Gelemso


Gelemso is a town in eastern Ethiopia, in the western periphery of the highly networked mountain chain referred to by the natives as Fugug but by geographers as the Ahmar Mountains. The administrative center of Habro woreda in the Mirab Hararghe Zone of the Oromia Regional State, it has a latitude and longitude of.
Gelemso is the origin of a variety of khat called by the same name. It is also a scene of an Amharic novel known as Akel Dama, written by Theodros Mulatu in 1991.

Etymology

Oral history says the name Gelemso came from the Oromo phrase Galma Usso, meaning the Hall of Usso or House of Usso, a mosque named for a man who came to preach Islam to the Ittu Oromos in the 13th century, called by his followers Aw Seid, and by the Oromos with his given name Usso after he was made ilma gossa or the adopted son of the Warra Qallu clan of the Ittu Oromo. As galma usually refers to the worship house under the traditional religion of the Oromos, we may wonder why the mosque was called so. The Oromo elders explain the case as follows.
The Ittu Oromo who are usually mentioned as the native Oromo group of the Chercher highlands, says AW Seid was the first person to start an Islamization campaign in their land. His real name was Seid Ali and according to the oral history of the Ittu Oromo], he was a Sharif It was in latter periods that his followers who believed in his sainthood added a prefix Aw to his name, in the manner of the Harari and the Somali who call their saints and national heroes so.. Since then, Seid Ali has been called Aw Seid.
Local history tellers say that in order to achieve his target, Aw Seid had to seek a means that enables him live in the land of the Oromos with full citizenship rights, which could be accessed under the tradition of the Oromo people at that time. Accordingly, he became ilma gosa or the adopted son of the Warra Qallu sub-group within the Ittu Oromo division of the Eastern Oromo, and on his adoption ceremony, the Oromos named him Usso.
When Aw Seid built his mosque in the southern part of the current site of Gelemso town, the Oromo started to call it galma Usso. Here, as elders say, galma stands to notify the spiritual significance of the newly built structure, and Usso denotes the owner of the house. The name Galma Usso was introduced in this way, and in the long period of time, it evolved to Gelemso.
This story is in not documented, while the Islamization effort of Aw Seid has been discussed by different scholars. However, as the name Gelemso can never be found at any other place in the Oromo lands, and as it has no exact meaning in Oromo or any other language, it might be sound to conclude the ancient Galma Usso gave rise to the current Gelemso, the name of the town.

Basic statistics

Based on figures from the Central Statistical Agency, the result of the third Ethiopian census shows that Gelemso has total population of 16,484, of which 9,003 are male and 7,481 are female.. However, this report is unacceptable to many people and organizations, including authorities in the departments of the woreda and zonal administrations. People who refuse the report demonstrate their argument simply by the sex ratio of the population . which can not express the reality of the town. On the other hand, many inconsistencies of the report may induce one to reject its conclusion
For example, the report says that the town of Mieso has a population of 13,339, exceeded by Gelemso only with 3000 souls. On the other hand, Hirna town, which is twice as large as Mieso has only 11,650, something very difficult to believe.
Free viewers say that the census has defects, and the Ethiopian government admitted that. But the quest for the true figure of the population of Gelemso and many other factors remained unanswered.
With regard to the religious affiliations, it is witnessed by many that most of the residents of the town are Muslims. And Orthodox Christianity is the second significant religious domination.
Oromo is the native and the dominant ethnic group in Gelemso and the surrounding areas. Amhara is the second largest ethnicity with persons from different Gurage subgroups at the third level. And a few others are persons of Somali, Argoba and Harari ethnicities..

Language

The Oromo tongue, called by the natives Afan Oromo, is a principal language in the town. Amharic is also widely spoken in the town. From among the languages of international significance, in Gelemso town, it is Arabic that has due benefits for communication purposes. It is said that some 40 years ago, Arabic was the language of commerce in the town, a custom survived to this date.

Customs

Here are some important notes on social and commercial customary features of the town.
Locations of interest around Gelemso include the followings.

