Gadaa on Trial: How Yonas Biru Turns Selective Ethnography into Political Prosecution

Excerpt

Yonas Biru’s “Gadaa is part apartheid” is not scholarship but a political prosecution dressed in citations. It announces a verdict (“Oromummaa is a lie”), then cherry-picks evidence to delegitimize Oromo identity claims, smear Oromo scholarship as extremism, and insinuate guilt-by-association with violence. The apartheid analogy is a sensational moral grenade, not a serious comparison. UNESCO’s recognition of Gadaa underscores its governance value, not Yonas Biru caricature.

#Amhara Elites, #Amhara Extremists, #Anti-Oromo Scholarship, #Asafa Jalata, #Borkena, #Ethiopian Empire, #Gadaa @ UNESCO, #Gadaa Democracy, #Misuse of Oromummaa, #Oromophobia, #Oromummaa, #Yonas Biru

A Political Prosecution Disguised as Scholarship

Yonas Biru’s article [1] is not an honest inquiry into Gadaa, Oromummaa, or Oromo political thought. It is a courtroom brief written for a political audience: a charge sheet dressed in citations, built to delegitimize Oromo identity claims, criminalize scholarly advocacy, and make “Oromo” itself perpetually suspect.

The trick is simple: he pretends to be “balanced” (“I critique extremist political Oromummaa, not Oromo identity”) while constructing a rhetorical pipeline in which Oromo scholarship is reframed as extremism, Oromo collective memory is reframed as indoctrination, Oromo resistance is reframed as a “nuclear option,” and Oromo cultural heritage is treated as propaganda unless it flatters Ethiopia’s imperial storyline. That is not critique. That is political prosecution.

1) Start With a Verdict, Then Shop for Evidence

From the title—“Oromummaa is a Lie”—the verdict Yonas Biru announces before the evidence is weighed. This is not how scholarship works. Scholarship begins with questions, tests claims, weighs counter-evidence, acknowledges ambiguity, and treats complexity as a feature, not an inconvenience. Yonas Biru begins with condemnation, then raids sources to decorate it.

Notice the choreography: he declares “extremist ethno-nationalist intellectuals” have “co-opted” Oromo heritage, then insists he has “inoculated” his article by citing only a curated list of names. That “inoculation” is itself the method of prosecution: the defendant list is preselected, and everything that follows is engineered to secure conviction.

2) UNESCO Recognition: He Ignores What Matters and Exploits What Doesn’t

Gadaa is globally studied, for instance [2,3,4], and, crucially, inscribed by UNESCO as an element of Intangible Cultural Heritage [5]. That inscription does not claim Gadaa was a modern liberal democracy, nor does it pretend every historical form of every society was morally spotless. What it does say is that Gadaa is a developed governance tradition that regulates political, economic, social, and religious life; that it includes mechanisms for conflict resolution and reparation; and that it functions as a moral-legal framework for community cohesion.

Yonas Biru does not engage that reality with seriousness. He tries to collapse a living governance heritage into a single prosecutorial frame: “part democratic, part apartheid.” He wants the world to hear “apartheid” and stop thinking. That is not analysis; it is sabotage of meaning.

3) The Apartheid Comparison Is Not Bold; It Is Careless and Politically Loaded

“Apartheid” is not a casual adjective. It is a historically specific, modern, state-enforced, racialized system of law, bureaucracy, policing, and economic exclusion designed to permanently maintain white supremacy. It had statutes, pass laws, a modern surveillance state, racial classification, and a formal architecture of coercion backed by an industrial state.

Yonas Biru admits the systems are different—then tries to smuggle the emotional conclusion anyway: “an unavoidable parallel.” No. A parallel is not “unavoidable” because you can force it. You can find hierarchy in almost any historical society and then slap “apartheid” onto it, but doing so is not insight—it is sensational labeling.

If the claim were simply that historical Oromo expansions included coercion, domination, assimilation, and stratified status relations—as occurred across the region in multiple polities and eras—that would be an argument worth exploring with care and comparative honesty. But “apartheid” is chosen because it is a moral grenade: it detonates reputations, not ideas.

4) The Borana-Only Trap: He Narrows Gadaa to One Corridor, Then Calls It the Whole House

Yonas Biru repeatedly anchors his apartheid analogy to a specific historical expression (he centers the Borana case, then treats it as “the cradle and pinnacle” that defines everything). That is a classic prosecutorial move: pick the narrowest corridor where your accusation, allegedly, can be made to stick, declare that corridor “the essence,” and then rebrand the entire house by the corridor’s shadow.

