Introduction
"Rastafari has extended from a small and formerly undesirable cult into a dominant force which influences all levels of national life; and it has done so against formidable odds, political harassment and general condemnation. The Rastafari has dramatised the question that has always been uncomfortable in Caribbean history, and the question is where you stand in relation to blackness."
George Lamming, 1980
In his commentary on the Rastafari, George Lamming joined the ranks of
those members of the Caribbean community who correctly noted that the Rastafari movement
carried with it a certain continuity from the days of slavery, a continuity of resistance
and confrontation with white racism.1
The Rastafari movement, in all its contemporary manifestations, challenges not only the
Caribbean but the entire Western World to come to terms with the history of slavery, the
reality of white racism and the permanent thrust for dignity and self-respect by black
people. The racial consciousness which was stamped yesterday in the Universal Negro
Improvement Association, and which is today encrusted in the locks and beards of the
Rastafari, stands as a potent force in the struggle for justice.
Race consciousness remains an integral part of the class consciousness
of African peoples as long as Euro-American culture seeks to harmonise the economic and
political domination of black peoples with attempts at destroying their cultural
personality. Such a harmonising project of dehumanisation started in the era of the
slave trade, when the day-to-day atrocities were unified by a cultural assault - whether
French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese or British - to impose European ideas and values on the
dominated Africans.
In the face of cultural resistance - manifest in religious practices,
the preservation of African languages, African medicinal and healing crafts, and musical
forms of communication - and open slave revolts, the slavers deepened their racist
theories, building upon the original biblical justification for racial inferiority with
the kind of pseudo-science which led to the theories of Arthur Jensen (that black people
were genetically inferior to white people).
This study of the Rastafari spans the past fifty years, properly
linking the emergence of Rasta to the roots of resistance to slavery. A recourse to
the world of slavery, where the cultural and spiritual expressions of the slaves were
preludes to armed revolts, begins in the analysis of resistance, centralising the role of
religion among the slaves and their children, highlighting the importance of religious
leaders such as Sam Sharpe and Paul Bogel.
Bogle's strident defence of the black poor, the Morant Bay Rebellion
and the song 'Colour for Colour' laid the foundations for the development of Garveyism in
the society. The incomplete crystallisation of the Jamaican working class, their
dispersal by capital to Central and North America, the deformed racial hierarchy of
whites, mulattoes and blacks, provided the background for the ideas of African redemption
and deliverance which were to be so clearly articulated by Marcus Garvey. The
convergence of the heritage of the Maroons, the religious movement - called Ethiopianism -
and the emergent Pan-African movement which culminated in the U.N.I.A., were some of the
forces which merged in the formation called Rastafari.
Rastafarians in Jamaica today see themselves as the conscious heirs of
Garveyism. One Rastafari expressed this fact in the following manner:
"Many say Garvey is dead, yet it is clear that I and I sons of Marcus Garvey are still here making his philosophies a reality in 1980. Garvey was the undisputed champion of the black race, of the poor, of the working class and the downpressed. For this he was vigorously opposed in the land of his birth . . . I and I have been safeguarding Garvey's work for fifty years in an attempt to keep the predicted bloodshed within limits and to help the successors of Father Manley and Busta to solve the host of problems they take on their heads when they assume political power in Jamaica."2
Here I. Jabulari Tafari was pointing to the role of the Rastas in the
political life of the Jamaican society; and it is the continuity in the assertive racial
identification of Garvey and the Rastafari which is the main thrust of this study.
The limitations of the all-class racial appeal of Garveyism were to
emerge in the Rastafari movement, and nowhere clearer than when in 1980 a 'white' Rasta
formation joined the white ruling class of Jamaica in quoting the anticommunist statements
of Garvey during the 1980 electoral struggle. The problems of the racial divisions
of the society are elaborated within the context of the capitalist depression of the
thirties, which led to the massive revolt of 1938. The origins and growth of the
Rastafari movement are explored against the background of the social conditions of
colonial Jamaica, which led some of the rural poor to reject the British overlordship by
identifying positively with the Ethiopian monarch, Haile Selassie.