Natural wonders

a chronicle of the brilliant campaigns of Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi whom the Ethiopian writers call Ahmad Gragn, which was written by the eyewitness of the conquests in the 16th century. This village is found about 30 km away from Gelemso near to a small town called Hardim.
The village is about 60 km to the south of Gelemso. In the 1980s, the Dergue government had established a strong military base there in order to watch the nearby movements of OLF.
which is a commonly known name in Oromo nomenclature. However, among many places of the Chercher highlands called by the name Qunburah, the Oromo elders do not consider any one as a long standing. But this does not mean there was no place who had this name in ancient times. In fact, one of the places called Qunburah in Chercher highlands is believed to be the offshoot of the ancient Qunburah of Al Futhul Habash. Therefore, a search for that place should continu.
Today, as Professor Urlich Braukamper had described precisely in his book, the remnants of the stone built necropolis, store pits, houses and mosques of the ancient Harala people are observable in all of the Hararghe highlands. Their mysterious legends reach as far as Karayu in the west and Jijjiga in the east.

Places of cultural importance

Gelemso has been associated with many imminent figures. Its notable personalities include the following:
The city produced many doctors, engineers, teachers, lawyers, nurses, pharmacists, and many other professions.

Notable administrators

Early history

It is difficult to trace when the history of the town starts. And it is so troublesome to single out the early history of the town from the history of the whole of the Hararghe highlands. But for accuracy purposes, and to construct a relevant historical order, it is better to discuss those tales that directly focus to the town itself. Accordingly, some data obtained from oral history and written sources, which might describe the antique nature of the town, are not presented here. These include specially the one that related to the ancient Harala people, whom we know only through their legends and few descriptions in the works of some scholars.
All of our sources dignify the importance of a man mentioned above as Aw Seid in the birth of the town. It is said that Aw Seid was appointed by Sheikh Abadir, the then chief Islamic scholar in Harar, to preach Islam to the Oromos around Gelemso in the second half of the 13th century. Hence, as the sources say, Aw Seid came with his family and settled at Gelemso. He built the first mosque of the town, but he had little success in converting the local Oromos to Islam. Latter, he disagreed with the Ittu Oromo and returned to Harar, where he died and buried according to legends.
However, some of the most notable scholars who studied the case deeply, such as Ulrich Bräukamper, suggest that the Islamization effort of Aw Seid could be a phenomenon of latter ages, an argument that has a good ground, as far we consider the starting period of the mutual interdependence between the Muslims of the southeast and their Oromo neighbors. But one thing that deserves attention here is the recurrent appearance of a name Aw Seid or Seid Ali in the long list of Harari saints, from which we may infer the saint called so was not a mere a legendary man only.. For all, detail investigations would clarify the real story.
The current site of Gelemso town lays, according to proposed suggestions, within the boundary of the ancient Sultanate of Dawaro,. whom in the 14th century, the Syrian writer Abu Fadlulah Al Umari and, in the 15th century, the Egyptian Al Makrizi had mentioned as one of the Seven Islamic Principalities of the Southern and Eastern Ethiopia that constituted the Zeyla Federation.
In the oral history collected from the elderly people, the ancient Dawaro is said to be synonymous to the late Daro district which was merged with the adjacent district of Lebu to form the current Darolebu woreda during the Haile Selasie period. However, it is unclear as to what Gelemso appeared to be when the ancient Sultanate of Dawaro was flourishing. But again, we may argue that the oral history concerning the Islamization effort of Aw Seid, in which Gelemso is identified as the scene of action, may have solid truths which can be inferred from the chronological concurrence of the mission of Aw Seid and the flourishing era of the Sultanate of Dawaro.
And again, it is said that Gelemso assumed a wider fame with the foundation of Oda Bultum as a cultural and administrative center of the Eastern Barento
Oromos . Here, as many books have recorded, it was also Aw Seid who played a key role in the derivation of the Oromo Constitutional Law at Oda Bultum.
Prior to the 1991 governmental change, people who live closer to the Oda Bultum often called the Oda itself as Aw Seid. . And many rituals exercised when the Ya'ii of the Chaffe Gada were undertaken at Oda Bultum in recent years were called in the name of Aw -Seid. In this case, the role of the saint called Aw-Seid at the establishment of Oda Bultum can be accepted without any doubt.
However, it is not clear again how Gelemso was elevated to a place of high social status with the establishment of Oda Bultum, pertaining that the place called so is 25 km away from the town. Some people say Gelemso was an administrative capital and the seat of the Mana Bokkuu of the Eastern Oromo, with Oda Bultum serving as the place where Caffee Gadaa assembled only once in eight years. And others say that it was a place where the Oda Bultum itself was located prior to its move to the current place.
Latter on, oral history says, Gelemso evolved to an important village of commerce when one of its counties called Qabri Lukku was organized as a market center to accommodate traders who were coming from different regions. It is said that at that place, a local chief called Lukkuu had mastered over the caravan traders who used to sell the goods they brought from remote areas. Few elders, however, dispute this story and say rather Lukku was a man who in ancient times, left the traditional Oromo religion and accepted Islam so that when he was diseased, the Ittu Oromo sanctioned his dead body not to be buried with the mass, a reason why we see his grave on isolated ground.
To conclude, when we consider oral histories which assert the town had Karra Torba in ancient times, non existent in the case of other towns of West Harerghe save Gelemso, when we consider its presence closer to places of significant traditions like Halayya Buchuro and Laga Bera, when we analyze its tie to Oda Bultum and the presence of the shrines of Aw-Seid both at Gelemso and Oda Bultum, we can deduce that Gelemso must had been a place of higher social and spiritual importance in the tradition of the Oromo people since ancient times. And to the least, we can say it existed on the line of history long before the appearance of many of the current towns of the Hararghe region.

