Hiriira Spatiotemporalities: Mapping Oromo Women’s Liberation in Post-Imperial Berlin

In September 2020, Oromo women marched through the streets of Berlin, Germany, demanding recognition for their struggle. This protest march, called a Hiriira in the Oromo language, offers a case study into the entanglements between settler colonial Ethiopia, Germany’s post-empire, and the forces of oppression which link them. This paper uses the spatiotemporal reckonings generated from the Hiriira perspective to understand violence and elucidate the practices of resistance that have emerged despite it. These contrasting ways of viewing space and time are expressed through the tension between imperial spatialising, a way of knowing the world that is imperial and oppressive in nature, and geography guraacha, a Black and Blackened way of knowing space with a particularly Oromo perspective. The result is a type of mapping, tracing the Hiriira route across Berlin while describing the histories that shadow these streets, and the pathways towards liberation that Oromo women are organising.     

CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS IN THE CONSTRUCTIVE GEOGRAPHY OF LARGE CITIES

The increasing impact of urbanization on the natural environment and physical constraints on city planning in the various natural zones of the USSR call for a program of research that would bring to bear the tools of the various geographical disciplines on the problem and might give rise to a distinctive geography of city planning. Geomorphology might be concerned with a variety of caving and slumping processes typical of large cities; climatology with the impact of cities on the microclimate of an area; hydrology with watertable changes and water-management problems, and biogeography with the distinctive plant and animal life of large cities and urban agglomerations. More complex, integrated research in both physical and economic geography would deal with the choice of suitable sites for new cities, particularly in extreme types of environment; with predictive aspects of the impact of urbanization, and the functional structure of cities. A number of cities and parts of cities with different layouts and different environmental settings should be designated as experimental study areas for geographical research of a more systematic character.