This analysis of the Rastafari is developed to show the identification
with Ethiopia as a profound response to the racial repression of capitalism. Rural
Jamaicans were only one section of the black world which welcomed the crowning of this
African King in an independent African Kingdom. This welcome had been preceded for a
hundred years previously by an Ethiopian Movement which took the words of the Psalms -
"Princes come out of Egypt, Ethiopia stretches forth her hands unto God" - to
mean that Ethiopia would literally help in the emancipation of all blacks.
Rastafari, who proclaimed that Haile Selassie was the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, was
taking the Ethiopian Movement one step further by centralising the person of Haile
Selassie as the vehicle of liberation.
That the first Rastafaians were not madmen was clear to the society
when both Rastas and non-Rastas raised their voices against the Italian invasion of
Abyssinia in 1935. Leonard Howell, and those who sang that "The Lion of Judah
shall break every chain and bring us victory again and again", found an international
outlet for their ideas through the Ethiopian World Federation. The first doctrines
of this young movement were linked, in this analysis of the Rastafari, to the writings of
the Voice of Ethiopia (the widely circulated paper of the E.W.F.) to further
underline the assertion that the ideas expressed by black Jamaicans that Haile Selassie
was King of Kings (Ras over Rasses) was no mere millenarian escapism. The question
which could be posed is: What made Jamaicans who positively identified with Haile Selassie
millenarian, and those who identified with the images of the British King well-adjusted?
The answer to this question is explored in the context of the idealism of the
society.
The effects of this idealism could clearly be seen after the 1938
revolt, when the ideas of the Rastafari could not carry the sufferers forward. After
the 1938 uprising, the working people of Jamaica were willing to downplay the strength of
racial identification to accept the 'brown man leadership' of the fledgling two-party
system. This compromise was a holding action which the working people
accepted in order to oust the British overlords from the politico-constitutional sphere.
The continued wretchedness of the poor, the incipient political
violence which was becoming a part of the political culture, and the leaderism and
competition of the two-party system, had a debilitating effect on the unity and purpose of
the working people. Membership of the Rasta groups increased in the fifties,
accompanied by a strident call for repatriation, a call issued in protest against the
massive population movement of the society. For between 1943 and 1970 the biggest
movement of the population took place since the time of slavery, when over 560,000 rural
Jamaicans were uprooted from their provision grounds by the bauxite tractors and
earthmovers.
Herein lay the roots for the growth of the Rastafari movement inside
Jamaica in the fifties. Because of the range of influences - Garveyism, anti-slavery
resistance, Nyabingi, Ethiopianism - which came to bear on the growth of the movement,
this study seeks to illuminate the elements which were paramount and does not seek to
recount the history of Jamaica in this period. The richness of the pre-World War II
struggles is captured by Ken Post in his book Arise Ye Starvelings; but the work
has the limitations of representing the sufferers as Quashie and the Rasta as millenarian.
Post's use of this formulation showed how pervasive the stamp of millenarianism had
become. Both Marxists and non-Marxists took similar attitudes to this new force
among the black poor of Jamaica, leaving behind a barrage of studies which have helped to
create an image of the Rastafarians as 'escapists'.
Amilcar Cabral's notion of culture and resistance provides the
theoretical foundation for this study in an attempt to bring a new approach to the
analysis of the Rastafari. This African freedom fighter, who struggled for the
highest form of cultural liberation, captured the essence of cultural resistance in the
process of armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism, observing that:
"The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation of the ideological plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people's history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of the relationship between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as different societies. Ignorance of this fact may explain the failure of several attempts at foreign domination - as well as the failure of some liberation movements."3
The resistance of the Rastafari to the neo-colonial
society of Jamaica is examined against the background of positive and negative influences
which this movement has exerted on Jamaica and Caribbean society. The rejection of
the superstructural analysis of locks, beard and the chillum pipe is an effort to grasp
the process and ideas which led to the development of the particular symbols of the
Rastafari. Those studies which have been preoccupied with the external phenomenon of
locks, beard and the divinity of Haile Selassie represent a particular world view, a view
which supported the existing social order. This much was evident from the first
major study of the Rastafari in 1960, which was seen as a "palliative to an explosive
situation". The first Report on the Rastafari, published in 1960, set
the agenda for future distortions of the Pinnacle settlement. Further research on
the growth and the development of the Rastafari will help to correct some of the
distortions, especially when the research is carried out from a perspective which is not
anti-people .4
Efforts towards control of the Rastafari ranged from the ideological to
the coercive, with the use of the Dangerous Drugs Law as the most prominent. At the
ideological level, the incorporation of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as a Church of
State, subsequent to the visit of Haile Selassie to Jamaica in 1966, showed the failure of
outright police harassment. It was not possible to keep on cutting the locks of the
Rastamen and putting them behind bars; thus the sociology of 'political cultism' was taken
off the library shelf to see if the movement could be isolated into the realm of an
obscure 'sect'. But the movement kept on growing. The original spate of
studies which stamped the movement with the 'escapist cult of outcasts' failed to explain
the massive spread of the culture inside Jamaica, in the English-speaking Caribbean, and
ultimately as the most dynamic force among the children of black immigrants in the United
Kingdom.
