Mahay Choramo - Background

Background

The exact date (or even the exact year) and place of Mahay Choramo's birth is not known, beyond that he was born in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region of Ethiopia in the mid-1920s. His mother, Paltore Posha, was from Humbo in Welayta. Choramo, her second husband and Mahay's father, was from Kucha.

Choramo named his son "Mahay Choramo." "Mahay" means "leopard" in the local language. However, like many non-Amharas in Ethiopia, Mahay Choramo often Amharized his name (e.g. in his autobiography), and went by the Amharan name of "Mahari", which means "merciful." Mahay Choramo had three siblings: a sister, Tera, who died when she was two years old, and two brothers, Meskele (d. 1976) and Feteshey (d. 1979).

Up to this point in time, the only Christians in Ethiopia were members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which was the religion of the Amharas and the Tigres. (The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church conducted its liturgy in the otherwise extinct language of Ge'ez, though the church used Amharic in its administrative and social life.) Subjects of the Ethiopian Empire who were not Amharas or Tigres followed various African traditional religions; to become a Christian a person had to abandon his or her local ethnic identity and embrace the dominant Tigre-Amhara culture. Beginning in the 1920s, however, Emperor Haile Selassie allowed non-Orthodox missionaries into Ethiopia, on the condition that they would not translate their works into Amharic and would focus only on the non-Amharic-speaking population.

As such, the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) launched its "New Churches Movement" in the late 1920s. In April 1928, expatriate missionaries from the SIM. arrived at Sodo and began a mission there, establishing a hospital and conducting evangelism in the surrounding rural areas. These missionaries left Sodo on April 17, 1937, in the wake of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. They left behind them a small group of local Christian converts. The missionaries had translated a small amount of material into the local Wolaytta language, consisting mainly of a Scripture Gift Mission pamphlet entitled God Hath Spoken and the Gospel of John. Unfortunately for the converts, the whole Bible was available only in Amharic, a language which they associated with absentee landlords and greedy government officials.