Cosmopolitanism from the Global South: Caribbean Spiritual Repatriation to Ethiopia (Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology) 3030822710, 9783030822712

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
About the Book
Contents
About the Author
Chapter 1: Cosmopolitan Sensibilities and Outernational Imaginaries
1.1 Spiritual Repatriation
1.2 Shashamane
1.3 Rastafari Symbolism
1.4 The Plantation and Creole Subjectivities
1.5 Cosmopolitan Theory
1.6 Migration
1.7 Organisation of the Book
References
Chapter 2: “Word-Sound-Power”
2.1 Everyday Performativity
2.2 Itiopia/Ethiopia in Rastafari Worldview
2.3 Haile Selassie I
2.4 Sighting Rastafari and “Knowing Your Bible”
2.5 Testing Strangers: To Suss Out a Person
2.6 Chanting: Dread Talk, Morality and the Commodification of the Word (Music)
References
Chapter 3: Ambiguities of Belonging
3.1 A Lineage of Ethiopian Royalty, an Abyssinian Pedigree
3.2 The West Indian God of Rastafari
3.3 An Everyday Micro-conflict
3.4 Reclaiming Blackness
References
Chapter 4: Narratives of Community: His Majesty’s People
4.1 Origin Stories
4.2 Narrative Self-Making
4.3 Everyday Practices of Relatedness
4.4 Being Ethiopian
4.5 Being Heartical
References
Chapter 5: Making a Living
5.1 Outernational Livelihoods
5.2 Household Earnings
5.3 Routine Precarity
5.4 The Western Union Run
5.5 The Neighbourhood Shop
5.6 Translocal Reciprocity
5.7 Material Betterment, Status and In-Kind Remittances
References
Chapter 6: Family and Kinship: Rastafari Yards
6.1 Creole Kinship
6.2 My Yard: Family and Household
6.3 A Rastafari Yard and an Ethiopian Beit
6.4 Making Place, Reproducing Culture
6.5 Gender, Class and the Sexual Division of Labour
6.6 Being Rooted: Locating Identities in Time and Space
References
Chapter 7: Rastafari Citizen-Subjectivities
7.1 Modes of Belonging
7.2 The Legal Face of Citizenship
7.3 The Generation Born on the Land Grant
7.4 The Passport: Inclusion and Exclusion
7.5 Local Development
7.6 Babylon Is Everywhere
References
Appendices
Appendix A: Note on Methodology
Appendix B: Note on Transliteration and the Use of Italics
Glossary
References
Further Reading
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY

Cosmopolitanism from the Global South Caribbean Spiritual Repatriation to Ethiopia Shelene Gomes

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology Series Editors Deborah Reed-Danahay Department of Anthropology The State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY, USA Helena Wulff Department of Social Anthropology Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden

This series explores new ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthropological studies. Books in this series are grounded in ethnographic perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings to the study of reading and writing. The series explores the ethnography of fiction, ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, and the connections between travel literature and ethnographic writing.​ More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15120

Shelene Gomes

Cosmopolitanism from the Global South Caribbean Spiritual Repatriation to Ethiopia

Shelene Gomes University of the West Indies St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology ISBN 978-3-030-82271-2    ISBN 978-3-030-82272-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82272-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: marcos alvarado / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book has been germinating for quite some time. There are many people across continents to whom I am grateful, underscoring the collaborative efforts of writing across time and space. The University of St. Andrews Centre for Amerindian Studies (now Centre for Amerindian and Latin American Studies) in the Department of Social Anthropology partly funded this research as well as the Russell Trust for fieldwork. The administrative and academic staff, in particular Huon Wardle, of the department and those who provided support both pre-fieldwork and post-fieldwork were integral towards completion. I remain indebted to IandI in Shashamane, who shared their lives, and especially to my adopted family. Family is forever. Throughout the years, Charmaine Gomes and P.I. Gomes provided valuable intellectual, financial and day-to-day support from the Caribbean and Europe. Their acute insights have shaped my worldview. From transhistorical systematic conditions of imperialism and colonialism in the making of the circum-Caribbean, their involvement in Caribbean decolonisation movements, and the nuances of postcolonial realities and structures, their support was critical. Over the years, I have presented papers and portions of the chapters at different venues. Sections of Chap. 3 appear in “Counter-narratives of Belonging: Rastafari in the Promised Land,” The Global South 12 (1): 112–128 (https://doi.org/10.2979/globalsouth.12.1.07). Sections of Chap. 6 appear in “Notes on a Rastafari Yard-Space in Urban Ethiopia,” Virtual Brazilian Anthropology Vol.17: 1–16 as well as in a jointly authored paper, “Placemaking in the Transnational Caribbean: A Rastafari Community in Ethiopia,” with Scott Timcke, Journal of Black Studies 51 v