There is no doubt that whatever the limitations of the cultural
pluralist analysis, the emphasis on locks, ganja and Haile Selassie in this literature has
had an impact on the development of the ideas of the movement. One only has to read
the writings of the Rastafari in the fifties and the present organs of some Rastafari,
such as the Voice of Rasta, to see the results of bourgeois sociology and anthropology.
Another of the original distortions of the movement which has gained
currency is the stamp of criminality on the movement. From the original police
harassment in the hills of Sligoville to the British police attitude towards the
'criminalised dreadlocks subculture', the ideas of those works which linked ganja to crime
has given sustenance to State violence against the Rastafari. Rastafari
confrontation with the State over the usage of ganja is examined to show the folly of the
attempt to outlaw a popular custom, viz., the smoking of the chillurn pipe.
However, as in all aspects of Rasta life, the dialectic of the positive
and negative emerges in the form of the Coptics and the international trade in ganja.
Similarities can be drawn between the takeover of the kola-nut trade in West Africa
by the Afro-Portuguese in the era of the slave trade, and the intervention of the
Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church in the new circuit of capitalist trade in ganja. The
sophisticated methods of transport, procurement and harvesting of the Ethiopian Zion
Coptic Church are a far cry from the original system of small farmers planting the weed as
a crop to provide additional income. But, because the State has systematically used
the Dangerous Drugs Law against the Rastafari, imperialism hoped to bind the brethren in a
united bond with the Coptics, who wanted the weed legalised as a 'holy sacrament'.
The boast of the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church in 1980 that "ganja
saved Jamaica from Communism" raises further questions on the purpose of this 'white
Rasta' formation which emanated from Star Island, Florida. The experiment in
subversion by a pseudo-popular group had been duplicated in the other regions of the
Caribbean, with the opposition elements in Grenada attempting to bind Rastafarians into
supporting their international trading activities. From Handsworth, Birmingham, to
St. Thomas, Jamaica; from the Turks and Caicos Islands to Soweto, imperialism has used the
trade in this commodity to lure young blacks into the commodity fetishism of the
capitalist order. Inside Jamaica the trade in ganja in the early sixties had
provided the surpluses necessary for the growth of a lumpen stratum which was part of the
ganja/gun/crime complex.
The Rastafari who had rejected the two-party competition were not aloof
from the political struggles of the society. Instead of becoming pawns in the
political game they used the medium of the Rasta song - reggae - to mobilise the people.
Despite the promotion of religious forms, despite the distortions by the media and
the infiltration of the ranks by lumpens (who wore locks), the Rastafari had begun to
promote the cultural and musical forms in the search for a popular culture. Ras
Daniel Hartman's depiction of the Rasta - as a lionhearted man - complemented Count
Ossie's use of the drum to fashion and deepen the music as a tool of communication, and
become the Rastafari form of cultural resistance.
In analysing the culture of resistance, called reggae, it becomes clear
that the conscious efforts to internationalise this music stemmed from the fact that the
Rastafarians understood that in the neo-colonial society of Jamaica it was only the
attainment of international recognition which would lead the music to become the music of
Jamaica. Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff and other reggae artists who took the music of the
poor around the world were in the process of producing their music to contribute to a new
anti-imperialist culture. Mastering the skills and technology of modern
communication, the Rastafari song of defiance and inspiration took root in the world,
spreading the anti-racist doctrines of the Jamaican movement to the Eastern Caribbean, and
to the capitalist metropoles. Bob Marley's intervention on the side of the
Zimbabwean guerillas, and his historic appearance at the Zimbabwean Independence
Celebrations, signalled a shift in emphasis of the movement from the preoccupation with
Haile Selassie and Ethiopia to the battles for liberation in Southern Africa. Peter
Tosh, who as a youth had been arrested for demonstrating against Ian Smith in Jamaica,
simply put the words to song in "We Must Fight Against Apartheid".
