by Ian Thomson
The lectures became a cause célèbre not just in Jamaica, but in all the West Indies. On 15 October 1968, after attending a Black Writers’ Conference in Canada, Rodney was banned from reentering Jamaica. Hugh Shearer, Jamaica’s conservative prime minister, proclaimed the Guyanese historian persona non grata. In retaliation, students at the Jamaican campus of the University of the West Indies threatened to boycott lessons unless Rodney was allowed to return.
Rioting - the so-called Rodney Riots - broke out in Kingston over a period of two days. Rastafarians joined students in marches downtown, shouting ‘Black Power!’ Accusations of police brutality were levelled and the Gleaner newspaper building - symbol of Judaeo-Chinese-Syrian ‘oppression’ -- was besieged. One man was shot dead; cars were burned and overturned. Rodney decamped to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where he was welcomed by President Julius Nyerere. Twelve years later, in 1980, he was assassinated in his homeland of Guyana, of whose government he had been no less critical.
In hindsight, the ‘Rodney Affair’ served to unite Jamaicans of all backgrounds in an uptown-downtown alliance that called for an end to foreign investment and, even, the nationalisation of certain key industries. After the riots, the authorities came to embrace a dilute form of Black Power, and promoted Jamaican cultural ‘selfawareness’ on a national scale.
Yet, forty years on, Jamaica is still riddled with social distinctions. Everyone in Jamaica today (black, white, brown) prides themselves on their superiority, while at the same time everyone is uneasily aware that someone, somewhere (Chinese, Jewish, black), regards them as inferior.
I was back at PJ’s when the telephone rang.
The voice at the other end of the line asked me: ‘I take it that you’re a Caucasian of British nationality?’
It belonged to Arthur Newland, a lecturer in religious anthropology at the University of the West Indies in Kingston.
‘Yes,’ I answered, a bit nettled, ‘I’m a Caucasian. Of British nationality.’ I had contacted Newland for permission to visit the Bobo Ashanti Rastafarians in their community situated due east of Kingston, in the volatile Nine Mile region of Bull Bay.
‘And you’re a journalist?’ the voice went on severely. ‘Well, we don’t like journalists snooping around up there - poking fun.’ A silence. ‘What gives you the right to visit the community? Why do you want to visit?’
Of all the Rastafari offshoots, the Bobo are reckoned to be among the most ascetic and uncompromising. While most Rastafarians have integrated in varying degrees within Jamaican society, the Bobo are not interested in accommodating (still less in changing) that society, because they have effectively disowned it. As fundamentalists, they have withdrawn from the mainstream of island life and taken a Nazarene vow of poverty. In order to support themselves they sell brooms at traffic-lights in Kingston; the brooms are symbolic of the Bobo endeavour to ‘sweep away’ the filth of Babylon.
In recent years, thanks to the fiery, drum-driven chants of the Bobo adept Sizzla, membership of the cult has grown. Sizzla’s dancehall reggae goes beyond the usual gangsta celebrations of Hennessy brandy and Nike trainers. Woman & Child, his extraordinary 1997 album, is a righteous hymn to ‘black supremacy’ and the suffering caused by colonialism. Sizzla sees himself, in his tightwrapped turban and long flowing gown, as a chastiser of the wicked come to cauterise the human heart of sin. And, like many Bobo, he appears to advocate violence (even if only symbolic violence) as a vehicle of deliverance: his lyrics are full of an Old Testament outraged godliness and the words ‘purify’, ‘burn’, ‘overthrow’.
Yet, despite his biblical image, in 2005 Sizzla was arrested at his home in Judgement Yard (outside Kingston) for suspected gunrunning and incitement to gang violence. The Nine Mile community, rightly or wrongly, is seen by many ordinary Jamaicans as a hive of criminality.
Professor Newland was proving hard to persuade but, not wanting to be pushed into defeat, I told him: ‘Look, it’s not my intention to stare and make fun.’
‘All right,’ - his voice softened - ‘ask for Anthony Morgan, a Bobo priest. Say I sent you.’