After the conquests of Menelik II

In 1887, while campaigning to occupy the city state of Harar and the whole of Eastern Ethiopia, which he accomplished after his victory at the Battle of Chelenqo, Emperor Menelik II had arrived at the bottom of the current Gelemso town. The Ethiopian writer Tekletsadik Mekuria tells that Menelik arrived at Gelemso on December 18, 1886.
Menelik was attracted by the landscape around Gelemso and ordered a garrison to be founded there, which his warlords had executed immediately. The garrison was established at the western part of the current town, and had been called Gorgo. That was a second turn in the long history of Gelemso, by which it had leaped from a small village of cultural importance to a truly urbanized community. However, elderly people assert that the formation of the garrison had also some bad objectives behind. It is said that Menelik II had an aim of erasing the centrality and symbolism of early places like Gelemso from the mind and the heart of his Oromo subjects.
Truly speaking, it was Emperor Menelik II who officially closed down all of the traditional Oromo institutions like Chaffe assembly and prohibited many other cultural feasts, a fact that Ethiopian writers of the early 20th century like Aleqa Tayye had recorded. But the true urban feature of the town dates from Menelik's period. This will be agreeable when we know that in 1908, Gelemso was one of the few centers that the imperial government formally recognized as true towns.

During the Italian occupation

Gelemso stayed under a period of dwarfism and stagnancy in the reign of Ras Teferi Mekonnen who had special sympathy for another town established in the Chercher highlands and named for his honor Asebe Teferi. Bahru Zewde narrates that in 1933, immediately after his ascension to the throne, Emperor Haile Selesie made Chercher Awraja the model of his future administration system.
However, when Italy conquered Ethiopia and formed the Italian East Africa in 1935, Gelemso began to expand in every direction. During their five years administration, the Italians returned the seat of the Chercher province to Gelemso and made valuable change on its urban customs. They established new settlements in the northern and eastern parts of the town, starting from a hill called now Kambo.
The Italian occupiers also constructed the first graveled road of the town, and connected it with Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa through all weather roads which run in the west to Awash, and in the east to Dire Dawa through Wachu and Bedessa.. The first modern buildings of the town were also attributed to the Italians, the most eloquent of them being St. Michael Catholic Church mentioned above.
Scholars tell us that the Italians had focused on Gelemso because of its presence in the vicinity of Wachu , a place where they intended to build Secondo Roma , a future city to be evolved from the agrarian community that would be brought from southern Italy under the resettlement program.
On the other hand, one of the most important features of Gelemso town, the Sheikh Omar mosque, was built in that period while Sheikh Omar was Qadi of the Chercher province.

