Bakri Sapalo

Sheikh Bakri Sapalo (born Abubakar Garad Usman; November 1895 - 5 April 1980) was an Oromo scholar, poet and religious teacher. He is best known as the inventor of a writing system for the Oromo language.

Life

Bakri Sapalo was the son of

He is believed to have invented his writing system for Oromo in 1956 at the village of Hagi Qome. Neither Hayward nor Hassan offer a reason why Sheikh Bakri returned to his home area to work on his system, "unless it was for the purpose of keeping the thing secret, for the authorities would certainly have been adamantly opposed to the idea of Oromo being written in any form, let alone in a script other than Ethiopic."[4] Although it was initially met with great enthusiasm and found a number of users in his province of Hararghe, the Ethiopian authorities predictably reacted with fear that he was "inciting the Oromo to too great an ethnic consciousness and thus endangering the national unity." Local officials moved quickly to suppress its use, and in 1965 Sheikh Bakri was placed under house arrest in Dire Dawa but allowed to continue his teaching. In 1968, he was given permission to visit Addelle two or three times a week. It was during these years that he wrote Shalda, a twenty-page pamphlet which purported to be a work of religious instruction, but was actually from beginning to end a caustically worded indictment of Amhara colonial oppression and an account of the suffering of the Oromo under the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie. Hayward and Hassan further note that "Shalda is of interest in that it is really both the first and the last major writing in Shaykh Bakri Sapalo's alphabet."^[5]

In 1978, after Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed and the

Hiraan. Sheikh Bakri had hoped he would be allowed to proceed further to Mogadishu where he could work and have his writings published, but he never received permission to leave the camp. Conditions there proved too much for a man in his eighties, and he died in the camp after a prolonged illness.^[5]

Although Sheikh Bakri wrote many works both on religious and secular topics, except for a few distributed in mimeograph form all of his writings remained in manuscript form during his lifetime, and were distributed amongst his students.^[6] Hayward and Hassan list eight of his writings in Arabic, which at the time could be consulted in Mogadishu: Dirdsa fi al-mantiqa 1-Harariyya jughrafiyyan wa bashariyyan, a study of the geography and demography of the Harar region of about 200 pages; two works on history, Janaza shamarikh min hadayiz al-tawarikh 95 pages in length, and Kitab irsal al-sawarikh ila sama' al-tawarikh a history of the Oromo in 56 pages; three religious writings Al-mawahib al-madadiyyah fi l-'awf al-'adadiyya, Muqaddamat taysir al-zari'a (48 pages long), and Taysir al-zari'a ila fuquhiyy fi ahkam al-shari'a; and the two biographies of his teachers mentioned above.^[3]

Mohammed Hassan made use of Sheikh Bakri's Kitab irsal al-sawarikh ila sama' al-tawarikh in writing his The Oromo of Ethiopia, a History: 1570-1860, describing the manuscript in the bibliography as sketching "an overall panorama of Oromo history from early times to the present. Although it is not free from major limitations on early Oromo history, it contains much useful data on the gada system."^[7] Hassan relies on it heavily in his discussion on the gada system.^[8]

Legacy

As noted above, Sheikh Bakri was also a renowned Oromo poet. "Shaykh Bakri, write Hayward and Hassan, "stirred the imagination and captured the love of the Oromo masses by means of his poems, which were composed in their language and were short enough for the people to learn by heart."^[4]

Sheikh Bakri Sapalo's chief accomplishment is his writing system.