Atete

Also Known As: Oromo Ateetee; the women’s rite of the Oromo of Ethiopia, the women’s organisation that holds it, and the female divinity it is named for, who is also called Mother, Great Mother, Grandmother and Maryam, and in the Arsi lowlands Faxiimee; among the western Macca Oromo the rite is called Atete and the divinity invoked at it is Maram
Region/Culture: East Africa
Mythos: Ethiopian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Ceremonies and Rites
Mythical Attributes: The rite asks Waaqa, through the women and through the female divinity who stands beside him, for rain, for children, for health and for redress when a woman has been wronged.
Role in Mythos: It has no fixed day in the year and is called whenever drought, sickness, childlessness, war or an injury to a woman demands it.
Relation to Humans: The rite is held by married women, carrying the ritual sticks given to them at their weddings, and an offender who refuses to answer them faces their curse. Men are bound to approach the gathering with grass in their hands, to keep out of the women’s path, and in a dispute to pay a cow and receive the women’s blessing before life returns to normal.

The sticks go into the river first. At a ford in the Arsi highlands of southern Ethiopia, women kneel in the creek bed and lay down their siinqee, slim staffs of blessed wood that each of them received on her wedding day, and pack them over with cold river mud and handfuls of grass. The mud renews the sticks’ power. Then the singing starts, and somewhere above the water, if the women are right about the world, Waaqa is listening.

Atete, or ateetee in the Arsi spelling, is the name the Oromo give to that gathering. It is also the name of the songs sung there, of the women’s body that runs it, and of a female divinity who watches over women. The ethnomusicologist Leila Qashu, who spent more than two years with Arsi Oromo communities between 2010 and 2011, found that when she asked whether ateetee was a person, many women told her it was the ritual. Others, and several male elders, said flatly that ateetee is a person. Both answers are true, and the rite does not seem bothered by the overlap.

The divinity is easiest to see from the side. Women address her as Mother, as Grandmother, as the Great Mother, and in some places as Maryam, a name Christian Oromo also use for the Virgin Mary. In the Arsi lowlands a woman named Guljaa Anoota told Qashu that she is called Faxiimee, the mother of cattle and the mother of children. She is not God and she does not pretend to be. One interlocutor put it simply: Ateetee prays to God, and God hears her. Only women can speak to her. Among the western Macca Oromo the Catholic priest and ethnographer Lambert Bartels recorded the same figure under the name Maram, the divinity of motherhood, invoked at every birth and at a ritual called Atete that every woman who wished to conceive once held with her neighbours. The Oromo scholar Gemetchu Megerssa, quoted in Bartels’s book, explained the arrangement precisely: Waaqa gives the child, but from that moment everything is in Maram’s hands, the pregnancy, the health of the child in the womb, the labour. She is virgin and the mother of all mothers. Men have nothing to do with her.

No one describes her face. The tellings give her a voice that reaches God and a following of women, and they stop there. What can be seen is the rite, and the rite is loud.

Its weather work is the oldest picture of it. The Oromo scholar Jeylan W. Hussein, who watched the ceremony among Arsi women at Kokosa between December 1994 and January 1995, recorded that when crops failed, when drought held, when disease spread or a war dragged on, the men did not puzzle over the cause. They sent the women. The women gathered under a sacred sycamore, at a known ford, on high ground or at a tree shrine, and sang. One rain hymn from the ford of the Katiyyo river asks the Lord not to harm the singer for her small faults, and in the middle of it she names her own staff: my wet and lustrous stick. According to the legend, Waaqa answered such prayers at once, with as much rain as the people wanted. Qashu saw the same thing seventeen years later: women sprayed milk from their mouths over the ground and over each other, passed round butter and roasted coffee beans, painted river mud on one another’s foreheads, and at the end handed bunches of sardoo grass, taken from a fertile riverbed, to the men’s council with a blessing.

Childlessness calls the same gathering. Among the Arsi a couple without children would appeal to the council of senior mothers, who arranged an Atete for them. The village women performed the fertility rites, and the senior mothers led a blessing in call and response, calling on the earth to listen, on the ford to listen, on God who made the earth and the sky to listen, and asking that the woman bear, next year, a son to inherit the homestead. The others answered each line with a single word: listen.

Then there is the Atete that frightens men. Oral tradition says that when the spiritual leader, the Qaalluu, invested the ruler of the gadaa age-grade system with his staff of authority, he also gave him a siinqee and a qanafa, a sacred piece of wood, to take home to his wife. The stick stood for her rights and her dignity. The qanafa was tied on a mother’s forehead after childbirth, through a postpartum rest of four or five months during which her husband was bound by taboos, among them that he must not mistreat her.