Gadaa is not a single frozen institution. It is a broad, evolving governance complex, expressed differently with local culture across Oromo confederacies and across time, shaped by ecology, war, trade, neighboring polities, religious change, and as important modern state disruption. Collapsing that complexity into one alleged “gotcha” frame (noting without any concrete evidence) is not rigor; it is strategic reduction.

5) He Weaponizes Words: “Safuu,” “Nagaa,” and the Fraud of Absolute Claims

Yonas Biru asserts that Safuu and Nagaa were “segregated values” reserved for “pure Oromos.” That is a totalizing claim—an absolute claim—offered with the confidence of someone who expects the reader not to ask: how do you prove a moral concept was categorically unavailable to entire categories of people across centuries and regions?

In serious work, you would see careful boundaries: which communities, which period, which sources, which counterexamples, what internal contestation existed, how norms were enforced, and how norms changed.

Yonas Biru does not do careful. He does sweeping. Sweeping is the language of propaganda, not scholarship.

6) “Amnesia of Oromo Atrocities”: The One-Sided Morality Play

Yonas Biru accuses Oromo narratives of “whitewashing atrocities” while constructing his own moral asymmetry: Oromo political memory is depicted as myth-making, while Ethiopian imperial violence is treated as a bounded episode, a regrettable footnote, a “power consolidation campaign,” something we should acknowledge and then quickly move past.

That is the real ideological engine here: he wants Oromo history to be permanently indicted while Ethiopian imperial history is permanently normalized. He calls one side a cult-like faith and the other side “the nation.” That is not reconciliation; it is hierarchy of legitimacy.

7) The Demography Game: The “Fabrication” Accusation Without Intellectual Honesty

Yonas Biru attacks Asafa Jalata’s population claims by presenting his own estimates as if they settle the matter, then uses that to brand the broader Oromo grievance narrative as “utter fabrication.” Even if one scholar’s number is debated, that does not vaporize the lived reality of conquest, dispossession, coerced labor regimes, linguistic repression, and political exclusion documented across multiple archives, memoirs, and state practices.

This is another prosecutorial sleight of hand: challenge one figure, then declare the entire case fraudulent. It is the logic of a defense lawyer trying to get the jury to throw out the whole indictment because one witness stumbled on a date.

8) The “Shield Strategy” Claim Is Psychological Warfare

Yonas Biru claims Oromummaa “shields its lies” by “fusing culture, identity, and politics.” But identity, culture, and politics are fused in every nationalism and in every state narrative, including Ethiopia’s. The only difference is whose fusion is treated as “normal” and whose fusion is treated as “subversion.”

He also frames the defense against ethnocentric attacks as a “signature defense” of labeling critics “Oromophobic nafxanya.” That framing is designed to preemptively delegitimize Oromo critique: before the Oromo even speaks, the Oromo is accused of playing a card. Again: prosecution. Not inquiry.

9) The Most Dangerous Move: Conflating Scholarship With Militancy

The article’s gravest maneuver is not the apartheid label. It is the insinuation that scholarship and political thought are morally responsible for every act committed by armed actors, and that Oromo intellectual work itself is a pipeline to violence.

This is how political prosecutions are built: you do not merely disagree with a scholar; you attach their ideas to “terror,” then you present yourself as the sober guardian of order. Once that association is planted, academic freedom becomes the next casualty. Today the target is Asafa Jalata [6]. Tomorrow it will be anyone who articulates Oromo self-understanding in Oromo terms.

A serious writer would separate normative claims, empirical claims, and moral responsibility. Yonas Biru deliberately entangles them so that the reader feels licensed to punish ideas rather than debate them.

10) His “Reconciliation” Section Is Not Reconciliation—It Is Submission

He argues peace requires Ethiopians to reject Oromummaa and accept his “truth.” That is not reconciliation; that is ideological surrender. Reconciliation is not achieved by demanding the oppressed abandon their interpretive frameworks while the dominant narrative remains the default national scripture.

His Solomon parable is revealing: it portrays Oromo political actors as impostors who would rather “cut the baby” than share it. The story is not analysis; it is character assassination—moral theater that trains the reader to see Oromo demands as blackmail by design.