I had no idea of what a Rastafari community-a utopian community - was like. It was important to keep an open mind, I reminded myself, as we set off for Bull Bay in a taxi.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon and the sun blazed down out of a cloudless sky. Myrtha Desulmé, a Haitian friend who lived in Kingston, was in the taxi with me. Black and strikingly stylish, Myrtha had fled Papa Doc’s tyrannous Haiti with her parents in the 1960s. I was sure she would impress the Bobo Ashanti. She had dressed for the occasion in a Kente print dress, madras scarf and gold hoop-earrings, and looked like an Ashanti princess strayed into the Caribbean. Along the way, she teased me for my avowed interest in Africa and Afro-Haitian animist cults.
‘You blancs always like to hunt for the dark - for the black, the alternative.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes,’ Myrtha went on with a shrug, ‘you always go on about Africa’s supreme natural beauty - its capacity for intuition, spontaneity, the ancient wisdom of its customs and instincts.’
‘Do we? And what about you? Do you believe in any of that?’
‘Only a bit,’ she said with a touch of coquetry.
We turned up a dirt track that lead to a squatter settlement, where the corrugated-iron fencing had been spray-gunned: ‘Poor People Fed Up To How De System Set Up’. The squatters, in their cinder-block huts, lived just below the Bobo commune, and cooperated with the ‘dreads’ in harnessing water and other resources.
On foot we toiled up a steep path, too narrow for the taxi, that overlooked a dried-out river. Our spirits rose as we continued on up the hill. The first clear view of Bull Bay was unrepeatably dramatic; way below us the Caribbean Sea spread out a dark, deep blue. The Bobo hillside community commanded giddy views all round and was encircled by wooden palisades like a US cavalry fort. Over the entrance there was the painted sign: ‘BLACK SOVEREIGN NATION’.
A Bobo priest came to greet us, arrayed in a green turban and a green cape. Pinned to his cape was an outsize badge of Haile Selassie and another, equally big, of Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican apostle of black liberation. The Bobo priest, assuming a grave hieratic manner, introduced himself as Anthony Morgan - my Newland contact. He greeted me warmly, if disconcertingly, as ‘Lord’, while to Myrtha he bowed smilingly and said: ‘Blessed, my Empress.’ These magnificently medieval titles are adopted by the Bobo in opposition to the bourgeois convention of ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’.
If Myrtha was ‘sick’ (menstruating) she would not be allowed inside the commune. Women are rarely an elevated sex among Rastafarians and are viewed by the Bobo as virtual chattels or Delilah figures whose legs and arms must be covered in the presence of their ‘Lords’. Once a month they must go into menstrual reclusion, when they are kept out of sight in a sickbay built for the purpose.
An elderly priestess approached us carrying a wall calendar. The calendar was to determine the extent of Myrtha’s ‘defilement’. Here my resolution to be open-minded was stretched. Was it humane to subject a woman to a test like this in public? While the crone consulted with Myrtha I turned my back and looked out over Bull Bay; minutes went by. Having passed the calendar test, Myrtha was allowed to accompany me into the guardhouse. There, into a cardboard box, went our mobile phones, credit cards, taperecorders, pens and other trappings of ‘Babylon’.
I looked around. On one wall was a brightly coloured relief map of Africa, on which the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa was symbolised by a huge, five-pointed Judaic-Rastafarian Star of David. Next to that were black-and-white photographs of Marcus Garvey and Haile Selassie. Though Selassie had been condemned by Garvey as a ‘great coward’ (for fleeing Mussolini’s troops in 1935), the Bobo revere him as a breathing - for he is not really dead - divinity. Even Bobo children, mere saplings in His Imperial Majesty Selassie’s vineyard, must answer to the authority of the Ethiopian Pope Almighty.
Bobo Ashanti, founded in
the 1950s by the Jamaican mystic Prince Emmanuel Edwards, owes its blend of Black Power and Pan-Africanism chiefly to Marcus Garvey, one of the most bizarre and misunderstood figures in twentieth-century black history. Born in Jamaica in 1887 to freed slave parents, Garvey had grown up with a powerful sense of racial awareness and grievance. On leaving elementary school, he worked as a printer in Kingston and at an early age became involved in movements aimed at improving the lot of black people. In 1914, during his self-imposed exile in Harlem, New York, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), intended to ‘regenerate’ and encourage the English-speaking black diaspora to ‘return’ to Africa. By the end of the First World War, branches of the UNIA had been set up in several American cities; Garvey boasted a membership of six million.