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(4): 368–385 (https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934720967042). Chapter 7 was shaped by “Global Sufferahs: Rastafari Cosmopolitan Citizenship” in Tout Moun: Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies 5 (1): 1–13. Public essays in Anthropology News 60 (2), “Observations on Rastafari Cosmopolitics from the Caribbean” (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/ AN.1137) and “Rastafari and West Indian Reinvention,” in Global Dialogue 10 (3), both co-authored with Scott Timcke, reached a wider audience. Ethnographic data in Chap. 2 appears in a forthcoming chapter, “Being ‘Shashamane Sew’: Second Generation Caribbean Rastafari in Multicultural Ethiopia,” in Human, Intellectual and Cultural Mobilities Between Africa and the Caribbean—From the Late 19th Century to the Present edited by Birgit Englert, Barbara Gföllner, and Sigrid Thomsen (London: Routledge). I received useful feedback from presentations at the African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand, in 2018; the Institute for Sociology, Justus Liebig University, in 2017; and early on at the Second Global Diasporas Conference in Oxford in 2009; as well as the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at St. Andrews. In 2008, conferences at the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism of the LSE and the Latin American and Caribbean Network in St. Andrews influenced the initial draft. Study visits to the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Concordia University, in 2019 and the Brussels School of International Studies provided the time and facilities to write. Maarit Forde and Scott Timcke gave valuable feedback on revised chapters, which helped immensely to enrich the work. More recently, Christopher Ali and Thearen Parris provided essential editorial support. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers. Any omissions and shortcomings are solely my responsibility. Port of Spain. May 2021.

About the Book

This is a book about the power of the imagination to move persons from the Global South as they reinvent themselves. This ethnography focuses on Caribbean Rastafari, who have undertaken a spiritual repatriation to Ethiopia over several decades particularly, though not exclusively, from Jamaica. Shelene Gomes traces the formation of a Rastafari community located in the multicultural Jamaica Safar or Jamaica neighbourhood in the Ethiopian city of Shashamane following a twentieth-­century grant of land from the former Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie I. In presenting narratives of spiritual repatriation, everyday behaviours and ritualised events, Gomes provides an ethnographic account of Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibilities. Situated in the historical conditions of colonial West Indian plantations and the asymmetries of freedom and bondage within modernity, a recognition of global positionalities and local situatedness characterises this case of cosmopolitanism from the Global South. Shifting the centre of worldviews from Europe to Africa, Rastafari both challenge global disparities and reproduce hierarchies in the local space of the Jamaica Safar. In positioning Ethiopia as the spiritual birthplace of humanity, Rastafari also engage in ontological and epistemological reinvention. This spiritual repatriation, in its emic sense, foregrounds the Caribbeanist contribution to anthropology. Ethnographies of the Caribbean have been at the forefront of anthropological enquiries into global interconnections. This discussion of spiritual repatriation is both specific to the diasporic Caribbean and relevant to wider world-making processes and representations. vii

Contents

1 Cosmopolitan Sensibilities and Outernational Imaginaries  1 1.1 Spiritual Repatriation  1 1.2 Shashamane  4 1.3 Rastafari Symbolism  9 1.4 The Plantation and Creole Subjectivities 13 1.5 Cosmopolitan Theory 15 1.6 Migration 18 1.7 Organisation of the Book 19 References 22 2 “Word-Sound-Power” 27 2.1 Everyday Performativity 27 2.2 Itiopia/Ethiopia in Rastafari Worldview 29 2.3 Haile Selassie I 30 2.4 Sighting Rastafari and “Knowing Your Bible” 31 2.5 Testing Strangers: To Suss Out a Person 39 2.6 Chanting: Dread Talk, Morality and the Commodification of the Word (Music) 42 References 51 3 Ambiguities of Belonging 55 3.1 A Lineage of Ethiopian Royalty, an Abyssinian Pedigree 55 3.2 The West Indian God of Rastafari 58 3.3 An Everyday Micro-conflict 61 ix

