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Jimma
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jimma is the largest city in western Ethiopia. Located in the Jimma Zone of the Oromia Region, this city has a latitude and longitude of . It was the capital of Kaffa Province until the province was dissolved.
Based on figures from the Central Statistical Agency in 2005, this town has an estimated total population of 159,009 of whom 80,897 were males and 78,112 were females.[1] According to the 1994 national census, it had a population of 88,867 people. Herbert S. Lewis states that in the early 1960s it was "the greatest market in all of southwestern Ethiopia. On a good day in the dry season it attracts up to thirty thousand people."[2]
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Its northern suburb of Jiren was the capital of a large Oromo kingdom until the late nineteenth century. Originally named Hirmata, the city owed its importance in the 19th century to being located on the caravan route between Shewa and the Kingdom of Kaffa, as well as being only six miles from the palace of the king of Jimma.
The present town was developed on the Awetu River by Italian colonialists in the 1930s. At that time, with the goal of weakening the native Ethiopian Church, the Italians intended to make Jimma an important center of Islamic learning, and founded an academy to teach fiqh.[3]
Days before the end of the Ethiopian Civil War in May 1991, Jimma was captured by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front.
On 13 December 2006, the Ethiopian government announced that it had secured a loan of US$ 98 million from the African Development Bank to pave the 227 kilometers of highway between Jimma and Mizan Teferi to the southwest. The loan would cover 64% of the 1270.97 Birr budgetted for this project.[4]
Some buildings survive from the time of the Jimma Kingdom, including the Palace of Abba Jiffar. The city is home to a museum, Jimma University, several markets, and an airport (ICAO code HAJM, IATA JIM).
- ^ CSA 2005 National Statistics, Table B.3
- ^ Herbert S. Lewis, A Galla Monarchy: Jimma Abba Jifar, Ethiopia, 1830-1932 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), p. 56.
- ^ J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia (Oxford: Geoffrey Cumberlege for the University Press, 1952), p. 137.
- ^ "Ethiopian Embassy Newsletter", NOv/Dec 2006, p.2, Ethiopian Embassy to the UK website (accessed 11 January 2007)
- Cities of Ethiopia: Jimma by John Taylor (Addis Tribune, 21 December 2001)