By Keith Noel:

MY FATHER-IN-LAW rarely uttered the word 'Rasta' without prefacing it with the word 'dutty'. He loved my younger daughter dearly and as far as he was concerned, she was the perfect child. He must be revolving in his grave now to see her with locks flowing down her back.

This to me images the marked difference in the perception of Rastafari over the past 30 years. I remember in the 1960s the fear with which people spoke of these cultists. They were sometimes described as 'blackheart' men and spoken of as if they were the spawn of the devil. They were berated and scorned from many a pulpit and many parents suffered paroxysms when their children showed even a mild interest in the movement.

From the very outset, Rastafari had a firm commitment to the struggle for black dignity. What particularly fascinated me was their absolute rejection of the idea of white superiority and even their rejection of any values they considered white. They gave the generation of the '70s the base on which to build a world view that was not a mirror of that of the metropolis.

Brutalise them

Society saw the threat of the Rasta to the status quo and gave licence to their agents in the police force, the teaching profession, and the civil service to brutalise them physically or psychologically. And the rest of 'decent' society stood by in tacit acceptance of this abuse. I remember one day at a football match in the stadium, seeing a policeman search a Rasta for ganja, forcing him to kneel and cutting a couple of his locks in the process. There was no outrage. In fact, at the time, local pop songs had jokes about policemen beating Rastas for speaking their particular dialect!

Then there was the chilling story of Peter Tosh stepping out into the yard of the studio in Half-Way Tree where he was recording what was to be a classic LP. He was smoking a spliff and a policeman saw him and, although he had flicked the spliff away, began to beat him, and as Tosh said "when him lif up de batten to deliver the fatal blow" to his head, he parried it with his forearm, which was badly broken. There was no real outcry and, as far as I know, the policeman did not lose his job.

The aggression was psychological as well. Under the guise of 'proper grooming' any efforts by teenage blacks to adopt hairstyles that shouted their blackness to the world were outlawed in schools. There was tremendous opposition to the 'afro'. A young friend of mine was prevented from going to her exams at Immaculate High unless she agreed to forego her afro. A namesake of mine lost his job at Knox College for being too afrocentric in his teaching, and one reason given for my being fired from my post at Haile Selassie Junior Secondary, where I was acting head of English, was that I had become too obviously sympathetic to the Rasta movement (there is an irony there somewhere).

Black assumption

There seemed to be a reason for this fear. Rastafari, with all its apparent strangeness, delivered a message of black assumption of full personhood and of rejection of the perception of himself as inferior. This would mean a revolution in thinking that would result in the white world relinquishing much of its power over the black man. And who wants to relinquish power?

The Rastaman's message was delivered through his music. Bob Marley, its leading exponent, was a creative genius, but his creativity found its roots in his Rastafarianism. His message is possibly the most important delivered to the world by any entertainer, maybe any man, in the 20th century.

It is a tribute to the steadfastness, the courage, the vision, the clearheadedness and the creativity of these 'ancient Rastas', as Morgan Heritage calls them, that they are now a prominent part of our society. We owe them a great deal. Their vision of Jamaica's and the black man's "emancipation from mental slavery" has not been fully achieved, but we would have been so much further back were it not for them.

Keith Noel is an educator. Send comments to columns@gleanerjm.com.

February 9, 2012

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