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3.4 Reclaiming Blackness 64 References 71 4 Narratives of Community: His Majesty’s People 73 4.1 Origin Stories 73 4.2 Narrative Self-Making 75 4.3 Everyday Practices of Relatedness 77 4.4 Being Ethiopian 79 4.5 Being Heartical 82 References 89 5 Making a Living 91 5.1 Outernational Livelihoods 91 5.2 Household Earnings 93 5.3 Routine Precarity 96 5.4 The Western Union Run100 5.5 The Neighbourhood Shop102 5.6 Translocal Reciprocity104 5.7 Material Betterment, Status and In-Kind Remittances106 References112 6 Family and Kinship: Rastafari Yards115 6.1 Creole Kinship115 6.2 My Yard: Family and Household117 6.3 A Rastafari Yard and an Ethiopian Beit120 6.4 Making Place, Reproducing Culture122 6.5 Gender, Class and the Sexual Division of Labour125 6.6 Being Rooted: Locating Identities in Time and Space131 References135 7 Rastafari Citizen-Subjectivities139 7.1 Modes of Belonging139 7.2 The Legal Face of Citizenship143 7.3 The Generation Born on the Land Grant146 7.4 The Passport: Inclusion and Exclusion149 7.5 Local Development151 7.6 Babylon Is Everywhere156 References163

 Contents 

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Appendices167 Glossary173 References177 Index195

About the Author

Shelene Gomes  teaches social anthropology and the sociology of culture at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago. She is a senior research associate in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg.

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CHAPTER 1

Cosmopolitan Sensibilities and Outernational Imaginaries

1.1   Spiritual Repatriation I am Ethiopian, just like my neighbour who was born and grew here. (Brother David).1

Brother David arrived in Ethiopia in 1975 from Jamaica. We met in 2008 while I was conducting an ethnographic study on southern cosmopolitanism in Rastafari thought and action. David made this statement during the back and forth about how his spirituality shaped his Rastafari identity as we sat in his yard on December 23 of that year. We were on the land grant in the Jamaica Safar2 (transliterally, the Jamaica neighbourhood) in the southern Ethiopian city of Shashamane. Even though Brother David has spent more of his life in Ethiopia than in his birthplace Jamaica, there are Ethiopians who believe his self-­ designation as “Ethiopian” might read as an insincere masking of his imposition that comes from a foreign birth and subsequent migration. Brother David has raised his children and built a life in the Jamaica Safar, just like his Ethiopian Orthodox Christian neighbour. However, from a Rastafari perspective, this statement is an existential one. It reflects a Rastafari reimagination of self as African and Ethiopian (Ityopian in Rastafari speech), as a human being fashioned in the image of the Ethiopian Creator, His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I; and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gomes, Cosmopolitanism from the Global South, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82272-9_1

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for David, it reflects his own validation as a Rastaman who has achieved his goal of “repatriating” to Ethiopia, in his words. These remarks about place-making and belonging, as well as the struggles they bring about, provide a suitable aperture for introducing the conceptual concerns of this ethnography. Relatedly, personhood is a central topic, especially in the sociohistorical context of West Indian plantation societies and the multicultural character of the Jamaica Safar, as residents refer to the area. Also central are the imaginative and symbolic dimensions of the migration of Caribbean persons (or Caribbeans/West Indians) to Ethiopia or what I refer to as spiritual repatriation. Rastafari consider this movement to be a form of repatriation to the spiritual birthplace of Ethiopia—from which they were forcibly removed centuries ago and that they have reimagined as home. Tracing the making of the Jamaica Safar through everyday behaviours and ritualised events provides an empirical account of what I refer to as Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibilities. Throughout my fieldwork, what I identified as cross-cutting themes of translocal networks and community building frequently appeared. As I examine further, the topics and themes in this ethnography can best be reconciled through a theoretical framework of “southern cosmopolitanism.” While I will elaborate on this concept, I provisionally define southern cosmopolitanism as a proclivity for intellectual and imaginative reinvention in line with a recognition of global belonging, ideals of equality and a praxis of solidarity. This orientation is grounded in the liberal ideals of individualism as well as community and kinship bonds. This framework permits raising cross-culturally relevant issues around belonging, identity, citizenship and creolisation. As I ended fieldwork in the Jamaica Safar, I concluded that the pan-African cosmopolitanism which characterises the Rastafari worldview provides the foundation for a southern cosmopolitan sensibility. Traits of this sensibility are visible in the lives of repatriated Rastafari in Shashamane and in “migrant” community building, which can be identified in Brother David’s self-positioning. Place and historical context matter. In terms of positioning, I take the view that cosmopolitanism indexes “an intellectual and esthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences” (Hannerz 2006, 6) and is employed “descriptively to address certain sociocultural processes or individual behaviours, values or dispositions manifesting a capacity to engage cultural multiplicity” (Vertovec and Cohen 2002, 1). For Rastafari in Shashamane, such attitudes are grounded in a historical awareness of the making of Caribbean sociality out of local

