Oromo community marks 20 years in Brighton and Hove since 2006

The Oromo community from Ethiopia has marked 20 years in Brighton and Hove with a celebration at the East Brighton site of MET College, where families shared speeches, music, traditional hot food and dancing.

The event on Saturday 24 October marked two decades since the community arrived in the city through the Gateway Protection Programme, a government refugee resettlement scheme. Brighton and Hove City Council published its account of the celebration on Monday 2 November, as Black History Month drew to a close.

How the community came to Brighton and Hove

The Gateway Protection Programme was set up in the early 2000s to bring some of the world’s most vulnerable refugees to the UK. Brighton and Hove was one of the early adopters, and the council worked with the government to welcome 79 refugees in the autumn of 2006.

The adults had all come from Ethiopia and had fled the Ethiopian government in the preceding years. Many of the children had been born as refugees, some in a large refugee camp in Kenya. Most of the families belonged to the Oromo ethnic group, which the council says was being persecuted by the Ethiopian government at the time.

The city had no Oromo community before they arrived, so the council says the learning curve was steep for local services as well as the newcomers. Interpreters were found in London and became a vital link between the families and services.

To introduce the children to the UK school system, a temporary school was set up in a spare classroom at Hove Park School. Children and parents were taught how schooling works, and the children’s English was assessed before they were placed in mainstream schools.

Twenty years on

With help from the council’s discretionary grants programmes, the community has worked to keep the culture, cuisine and language of the Oromo people alive. It has become known for musical events that attract Oromo people from across the UK and from other countries, and an Oromo women’s group meets every week and provides a support system for the women in the community.

Children and grandchildren of the original arrivals have been born in the city. Finding work was hard for the adults at first, because many of the jobs they had done in East Africa were difficult to replicate and some had no formal education. The council says a number of men and women from the community now work as cleaners, carers and security guards for the council, in schools and for its contractors.

The programme itself no longer exists, but the council says it has continued to resettle refugees since, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan, using lessons learned from the first resettlement in 2006.

In their words

Fardossa, who arrived through the programme aged four, said coming to Brighton and Hove had given Fardossa and the siblings opportunities they might not have had at home, and remembered a lot of support from the council when starting school.

Fardossa described a close-knit community that still meets every Saturday to check in on each other, share its culture and visit each other’s homes. It can be lonely at times, Fardossa said, because most of the family are still in Ethiopia, but Fardossa could not see living anywhere else.

Councillor Mitchie Alexander, Cabinet member for Communities, Equalities, Public Health and Adult Social Care, said Brighton and Hove prides itself on being a “City of Sanctuary”. The councillor thanked the Oromo community for helping the city learn to be more welcoming and inclusive, and thanked the services and professionals who helped the newcomers settle.

The council’s full account is on its news page.