By embracing blackness and black race-consciousness, Garvey would be revered one day in Jamaica as a prophet. (His given middle name, Mosiah, was a hybrid of Moses and Messiah.) His Black Star Line shipping company was launched in 1919 with the aim of linking black communities in the United States with those in the Caribbean, as well as transporting them (should they volunteer) to a ‘Negro Empire’ in Africa. Though the company eventually collapsed through unpaid debts, it gave an immense sense of pride to black people, not only in Jamaica, but in parts of Central America populated by Jamaican migrant workers.
Garvey’s adopted Harlem remained the centre of UNIA activity. One in five Harlemites was estimated to be West Indian; many were Jamaicans who had earned good money in Panama in the early 1900s when the United States took over construction of the canal. These were the energetic ‘Colón Men’ who brought a taste of the tropics to Harlem. Nowhere else came close to the ‘hot syncopated fascination’ of that part of New York, wrote the Jamaican novelist Claude McKay, later a leading light in the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s.
Jamaicans blocked traffic to hear Garvey preach in Harlem, their numbers swelled by curious, impoverished African Americans. Before long the Garveyite ideal of black emancipation had fused with the ‘Harlemania’ that took hold in Lower Manhattan nightclubs, as wealthy white thrill-seekers danced to Duke Ellington hothouse stomps and bumped up against West Indian migrant mento and the ragtime of tin-pan pianos. Black folk heritage - so-called ‘primitive’ art and music - became the mainstay of the Harlem Renaissance and behind it lay a Jamaican’s doctrine of black self-help and empowerment.
By the late 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance had tapered off. Orson Welles’s ‘voodoo’ version of Macbeth, staged in Harlem in 1935, was the movement’s last gasp. (Macduff had been made to resemble a cartoon Haile Selassie, while a troupe of West African dancers contorted luridly on stage amid live goats.) While it lasted, though, the Harlem Renaissance had provided an important link between Jamaica and the pre-civil rights United States, which endures as the numbers of Jamaicans living in America continues to swell.
In his day, however, Garvey invited a degree of ridicule. He dressed in martial regalia copied from European Fascist models, sumptuously plumed and braided. Zora Neale Hurston, the African American author and folklorist, visited Garvey at his home on 129th Street in Harlem: ‘On the walls of his living room hung a large picture of Napoleon,’ she wrote. ‘On the opposite wall hung one, still larger, of himself.’ Yet in lampooning Garvey for his ‘narcissistic Bonapartism’, Hurston and other Garvey-baiters rather missed the point. The Napoleonic hats and gowns were part of a master plan to create a parallel world equal to that of the white man. In his love of pomp and ceremony, Garvey may be said to have anticipated Mugabe, Amin, Bokassa, Kenyatta and other (originally well-intentioned) African leaders who ravaged Africa.
The line separating fantasy from reality was not always easy to draw with Garvey. Somewhere in his messianic notions of Africa and African redemption lurked a dubious race politics. In the March-April 1934 edition of his Black Man journal Garvey proclaimed Adolf Hitler a ‘wonderful personality’ and ‘trailblazer’ who (in Jamaican fashion) demanded ‘respect’. Later, when it became clear to Garvey that European Jewry was under the Nazi threat of extermination, he revised his earlier opinion of Hitler. Had he not done so, Jamaica may have been less keen to make him - as it did in 1964 - the island’s first National Hero. Even so, Garvey’s canonisation in modern Jamaica contains a contradiction: it claims the island as a black nation, when in reality Garvey’s birthplace is a multi-racial, many-coloured nation. ‘Out of Many, One People’ is the hopeful Jamaican motto, reminiscent of the first motto of the United States, E Pluribus Unum - One from Many.
Garvey was even accused by his critics of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Garvey denied the charge (ridiculous, in any case, since the Klan were intent on lynching black people). Yet Garvey did not deny that he had met, in Atlanta in 1922, the Klan’s Imperial Wizard. The Klan, in Garvey’s tolerant view, had no other desire ‘than to preserve their race from suicide through miscegenation’. Union between black and white was for Garvey regrettable, as it threatened ‘a wholesale bastardy of the race’. Black people could find no future in white or even mixed-race societies, no matter how socially advanced these might be. Mixed marriages were thus a ‘social misfortune’. Since that time white supremacists have tried to show Garvey up as a crypto-racist. In 1960s and 1970s Britain, not uncommonly, conservatives depicted Garveyite Black Power movements as an equivalent, anti-white racism, ‘Enoch Powellism in Reverse’. Needless to say, the analogy is absurd: people with white skin generally enjoy the liberty of not having to define themselves in terms of race.
