Bakri Sapalo

Sheikh Bakri Sapalo (born Abubakar Garad Usman; November 1895 – 5 April 1980) was an Oromo scholar, poet and religious teacher.

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.

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.

Local officials moved quickly to suppress its use, and in 1965 Sheikh Bakri was placed under house arrest in Dire Dawa but was allowed to continue his teaching.

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.

"Shaykh Bakri, write Hayward and Hassan, "stirred the imagination and captured the love of the Oromo masses by means of his poems, which were composed in their language and were short enough for the people to learn by heart.

[9] Although Oromo has been transcribed using two writing systems Sheikh Sapalo was familiar with, the Ge'ez script and the Arabic alphabet, both are "far from adequate" in Hayward and Hassan's opinion, for reasons they set forth.

However, although the symbols Sheikh Bakri adopted are not cursive, which suggests a connection with Ge'ez over Arabic, none of them can be traced to either writing system; "they are a complete novelty.