12/06/2026
The Unyielding Flame: The Life and Sacrifice of Jaal Seeyfuu Muummee
SIOUX CITY, Nebraska — In the darkness of oppression, some lights are not born — they are forged. And once lit, no wind of tyranny can extinguish them.
Jaal Seeyfuu Muummee was such a flame.
Born in 1948 into the Godii village of Duuyda-eelaa, in eastern Hararge's Meettaa district, Seeyfuu entered a world already on fire with injustice. His parents, Muummee Aadam Godii and Mardiyaa Aadam, gave him a name that would one day be whispered across Oromo liberation fronts — not as a ghost, but as a living pillar of resistance.
But no one is born a freedom fighter. They are made.
The Education of a Revolutionary
Seeyfuu completed the modern schooling available in his region and set out for Adare to pursue further studies. He advanced to the second level, his mind hungry for knowledge, his future seemingly bound for the quiet life of an educated civil servant.
Then the Derg's hand reached for him.
Conscription officers plucked him from his studies — not with a rifle, but with a deceptive kindness. They reassigned him, rerouted his path, sent him to Hargeisa as a trader. And for a time, he played the role: gathering goods, building a life, parking his car at the checkpoint like any other merchant going about his day.
But the road to revolution rarely runs straight.
Inside that ordinary trader's chest, something else was growing: the slow, terrible awareness of what was being done to his people. The land was bleeding. The Oromo were being crushed between the hammer of the Abyssinian state and the anvil of neglect. And Seeyfuu could no longer pretend not to see.
The Breaking Point
It was after the death of Elemoo Qilxuu — a martyr whose name still echoes — that Seeyfuu made his choice. He left behind the sweetness of comfort, the safety of obscurity. He abandoned trade routes for underground passages. He turned his back on profit and faced the wilderness.
On February 14, 1976 — during the era of Jaarraa Abbaa Gadaa — after five years of Somali imprisonment and a brutal period of confiscation, Seeyfuu returned to his homeland empty-handed but full of resolve. He crossed into the struggle with nothing but a weapon taken from Somali forces and an idea that would not let him sleep: the Oromo must be free.
From that moment, he became a supply line — a malkaa (buffer zone) between the rear base and the front lines. His home in Qobboo turned into a secret nerve center for Oromo patriots (sab-boonota). By night, he moved resources. By day, he organized. He dispatched fighters, gathered intelligence, and ensured that those who carried guns in the field had bread, bullets, and belief.
He did not merely send others to die. He went himself.
Into the Heart of the Struggle
By mid-1977, Seeyfuu had joined the Oromo Liberation Army (WBO) directly. He crossed into the battlefields of Dirree Qabsoo — the Front of Struggle — not as a quartermaster but as a combatant. Fellow fighters loved him. They saw the sincerity in his eyes, the absence of ambition for power. When they asked him to return to logistics, he accepted — not because he feared the front, but because the struggle needed him alive and moving.
He refused to buy enslaved Oromo with Derg money. He refused to compromise. He was arrested, released, arrested again — a rhythm that became his heartbeat. He outlived Haile Selassie's feudalism. He watched the Derg crumble. He embraced the changes of 1991, hoping that at last, justice would find its footing.
But hope, for the Oromo, has always been a patient thing.
When the new regime proved to be the old snake in new skin — when the transformation was not fundamental but cosmetic — Seeyfuu did not despair. He pivoted. Leveraging his trade routes and relationships with Somali communities, he became a bridge between struggling Oromo cells and the outside world. From Hargeisa to Djibouti, he moved like water through rock: invisible, persistent, indispensable.
Exile Without Surrender
By 2004, the net had tightened. The Wayyane regime's eyes were everywhere. Seeyfuu slipped out of Eritrea — where he had been watched — and made his way to Kenya. In late 2004, he arrived. Five years later, in October 2009, he found refuge in the United States of America.
But exile did not mean silence.
Even from Nebraska — even from Sioux City, far from the hills of Hararge — Seeyfuu continued to speak, to organize, to remind. He understood something that many had forgotten: that the enemy's oldest weapon was division. Rename the Oromo. Erase their language. Make them ashamed of their own name. And if they cannot be erased, scatter them.
Seeyfuu watched as some Oromo forgot who they were. He watched as others, desperate for light, burned with even greater resolve. He never judged the lost. He only worked harder for the ones who still remembered.
"The era of Haile Selassie's so-called civilization," he would say, "was nothing but a bridle on our mouths. And the Derg's era? A whip on our backs. But we are not beasts. We are Oromo."
The Final Battle
In 2018, at an advanced age, Jaal Seeyfuu Muummee returned once more to his homeland — this time alongside comrades from the ABO (Oromo Liberation Front). He met with old friends and new fighters. He did not come to command. He came to listen, to encourage, to pass the torch.
He told them: "Do not give up. Do not bow. True freedom is not served to you — you must rise and take it."
Then he returned to America, his heart full, his body finally beginning to tire.
In March 2020, the world stopped. COVID-19 — the invisible enemy that cared nothing for borders or ideologies — found Seeyfuu in Sioux City, Nebraska. He fought for weeks. On May 15, 2020 (Caamsaa 15 in the Oromo calendar), after seventeen days of illness, Jaal Seeyfuu Muummee laid down his last breath.
He was a father of eleven children. A husband. A trader. A fighter. A legend.
A Legacy Etched in Gold
The Oromo struggle has many names. Some are carved into trees in the forests of Wellega. Some are sung in lullabies that children no longer understand. Some are written in police files and regime dossiers, black ink on white paper, waiting to be reclaimed.
Jaal Seeyfuu Muummee's name belongs elsewhere.
It belongs in the chronicles of the resistance — not as a martyr who died young with a gun in his hand, but as a survivor who gave every year, every dollar, every connection to the cause. He was not the loudest voice. He was the steady hand. He was the man who made sure the fighters ate before he did. The man who could have prospered in business but chose poverty with purpose.
"What heaven and earth love," the elders say, "is that we, the living, should learn from those who came before."
Jaal Seeyfuu Muummee did not seek monuments. He sought freedom. And though he did not live to see it, he planted seeds that will outlast the tyrants who tried to burn the field.
May Paradise receive him. And may the Oromo never forget.
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Rest in power, Jaal Seeyfuu Muummee. The flame you carried now burns in thousands of hands.
Credit: Dhabesa Wakjira
