Interesting reasoning i must say.....let us see how long we can keep killing ourselves in defense over people who have not yet spent time to redeem themselves over the atrocities they have committed on this earth.
A people who doesn’t find it fitting to step down from their high place, to apologize to the world's darker peoples. A people, who by virtue of their barbarism has enjoyed the fruits of the earth while sitting on the backs of others. A people who has yet to restore the balance of the world they have almost destroyed. The genocide against people who have shown them love and kindness. question is...do we forgive them ? Do we ask them to return our belongings? Do we ask them to leave our lands? Do we chase them out of our lands? How do we do this thing? Or are we going to let it go? Or should we let it go? And why" But put all that aside…
Now we can discuss the birth of the Rastafari livity, or we can discuss "the birth of the Rastafarian religion" or we can all get into the streets and draw swords, either way the Massa will laugh...because we do exactly what he wants us to do.
Rastafari livity is an indigenous development in response to white supremacy and oppression. We have our own music, our own clothes, our own food, our own way of worship, own language.....this constitutes a legitimate culture. It is of Caribbean origin, with many influences of the 2 people who were brought there (Africans and Indians) more so influenced by the African on the plantation. It did not originate in Africa or Ethiopia for that matter.
The coming of His Imperial Majesty ushered in the strength for political and spiritual awakening.... while the majority of Africans were brought from West Africa, some also came from the eastern, central and southern part of the continent, due to the conditions that existed on the plantations opened the way for the livity to forward to a place of organization, which evidently came with Howell and his 3 idrens....the Nyabinghi came in after with bongo Wato and the Youth Black Faith...a little more organization and centralizing.
The bible was the tool used by the oppressor to captivate the people and keep them in subjection...and I imagine that I am saying nothing new to any of you....
Now before HIM all we had was the sounding of Marcus Garvey and later Howell....and other leaders who had gone before. We also had the Local evangelists and Parish Priests; we also had the underground spiritualists that kept old African traditions alive. As a boy I used to observe how they prayed, they always had the bible in the midst, they read the bible, but the revelations, I think now that it had a different meaning to them, after 400 years of forced reading, the thing became part of their daily system of belief, but their conditions dictated a different kind of revelation, there was the need for a deliverer, stories of brutality that were orally handed down and to even be experiencing the same kind of hostilities in this day and age is just unexplainable. These ancestors were not without leaders, they had all the leaders we now equate with prophet ship, and we have the stories. They had a good amount of access to information and some reasonably well developed ideas that may have worked and could still possibly work, those ideas became the building blocks for what the Rastafari have now. The Rastafari grew out of resistance for the plantations and its European owners. The philosophy that developed in which one race became superior and others became inferior, became the backdrop on which the people of darker complexion painted resistance. This is what prompted HIM to make the sound at Geneva; He was speaking directly to the European Nations, when He said, “That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, there will be war” and you know the rest.
The response to white supremacy in which the bible was used to "clarify" some of the mystical revelations that we in the West were experiencing was phenomenal to say the least. Here we were able to take the same tool that was taught to us and recreated it and tailored it to ratify and satisfy our regards for the black king that was crowned in Ethiopia. Because our ancestors were told of the reality of the King and being able to use the bible to trace their origins and remember their homeland is nothing short of mystical. For a people who have been so ruthlessly raped to take the same tool of oppression and remake it into a weapon of resistance and create a totally new and different livity than the plantation, while on the plantation, are pure genius and mystic. Because the bible was the most revered of all books on the plantations of the Caribbean, and the Americas.
Africa and Ethiopia was always the focus.
At this point in time and space Africans in Africa perhaps had not even heard of the Rasta. Africans in Africa perhaps only became acquainted with the Rasta thru the spread of Reggae during the 70's and 80's, just like the rest of the world outside Jamaica, except in some cases in one or two other islands where one could have found perhaps a single Rasta living, and that is with the exception of the delegation that left Jamaica in the 60's to visit H.I.M Haile Selassie and other places in Africa, that was the opening of the Rastafari dialog with Africa. (A dialogue that is still continuing) Now I mentioned already that the Rastafari livity is an indigenous culture. so the visit became a government to government reasoning, perhaps not recognized at the time as such, but with the development of the Rasta as a growing and evolving indigenous culture, easily makes it a documented dialog of Rasta and Africa, not to mention the 30 or so years that went by before that visit, that the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Rastafari stood at the front and sounded the trumpet for the liberation of African peoples and the rest of the oppressed world.
oh, and don’t tell me that we had dreadlocks in Africa long before the Rasta had dreadlocks in the Caribbean.....also in India there are the sadhus and in Tibet and in Malaysia, in China, in Australia and in North and South America, and i am sure we could have a couple in Northern Europe.....but having dreadlocks or not is not the argument I am making.