11) What a Real Critique Would Look Like (And Why This Isn’t It)

A real critique would do at least five things Yonas Biru refuses to do:

• Define Gadaa across time, and as important under colonial disruption, and not as a frozen caricature.
• Compare like with like: historical governance systems to historical governance systems, modern state apartheid to modern state apartheid.
• Distinguish description from condemnation, and evidence from insinuation.
• Apply the same moral standards to Ethiopian imperial expansion as he applies to Oromo expansion.
• Engage Oromo scholarship as scholarship—by argument—rather than as a defendant to be prosecuted.

Instead, he offers a politically convenient narrative: Oromo identity claims are “co-opted,” Oromo scholarship is “extremist,” Oromo historical memory is “myth,” and Oromo cultural heritage is “romanticized distortion.” The result is not enlightenment. It is delegitimation—designed to make the Oromo case sound intellectually disreputable before it is even heard.

Conclusion: History Will Not Be Fooled by Cleverness

This essay is not an argument against debate, disagreement, or critical inquiry. It is an argument against intellectual dishonesty disguised as rigor, and against the use of education as a shield for moral evasion.

Yonas Biru’s article seeks permission: permission for readers to dismiss Oromo scholarship without reading it, to treat Oromo identity articulation as a threat, to brand Oromo heritage with one of the ugliest labels in modern history and to confuse debate with policing.

At the core of the article, Yonas Biru's most revealing claim is also its most indefensible: “Oromummaa is a lie.”  What does that even mean?

Let us pause on that phrase, because it is not merely offensive; it is intellectually nonsensical. Saying an identity is a “lie” is equivalent to declaring “Amharinet is a lie” or “Americanism is a lie.” Does this make any sense?

Identities are not empirical propositions subject to verification or falsification. They are lived social realities formed through shared history, language, memory, and collective experience. To call an identity a lie is therefore not an argument—it is a category error. Such language does not arise from analysis; it can only be the language of those blinded by hatred. It reveals conceptual confusion so basic that it fails at the level of grammar, logic, and social theory alike.

This is the core political prosecution being advanced: take a legitimate cultural and national self-understanding, rebrand it as “extremism,” smear its scholars as conspirators, and then present the resulting caricature as proof that Oromo claims—historical, cultural, or political—deserve no hearing. It is not a search for truth. It is an attempt to disqualify the Oromo voice from the public square while wearing the costume of “balance.”

And then comes the rhetorical sleight of hand: he pretends to “protect” Oromo culture by splitting “cultural Oromummaa” from “political Oromummaa,” while using that split as a bludgeon to shame, expel, and silence Oromos who will not submit to his preferred narrative. That is not nuance; it is gatekeeping. It is not reconciliation; it is policing.

On Gadaa: the world does not recognize it because of Oromo propaganda; it recognizes it because it survives serious scrutiny. UNESCO’s inscription of Gadaa as Intangible Cultural Heritage was not a casual social-media “like.” It is the outcome of rigorous documentation, vetting, and review.

Disagree with interpretations of Gadaa, debate its historical evolution, critique specific practices—fine. But equating Gadaa to apartheid is not “half critique, half democracy.” It is a category error dressed up as scholarship, and it is designed to inflame.

Wait, and then there is Donald N. Levine—hardly an Oromo nationalist, nor a fringe romantic—who described Gadaa as “one of the most complex systems of social organization ever devised by human imagination” [13,14]. One is left to wonder: are the usual suspects now prepared to extend their familiar mud-throwing repertoire to Donald N. Levine as well?

Will Donald N. Levine too be recast as an ideologue, alongside Asmerom Legesse and Asafa Jalata—or does scholarly admiration become unacceptable only when it refuses to flatter imperial nostalgia? At some point, one suspects, the problem is no longer the evidence, but the discomfort it causes.

If we are serious about scholarship, we do not call a living governance tradition “apartheid” to win an argument by shock. We do not build ideological indictments and pretend they are neutral analysis. And we do not advance “reconciliation” by demanding that one people abandon the language through which they have narrated their own survival.

If an argument needs “apartheid” as a shortcut, it is usually because it cannot carry its conclusions on evidence alone.

A Conclusion That Refused to Be Compressed

As I began drafting a response to Yonas Biru’s controversial—and, it must be said, deeply offensive—article “Oromummaa is a Lie: Gadaa is Part Democratic and Part Apartheid,” [1] one thread led inexorably to another.