After the Italian occupation

In 1951, the Christian missionary group of American Adventist Church constructed the first school of the town at a place called Lode. Although the group closed its missionary activities in the 1960s, the school they built has continued to function to this day, and the elderly people still call it Amerikaanii.
Gelemso was made a municipal town in 1952. And in the year 1958, while it remained still under the Chercher awraja administration, it was designated an electoral district and had got 2 seats in the imperial parliamentary assembly of the Haile Seliasie regime, which was won in that very year by Haji Abdullahi Sheikh Ahmed and Mukhtar Mohammed. However, the governmental projects were rarely planned and executed in the town then. But when it became the capital of Habro Awraja up on the splitting up of the former Chercher Awraja to Habro and Chercher-Adal-Gara Guracha Awrajas in the year 1968 and afterwards, some improvements were made. For example, the town was equipped with electric light service for 6 hours a night, and its tap water supply system was expanded.
However, it was the efforts of Arabian, European and Asian traders that greatly helped Gelemso continue its long standing role as market center and social panorama. The list of those foreign traders includes Nasir Sana'ani, Abdallah Ubadi, Ali Ahmed, Ali Sa'ad, Salah Muhsin who were all Yemenis, the Greeks Kostar Gragor and his brother Stafrol, the Italians Antonio Viccini and Francesco Berto, the Sudanese Haji Abdullah and Sheikh Bashir Babikir, and the Indian Usma'il Hindii.
Latter on, natives of the town like Mohammad Abdo , Ahmed Yusuf, Mohammed Beker, Muteki Sheikh Mohammed and his brother Ahmad Taqi, Haji Ahmed Nure, Haji Sani Abdulqadir, Ahmed Alhadi, Usmail Ahmayyu, Nejash Usmail, Belew Haile, Mekonnen Metaferia, Jemaneh Yimamu, Tiruneh Gebremichael, Omar Ghazali and his brother Mumme Ghazali etc....and well known Ethiopian entrepreneurs like Mohammed Abdullahi Ogsade also entered to the business and they altogether marked the town's classic commercial era. That was why the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia moved against its working rule of the time and opened a branch at Gelemso.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, General Taddese Birru, a well known Oromo nationalist and co-founder of Mecha-Tulama Self Help Association, had been in the town for his supposed ግዞት . Fortunately, the incident favored Tadesse to meet other early Oromo nationalists like Elemo Kiltu, Ahmad Taqi and Mohammed Zakir Meyra, with whom he could demonstrate his devotion for Oromo freedom, an act that became one of the main reasons for which Gelemso is heard so loudly.

From the 1974 revolution to 1992

When the Dergue came to power in 1974, more attention was given to Gelemso. Viewers and most of the residents say that the Dergue era was a prosperous time in the town's history where many governmental buildings were erected, and subsequent improvements were made in the town. This includes the health centre, two primary schools, the current Gelemso High School, the multipurpose city assembly hall, the public slaughter house, a stadium, youth recreation center, farmers training center and most notably, the Gelemso-Mechara high way. On the other hand, NGOs like CARE international highly participated in the development activities of the Habro Awraja starting from the late 1980s.
The 1984 Harerghe Province All Games Championship it hosted was the major sport festival in history of the town where all of the 13 awrajas in Hararghe participated in the contest. Gelemso was also the first town of Eastern Ethiopia where the Development Bank of Ethiopia had opened its branch. One of the main urban zones of the town, called in its Amharic name Addis Ketema, totally emerged during the Dergue time as well. It is worth having also to mention the former President Mengistu Haile-Mariam had visited Gelemso and its surrounding villages in 1985 which makes Mengistu the only Ethiopian ruler that came across the town for official visit while in office.
However, the prosperous situation prevailing during the Dergue time must never be considered as an expression of sympathetic view of the Dergue towards Gelemso. The motives behind the Dergue's considerable attention, as many people believe, were the economic importance of the Habro Awraja for whom Gelemso was a capital, and to an equal importance, Gelemso's central location in the Chercher highlands, a region highly known for Oromo rebellion.
Indeed, the Dergue era was also a period where brutal campaigns like the Red Terror were undertaken in Gelemso and elsewhere in the country. For instance, the residents of Gelemso still have fresh memories of the Kara Qurqura Massacre where 70 people were taken away from town, executed, and then bulldozed to one grave in April 1970 at a place called Karra Qurqura. bulldozed and buried in one grave yard in the place called 'Biyo' few km from town of Michata. It is still remembered locally as 'Qabri sodoma' in local Oromo language.
On May 30, 1991, the town came under the control of the Oromo Liberation Front and was made the administrative center of the OLF-held areas in the former provinces of West Hararghe, Arsi and Bale. The most memorable event of that time was the Oda Bultum festival, where about 800,000 Oromos came together at Gelemso and Oda Bultum to celebrate the resurrection of the ancient Chaffe Gadaa assembly tradition.
On June 21, 1992, when OLF quitted the transitional government, Gelemso was passed to the current Ethiopian government led by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front along with the other towns of the West Harerghe Zone.