The Rastafari song - reggae - was the highest form of self-expression,
an expression which was simultaneously an act of social commentary and a manifestation of
deep racial memory. This memory had been kept alive by the attempt of the Rasta to
build upon the foundations of the Jamaican language with their own contribution, called
Rasta talk. The question of cultural resistance could not be examined simply within
the context of music, since the food policy - called ital food - the language, and efforts
at communal practices were as much a part of the rasta culture as the song of mobilisation
which said "Get Up, Stand Up, Stand Up For Your Rights".
Walter Rodney's Groundings are analysed as part of the positive
experience of a black intellectual who sought to "attach himself to the activity of
the black masses". Rodney had perceived correctly that the Rastafari were
"the leading force of the expression of black consciousness in the Caribbean",
but he did not trail behind the movement; instead he brought his training as a historian
to the movement, in an effort to lift the movement beyond the myths of Ethiopia and Haile
Selassie. His exercise of Groundings, his clear identification with the most
oppressed sections of the Caribbean people, were part of his awareness that the region
should be liberated from foreign domination to be really independent. The Rastafari
was one component of the people's right to their own history. He believed, as Cabral
did, that the return to history could only be achieved when there was full development of
the national productive forces. Cabral noted that:
"The foundation of national liberation rests on the inalienable right of every people to have their own history; whatever formulations must be adopted at the level of international law. The objective of national liberation is therefore to reclaim the right, usurped by imperialist domination, namely: the liberation of the process of development of national productive forces. Therefore, national liberation takes place when and only when national productive forces are completely free of all kinds of foreign domination. The liberation of productive forces and consequently the ability to determine the mode of production most appropriate to the evolution of the liberated people, necessarily opens up new prospects for the cultural development of the society in question, by returning to that society all its capacity to create progress."5
Walter Rodney, the Pan-African, Pan-Caribbean
Marxist, saw within the racial expressions of the Rastafari a possibility of
assisting the region to free itself from foreign domination. He was fully aware of
the negative influences of the movement, but he was sure that if the positive attributes
could be harnessed, without complexes and without underestimating the importance of the
positive contributions of other cultures, the Rastafari movement could be part of the
dynamic regeneration of the working people in their search for complete freedom from
imperialist domination. Rodney used the tools of historical materialism to analyse
the emergence of the Rasta, patiently pointing out to them that there was an Africa of the
villages, and that only a small minority lived in Kingdoms.
The negative results of the question of race had put a brake on the
unity of the working people of the Caribbean, with the Trinidadian and Guyanese working
people burdened with racial insecurity. Rodney had grown up in a society where the
politicisation of race and the manipulation of African and Indian workers had diverted the
energies of the people. The spread of the Rastafari movement to the Eastern
Caribbean was to be a major test of whether a movement which called for black dignity
could manifest racial tolerance.
Conscious elements in the Eastern Caribbean identified the divisive
racial alignments at the political level as a negative factor, and were working for a
nonracial society, but those whose interest lay in exploiting the people would not want
the Rastafari to prosper, hence they were seen to be subversive. The coercive
legislation against the Dreads in Dominica, the discussion of the Rasta in Trinidad after
Stalin's tribute to the Caribbean Man, and the subsequent role of the Rastafari in
the Grenadian revolution in 1979 were clear signs that the Rastafari movement was destined
to be part of a new Caribbean. Walter Rodney recognised this fact, and in his work
with the Working People's Alliance of Guyana called for the recognition of the nature of
the Caribbean working class which would necessitate the mobilisation of elements who were
not at the point of production. Underdevelopment had rendered more than 40% of the
population unemployed, and cosmetic measures such as 'Special Works' or 'Crash Programmes'
could not deal with this fundamental problem of failure to fully mobilise the productive
capacity of the working people.
