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Paper short abstract:

The 'politics of identity' are not a recent phenomenon but have been historically articulated through 'modern' schooling that has created a difference of political interest out of diversity with unstable and competing claims for varying types of minority and majority status.

Paper long abstract:

The 'politics of identity' have become increasingly explicit in Ethiopia in the past two and half decades. Some have argued that this is a totally new phenomenon prompted by the advent of federalism in the mid-1990s based on ethno-linguistic difference. This paper will contest the recency of this development and consider its origin in the changing manifestations of modern citizen subjectivities and their relationship to national belonging as an effect of power of successive regimes produced through state schooling.

Oromo people in Ethiopia were defined as a political minority subordinated to the state, despite their numerical majority, by Hamdesa Tuso in 1982. He explained this as an effect in part of imperial and subsequently, socialist government schooling that discriminated against Oromo peoples and subjectivities. It is contended that the experience of alienation from schooling and the struggles to oppose this have left a legacy of contesting identification.

Oromo school experience will be explored to consider how it named and positioned Oromo, their language and culture as antithetical to modern, urban, and educated subjectivities. Schooling has been deployed in a manner that has reified certain cultural capital and over time, articulated socio-cultural diversity as a difference of political interest.

Consideration will be given to how the status of being Oromo - as both a political minority and a numerical majority - and more discursively Indigenous - has been exploited to drive the momentum and justification for contemporary change to bring Oromo in closer proximity to the state and normative belonging in the nation.