With the sources at our disposal, it is not difficult to establish the pre-sixteenth century Oromo presence within the medieval Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, more appropriately identified as the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia. Though Christian sources mention some Oromo groups during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, these were ignored or overlooked, possibly because of the firmly entrenched theory claiming that the Oromo entered the Christian kingdom around the middle of the sixteenth century in the wake of the disastrous jihadic war of Imam Ahmad. Even Merid Wolde Aregay, who in his earlier study established the Oromo presence in the southern parts of the Christian kingdom during the fifteenth century, claims that they were ‘relatively speaking, newcomers to the central highlands’. The central highlands include the present region of Shawa, the heartland of the medieval Christian kingdom, far from its frontiers.

The literature on the pre-sixteenth-century Oromo presence within the medieval Christian kingdom is limited. Besides my own short chapter of 1994, only three recent sources discuss the pre-sixteenth century Oromo presence in the region of Shawa. There appear to have been two principal reasons why other scholars did not suspect, much less discuss, this issue. The first was the credence attached to Abba Bahrey's Zenahu le Galla, which dates their arrival on the border of the southern province of Bali in the early 1520s. The second was the scholarly assumption that placed the original homeland of the Oromo either in northern Somalia or northern Kenya or southern Ethiopia but far from the frontiers of the medieval Christian kingdom, thus excluding the possibility of an Oromo presence in and around the region of Shawa before the sixteenth century.

As indicated earlier, the presence of some Oromo groups within the medieval Christian kingdom is confirmed by, among others, the Chronicle of Emperor Amda-Siyon (1313–44), which makes clear reference to a people called Galla and their country as ‘Hagara Galla’ (the country of the Galla). Despite such unmistakable reference to the Galla and their country, Jules Perruchon, who translated Amda-Siyon's Chronicle from Geez into French, and G.W.B. Huntingford, who translated it into English, replaced Galla by Gala and the country of the Galla by the country of Gala. They did this most probably because they assumed Gala to be a different people from Galla, who were not thought to be within the Christian kingdom before the middle of the sixteenth century.