by Ian Thomson
Myrtha and I were gestured to sit down. One of the priests nodded for us to speak. Bearded, he wore a blue turban and said his name was Harold Mitchell.
‘Who are you?’ Mitchell turned to me.
I was worried that I would not be welcome here. White people are the demons, the Pharisees, the Philistines, the Pharaoh people and, as such, potential emissaries of ‘Babylon’. All the concentrated malignity of Satan - according to Sizzla - is to be found in the white man.
‘I’m a writer,’ I replied.
‘Books? You are a writer of books? What kind of books? Please tell.’
It did not seem the appropriate place or time to embark on a literary discussion.
‘I’m writing a book about Jamaica,’ I said, evasively.
Harold Mitchell scrutinised me. ‘Are you married? How many children have you? I sometimes think of visiting London. How much does it cost to spend the night there?’
‘That depends,’ I said, ‘on what sort of night you want to spend.’
Prophet Mitchell smiled at his attendant patriarchs, before turning to Myrtha.
‘Empress. Who are you? And where are you from?’
‘Haiti.’
‘The black nation?’
‘Haiti was the world’s first black republic.’
Harold Mitchell lowered his head in a small (very small: Myrtha was a woman) gesture of respect.
Myrtha, with assertiveness in her voice, now asked the priest why the Bobo did not simply ‘get up’ and go to Africa. Right now.
The Bobo replied evenly, ‘We’re ready to go back at any time. We’re only waiting for the ship to come from Africa.’
‘But why,’ Myrtha persisted, ‘has the ship not come yet? Where is Haile Selassie? Why are you not ready to ride the Lion to Zion?’ For Myrtha, the dream of a return to Africa was just that-a dream. Jamaica, she confided to me later, needed to put its own house in order; Africa was a distraction.
‘These things take time, black princess lady,’ explained Harold Mitchell, visibly taken aback. There was no agreement as yet on the date of departure to Africa, and funds were a problem. The Garveyite agenda for repatriation required money - lots of it.
Harold Mitchell, with a touch of annoyance, continued, ‘We are the exiled children of Ethiopia - we are sufferers.’ Bobo Ashanti are quick to subscribe to the doctrine of ‘exploitation’ and ‘victimhood’. Yet that word ‘sufferer’ - sufferah, in island patois - is bandied about by Jamaican academics and politicians as shorthand for ‘righteous poor person’. William Beckford (father of the Gothic novelist of the same name who had tried but failed to visit Jamaica in 1787), in his A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790), had referred to ‘sufferers’, and Lady Nugent in her Jamaica diary of 1801-5 spoke of the ‘poor sufferer’s life’ with the same assumption of superiority. The term, by conferring a victim status, implied a deficiency that cannot be overcome and seemed to me dubious.
There is the lure of Ethiopia, and there is the lure of another, equally unobtainable salvation. In 1834, according to a Jamaican legend, Queen Victoria had earmarked £120 million for the repatriation of her West Indian subjects to West Africa. The project was never carried out, yet the Bobo believe the money is still owed to them. Prophet Mitchell had done his mathematics. ‘With accumulated interest, the figure now stands at £7,469,696, 470,000,’ he told us.
Myrtha (who was beginning to embarrass me) said, ‘What?’
‘Seven trillion four hundred and sixty-nine billion, six hundred and ninety-six million, and four hundred and seventy thousand pounds sterling,’ said the priest.
‘That’s what the British Crown owes?’ I asked.
‘That’s right,’ Mitchell said. As this madness (if one can call it that) had slavery at its heart, it demanded something more than mere amazement as a response. Jamaicans had not asked to come to Jamaica: ‘imperialistic interlopers’ - to use Walter Rodney’s phrase - had brought them here. The British Crown had a responsibility to redeem and compensate them.
Yet did the Bobo really expect to find salvation in war-torn Ethiopia? Only the most romantic could claim that Ethiopians ever lived (still less, live today) in a state of prelapsarian grace. Marcus Garvey had described Haile Selassie as a ‘feudal Monarch who looks down upon his slaves and serfs with contempt’.
