #Amhara Extremists, #Asafa Jalata, #Ethiopian Empire, #Oromia, #Oromo Hatred, #Oromo Scholarship, #Oromummaa, #The University of Tennessee, #Yonas Biru

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Introduction

There are moments when an act of suppression backfires so completely that it exposes not the weakness of the target, but the insecurity of the aggressor. The recent campaign by Amhara extremist elites against Professor Asafa Jalata is one such moment. Intended as an act of erasure, it has instead elevated Asafa Jalata’s scholarship into a historical lineage reserved for thinkers whose ideas were too clarifying to be tolerated by dominant power structures.

Asafa Jalata, a University of Tennessee professor of Sociology and African Studies, has authored over ten books and 70 peer-reviewed articles on Oromo identity and Ethiopian oppression, drawing from decades of research to advocate for Oromo self-determination without endorsing violence. The controversy over the recent years highlights tensions in "Ethiopian academia", where critiques of historical injustices are reframed as incitement, underscoring broader struggles for Oromo recognition amid Ethiopia's multi-national dynamics and recent political unrest.

For nearly half a century, Asafa Jalata has dedicated his intellectual life to studying, articulating, and documenting being Oromo—Oromummaa—the Oromo people’s identity, history, political consciousness, and struggle for dignity. His work did not emerge overnight, nor was it crafted for momentary political convenience. It is the product of decades of rigorous academic inquiry, grounded in sociology, political economy, historical analysis, and lived Oromo experience. To attack Asafa Jalata is therefore not merely to dispute an argument; it is to assault an entire body of accumulated knowledge.

Unable—or unwilling—to engage Asafa Jalata’s scholarship on its merits, his detractors have resorted to a familiar tactic: reframing scholarship as propaganda and advocacy as incitement [1]. In a breathtaking inversion of logic, they accuse Asafa Jalata of causing violence simply by studying oppression, as if describing injustice were equivalent to committing it. This move is not scholarship; it is epistemic warfare.

And history tells us exactly what happens next.

The League Table They Never Meant to Create

They intended erasure. What they achieved instead was canonization.

By targeting Asafa Jalata, Amhara extremist elites, spearheaded by Yonas Biru—one extremist who is demented and blinded by Oromo hatred—have unintentionally placed him in a historical company reserved for scholars whose work threatened entrenched power simply by telling the truth.

Here is that league table, they just created:

1. Frantz Fanon [2]
Accused of inspiring violence simply by naming colonial brutality. His psychological analysis of oppression was treated as a threat to public order.
Parallel: Explaining domination becomes “causing” resistance.

2. W.E.B. Du Bois [3]
Hounded, surveilled, and delegitimized for documenting racial injustice. His scholarship was branded subversive rather than debated.
Parallel: Truth-telling reframed as ideological danger.

3. Edward Said [4]
Accused of inciting terrorism because he articulated Palestinian identity and colonial erasure.
Parallel: Identity itself treated as provocation.

4. Hannah Arendt [5]
Vilified not for factual error, but for refusing comforting myths after exposing the banality of evil.
Parallel: Intellectual honesty punished for destabilizing moral convenience.

They did not diminish him.
They promoted him.

Suppression as Confession

The attempt to remove Asafa Jalata’s work from an academic repository does not weaken Oromummaa; it confirms its force. Oromo identity has survived far more brutal campaigns of erasure than administrative withdrawals and malicious letters. What is being punished here is not extremism, but clarity. Not violence, but explanation. Not propaganda, but the refusal to participate in historical amnesia.

History is littered with such attempts. When Frantz Fanon analyzed the psychological violence of colonialism, he was accused of inspiring rebellion. When W.E.B. Du Bois documented racial injustice in America, he was branded subversive. When Edward Said articulated Palestinian identity, he was accused of incitement rather than engagement. When Hannah Arendt exposed the banality of evil, she was vilified for refusing comforting myths.

In each case, the pattern was identical: the scholar was not wrong—he or she was dangerous to a dominant narrative.

So it is here.

The campaign against Asafa Jalata is therefore not a sign of strength; it is a confession of fear.

It signals a political imagination so fragile that it cannot tolerate analysis, so brittle that it must criminalize explanation, and so exhausted that it mistakes suppression for victory. When ideas must be silenced rather than debated, it is not the ideas that are weak.

The Futile Attempt of Amhara Extremist Elites

Removing Professor Asafa Jalata’s articles from the University of Tennessee’s website does not dent Oromummaa in the slightest. If anything, it injects new energy into a consciousness that has survived far more brutal attempts at erasure than administrative takedowns and bad-faith accusations.

This pattern is familiar: You try to erase Oromo identity; You try to redraw maps that erase Oromia; You try to delegitimize Oromo political existence [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21].

And now, in a final act of desperation, you attempt to suppress knowledge itself—scraping university websites as if digital deletion could undo lived history, collective memory, or political awakening.

How desperate must a project be when it fears scholarship?

Every such attempt confirms one truth: Oromummaa does not require permission to exist, and it does not disappear when its interpreters are attacked. It adapts, deepens, and returns sharper.

Demand, Not Delusion

The Oromo people demand what is rightly theirs: self-definition, dignity, historical recognition, and the freedom to exist without apology. Asafa Jalata’s scholarship does not invent this demand; it confirms it through decades of analytical research. His work documents continuity where others insist on rupture, coherence where others impose fragmentation, and legitimacy where others demand submission.