In 1922 the United States imprisoned Marcus Garvey after a conviction for fraud; he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment - later mitigated to deportation. By the time Garvey died in London in 1940, at the age of fifty-two, black disaffection in his native Jamaica and the diaspora had become more militant by his example.
Jamaica’s first preacher of Rastafari, Leonard Percival Howell, was a militant Garveyite. In 1934 he was sentenced to two years’ hard labour for the ‘crime’ of selling picture-postcards of the lately crowned Haile Selassie. The act was judged to be seditious by the colonial courts as it showed disrespect for the British Crown. In 1940 Howell formed the Ethiopian Salvation Society, a forerunner of Bobo Ashanti, whose headquarters were in a ruinous, 1,300-acre sugar estate called Pinnacle, north-east of Spanish Town. Howell was hailed ‘Gong’ (or ‘Prince Regent’) by his followers, who, aided by quantities of ganja (‘thou shalt eat the herb of the field ...’ Genesis 3:18), reasoned from the Bible. Howell alone meted out punishments which occasionally involved flogging.
At Pinnacle the Howellites practised a Bobo-like ideal of communal labour, looked to Selassie for salvation and began to wear their hair in dreadlocks in imitation of Kenya’s anti-colonial Mau-Mau. In so doing, they struck a blow at Jamaican planter privilege and anticipated Walter Rodney’s racial defiance two decades later. In 1955, however, the commune was finally dissolved by the Jamaican government.
‘Howell wasn’t a bad man,’ Patrick Mudahy had told me, ‘but maybe he was a mad one.’ In Jamaica the distinction can be quite a fine one. For many Jamaicans, Howell was like the man in the padded cell who believes he is God.
I was peering at a photograph of Idi Amin on display in the Bobo guardhouse when a voice cut in on my thoughts. ‘You know Amin Dada?’ A young-looking Bobo priest was observing me. I said to him: ‘Not personally. Why? Is Amin worshipped here?’
The priest gave me a glance of ironical enquiry. ‘Amin is respected here.’
Amin is in fact believed by the Bobo to be a physical reincarnation of Marcus Garvey. No theology is more fluid or more elusive than Rastafari. Without scriptures and ordained leadership, adepts are free to invent their own version of the creed and their own divinities, even if one of them is Idi Amin.
‘Surely it would be better to dis-incarnate from Amin,’ I said to the priest. The Ugandan president had inflicted a murderous racism on his country’s Asian community.
The priest, ignoring the remark, said
: ‘All good men are Rasta,’ and led me towards a wooden coffer at one end of the guardhouse. A hole in the top revealed it to be an offertory box. At his invitation, I put a couple of notes through the hole. ‘Blessed, my Lord,’ he said to me solemnly.
Next, Myrtha and I were invited to salute the Holy Trinity of the Bobo Ashanti, which consists of Selassie (King), Garvey (Prophet) and the sect’s founder, Prince Emmanuel (Priest). As we did so, the Bobo priest held his hands together at crotch-level, displaying a triangle-shape between splayed fingers and thumbs. The gesture was symbolic of the Bobo ‘Godhead triumvirate’ and not intended to be sexually suggestive. It is said that Haile Selassie descended from the plane in Kingston with his hands held in this way; his supporters saw the gesture as highly significant.
Thus triply blessed, we set off under escort to the Bobo temple, passing on the way storerooms, a kitchen, a generating plant, and a field of gungu peas. At the entrance we were instructed to take off our shoes (which I was happy to do, it was so hot). There were virtually no windows in the bungalow-like building. Three Bobo elders sat in turbans at a long table in front of us like a tribunal. A personal computer rested on the table; to the right of the table stood a filing cabinet covered in stickers: ‘I LOVE AFRICA’. A life-sized painting of Prince Emmanuel in imagined conversation with Haile Selassie hung on the wall behind the turbaned priests. Selassie, eagle-beaked, looked like a company executive; Emmanuel had the patriarchal mien of a Highland chieftain.