The birth and development of the Rastafari livity is a direct response to colonization and neo-colonization. It is not a religion; it doesn't even have a religious over tone! It is the result of 400 years of an oppressive system of existence for African people and 150 years of indentured Indians and the extinction of the real Caribbean people, the Taino, and then there is the co-existing and the results of co-existing under some of the same conditions. Then there are the children of the co-existing. Rastafari livity is the direct descendant and the answer to the Trans Atlantic Trade in people.
the experiences that were derived from the 400 years of forced labor and cultural raping is to much to mention here, so we will perhaps just catch a couple during this conversation.
If the Rastafari Livity is a religion or set of religious beliefs it would be of Christian orientation, but it is not, it is a way of life that developed from the mixture of oral and spiritual remembrance of African ancestry, also co-mingling and existence with Indians and Taino peoples. There are a significant amount of documentation concerning Africans and the co-existing of other black people of the world.
Through the development and spread of Reggae music the world became aware of the Rastafari. Through the stage charisma of the Honorable Robert Marley, a new sound of musical radicalism began to grow; it attracted a lot of different kind of people to the sound, I think the open smoking of weed by reggae singers and musicians had a distinct impact on America’s underground weed communities. The dreadlocks and the weed attracted a lot of descendants of the colonizers, and I am almost certain that Rastafari has also attracted the descendants of John Brown and Thaddeus Stevens and Samuel Adams and other such abolitionists like them. For these youths it’s a bit hard for them to simmer down and just help to put things back in order, get some balance to the thing…I actually pity some of them, but somehow it seems they have some kind of genetic dilemma with control.
Their arrival in America as we know spelled extinction for the American people, these people who came to America were religionists, it is in their genes to always want to convert anything they deem to be “savage” just as their ancestors did when they came in to the countries of our ancestors. It is the same in their minds when they encountered the Rastafari, their ancestors had already written the book on how to subjugate the indigenous cultures of the world. See the old guard is the ones with the money and the power, they make the decisions, using their age old guide of white supremacy and with the political and economic control of the worlds economy, they bought the Jamaican music industry, in that I mean the record labels and companies who went down and spent big money to lure the poor “third world” singers of the new indigenous culture in Jamaica and perhaps the rest of the Caribbean, the Rastafari was seen by these white men as another emerging maroon type renegade movement, which in fact it is. The music industry was the first triumph, they bought it and unleashed it in Europe and America and it attracted their children, who they had already known would bring the religionist bible attitude to the “savage” Rasta, who was using the bible wrong! The Rastafari was not doing the Jesus thing right! So its just a repeat of the same colonial ploy. Now I am not saying that there are no genuine European descendants who want to actually become a part of the Rastafari and don’t want to argue their “religious beliefs” The Rastafari don’t argue religious belief, there is none to argue or debate.
There is a reason for the hardheadedness of the white youth, and this is why I pity them, it is a fact that the Rastafari livity was born out of resistance and black power, white youth don’t have the experience of the Trans Atlantic Trade and so don’t get the picture of Rastafari, they see some Rasta reading bible and they believe it is about the bible, so they spend a lot of time in the bible looking for the line that was traced by Rastafari Matriarchs and Patriarchs! But if you not in the line you will not see the line, simple as that. So that is the reason for the debates. Think about this, how long ago did the information that human existence can be traced to Africa appear on the scene? Who made the discovery? Who published the discovery? Do the math!
In Ethiopia there are many different tribal people and languages. The word Ethiopian was used by the Greeks in describing the people they found in “Ethiopia” during their spying missions. The word means Black or dark skinned whichever one fitted the context of their conversations. So in a very serious reality, the Rasta is not an “Ethiopian” by birth or culture, he/she is an Ethiopian by virtue of being black or dark skinned. Because the Rasta has their own culture, developed somewhere else and brought into Ethiopia.
In His Gratitude toward the Black people from the West during the Italian war, His Majesty Haile Selassie granted as a gift 500 hectares of land at Shashamane to the Black people of the West to come and settle and work in Ethiopia. So since Rastafari is not a religion, Shashamane cannot translate into Zion. When Rastafari uses bible terminology it disguises the reasons of resistance. To the Rastafari livity, Africa/Shashamane means freedom and freedom equals Zion.
Ras Ravin-I
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