By Mark Dawes, Staff Reporter
Dr. Imani Tafari-Ama. - Winston Sill/Staff Photographer
SHE GREW up in a Seventh-Day Adventist household. Her parents were well-known community and church leaders in Albion, Manchester. She was an active youth leader in the congregation there. Then at age 22 she became a Rastafarian. Dr. Imani Tafari-Ama is today a spokesperson in Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean on the Rastafarian worldview and lifestyle.
After graduating from Manchester High School in 1978 she later that year entered the University of the West Indies (UWI) where she became part of the second cohort of persons enrolled at CARIMAC (the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communications). She did a Bachelor's degree in Communication with Language and Literature, and along the way became involved in the Rastafarian movement.
"At UWI, I was exposed to the Twelve Tribes House of Rasta, reasonings with Rastas, going to binghi and reading the Bible in an entirely different way. All of a sudden, my searchings to rationalise my Africanness found congruence with a belief system that reclaimed race as a site of struggle. In recognising the divinity of a king who is a black person, with the whole Ethiopian history intertwined in that personality, it seemed to me that if we are created in the image of the Almighty then we must look like God and if God looks like us, then it makes sense. All of a sudden, this blonde, blue-eyed Jesus Christ was out the window."
Predictably, her decision to wear locks did not go down well with her family. They were disappointed with her decision. Their disappointment was ameliorated in large measure by the
fact that she distinguished herself in academia.
HER OPINION OF THE CHURCH
Dr. Ama, who was formerly known as Faith Morris, is employed at the National Housing Trust (NHT) as manager of Social Developments. In her job she promotes inner-city and urban renewal as part of social development strategy of the NHT. She also teaches at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies and CARIMAC on the UWI Mona Campus.
"Rasta people say 'God a man'. I would extend it to say 'God a woman'. In that sense we create our own divinity by how we live our lives. Creation is an event of the mind and once we make that mental shift from being people who are custom-designed to be Christians in the sense of missionary proselytising-- to self-defined people who say 'I will remake myself in my own image and create my divinity in my own likeness.' So going through my early university days was a wonderful experience of exploration reading books like The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, the works of Kwame Nkrumah, Angela Davis and others."
She is by no means bitter towards the Church. "The Church serves a purpose in giving people a foundation, a perspective and for some, something to hold on to." Sadly, she continues, the Church still lacks a needed degree of effectiveness, as it often does not look keenly enough at reality through culturally relevant lenses. It needs, she stressed, to become more critical of the colonising heritage of Christianity and Christian Theology. It is this legacy, she said, that causes some church folk to be so heavenly-minded that they fail to be meaningfully engaged in struggles such as the improving the lot of persons threatened by the scourge of HIV/AIDS in Africa.
Nevertheless, she acknowledges there are significant areas of harmony between Adventism and Rastafarianism notably, the exalted place both belief systems give to proper nutritional health, and the mutual attribution they give to the Pope as the Anti-Christ of Biblical prophecy.
With the embrace of Rastafari, her critical awareness of sources of oppression within religion has soared. This extends to her view of the Bible. She believes strongly that there are truths
to be known that are not recorded in
the Bible.
"Whose history is in the Bible? Who are the Jews in the Bible? When I get to moot questions like that I think it is safer for me to try to ask 'Where did my ancestors really come from? What is it that they believed in? How is it that that belief system has relevance for me now? I would like to go back to what animism is, what ancestor worship is. Why is it we rejected these things just because colonisers said these things are of the heathens?"
Gleaner: Do you accept the divinity of Haile Selassie?
Dr. Ama: Yes, inasmuch as you accept the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Gleaner: Do you believe Jesus was fully God and fully man?
Dr. Ama: Yes. I am fully God and fully woman. I think we should demystify this notion of godness. Until we can do that this notion in St. John's Gospel, where it says you are sons and daughters of the Most High, makes no sense.
"Why would you regard yourself as a son of the Most High if there wasn't the possibility for there to be a correlation as man to be God much of the soapbox treatment of Rastafari relates
to the fact that Haile Selassie is a
black man.
The Church set up this notion of Jesus Christ being God to the exclusion of all else. That kind of arrogance of belief system, I think, is what allows the state of intolerance of people who are deemed to be other to be perpetuated in the world I shy away from any kind of system that would want to present a monolithic approach that says 'I am right and you are wrong'.
Gleaner: What if the Christians are right, that Jesus is the only way?
Dr. Ama: Then respect due.
Gleaner: That means that others are lost.
Dr. Ama: Absolutely. We will just have to be languishing in hellfire.
A person's faith, she said, "is a personal thing." For this reason she frowns on notions of proselytising. The Rasta ethos, a.k.a. 'livity', is bigger than Selassie and so, she explained, using the words of a popular Morgan Heritage song "You don't have to dread to be Rasta. It is not a dreadlocks thing, but
a divine conception of the heart."
She hinted that Rasta has more adherents and sympathisers than is apparent, as many are 'internalising beliefs and livity without subscribing formally
to it."
HAILE SELASISE LIVES ON
Selassie, however, has given
legitimacy to Rasta, she said "and Rasta has exponentially kept alive the person of Haile Selassie. I wouldn't go and say you can be Rasta without seeing Haile Selassie. It is Haile Selasise that gives the raison d'etre to Rasta--. When you see I and I you see the perpetuation of the life of Haile Selassie so in that sense Selassie can't die. I could accept the physical passing-- but there is an indivisibility between life and death which we also know and recognise which is beyond physical vision--
that is what gives the je ne sais quoi
(a quality that cannot be easily identified) to one's spirituality and to one's immortality.
She is by no means uncritical of Rastafari. Being an egalitarian at heart, she has issues with its patriarchal structures as it, in her view, perpetuates a "hierarchical system of power which privileges one set of people over
another." She also has issues with a growing individualism that is diminishing the communal spirit for which the movement extols.
There's scope, she says, for a meeting of the minds between people of
differing faiths. In that regard she favours more dialogue between Rasta
communities and churches so that both groups can work toward social transformation. In this regard, she said, scope for such co-operation exists to feed the
hungry, clothe the naked and house
the homeless.
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