Oromo

The Oromo are a Cushitic people of the Ethiopian highlands, divided into the Borana and Barentu. Originally pastoralists, they ordered their society through the gadaa system, electing leaders for eight-year terms, and venerated the sky god of Waaqeffanna.

From about 1530, the collapse of Christian Ethiopia and the Adal Sultanate in war opened the way for Oromo expansion, recorded by the monk Bahrey in 1593. Raiding parties gave way to settled clans in Bale and Shewa, absorbing outsiders through adoption rituals; migrants founded kingdoms in the Gibe region, while the Ajuran Empire turned back their eastward push in the mid-seventeenth century.

Ethiopian emperors fought and courted them: Iyasu II took a Yejju Oromo wife, whose son Iyoas I inherited the throne. By the later eighteenth century Oromo was the everyday language of the Gondar court, until Mikael Sehul's coup of 1769 broke Yejju power and opened the Zemene Mesafint.