Author Peter Abrahams and his dog
Below is the third part in the serialisation of Peter
Abrahams's "Coyaba Chronicles" published by Ian Randle Publishers.
Today's excerpt is from Chapter 11 - "The Rastafari". The
book is due in stores on July 14.
THEY CAME out of the bush immediately below Coyaba
in the late afternoon. There were more than six of them -
eight or ten. They looked as though they had walked all the
way up to us in a straight line across hills and valleys.
Most of the men working on the road had gone; only Enos and
Maisie were still with us, but ready to go to Rock Hall.
The men were bearded, their long, braided hair covered by
bulging tams. The two elder ones were like people out of the
Old Testament, dressed in flowing white robes. The others
were more conventionally dressed.
One or two of the younger ones seemed hard put to grow the
appropriate profusion of 'dreadlocks' and thick beards. Most
had rods and staffs; those of the two elders were the most
elaborately carved.
They emerged directly from the bush onto our rough road.
Daphne called Delilah to heel. She was the big beautiful
yellow Labrador who had adopted us and followed us all the
way up from Henderson Avenue. After the first week of refusing
to feed her at Henderson Avenue, hoping she would go back
to her own home, she had turned up with a huge block of processed
cheese, then a whole chicken as if saying, "If you cannot
feed me, I can feed us."
Daphne had collapsed between tears and laughter and Delilah
had joined the family. She came to heel at Daphne's command.
The elder raised his staff. I waved them to come.
They were hot and sweating. I invited them to the long verandah.
They preferred to sit on the steps and boulders just below
it.
"We will have water, please," the elder said.
I signalled to Daphne and Maisie, and they went for cool
spring water from our old-time water cooler. The men nearly
emptied the cooler.
"You the brother from Africa?"
His speech was soft and clear. Behind the thick beard was
the lean face of a man between forty and fifty. His dark brown
face glowed with good health.
"Yes."
"They say you from Ethiopia?"
"No. My father was."
"But you are one of us; Rastafari?" It was a challenge.
"No."
"Why? You join Babylon?" A hint of anger.
"No."
"You're not with us and you're not with them?"
"That's right."
"He's no Rasta," one of the others said. The elder silenced
him with a wave of the hand without turning his head.
"Then what are you doing here? Why are you here? Not in Africa?"
Enos and Maisie decided it was safe for them to leave us
alone with the Rastas. They helped Daphne bring fresh orange
juice for the visitors, then started the long walk to Rock
Hall.
"House slaves," one of the Rastas said softly.
"They are our friends," I said. "You do not have to be a
slave to work for a person."
"Stop that nonsense!" The elder was impatient. "So why are
you here, Mr. Abrahams?" He looked into my eyes and a polite
smile touched his lips.
I told them about my travels and experiences and about South
Africa and our search for, in Langston Hughes' words "a
house in the world where the white shadows will not fall".
Some of the younger ones made their "spliffs" and lit up
and the smell of ganja was strong in the still atmosphere.
We talked for more than an hour, and the idea of a black man
not finding a place of peace in his own continent shocked
them.
Africa, by their folk myth, was the home of all black people,
the one place on earth where all black people could be free
of Babylon and in control of their own lives. For most it
was a land of milk and honey as in the Bible. Ethiopia, the
land of my father, was free and independent and its ruler
was the reincarnation of the living God.
They had rejected Babylon and this slave culture to which
they had been brought against their will. All they wanted
from Babylon was to be repatriated, to be returned to Africa
from which they had been snatched.
Repatriation and reparation: that was their right. The Germans
were paying the Jews reparation for slaughtering six million
Jews. More than 20 million Africans perished on the Middle
Passage and still no reparations more than 100 years later.
And this Babylon government here did not have the guts to
stand up for black people's rights in the world. Only Marcus
Mosiah Garvey did, and see what they did to him. So a Rasta
makes his own life and raises his children to be pure and
clean and his women to be modest and cover themselves as women
should. And for this, they are hunted and humiliated and their
locks cut off.
But Rasta will survive Babylon and Africa will be free and
all her children from all the four corners of the earth will
return to the motherland.
When the sun began to dip, we stopped talking. They had refused
food and the bottle of white rum I had brought out.
I could see that, but for the authority of the two elders,
some of the younger ones would have gone for the rum. The
authority of the elders was quite as strong as anything I
had seen in Africa.
I had suggested that wherever Africans and people of African
descent formed the majority, that place should be seen as
a part of Africa.
The elder whispered: "Africa is its people." Then he shook
his head.
Ruined expectations
It had not turned out a good encounter. I could see they
had expected something better from our meeting. I had no "good"
answers for them.
They could not dismiss me as a "liard" because I had been
born there and, despite their wishful dreaming, they recognised
the truth of what I told them. But how they wanted Africa
to be their Zion, their land of milk and honey, the place
where all the pain and anguish of generations of black visionaries
would be put to ease. How deeply must you hurt to escape into
such dreams?