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and global interconnections, especially of late industrial capitalism. These historical conditions, characterised by bondage and freedom, reverberate with the modern Caribbean and its peoples (James 1963; Patterson 1969; Nesbitt 2008; Bogues 1997). Central to this ethnographic endeavour is understanding how Rastafari imaginative responses to inequitable social structures and postcolonial exploitations, even with shifting parameters of nationhood that now make Rastafari integral to postcolonial Jamaican nationalism (see Edmonds 2003; Anderson and MacLeod 2017), were shaped under particular conditions of modernity in the Caribbean. I look to the potential for systemic change also through a Rastafari cosmopolitics. Here, I define Rastafari cosmopolitics as the emic expressions of world community situated in such acts of imagination and solidarity, which can help to highlight localised scenarios and interconnections with global processes. Not only does the historical context matter but also the disciplinary one. Such an analytical view is especially useful to anthropologists. The legacies of ethnographies of closed “culture” in early twentieth century out of a structural-functionalist anthropology were superseded by world-­ systems anthropology fixated on colony-metropole dependency. While these were themselves replaced with a focus on global networks and ethical inter-dependencies in postcolonial anthropology, often still our understandings of identity and place are predicated upon essentialist categories. These categories both foreclose productive politics in academic and lay circles, and are inconsistent with empirical evidence. These are concerns close to the anthropological enquiry into roots and routes, to use a now oft-cited conceptual framing (Clifford 1997). The Caribbean and its diasporas can teach us a great deal about not only a postcolonial anthropological approach, but a decolonial one. As such, while this study of spiritual repatriation delves into the historical formation of global networks, emerging social relations, and community conceptions of belongings, the stakes are much greater. This is a book about the power of the imagination to move “southern” persons as they reimagine themselves today through the case of Caribbean Rastafari spiritual repatriates in Ethiopia. In the following sections, I describe in detail the place of Shashamane, in particular the Jamaica Safar. I am attentive to the sociocultural processes of Rastafari integration and diasporic Caribbean social reproduction, within the theoretical framework of cosmopolitanism, and specifically what I identify as a pan-African cosmopolitanism to analyse Rastafari

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repatriation to Ethiopia and the making of the multicultural Jamaica Safar. Conceptually, I then draw attention to literature on creolisation and West Indian colonial plantations to situate the emergence of Rastafari praxis in the twentieth-century Caribbean. I use praxis here in the feminist meaning of the practice of change and the prospect of collective action to challenge unequal systems. I end by describing the organisation of the chapters. I outline selected methodological issues in doing ethnography in this particular locale in Appendix A.

1.2   Shashamane During our discussions, Brother David related his spiritual, religious and physical journey to Rastafari and to Ethiopia. Given the length of his residence in Shashamane, he was a good interlocuter to teach about how Rastafari themselves understand the history that brought them to Shashamane as well as how the community developed. In the next section, I detail the internal social forces that prompted Brother David to repatriate, but it is worth noting that there was a standing invitation. After the Second World War, His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia donated five gashas of land (about 200 hectares) “as far as the eye can see,” according to an early repatriate in Shashamane, to the Ethiopian World Federation (EWF). Meant for the settlement of “black people of the world,” this land was granted in appreciation of their opposition to the Italian occupation of Ethiopia in 1935–1941 (Bonacci 2015, 270–271). Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, organised groups of Rastafari came to settle. Some were self-funded Rastafari and non-Rastafari members of the EWF, the latter from the Caribbean and the United States.3 Given the nature of the invitation by a person deemed to be divine in Rastafari theology, this land grant symbolises home, dignity, recognition of black African and Ethiopian/Ityopian identities and equality for all Rastafari, regardless of their location or whether they intend to repatriate. To build up a picture of Shashamane, the landscape is replete with newly finished, brightly painted concrete multistorey buildings. Many of these buildings in the Jamaica Safar and in Shashamane are more widely used for commerce. There are also Pentecostal and Orthodox churches, a mosque and Rastafari Mansions.4 The characteristic red, gold and green colours of Rastafari on houses and buildings stand out. Whether a chika shop painted in a vivid green or the large pink hotel at the junction of

