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Sheikh Bakri Sapalo (born Abubakar Garad Usman; November 1895 - 5 April 1980) was an Oromo scholar, poet and religious teacher. He is best known as the inventor of a writing system for the Oromo language. ==Life== Bakri Sapalo was the son of Garad Usman Oda, a landowner in the area of the Sapalo River who was among those who were carried over into Emperor Menelik's regime after the conquest of Harar. His son Abubakar was born eight years after the conquest of Harar, and probably some sixteen years after Garad Usman had embraced Islam; Abubakar had three brothers and four sisters. Although reputed to have been a good Muslim and remembered to this day for his skill in oratory and command of the Oromo language, Garad Usman remained illiterate. R. J. Hayward and Mohammed Hassan speculate, based on her name, that his mother Kadiga was also a Muslim. After receiving his elementary education, Abubakar went to Chercher where he studied under the Islamic teacher Sheikh Umar Aliyye Balbaletti, and afterwards went to Harar to study with Sheikh Yusuf Adam for a number of years there. Although he also studied under other Islamic teachers, these were the only ones he wrote biographies about.〔Hayward and Hassan, ("The Oromo Orthography of Shaykh Bakri Saṗalō", ''Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies'' ), 44 (1981), p. 551〕 After devoting 20 years of his life to his studies, he returned to his home village of Sapalo, where he began to teach. Besides religion, subjects he taught included geography, history, mathematics, astronomy, Arabic, and the composition of writings in the Oromo language. He also began to compose poetry in the Oromo language, which not only brought him fame but the name he afterwards was known by, Sheikh Bakri Sapalo: "Bakri" is the popular form of "Abubakar" and Sapalo after his village.〔 Sheikh Bakri eventually left Sapalo and taught in a number of places, of which the three best known are Hortu, near Dire Dawa, the city of Dire Dawa itself, and Addelle, a place some 25 kilometers from Dire Dawa, on the road to Harar. It was at Addelle where he built a school and what came to be known as his mosque. He is said to have married a local woman at every place he stayed, at least 11 of whom are known. He had eighteen children by three of his wives, thirteen sons and five daughters. Despite the large number of wives, he carefully obeyed the Muslim commandments on polygamy, for he is said never to have had more than two wives at once, and towards the end of his life he had only one wife. During this time he also wrote prolifically both in Arabic and Oromo.〔Hayward and Hassan, "Shaykh Bakri Saṗalō", p. 552〕 He is believed to have invented his writing system for Oromo in 1956 at the village of Hagi Qome. Neither Hayward nor Hassan offer a reason why Sheikh Bakri returned to his home area to work on his system, "unless it was for the purpose of keeping the thing secret, for the authorities would certainly have been adamantly opposed to the idea of Oromo being written in any form, let alone in a script other than Ethiopic."〔Hayward and Hassan, "Shaykh Bakri Saṗalō", p. 553〕 Although it was initially met with great enthusiasm and found a number of users in his province of Hararghe, the Ethiopian authorities predictably reacted with fear that he was "inciting the Oromo to too great an ethnic consciousness and thus endangering the national unity." Local officials moved quickly to suppress its use, and in 1965 Sheikh Bakri was placed under house arrest in Dire Dawa but allowed to continue his teaching. In 1968, he was given permission to visit Addelle two or three times a week. It was during these years that he wrote ''Shalda'', a twenty-page pamphlet which purported to be a work of religious instruction, but was actually from beginning to end a caustically worded indictment of Amhara colonial oppression and an account of the suffering of the Oromo under the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie. Hayward and Hassan further note that "''Shalda'' is of interest in that it is really both the first and the last major writing in Shaykh Bakri Sapalo's alphabet."〔Hayward and Hassan, "Shaykh Bakri Saṗalō", p. 554〕 In 1978, after Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed and the Derg gained power, Sheikh Bakri and his wife fled the Red Terror and fled to Somalia where they were admitted to a refugee camp in Hiraan. Sheikh Bakri had hoped he would be allowed to proceed further to Mogadishu where he could work and have his writings published, but he never received permission to leave the camp. Conditions there proved too much for a man in his eighties, and he died in the camp after a prolonged illness.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Bakri Sapalo」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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