By contrast, Amhara extremist elites fight relentlessly for what is not theirs—the right to define others, to erase identities, to redraw maps, and to monopolize the moral language of the state under the hollow banner of Ethiopianism. Worse still, they advocate identity erasure while presenting themselves as guardians of unity, as if cohesion can be built on negation and peace sustained through denial. History offers no example where such a project ended well.

A Word to the University of Tennessee

Universities are custodians of inquiry, not instruments of political comfort. Professor Asafa Jalata did not diminish the University of Tennessee; he added to it by extending its intellectual reach into the study of identity, oppression, resistance, and human dignity. Complying—whether knowingly or inadvertently—with pressure rooted in extremist politics sends the wrong signal about your institution.

There is still time to choose wisely. Reversing this decision would not signal weakness; it would affirm academic courage.

Do note that the Oromo people—60 to 70 million strong within the Ethiopian empire—have long regarded the University of Tennessee as a respected center of learning where their identity, history, and struggle could be examined with academic integrity and intellectual courage. For many Oromos, your institution became a rare space where their existence was studied rather than denied, analyzed rather than erased.

Those who lobbied your university to take down Professor Asafa Jalata’s articles did so not out of scholarly concern, but with a political objective your institution should instinctively resist: the erasure of Oromo identity through the silencing of its interpreters. By yielding to such pressure—even inadvertently—the university risks lending its credibility to a long-standing project of denial that Oromos have endured for generations. Academic institutions do not merely host knowledge; they signal what kinds of knowledge are legitimate. In this context, silence is not neutral. It is read, quite rightly, as alignment.

Further to this section, the Appendix contains an open letter addressed to the President of the University of Tennessee, outlining the broader ethical and academic implications of this decision.

Conclusion

Scholarship that survives censorship does not disappear—it ascends. Ideas attacked for existing rarely fade; they harden into reference points.

When a scholar is accused of causing violence simply for studying an oppressed people, it is not scholarship on trial — it is the right of the oppressed to be understood.

By trying to erase Asafa Jalata's scholarship, his detractors have done what history shows they always do: they have elevated him into the company of thinkers whose work outlived the ideologies that tried to bury it.

They sought erasure.
They delivered enshrinement.

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Appendix

An Open Letter to the President of the University of Tennessee

Dear President,

We write to you not merely as observers of recent events, but as individuals speaking from within a community whose identity, history, and lived reality have long been subject to systematic denial. The Oromo people—numbering between 60 and 70 million—have followed with deep concern the removal of Professor Asafa Jalata’s scholarly work from your institution’s repository.

For decades, Professor Asafa Jalata’s research on being Oromo—Oromummaa, a concept as expressive, legitimate, and foundational as "being American"—has provided a rigorous scholarly articulation of Oromo identity, history, and political consciousness.

Just as “being American” encompasses shared history, civic experience, cultural memory, and political imagination, Oromummaa captures the collective self-understanding of a people whose identity was actively denied and whose culture and language were subjected to systematic erasure. This body of work emerges from scholarly advocacy on behalf of a nation under epistemic assault, where explaining existence itself became an act of resistance.

His scholarship did not call for violence, nor did it breach academic standards or norms of inquiry. It did something far more unsettling to certain political interests: it explained, documented, and legitimized the existence of an oppressed people in their own terms—precisely the function academic freedom exists to protect.

Those who pressured your institution to remove his work did so under the guise of ethics and public safety, while advancing a deeply political project aimed at delegitimizing Oromo self-understanding. This is not a neutral request. It is part of a broader and well-documented effort to erase Oromo identity by attacking its intellectual foundations. When a university complies with such pressure, even unintentionally, it risks becoming an instrument in that erasure.

For many Oromos across the world, the University of Tennessee came to symbolize something rare and valuable: a space where their story could be studied without distortion, where their identity could be examined without criminalization, and where scholarship could stand apart from political intimidation. The recent takedown has therefore been read not simply as an administrative decision, but as a troubling signal about whose knowledge is considered permissible.

Universities are not judged only by what they teach, but by what they are willing to defend. Academic freedom is not tested when scholarship is comfortable; it is tested when scholarship is inconvenient. Professor Jalata’s work added intellectual value, global relevance, and moral depth to your institution. It did not diminish it.

There remains an opportunity to correct course. Reinstating his work would not be an admission of error, but an affirmation of the university’s commitment to scholarly independence and ethical courage. It would also send a clear message to millions of Oromos that their identity is not a liability to be hidden, but a subject worthy of serious academic engagement.

History remembers institutions not for avoiding controversy, but for how they acted when principles were challenged. We urge you to place the University of Tennessee on the right side of that history.

Respectfully,

Members of the Editorial & Management Board, OROMIA TODAY, December 23, 2025.

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References

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2. Frantz Fanon - Wikipedia
3. W. E. B. Du Bois - Wikipedia
4. Edward Said - Wikipedia
5. Hannah Arendt - Wikipedia
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8. Asafa Jalata, The Ethiopian State: Authoritarianism, Violence and Clandestine Genocide, March 2010, vol.3, no.6, The Journal of Pan African Studies.
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15. Elemoo Qilxuu, When Falsehoods Wear Fancy Fonts: The Absurdity of Manufactured Maps, 17 April 2025, OROMIA TODAY.
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17. Elemoo Qilxuu, The Futility of Denial: How Historical Revisionism Undermines Inter-Ethnic Cohesion in Ethiopia, 17 February 2025, OROMIA TODAY.
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21. Elemoo Qilxuu,  ETHIOPIA'S 6 BIG LIES FUELING ITS IMPENDING COLLAPSE, 13 March 2024, OROMIA TODAY.

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