They gathered themselves together for the long journey to
where they had come from; somewhere in Western Kingston, I
suspected.
There were places there and in the Wareika hills and other
remote corners of the land where the Rastas could still worship
their black God, beat their drums, make their music, teach
their offspring Jah's ways, smoke their sacred herb, and defy
Babylon.
Already their cultural contribution to the world far exceeds
the contribution of any other comparably small, discriminated
against minority anywhere in the world in our time. And their
salutation is: peace and love, brother; peace and love, sister.
At the moment of departure the elder asked: "The woman?"
"The Mother of my children."
"From where? Not here?"
"No. Born far away in Java."
"Sees like you?"
"Yes."
"Call her, please."
I called her and she came. The elder took her hand.
"Thank you for receiving us. I wish he was one of us; and
you. Take care; peace and love."
Then he led his group back down into the bush, as though
they would make the same straight line down to the plain as
they had made on the way up.
I went in and made notes of the encounter. I would want to
write about it some day.
In Red Hills next day, the talk was all about the Rastas'
visit to Mr. P's place. Their progress up the hill through
the bush had been observed by men and women working their
fields; word of their presence and long stay at Coyaba had
circulated.
Tiny confronted me; the onlookers waited eagerly.
"You have Rasta visitors last night, Mr. P. I hear they stay
long. What happen?"
"We talked; they wanted to know about Africa."
"You not afraid? Me 'fraid of them!"
"Why? They're just people."
"Not like us," somebody said.
"Them bad," somebody else chipped in.
"Them smoke the weed and turn mad," another voice said.
"They smoke it at your yard?" another voice asked.
I ignored that one. It was against the law.
"Miss P not 'fraid of them?" Tiny pressed.
"No reason to be," I suggested.
"You don't know them," someone else said.
"I'm 'fraid of them bad," Tiny insisted. "Don't like them
in my shop."
"Why?" I asked.
After much discussion it boiled down to: "they not like us"
and "they are dirty, don't wash their hair".
I told them the men we had seen had been scrupulously clean,
even after the long sweaty climb up the hill. Their hair and
beards were clean.
For a time after that, a section of our village community
condemned me as a friend of the Rastas. They were tolerant
of strangers of all kinds, white or black, foreign or native,
but not of native-born Rastas.
The Rastas were indeed different and I suspect it was the
nature of their difference that made other Jamaicans of all
classes fear and distrust them.
They rejected what all the others had accepted. It showed
in the way they walked and talked and looked at you. They
were the mirror-image of what you would have been if you had
dared to reject Babylon. Seeing yourself thus can be unsettling,
frightening. We hate being reminded of our weakness.
Colour question
Jamaicans, until very recently, did not want to recognise
the centrality of colour and colour prejudice in almost every
aspect of their lives. They tried to forget slavery and resented
those who reminded them of it.
They played Anancy with the shade game. Unless they had "good"
hair, male Jamaicans either covered their heads with hats
or caps, or cut their hair so short they looked almost bald.
Only two men I knew, beside the Rastas, in those early Jamaican
days, allowed their kinky hair to grow long, or, as the Jamaicans
say, "to grow tall".
Theodore Sealy, the first black editor of The Gleaner
was one, Alva Ramsay, editor of The West Indian Sportsman,
was the other. I later found a third in harbour pilot Roderick
Francis.
The Rastas, the Garveyites, the supporters of the American-based
black power movement which was shaking the United States in
the 1950s, were the only people I found who supported Hugh
Shearer as Prime Minister.
Most of the rest of Jamaica had difficulty accepting a black
man as their Prime Minister. Within the Jamaica Labour Party
itself there were those who thought they were better qualified
for the job.
Seaga, whom Shearer had re-appointed Minister of Finance,
was one of those. During his very short-lived period as Prime
Minister, Donald Sangster had appointed Seaga to Finance.
When Sangster died, Shearer kept him there.
During this period Jamaican politics entered a new phase.
The black power movement reached the young intellectuals at
the University of the West Indies (UWI). Black power, the
Rasta movement and the discontent of the young people from
Kingston's burgeoning urban ghettoes converged, and there
was chaos on the streets.
There were demonstrations and marches. Fiery speeches were
made. White and brown people were abused on the streets. Our
son who was at the university at the time told us, with distress,
of the reverse racism which seemed to have taken over on campus.
We explained that change often came in extreme forms. Society
went into panic. The police cracked down on the "subversives".
In its early phase, the UWI had been as elitist as any small
conservative British regional university. Its colonial and
post-colonial objectives were to produce the people who would
manage and run the administrations of the region: the Financial
Secretaries, the Central Planners, the Permanent Secretaries,
the doctors and teachers and nurses and the senior heads of
departments who would take over from the British civil servants.