The Bobo elders wanted to hear my view on slavery. I began carefully (disliking the tone of righteousness in my voice) to speak about the question of responsibility. Slavery - chattel servitude - had been a part of Selassie’s Solomonic Empire, and in fact most African nation states (Dahomey, Oyo, the Niger city-states) had practised slavery. In 1817, the Ashanti nation had even asked Britain to allow them to renew the slave trade-a request from one aggressively imperialising, militaristic nation to another. The Bobo Ashanti had taken their name from the Ashanti (sometimes spelled Asante).
Cautiously I said, ‘I’m not saying that Selassie was a slave-driver, only that there was a flourishing slave trade in Ethiopia under his rule.’ I could feel myself stepping on dangerous territory.
After anxious consultation with each other, the Bobo elders asked me if I was Jewish. Why? Because only the black race are the ‘true Israelites’ - they, the blacks, are the true children of Israel, the Chosen People who have long been denied their earthly Zion. From this it followed that the Jews eradicated by Hitler were ‘false Jews’ merely. To brand those Jews as ‘false’ struck me as callous, even contemptible. The millenarian creed of Rastafari, I decided, was not something I could easily buy into, not just because of its illiberal traits (the nasty streak of misogyny) but because the absolutism of its blood-and-brimstone visions was temperamentally alien to the dilute Anglicanism in which I had been reared.
But, in spite of its spiritual ferocity, Rastafari has now penetrated every level of Jamaican society. At Kingston dinner parties it is not uncommon to meet guests who forbear to eat pork (pork is prohibited in Rastafari as it is in Judaism), as well as processed or canned foods and salt. Middle-class attitudes to Rastafari changed for the better two years prior to independence, when in 1960 the Jamaican government commissioned the University of the West Indies to compile a report on the movement’s rituals and beliefs.
One of the authors of the report, Professor Roy Augier, is currently coordinator of the UNESCO General History of the Caribbean (a heroic project that has been under way since 1980). He met me in the courtyard of the Senior Common Room at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, where he teaches history. A year before the report came out, recalled Augier, Kingston had witnessed an extraordinary saga of ‘muddled idealism, Millenarian delusions and plain trickery’, when 15,000 Rastafarians were duped by a mystic clergyman, Claudius Henry, into buying ‘Miraculous Repatriation’ tickets to Ethiopia. For almost a week, Henry’s supporters camped outside his Kingston church in expectation of proceeding from there to Haile Selassie’s kingdom in Africa. No ship came, and riots broke out when police came to disperse the aggrieved ‘ticket’ holders. Henry was prosecuted and imprisoned.
One year later, in 1960, fear and distrust of Rastafari intensified when the Reverend Henry’s son, Ronald Henry, made a hare-brained attempt to ‘liberate’ Jamaica from British rule. With a group of African American self-styled revolutionaries he set up a guerrilla base in the Red Hills district above Kingston. There, he and his Bronx-based Black Power militia units (called the First Africa Corps) trained some 500 Rastafarians in the art of urban warfare. Before they could launch an attack on government centres in Kingston, however, their base was stormed by Jamaican and British soldiers, accompanied by aircraft and mortars. The guerrillas were all captured, several were executed and two soldiers died in an ambush.
It was during these troubled times that the Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica was published. From the report’s careful, expository tones, Rastafari emerges as the peaceable, law-abiding religion it generally is. After a generation in the wilderness, Rastafarians now had an audie
nce. ‘The report was very widely read,’ Augier told me. ‘A group of Rastas even bought cut-price copies from the University bookshop and photocopied them to sell at a profit downtown.’ A slew of books on Rastafari followed, but none has ever equalled that report for its objectivity and sympathy. One of its recommendations - addressed directly to the Jamaican government - was that a mission should be sent to Ethiopia to investigate the possibility of settling Jamaicans there. During the 1950s and 1960s some 2,500 West Indian and African American Rastafarians went to live in the vicinity of Addis Ababa (in what is now Shashamane Village) but only 300 of their number are believed to remain today.
After my visit to the Bobo encampment, at a friend’s house in Kingston I met a descendant of Haile Selassie, Bella Tekle-Hawariat. Bella was self-confessedly one of Addis Ababa’s Amharic elite; a necklace of semi-precious stones glinted at her throat. She had been educated in Switzerland, and prided herself on having Ethiopian as well as European manners. Her father, Germachew Tekle-Hawariat, had been a government minister under Haile Selassie.
