Brighton & Hove's Oromo community marks 20 years in the city

Brighton & Hove’s Oromo community marked 20 years in the city on Saturday 24 October, with speeches, music, traditional hot food and dancing at the MET College’s East Brighton site. The council wrote about the celebration as Black History Month came to an end.

In the autumn of 2006 the council took in 79 refugees through the Gateway Protection Programme, a government scheme set up to bring some of the world’s most vulnerable refugees to the UK. Brighton & Hove was one of the early councils to sign up. The adults had all come from Ethiopia, which they had fled in the years before, and most of the families were Oromo, an ethnic group the Ethiopian government was persecuting at the time.

There was no Oromo community in the city before then. The council said the learning curve was steep for its services as well as for the new arrivals, and interpreters had to be found in London. The programme no longer exists, but the council has kept resettling refugees since, mostly from Syria and Afghanistan, using lessons from 2006.

Work was hard to find at first. Many of the jobs people had done in East Africa were difficult to pick up again here. Several members of the community now work as cleaners, carers and security guards for the council and its contractors.

With help from the council’s discretionary grants, the community has kept up the culture, cuisine and language of the Oromo people. Its music events draw Oromo people from across the UK and abroad, and a separate women’s group meets every week.

Fardossa, who came to the city through the programme, said: “Brighton & Hove is a great city, and I really could not see myself living anywhere else.” The community still meets every Saturday, she said, “to check in how everyone is doing, to get together and share the culture”.

Councillor Mitchie Alexander, the cabinet member for communities, said: “I want to thank each and every one of the members of the Oromo community for helping us to learn how to be more welcoming, how to be more inclusive and how to be everything we strive to be.”

The group is a registered charity, the Oromo Community in Brighton and Hove. One of its aims is to give people across Brighton, Hove and Sussex the chance to learn about Oromo culture by coming to its events.