But, by the 1960s, the place was becoming radicalised by
a first generation of black West Indian scholars replacing
the repatriate teachers and lecturers. Many Jamaicans saw
the Mona campus as a revolutionary hotbed.
A neighbour living on the hill above us, the charming wife
of a senior local government official from the colonial age,
swore that the people down at Mona were all bent on making
Jamaica communist. She would not allow her son to go to that
university.
Radicals
One of a large number of young radicals at the Mona campus
in the 1960s was a young man from Guyana named Walter Rodney,
whose political activism either frightened the daylights out
of Hugh Shearer's government, or was used as an excuse to
clamp down on the radicalism spreading from Mona. Rodney had
been on a brief trip out of the island. On his return, he
was stopped at the airport and ordered expelled as an undesirable.
When the news broke, there was pandemonium on the streets.
University students, some of their lecturers, Rastafari, ghetto
youth, Garveyites, the unemployed, all took to the streets
in angry protest.
The police and the military came out in force. Helicopters
flew overhead. Tear-gas was used to disperse crowds. There
were a few violent skirmishes. Shearer, the trade unionist
turned Prime Minister, told his police not to recite the Beatitudes
to the protestors.
The 'Rodney riots' were put down forcibly within the week.
Hugh Shearer lost that special aura as the first ever black
Prime Minister of Jamaica. He was, they said on the streets,
just another one of 'them'.
Yet I found Hugh Shearer not "one of them". He remained the
same as he was before becoming Prime Minister. He had no circle
of influence-seeking businessmen around him; no old boys'
network from shared schooling in one of the island's handful
of prestige schools; no connection by membership in any of
the recognised clubs.
Both Manleys, father and son, had such connections. So did
Sangster. So, later, when he became Prime Minister, did Seaga.
Bustamante had been the first outsider in terms of the Jamaican
social establishment. When he became Prime Minister, the establishment
had to meet and deal with him on his terms.
Busta was a light brown man, which made it easier for the
high and the mighty to swallow their pride and deal with him
on his terms.
Black Hugh Shearer, like brown Bustamante, was also related
to the Manleys, though more distantly; he came from the darker
side and had not been to any of the elitist colleges. So they
found him hard to take and he was not about to change to suit
them.
Shortly after taking office, Shearer invited a group of us,
the senior journalists, for an informal Sunday morning chat
at Jamaica House, then the official residence of the Prime
Minister.
Among the things I remember was his insistence that he would
not allow any of the household staff to polish his shoes.
It was traditional as in some better old-time hotels, to put
out your shoes the night before and get them back highly polished
the next morning.
"I don't ever want to forget where I came from and how to
polish my own shoes".
He was the most modest, least pretentious Prime Minister
of Jamaica I knew - without a hint of the arrogance that office
nearly always seemed to engender.
Changing times
In 1968, Alexander Bustamante was 84 and in retirement. His
cousin and great political rival, Norman Manley, had died
the year before. Busta was going blind. His grip on both his
party and his trade union was loosening.
The times were changing. The two cousins had, between 1938
and 1968, held Jamaica together as a stable, flourishing two-party
parliamentary democracy. They had done it by keeping their
rivalry within bounds. When it was the turn of one to govern,
the other stood back, allowed him to do so, held a watching
brief as Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.
Whenever Manley's people went too far in their opposition,
which was almost never, he would pull them back; whenever
Busta's people did so, Busta too would pull them back.
Busta, in particular, made sure that his followers showed
respect for "me cousin, Norman" at all times. So it seemed
that parliamentary democracy and the adversarial two-party
system were secure.
In times of trouble the two parties always worked together.
The interests of the nation always superseded the interests
of the parties and of the special interest groups. Jamaica,
under Bustamante and Manley, flourished.
The first hint of trouble had been the violence of the West
Kingston elections in which political opponents traded gunfire.
That, on the surface, had been brought under a measure of
control by behind-the-scenes pressure from the two cousins.
They induced their followers to accept a set of basic rules
for peaceful co-existence. They worked out a formula for the
sharing of public works jobs and "scarce benefits". They avoided
the politics of "winner take all, loser suck salt", by agreeing
to forty per cent of available public works jobs going to
PNP supporters, forty per cent of JLP supporters, and twenty
per cent to those of neither party. This had worked throughout
the Manley-Bustamante years.
In the run-up to his brief period in office Sangster had
been the first to break this compact. The younger Manley and
Seaga, later, quietly let it slide.
Now, with one dead and the other incapacitated, with their
steadying influence no longer there, Jamaica drifted into
the "war politics" of the Cold War.
Up to this point, that Cold War happened elsewhere, not in
Jamaica. It happened in Africa, Asia, Latin America, not in
Jamaica.
As with the limitation of press freedom, free speech and
freedom of movement, we said those things cannot happen here.
They did.
Continued next week
