A book dealing with history of the Oromo and the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia c. 1300–1700 cannot avoid addressing the location of the Oromo cradleland. The search for this began in the 1620s and continues in recent publications by scholars Mekuria Bulcha and Eloi Ficquet. According to Bairu Tafla, the question remains, by and large, unresolved. The Oromo, however, claim only Ethiopia as their land of origin. The aim of this chapter is to synthesize the available information on the controversial subject of the Oromo cradleland and clearly establish an area that may be designated as the birthplace of Oromo national institutions, sanctioned as sacred land in their traditional religion, as well as to indicate the locations of the homelands of the Borana and Barentu moieties. I argue that it was from six separate homelands within the boundaries of the modern Ethiopia that the pastoral Oromo groups launched their large population movements from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century. My analysis is based on oral traditions, early chronicles and linguistic evidence.

There have been persistent attempts in Ethiopian historiography to present the Oromo as the sixteenth-century ‘New Invaders’ of Ethiopia, in spite of the fact that the Oromo are one of the original inhabitants of that country. Some scholars assumed that the Oromo originated beyond Africa, others that they came from central Africa, others still that the Oromo originated either in Somalia or Northern Kenya, all thus placing their cradleland outside the boundaries of modern Ethiopia. This hypothesis finds support in the works of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese writers and in Somali oral traditions, if the latter are taken at face value. The Portuguese writings depend heavily on the works of the Christian monk, Abba Bahrey. For some scholars, Bahrey's manuscript Zenahu le Galla establishes 1522 as the beginning of documented Oromo history. The pastoral Oromo themselves, however, have never claimed any homeland other than the regions of Bale, Sidamo and Gamu Gofa, yet very few authors have paid attention to what their oral tradition had to say about their homelands. Careful interpretation of these traditions provides insight into the political economy of their different homelands on the eve of their history-making massive population movement.