‘You should go to Ethiopia one day,’ Bella said to me. ‘The landscape has a wild exhilaration. But,’ she added, ‘there is much corruption now.’ The corruption was a legacy of the ‘Red Terror’ under President Mengistu and Ethiopia’s murderous border dispute with Eritrea. In Jamaica she preferred to keep quiet about her descent from Haile Selassie. Once, in the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, she got talking to a Rastafari member of staff. ‘He knew everything about the Ethiopian royal family - its descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Its ancient Semitic connections. He even corrected me on a point of my ancestry.’ Yet Selassie was not the great man Rastafari would have him be, said Bella. With his unbending antipathy to any kind of social reform he became out of touch and indifferent to the suffering of his people. ‘Selassie didn’t want to be taken up by Rastafari, of course not!’ said Bella with some irritation.
She added, ‘Do not forget that we Ethiopians are a people with thousands of years of civilisation behind us, we have a profound sense of our identity - of who and what we were, of what we are.’ Jamaica, by comparison, had no recorded ancient history, religion or civilisation of its own (other than a recent history of British cruelty). In the absence of an indigenous civilisation, American culture, for good and ill, has engulfed the shallow soil of Jamaica. America is there in the ubiquitous basketball courts, the inadequate public transport system, in the fat policemen in Kingston with their hands poised on bulging gun-holsters. ‘All the same,’ concluded Bella Tekle-Hawariat, ‘it’s odd that Jamaica has no Haile Selassie Street - Haiti does.’
Papa Doc Duvalier, the Haitian dictator, had revered Selassie as a crusader in the battle for black solidarity. Not only had he named a street after Selassie in the capital of Port-au-Prince, but in April 1966 he equipped the national palace with a special luxury bathroom to accommodate the Ethiopian ruler following his visit to Jamaica. I have seen the bathroom: the rim of the lavatory bowl is adorned with gold leaf.
9
Stranded on Death Row
While I was in Kingston I went to see Father Webb, a Canadian Jesuit operating from offices downtown. Jesuits are often regarded by other Catholics as not quite regular clergy (they refuse to be cloistered in a monastery) and Webb was no exception. He took his itinerant ministry to the people who needed it the most - the poorest of the Jamaican poor - and had been threatened with death for his trouble. To some branches of Rastafari, Jesuits are sinister self-publicists bent on disseminating ‘Romish’ propaganda. The pope is often ‘burned’ lyrically in reggae songs (Max Romeo’s ‘Fire Fi the Vatican’ is a good example), because the Vatican had blessed the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
Father Webb, though, was devoted to an ideal of ‘social justice’ and, in this role, had set up rural cooperatives and campaigned to abolish Jamaica’s death penalty. Catechising the poor with passages of scripture was of no interest to him. Any Jamaicans he had recruited to the Jesuit Order, he had done by ‘gentle cajolery’ (he allowed himself a smile) rather than by ‘proselytising’.
We met at St George’s Jesuit College on the sun-blistered South Camp Road. The school, founded in 1850, was set back from the main road amid banana groves and seemed peaceful. Father Webb, a tall, thin man in his mid-fifties, was the school principal; his job was to enrol and expel pupils, as well as adjudicate at exams. A sense of ordinary goodness surrounded him - his office was practical rather than pious, with bare wooden floors and filing cabinets. Only the pectoral cross round his neck betrayed his high rank as Jesuit Regional Superior for Jamaica; he wore lay sandals and a T-shirt.
Roman Catholics have lived in Jamaica since the Spanish period, he explained, and today they run some of the best secondary schools in the island. Even non-Catholic Jamaicans will tell you, ‘I want my child to go to a Roman school,’ meaning St George’s. Pupil attendance has declined in recent years owing to levels of violence downtown; parents are increasingly frightened to appear at dropoff and collection. ‘I can’t even get a pizza delivered here,’ said Father Webb, who was standing under a portrait of Saint Ignatius Loyola (founder in 1534 of the Jesuit movement). ‘Jamaicans are, anyway, much more apprehensive these days - there’s a general atmosphere of violence.’ In the twenty-five years he had lived in Kingston, said Father Webb, most things had been affected by the corruption of politics. ‘I’ve even had to root out corruption from St George’s but, unfortunately, impunity rules. You might say there’s a power in the land like that of the Mafia.’
