ABSTRACT
Waka town of Mareka woreda in Dawro zone of southern Ethiopia hosted a boisterous cultural event – Day of Social Equality. Political history gets perhaps its most troubled cultural expression. A range of distinct issues such as slavery, occupational stratification, kinship, and legacies of kingship all intractably intermingle. While Ethiopia’s imperial policy held together a weakly integrated empire for as long as it could, by the late twentieth century new notions of citizenship were needed in which different cultural identities were recognized. The 1974 overthrow of the Ethiopian monarchy and subsequent declaration of the wholehearted adoption of socialism promised new conceptions of nationalism and citizenship. The subjugated ethnic communities resiliently held on to their respective ethnolinguistic identities and cultural practices, partly as resistance against the reality of political marginalization and cultural subjugation.