If he did, the women of the village left their houses. Hussein describes them gathering in the offender’s compound to sing songs of resentment and to curse him, and Qashu, writing of present-day Arsi practice, describes the wronged woman taking up her siinqee and leading a column of women to the offender’s door, singing insults all the way, then singing in front of the house until the matter was settled. While the women are in Atete they are under ritual taboo. Anyone who meets them on the road stops in silence and waits for them to pass, because stepping into their path earns a curse. The curses named in Hussein’s account are an incurable illness, the ruin of a household’s wealth, and madness. If the men’s elders were slow to act, the women could walk out altogether and take refuge in the next clan, which received them with butter smeared on their heads and sent word back that the boycotted clan had better come and fetch its wives.

The men come with grass. Before anything can be negotiated, the elders hand the senior mothers a bundle of lush grass and say together, save us from your eyes. The women answer, survive our eyes. Then a senior mother lays out the offence in full, the men’s council talks with the women’s council, and the offender is expected to confess, ask forgiveness and give a cow or a calf, which is slaughtered for the women to eat. Hussein calls this both compensation and the appeasing of the women’s divinity. At the end the women bless the man they came to curse. If he will not confess, they set their sticks on the ground and pray to Waaqa for his ruin.

Where the sticks came from is told more than one way. Most Arsi elders say the siinqee arrived with the gadaa institutions. Some women of the Kokossa countryside tell of a mother who crossed a great water at the time of creation, her baby in her arms and her siinqee in her hand, and say the stick sank into the sea and afterwards came to their country. Others trace it to a formidable woman called Akko Manoyee.

The rite’s power runs entirely through Waaqa and through the women’s standing as the people closest to him, and it reaches a long way: into the sky for rain, into the womb for a child, into a man’s health and his cattle when he has wronged his wife. Its limits are just as clear. It is not used for rape or murder, and women do not carry their siinqee to funerals, since their spiritual power belongs to the living. Its harder limit is history. Hussein wrote in 2004 that Salafi preaching since the 1980s had made the rite rare among Muslim Arsi women, and Qashu attended a gadaa ceremony at Faccaa’aa that had stopped for a decade under that pressure and had only just begun again. The nineteenth-century British traveller Captain Harris called Atete a goddess of fecundity appeased once a year. The women who still sing it would add that she comes whenever she is needed, and that the men had better bring grass.

General reference books say something else: that Atete was a fertility goddess of the Kaffa. That line circulates through compilations such as Michael Jordan’s dictionaries of gods. The fieldwork places her among the Oromo, in Arsi, Bale, Shewa and the Macca west, and it is the Oromo women who still know her songs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Atete in Oromo religion?

Atete is a women’s rite of the Oromo of Ethiopia, and the name is also used for the women’s organisation that holds it and for a female divinity the women address. In the rite, married women gather with their ritual sticks to pray to Waaqa, the Oromo God, for rain, children and health, or to demand redress when a woman has been wronged.

Is Atete a goddess?

For many Oromo women Atete is a female spirit who watches over them, called Mother, Great Mother, Grandmother or Maryam, and in the Arsi lowlands Faxiimee. She is not God: women say she prays to Waaqa on their behalf and that only women can speak to her. Among the western Macca Oromo the same role belongs to Maram, the divinity of motherhood, who is invoked at the ritual called Atete.

What happens at an Atete dispute ceremony?

When a woman is abused, she takes up her siinqee and leads other women to the offender’s house, singing insults on the way and in front of the house. Men’s and women’s councils negotiate, and the offender is expected to confess, ask forgiveness and give a cow to be slaughtered for the women. The women then bless him, but if he refuses to confess they lay their sticks on the ground and pray to Waaqa for his ruin.

What is a siinqee?

A siinqee is a carved stick of blessed wood that an Oromo woman receives on her wedding day as a sign of her rights, her dignity and her spiritual power. Women carry it to every Atete ceremony, and in prayers for rain they lay it in a river and cover it with mud and grass to renew its power. Women do not carry the siinqee to funerals.

Was Atete a goddess of the Kaffa?

The fieldwork does not support it. The claim that Atete was a fertility goddess of the Kaffa circulates through general compilations such as Michael Jordan’s dictionaries of gods, while the fieldwork of Lambert Bartels, Jeylan W. Hussein and Leila Qashu records Atete among the Oromo, in Arsi, Bale, Shewa and among the Macca of western Ethiopia.