Father Webb paused. ‘Jamaica has more poverty now, more marginality, unemployment and crime than it did when I arrived in the 1980s. Every house is grilled and double-grilled - and you only have to look at all the guard dogs ...’ In the past Father Webb had not hesitated to give lifts to people in the countryside; now he never does. ‘A man might come out of the shadows and then you’re in for all kinds of trouble,’ he explained. So he drives as twenty-first-century Jamaicans drive: his car doors locked, the windows up and the air-conditioning on.
Catholic priests are intermittently murdered in Jamaica in reprisal for their ‘meddlesome’ politics, or because they are perceived as being homosexual. In 1993, Ron Pieters, a Guyanese Jesuit priest, was found nailed to a post in Kingston’s Jonestown ghetto, symbolically thorned and crucified. The following year, in 1994, Father Vincent Power, a sixty-two-year-old Irishman, was shot dead while at prayer in his church in Falmouth on the north coast.
The killings intensified in the mid-1990s, when imports of crackcocaine fuelled a cold-blooded violence. In 2000, Father Howard Rochester was found murdered on an isolated road outside Kingston; his car and mobile phone had been stolen. In 2006, two trainee priests from the Philippines were killed in Kingston as a single bullet passed through both men while they washed up dishes in their missionary base.
All these priests had worked at the front line of the ghetto, and were not afraid to speak out for the voiceless. One murder in particular haunts Father Webb. In 2001 a forty-one-year-old Canadian Jesuit, Martin Royackers, was gunned down in the parish of St Mary, where he was a pastor. He had been shot at close range in the chest as he went to open his door. The case, entrusted to the local police, remains unsolved.
A fortnight prior to Royackers’s murder, Father Webb had received death threats which the Jamaican police took seriously. The threats had to do with Jesuit attempts to redistribute land, and for eight months Webb was assigned a police bodyguard. Today Webb wants to carry on Royackers’s work in rural cooperatives, and in particular his innovations in the Catholic liturgy. Royackers understood that the Catholic Church had to become more ‘Jamaican’ if it was to survive. So he rewrote the liturgy to incorporate Afro-Jamaican religious expression: drums, call-and-response rhythms sung like a mantra. ‘It’s the African element - the element of magic in all of our religions,’ said Father Webb.
Not all Jesuit attempts to translate Christian concepts into local vernaculars have been succ
essful - some Japanese converts to Jesuitism reportedly believe that Noah survived the flood in a canoe rather than an ark. Yet Royackers had brought non-Catholics to his services by making the Mass more lively and charismatic. As a good disciple of Loyola he even preached at Pentecostal and other evangelical gatherings. The Jamaican upper and middle classes, however, with their antipathy to Africa, prefer to worship at the Anglican Church, where Afro-Revivalism is not a part of the liturgy. Africa is a darkness-a void - to be circumvented, the continent of the tom-tom and the bush.
Next day I went to ten o’clock Mass in a red-brick church downtown dedicated to St Anne. The church, known as ‘Annie’s’, had been rebuilt after the earthquake of 1907, which devastated Kingston, and stood on the sniper alley between the JLP-loyal Denham Town and PNP-loyal Hannah Town. During outbreaks of gang warfare the Catholics of Hannah Town guide their priest safely down back streets to his home. In this part of Kingston the violence had become so prevalent that the inhabitants regarded it almost as part of the social fabric. Death was far and away the most thriving trade on this political borderline; one street was lined with undertaker parlours. With their white Doric columns and pilasters, they were like a poor man’s dream of heaven. Jamaicans, if they can afford it, will spend as much as US $30,000 for a Cadillac hearse.
Peter Mais, a Jamaican lawyer, had done much for the neighbourhood, taking time off work to help the poor. I felt a sense of patience and goodness in his company as we walked past a group of rough-looking types playing dominoes outside ‘Annie’s’. His patch included the slums of Jonestown, Denham Town, Tivoli Gardens and Rose Town, home to many deportees (‘dips’) or convicted Jamaican criminals who had been sent back from Britain, the United States or Canada. ‘Sometimes as many as fifty deportees arrive in a single day,’ Mais told me. ‘They have no family, they don’t speak patois, and they can be very, very violent.’