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Melka Oda and Shashamane, iconic Rastafari colours also blend in with the brightly coloured surrounding structures. In the evenings, this public space is filled with women and boys returning with small animals from grazing, women loaded with firewood on their backs, and mostly male drivers of trucks and cars parked on the roadside stalls to rest, drink coffee, have sexual relations with women and socialise with each other. As the Jamaica Safar is about two kilometres from the centre of ketema (the Amharic word for town), there is a steady movement of people, Rastafari and non-Rastafari alike, between these places. People frequently go to town for work, for entertainment at one of the restaurants, bars or clothing shops, or to visit friends and relatives. Prior to the construction of banks on the periphery of the Jamaica Safar, most business was conducted at commercial banks in the town. Residents of the Safar took weekly trips to the market to buy food. A few repatriates who live in the Safar own businesses in the commercial centre, such as clothing shops. The town centre is also a hub for vehicles travelling to other areas of Ethiopia. As Gunilla Bjeren noted in the 1980s, Shashamane is usually a well-known necessary transit point for international and local persons heading to southern Ethiopia (1985), as still evidenced in the twenty-first century. Every Ethiopian adult whom I met in Addis Ababa knew of Shashamane. Since the earliest repatriates moved to Shashamane in the 1950s, the area has urbanised through internal migration leading to demographic, infrastructural and economic changes (Bjeren 1985). In 1970, the town’s population was about 11,900 (Bjeren 1985, 86). As the Ethiopian population increased, so did Shashamane’s. In 2007, the year before I arrived, the population was about 100,000 according to the 2007 national census with the wider wereda (district) approximately 246,000. Due to population movement and political restructuring, the periphery of Shashamane continues to change. At a national level, following the 1991 Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front-led (TPLF) coup d’état, Ethiopia was divided into “broadly decentralised ethnically based units called national regional states” (Adem 2004, 611). The towns of Shashamane and Melka Oda, for instance, are in Oromiyya Regional State since historically, the largest population there was Oromo. The city of Hawassa, although only 25 km from Shashamane, falls within the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Regional State (SNNPRS).

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Whether emerging as a garrison town from the 1970s, as an important transit point in the imperial and post-imperial periods or for its sizeable market, Shashamane has been an agricultural province producing vegetables and cereals, including teff, necessary for the dietary staple of injera (a flat, round, spongy bread). The land continues to be farmed by large state and private enterprises as well as subsistence-based farmers. The town is in an area of Ethiopia that is well-known for its natural scenery with the nearby mountainous area of Bale Goba recognised for its wildlife and flora and natural lake, Langano, for swimming, fishing and entertainment. Locals and international tourists also stop in Shashamane for meals or temporary accommodation on the way to the Omo National Park in southern Ethiopia. Located in the wereda of the same name, 250 km south of Addis Ababa, in historic Oromo territory, and now in West Arsi Zone of Oromiyya Regional State, the Jamaica Safar covers an area between Shashamane and the neighbouring town of Melka Oda with residents regularly crossing these borders. While there are no official borders of Jamaica Safar, there are discernible boundaries in the form of the Headquarters of the Twelve Tribes to the north and iconographic Rastafari yards and businesses to the south. This official distinction means that residents are documented in the national census based on the kebele or local district of Shashamane in which they live since the Jamaica Safar is a colloquial designation. Demographic data for Rastafari do not appear in the census. The bottom-up formation of the Jamaica Safar has resulted in a culturally diverse and multiethnic neighbourhood in the city of Shashamane. Residents of the Jamaica Safar include Ethiopian internal migrants and sedentary local Ethiopians of Oromo ethnicity (the numerical majority) as well as the other ethnic groups present in Shashamane and the wider Oromiyya Region, inclusive of Gurage, Hadiya, Kembata, Wollaita, Amhara, Sidama and Silte, to name a few (for a comprehensive list see the Population and Housing Census 2007, 99). Rastafari repatriates from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean countries of Barbados, Bermuda, Dominica, Jamaica, Martinique, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago, who themselves have resided in popular migration destinations of North America, the United Kingdom and Europe with culturally mixed children, all live in independent yet interconnected households in this Jamaica neighbourhood. This is not a geographically isolated Rastafari commune. In 2018, estimates of the total Rastafari population in Shashamane were 1000 (Beyecha 2018).

