ABSTRACT
Voice and Power, ed. R.J.Hayward & I.M.Lewis (ALC Supplement 3, 1996): 243-256.
1. Introduction
In presenting the following Macca Oromo songs from Wallagga, Ethiopia, a few words of introduction, and explanation, are perhaps due. The texts reproduced here were collected from the Sayyoo region of western Wallagga in the early 1970s. I owe these texts to the personal courtesy and academic generosity of Father Lambert Bartels, whose twenty years of almost uninterrupted field-research among the Oromo of western Ethiopia have resulted in several hundred pages and more than one hundred cassettes of raw data, a copy of which I was kindly given years ago within the framework of an Italian Ministry of Education research project on a Corpus of Historical Source Materials from Western Ethiopia (Triulzi 1988). Another copy was entrusted to Dr P.T.W.Baxter at the University of Manchester. As Father Bartels generously allowed me to use this material for my own research on Wallagga’s historical records, I am taking the liberty to reproduce here the texts which appear below. Unless otherwise indicated, page numbers in parentheses there refer to Bartels’ own Fieldnotes and related tapes.
