West Ethiopia
Jimma, also spelled Jima, is the largest city in southwestern Ethiopia. It is a special zone of the Oromia Region and is surrounded by Jimma Zone. It has a latitude and longitude of 7°40′N 36°50′E.
The town was the capital of Kaffa Province until the province was dissolved. Prior to the 2007 census, Jimma was reorganized administratively as a special Zone.
Herbert S. Lewis states that in the early 1960s it was “the greatest market in all of southwestern Ethiopia. On a good day in the dry season it attracts up to thirty thousand people.”
History
What is now Jimma’s northern suburb of Jiren was the capital of a large Oromo kingdom until the late 19th century.
Originally named Hirmata, the city owed its importance in the 19th century to being located on the caravan route between Shewa and the Kingdom of Kaffa, as well as being only six miles from the palace of the king of Jimma.
According to Donald Levine, in the early 19th century the market attracted thousands of people from neighboring regions: “Amhara from Gojjam and Shoa, Oromo from all the Gibe Kingdoms and numerous representatives of the Lacustrine and Omotic groups, including Timbaro, Qabena, Kefa, Janjero, Welamo, Konta and several others”.
The present town was developed on the Awetu River by the Italian colonial regime in the 1930s. At that time, with the goal of weakening the native Ethiopian Church, the Italians intended to make Jimma an important center of Islamic learning, and founded an academy to teach fiqh.[3]
In the East African fighting of World War II after their main force was defeated, the Italian garrison at Jimma was one of the last to surrender, holding out til July 1941.
Jimma was the scene of a violent encounter which started in April 1975 between radical college students (known as zemacha) sent to organize local peasants, who had benefited from land reform, and local police, who had sided with local landowners. Students and peasant followers had imprisoned local small landowners, rich peasants and members of the local police force; this action led to further unrest, causing the Derg (the ruling junta) to send a special delegation to Jimma, which sided with the local police. In the end, 24 students were killed, more arrested, and the local zemacha camps closed.
Days before the end of the Ethiopian Civil War in May 1991, the city was captured by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front.
On 13 December 2006, the Ethiopian government announced that it had secured a loan of US$ 98 million from the African Development Bank to pave the 227 kilometers of highway between Jimma and Mizan Teferi to the southwest. The loan would cover 64%% of the 1270.97 million Birr budgeted for this project.
Demographics
Based on the 2007 Census conducted by the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia (CSA), this Zone has a total population of 120,960, of whom 60,824 are men and 60,136 women. With an area of 50.52 square kilometers, Jimma has a population density of 2,394.30 all are urban inhabitants. A total of 32,191 households were counted in this Zone, which results in an average of 3.76 persons to a household, and 30,016 housing units. The three largest ethnic groups reported in Jimma were the Oromo (46.71%%), the Amhara (17.14%%) and the Dawro (10.05%%); all other ethnic groups made up 26.1%% of the population. Amharic was spoken as a first language by 41.58%% and 39.96%% spoke Afan Oromo; the remaining 18.46%% spoke all other primary languages reported. The majority of the inhabitants said they practiced Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, with 46.84%% of the population reporting they observed this belief, while 39.03%% of the population were Muslim, and 13.06%% were Protestant.
The national 1994 census reported this town had a total population of 88,867, of whom 43,874 were men and 44,993 were women.
Points of interest
Some buildings survive from the time of the Jimma Kingdom, including the Palace of Abba Jifar. The city is home to a museum, Jimma University, several markets, and an airport (ICAO code HAJM, IATA JIM). Also of note is the Jimma Research Center, founded in 1968, which is run by the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research. The Center specializes in agricultural research, including serving as the national center for research to improve the yield of coffee and spices.
Gambela National Park is a proposed national park, but the steps needed to fully protect it by the government of Ethiopia have not been completed as of 2002. Located in the Gambela Region, its 5061 square kilometers of territory is encroached upon by cotton plantations and refugee camps.
The general topography of the park is flat, with some areas of higher ground where deciduous woodland and savanna occur; these higher areas are often rocky with large termite mounds. About 66%% of the area is considered shrubland, 15%% is forest, while 17%% has been modified by man. Gambela National Park also supports extensive areas of wet grassland and swamps where the native grasses grow over 3 metres in height.
The Gambela Park was established primarily to protect two species of endangered wetland antelopes: the white-eared kob and the Nile lechwe. Other wildlife reported as living here include populations of African elephants, African buffalo, Masai lion, African leopards, Sudan cheetahs, roan antelope, tiang, Lelwel hartebeest, olive baboon, and guereza monkey. Several birds only found in this area include the shoebill stork, the long-tailed paradise whydah and the red-throated and green bee-eaters.
Mount Chilalo is an isolated, extinct silicic volcanic mountain in southeastern Ethiopia. The highest point in the Arsi Zone of the Oromia Region, and located on the border between the Hitosa and Tiyo woreda, this mountain has a latitude and longitude of 07°55′N 39°16′E with an elevation of 4,036 metres (13,241 ft) above sea level.
The mountain has an elliptical base (about 30 by 20 kilometers), whose major axis lies NNE-SSW or parallel to the predominant tectonic trend. Chilalo rises with gentle slopes for more than 1500 meters from the top of the plateau. At the summit, there is a large, almost circular caldera about 6 kilometers in diameter, whose southern rim is considered to be the mountain’s summit. Mount Chilalo last erupted in the Pleistocene.
One authority identifies Mount Chilalo as a late Trap Series volcano.[2] The geologist Erik Nilsson claimed to have identified traces of glaciation on Chilalo, as well as on its neighbor Mount Kaka down to about 3400 meters, which he dated to the “Last Pluvial Period”. Although this mountain is located south of the East African Rift, along with Mount Gugu to the north and Mount Kaka to the south, it is considered, geologically speaking, part of the Ethiopian Highlands.