What initially appeared as an isolated provocation soon revealed itself as part of a much wider and disturbingly consistent pattern. I found myself confronting an entire ocean of polemical writings in the same vein—articles marked by predictable accusations, recycled tropes, and an unmistakable animus toward Oromo identity and political self-articulation.

Individually, many of these pieces scarcely merited detailed analysis; their arguments are repetitive, their logic circular, and their conclusions foregone. Yet collectively, they could not be ignored. Their cumulative effect demanded engagement. Key claims had to be identified, confronted, and debunked—if only to prevent their unchallenged repetition from masquerading as truth.

That process, however, inevitably expanded the scope of the response. What began as a rebuttal to a single article grew into a lengthy critique and an expansive conclusion that far exceeded what would normally be appropriate for addressing one author alone.

After careful reflection, my colleague Olii Boran and I agreed that forcing this voluminous material into the confines of a single article would dilute both clarity and impact. We therefore made a deliberate decision to relocate the extended rebuttal and its conclusion into a separate, self-contained piece—structured as an Open Letter addressed to “Amhara Elites and Those Who Consider Themselves Educated.”

This was not a rhetorical flourish, but a strategic choice. We believed that framing the response as an open letter would speak more directly to conscience, responsibility, and intellectual integrity, and would carry the message home with greater force than a conventional academic rebuttal.

Our intention is not to inflame, humiliate, or score polemical points. It is, rather, to intervene—firmly but constructively—in a discourse that has become increasingly poisoned by hatred, fear-driven denial, and intellectual dishonesty.

The Ethiopian polity is already strained by conflict, mistrust, and historical grievance. At such a moment, the deliberate distortion of history and the criminalization of a people’s identity by those who claim education and moral authority is not merely irresponsible; it is dangerous.

We therefore refer our readers to the separate article: ይድረስ ለአማራ ልሒቃን በሙሉ በያላችሁበት: በተለይም በኦሮም ጥላቻ ለተጠናወታችሁ ግለሰቦች [15], which serves not only as a comprehensive concluding extension of this discussion, but also as a plea in its own right. It is a call for a higher standard of discourse—one grounded in facts rather than fear, in scholarship rather than polemic, and in mutual recognition rather than negation.

Above all, it is an appeal to those with platforms and education to rise above inherited animosities and to recognize that no meaningful future can be built on the denial of another people’s dignity, history, or right to self-definition.

---

References

1. Yonas Biru, Oromummaa is a Lie: Gadaa is Part Democratic and Part Apartheid, 18 November 2025, Borkena Ethiopian News.
2. Asmarom Legesse, "Gada: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society", 1973, Free Press (originally Collier-Macmillan Ltd.).
3. Asmarom Legesse, "Oromo Democracy: An Indigenous African Political System", 2006, Red Sea Press.
4. Asafa Jalata, "Gadaa (Oromo Democracy): An Example of Classical African Civilization" (2012), Sociology Publications and Other Works.
5. Gada system, an indigenous democratic socio-political system of the Oromo—Inscribed in 2016 (Eleventh session of the Committee) on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.
6. OT Editorial, Asafa Jalata: They Tried to Erase His Scholarship. Instead, They Enshrined It, 23 December 2025, OROMIA TODAY.
7. Yonas Biru, The Oromummaa Politics is Weaponized with Lies and Soaked in Blood, 5 May 2023, BORKENA Ethiopian News.
8. Yonas Biru, Oromummaa’s Religion Cleansing and Cultural Evilgelization Project, 3 June 2023, BORKENA Ethiopian News.
9. Girma Berhanu, The New Frontier Of Antisemitism: Racial Discourse And Oromo Extremism In Ethiopia – Analysis, 29 June 2023, Eurasia Review.
10. Yonas Biru, The Death of Gadaa and Waaqeffanna, Murder or Natural Mortality?, 7 February 2024, The Habesha.
11. Yonas Biru, Asmarom Legesse’s Gadaa: Anthropological Whitewash or Political Hackwork?, 21 November 2025, The Habesha.
12. Yonas Biru, The Oromummaa Legacy: From Liberation Ideology to Transgenerational Trauma, 13 December 2025, The Habesha.
13. Gadaa, Wikipedia.
14. Donald N. Levine, Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society (1974, 2000 edition).
15. Kumaa Daadhii and Olii Boran, ይድረስ ለአማራ ልሒቃን በሙሉ በያላችሁበት: በተለይም በኦሮም ጥላቻ ለተጠናወታችሁ ግለሰቦች, 7 January 2026, OROMIA TODAY.

---