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It is useful to note the periods of arrival to this land (see Bonacci 2015 for a history of the “Shashemene settlement”). The first was that of EWF members, as previously noted, and the second influx of settlers consisted of Rastafari from the Twelve Tribes of Israel in Jamaica in the 1970s, despite the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia. These repatriates who volunteered to repatriate, including Brother David, agreed to do so when their “number came up.” The third and final group repatriation took place in the 1990s when the Theocratic Order of Nyahbinghi, known informally as Nyahbinghi, and the Ethiopia Africa Black International Congress or Bobo Ashanti, sent a handful of Brothers and Sisters to Shashamane. Some remained following their participation in the 1992 centenary celebrations of His Majesty’s birth such as 5 Nyahbinghi members, including 4 elders (who have since passed on or left Ethiopia) while the Bobo Ashanti congregation sent 13 members. Rastafari families or persons alone repatriate independently of organisations. In 2008–2009, I met four repatriate families, three from the Twelve Tribes and one unaffiliated, who self-funded their move to Ethiopia, thereby indicating the continued interest in repatriating to this historic land grant. Rastafari have also settled in Addis Ababa, and in Bahir Dar in northern Ethiopia. Regular visitors from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Europe, and occasional visitors from the Caribbean constantly move in and out of the Jamaica Safar. With this diverse local and foreign composition, the name Jamaica Safar reflects the numerical majority of Rastafari from Jamaica who mostly arrived in the 1970s, especially from the Twelve Tribes Mansion, such as Brother David. When I lived in Shashamane, Rastafari from Twelve Tribes in the Caribbean continued to visit Shashamane “on works.” This signified that the members came on official visits whereby the House paid for their travel and accommodation expenses, and when these Brothers and Sisters returned to their country of residence, they reported pertinent information to other members. The purpose of going “on works” is to keep Rastafari (who also call themselves IandI) outside Ethiopia updated about the “development” of Shashamane and the prospects for repatriation there. Although repatriates ceased to arrive in groups, they do trickle into Shashamane at present. Today, the repatriate population consists mostly of Rastafari of various national origins from the four organisations of the EWF, Twelve Tribes (known also as the Organ), Nyahbinghi and the Ethiopia Africa Black International Congress or Bobo Ashanti, with a few Rastafari unaffiliated to any Mansion.

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Currently, Rastafari tend to move to Shashamane with much greater funds than their predecessors, largely because they are aware that organisations no longer provide continuous economic support. In contrast to early repatriates, they usually have an independent source of income, such as a pension, or savings to pay for air travel to Ethiopia, a house, its furnishings and initial living expenses. In distinguishing Rastafari repatriates and Mansion affiliation, I use the terms “early repatriate,” “recent repatriate” and “seasonal repatriate.” These are neither emic nor locally used terms but are useful categorisations in identifying status among repatriates. An “early” repatriate would have moved to Shashamane in the first or second periods of repatriation and lived there for at least 30 years. A “recent” repatriate is someone who moved to Shashamane during the last organised repatriation by the Boboshanti House and the Nyahbinghi Mansion in the 1990s, and following this time, as Rastafari also arrived independently. “Seasonal repatriates” live between Shashamane and foreign locations and may spend up to half the year non-consecutively in Shashamane, developing patterns of transnational residence. Permanent repatriates or simply “repatriates,” by contrast, reside consistently in Shashamane. Seasonal repatriates also own or regularly occupy houses in the Jamaica Safar. To adhere to the emic Rastafari meaning of Ethiopian, I use the term “local Ethiopian” for persons who were born in Ethiopia, whose parents and immediate ancestors were all born in what can broadly be considered a territory of Ethiopia, and where persons across these multiple generations speak a language native to Ethiopia in the home. This might include Afan Oromo spoken by Oromos, for instance, and not only the widely spoken language of Amharic. Although the Ethiopian-born children of repatriates speak Amharic fluently, their parents learnt it only after repatriating. Parents and children communicate primarily in English and in West Indian patois, which slightly differs by nationality. Children with one local Ethiopian parent who reside in the Jamaica Safar usually speak both patois and one local language such as Amharic, Afan Oromo, Wollaita or Tigrinya, but tend to communicate in patois at the yard. Those who reside in Shashamane, but outside the Jamaica Safar usually do not speak patois and use a local language primarily to communicate in the home. All Ethiopian-­ born youth have at least basic English language skills learnt at school. In the next sections, I turn to the relevant theoretical and conceptual literature to analyse the thematic focus on place-making through

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belonging, identity and community building. I have brought together three bodies of literature on Rastafari symbolism and thought, creolisation and cosmopolitanism to elucidate a lived pan-African cosmopolitanism.