The urgency of the task of harnessing the full potential of the working
people, especially the Rastafari, became clear in the United Kingdom as the music of
reggae took hold of the children of the immigrants. The explosion of this movement
in the seventies confounded the social workers, leaving them to wring their hands while
the police used all the power of the State against the youths who called themselves
Rastafari. An elaborate system of social control over these youths, which began in
the 'disruptive units' of the schools and ended for some in the Victorian prisons, was
justified by State intellectuals who branded the Rasta with the stamp of criminality.
Building upon the foundations of the distortions which had been
embedded in the first Report of the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, the Home Office
and the media moulded a popular conception that the Rastafari formed a 'criminalised
dreadlock culture'. British racism stared the Rastas in the face as a doctoral
dissertation was woven to link Rastas to murder. The ensuing book, Rastaman by
Ernest Cashmore, compared the Howell commune at Pinnacle to the murderous Charles Manson
cult of California. Such distortions of the purpose of the Rasta call for more
research and writing on the Rasta from a perspective which examines the social conditions
of society which produces Rasta. More and more it is important that there is a need
to study the institutions which oppress the Rasta and other black working people, instead
of retracing the old ground broken by the first report in 1960.
It is inevitable that the Rastafari movement in Britain would be
affected by the level of ideological development in the capitalist metropoles. The
virulent white racism of the society and the befuddling of the working people with
national chauvinism led to the impoverishment of ideas in this crisis-ridden capitalist
centre. Caught in the society of militarists and racists, some of the negative ideas
of the Rastafari came to the fore, and these were to manifest themselves in inter-personal
relationships, with the Rasta women being burdened with the view that "women could
only see fari through their men". Some elements sought biblical justification
for their actions, as they manifested practices which were not particularly progressive.
Twice removed from their homeland in Africa and from their adopted home
in the Caribbean, the Rastafari, as a part of the black population of Europe, yearned for
a land which they could call their home. The sentiments towards repatriation, which
were issued in the cry of the fifties - Ethiopia Yes, England No - re-emerged as the black
immigrants sought to escape the growing racist attacks on the streets of Britain.
Some young Rasta translated this yearning into a passionate appeal for repatriation.
Herein lay another contradiction, for the Rasta youths were calling for
repatriation at precisely the time when the racists in the State apparatus were
articulating the Nationality Bill and speaking about repatriating black people.
Those who did not know African history were not to know that in another epoch there had
been a convergence of a racist/humanist project in the Sierra Leone settlement. The
chapter on Repatriation and the Ethiopian Revolution attempts to show the results of three
former schemes of repatriation: the Sierra Leone forced deportations of 1786, the
colonisation scheme of Liberia, and the Shashamane settlement.
The Liberian Scheme has shown concretely that those who sought black
dignity had to return to Africa with more than the search for respect, or they would carry
with them the capitalist values of exploitation, as shown in the experience of the
relationship between those who returned and the indigenous population. The
settlement in Shashamane, Ethiopia, remained small, but similar problems of individualism
and competition had dogged the settlement, especially when it was tied to the royal
household.
It remains the right of any black person, whether or not they are
Rasta, to repatriate to Africa, but such a move cannot be carried out under any illusions
as to the nature of contemporary African society. That the continent of Africa is in
ferment and that not even Rastas can remain aloof from this ferment was demonstrated in
Shashamane when the Ethiopian people expropriated the land of the settlers in 1975.
This act of expropriation was the way in which the peasants of Ethiopia, in the process of
the Ethiopian revolution, were saying to the Rastafari that the Haile Selassie that they
deified was not the same Haile Selassie who helped to mobilise the people against Italian
fascism.
Would the Rastas listen to the people of Ethiopia and have the humility
to understand that their embrace of Haile Selassie was an affront to the struggles of the
African people? This question remains a burning issue, especially for those who have
consciously built up rituals and hierarchy to create the Rastafari religion. Those
who have not been carried away with the rituals are responding to the struggles of the
people of Southern Africa, with the Grenadian Rastas showing that wherever there is
clarity of purpose, the Rastas can be mobilised to struggle where they live.
The struggle in Southern Africa calls for Rastas to transcend the forms
of cultural resistance to embark on a programme of cultural liberation which would release
the creativity of black peoples everywhere.
Horace Campbell, September 1981, London
FOOTNOTES
PREFACE |
CHAPTER ONE PART I |
Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney, by Horace Campbell (African World Press 1987), pp. 1-9.