Professor Abdullahi Shongolo, whose decades of research on Borana Oromo culture, customary law, and history brought international recognition to the community’s heritage, passed away on 20 October at Nanyuki Hospital in Kenya following an illness. He was 68.

Born in 1958 in Moyale, Kenya, Professor Shongolo completed his education in Kenya and went on to serve in the country’s Ministry of Education, rising to the position of Assistant Director of Education. But it was his later turn to scholarship that would define his legacy.

Jaatani Diidaa, a cultural and historical researcher, told Addis Standard that Professor Shongolo devoted much of his life to in-depth research, making significant personal sacrifices to bring the educational and cultural heritage of the Oromo of Kenya and Ethiopia to international attention.

Professor Shongolo made substantial contributions to anthropological research, serving as a senior researcher at Germany’s renowned Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology for more than two decades, from 1999 to 2019. During the 2000s, he also served as an Associate Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where he pursued research and academic work.

Among his major scholarly contributions were books co-authored with prominent German scholar Professor Günther Schlee, including Pastoralism and Politics in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia and Islam and Ethnicity in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia. He also documented traditional Borana oral literature and proverbs in Boran Proverbs in Their Cultural Context. These works helped bring greater international recognition to Oromo history, pastoral life, religious traditions, and customary systems of governance, particularly the Oromo customary governance system, the Gumii Gaayo Assembly.

Professor Shongolo’s passing “has brought profound grief and shock to the Borana Oromo community, the wider Oromo community across the world, and people in Kenya and Ethiopia, as well as to scholars in the international academic community,” Jaatani said.

His funeral was held on 21 October in Nanyuki, Kenya.