1.3   Rastafari Symbolism Facing stigmatisation and state harassment as well as persecution, Rastafari community leaders in pre-independent, 1960 Jamaica approached the first West Indian campus principal of the University College of the West Indies. Asking for an accurate and fair portrayal of their movement, this first brief survey, the Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica, was meant to dispel negative stereotypes and curb the violence that Rastafari regularly confronted. The report noted that “much of the psychology of the brethren is the psychology of the unemployed in any place of the world…The movement is rooted in unemployment” (Smith et al. 1960, 28). One of the more notable recommendations was an organised mission to Africa to explore possibilities for the resettlement of Jamaicans who wished to “return” to the continent.5 In bringing together cultural resistance and anti-colonialism, the “African identification of the Rasta…was also a reflection of the class struggle” (Campbell 2007, 220). While these materialist and functionalist analyses point to the significance of material factors, the imaginative and cultural dimensions of Rastafari worldview, its enhanced popularity over decades and the actual repatriation to Ethiopia ought not to be overlooked. To cite Aihwa Ong, it is necessary to “go beyond the classical formulation of political economy as a domain of production and labor that is separate from society and culture” (1999, 16). While there is debate regarding the materialisation of Rastafarians in Jamaica (Barrett 1988; Chevannes 1994; Edmonds 2003; Price 2009), the emergence of Rastafari faith was precipitated by the 1930 coronation in Ethiopia of Ras Tafari Mekonnen as His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I. Thousands of miles away in the Caribbean, everyday black Jamaicans watching newsreel footage, exchanging information, reading newspapers and magazines came to reimagine themselves as “Rastafarians” or “Rastafari.” In the social turbulence of colonial Jamaica, Rastafari meetings provided a haven for the poor and dispossessed to enact verbal resistance against the local elite, inclusive of the police force, politicians and businesses, as George Simpson’s studies indicate (1957; 1978). It was because

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of these critiques of the local bourgeoisie that Rastafari were “hunted” on the eve of decolonisation, while also being repressed by the new well-­ educated black and brown classes. As Brother Lewis, another early repatriate bluntly remarked, had he stayed in Kingston, he would likely be dead. Horace Campbell summarises this situation: “the African identification of the Rasta…was also a reflection of the class struggle” (Campbell 2007, 220). Brother David also situated his experiences in these circumstances in Jamaica in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to his identification of Rastafari, a period which saw rapid urbanisation and migrant labour abroad. Thousands of rural Jamaicans displaced by the government to build bauxite factories were either relocated to the urban slums that sprung up and surrounded Kingston or were packed onto the so-called banana boats that carried agricultural produce to the United Kingdom (Campbell 2007). From the end of the nineteenth century, Jamaicans had been one of the largest groups from the Caribbean to move as sources of cheap labour to the United States as well as the plantations of Central America, and then in the post-war period to England and Europe to fill labour deficits. Movement, or more precisely, adapting to it, was a core feature in the formation of Rastafari and broadly, Caribbean identities. Rastafari, on the other hand, rejected migration to England and the “West” in favour of the riskier move to Ethiopia. In Rastafari worldview, Ethiopia and Africa signify not only the origin of humankind but are also divine and sacred places, the promised land or zion.6 This desire to move to Ethiopia was not unique to Rastafari. From the end of the nineteenth century, Pan-Africanist-oriented African Americans and Caribbeans had visited Ethiopia. Many resided in Ethiopia for varying lengths of time. Within this particular black imagination, Ethiopia is understood as a synecdoche of Africa as well as a specific country within Africa. It also signifies the ancestral homeland of African-descended peoples forcibly brought to the Americas, inclusive of the Caribbean, in the New World during the transatlantic slave trade as well as an ancient empire. This is contrasted to the babylon or hell of the Caribbean and the Western world in general. Barry Chevannes offers a definition of babylon in Rastafari theology whereby, Babylon represented an entire system of conspiracy: the white establishment of wealth and privilege, served by the state; the agents of the state, especially

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the police; the Church, especially the Catholic presence of Rome, the whore and downpressor whose apocalyptic downfall was already assured by prophecy; the headication (education) system (2006, 97).

These remarks illustrate the extent to which Rastafari spirituality is opposed to the project of whiteness in its sociological construction, and its associated apparatuses. Looking towards Ethiopia, even while a monarchy, was a response to the intersections of unequal class and race relations. Rastafari worldview has also been significantly influenced by Christianity. Steeped in Christianity of different sects, Caribbean people well-versed in the Bible reinterpreted these ideas and doctrine. The historical circumstances in which collective enslaved gatherings were prohibited but later permitted with coerced Christian conversion in the colonial West Indies meant that religion became a successful collective means of challenging Eurocentric institutions. With the increased number of schools opened in the first part of the twentieth century in the British West Indies, mainly by religious organisations, accessible education in Jamaica was through religious institutions, and the Bible became well-known to ordinary peoples (Edmonds 2003). Since these beliefs of black royalty and a recognition of systemic race-and class-based inequities within the plantation society of Jamaica were rooted in biblical imagery, they were both accessible and familiar to a wide cross-­ section of Jamaicans, especially African-Jamaicans. Religious organisations have been central in solidifying community relationships, developing networks of support locally and translocally, in social and cultural resistance, and as expressions of agency within stratified societies (see FernandezOlmos and Paravisini-Gebert 2011; Paton and Forde 2012). This influence is observable in Ethiopianism, “Back to Africa” and Garveyism. All these were foundational ideas for Rastafari anti-racism and African reinvention. Ethiopianism emerged in various forms in the eighteenth century during slavery and took on cross-Atlantic dimensions over the next century. Formalised in the creation of new black churches such as the Ethiopian Churches in Africa and the Baptist Churches in Jamaica and the United States, in the nineteenth century there were churches and lodges with “Ethiopian,” “African” or “zion” in their titles in Jamaica. Drawing upon biblical symbolism, Leonard Barrett writes that these positive references to blackness were rooted in a “vision of a golden past – and the promise that Ethiopia should once more stretch forth its hands to God – that revitalized the hope of an oppressed people” (Barrett 1988, 70; 75).

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Ethiopianism was enhanced over time by the representation and perception of Ethiopia as an ancient bastion of Christianity, especially as it was the only black African territory never to have been formally colonised by Europe (Pankhurst 2001, 215; Littlewood 1993).7 Ethiopian exceptionalism remained an essential part of black religious thought well into the twentieth century.8 However, within a framework of cultural resistance, Chevannes (1994) has argued that the “idealisation of Africa” pre-dates the dissemination of Christianity and its reinterpretations. There are two aspects to this ideal. The first as symbolic of freedom and “home” which encouraged repatriation, and the second as a reference of identity. Even prior to the granting of land in Shashamane, these ideas were developed by Rastafari with the claim that Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, crowned in 1930 with the titles “Lion of Judah” and “King of Kings,” was God. Not only was Ethiopia a home to which diasporic Africans were invited, but the invitation had come from a divine figure himself. The “first Rasta” Leonard Howell, had declared Haile Selassie I to be a black God “living among men” rather than a God who died more than a millennium before (see Hélène 2012).9 One key radical idea was that “being Black was a divine attribute” (Chevannes 1998, 11). The immanentism of a God who dwells within each person meant that, as Howell and Hibbert elaborated, black people shared in this divinity. This reimagined persona was supported by Marcus Garvey’s reported comment in 1916, “look to Africa for the crowning of a Black King, he shall be the Redeemer” (Barrett 1988, 81). Although scholars have argued that Garvey himself did not accept this interpretation (Hill 2001), Garvey highlighted the coronation of Ethiopian monarch Haile Selassie I as a momentous event for African and black peoples. These views served to historically and psychologically reclaim an imperialist ethnocentric concept of “the African” as inferior to “the European” and worthless, notions that were legitimated through Christian doctrine. This background of Ethiopianism and symbolism of Africa, with Garvey’s ideas of African empowerment, created a radical and inventive corpus of ideas. Garvey’s play The African King, performed in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1930 (Wardle 2000, 82) was a popular expression of these ideas. In the early twentieth century, Garvey’s newly founded United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) embarked on an ambitious programme of economic and cultural empowerment, notably through solidarity with colonial Africa. The Black Star Line of shipping tied economic self-sufficiency with “repatriation.”10

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A West Indian proclivity for individual and collective reinvention is evident in these historical developments. Hill (2001) and Gilroy (1993) refer to these activities and processes as part of a counter-modernity or a double consciousness of modern Caribbean peoples out of which alternative conceptualisations of personhood were created. Huon Wardle argues that evidence of this orientation today can be found in the universalist-framed narratives of displacement among ordinary urban Jamaicans (2002, 498). Rastafari have not only inherited aspects of the redefined Ethiopianism of this period, but Rastafari themselves also concur with the insistence on viewing the individual and humanity outside of hegemonic notions of place, territory and citizenship. In short, the Pan-African and cosmopolitan consciousness of Rastafarianism can be situated in earlier formal and popular expressions of Pan-Africanism, inclusive of Garveyism and Ethiopianism, from the end of the nineteenth century across the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993). The space of the West Indian plantation is central to understanding these ideas and intercontinental projects.

1.4   The Plantation and Creole Subjectivities As lives are being built on the land grant, in a changing Ethiopian milieu, ideas about attachment and belonging are continuously and simultaneously reiterated and reconfigured. The actions, behaviours and beliefs of repatriates and their children problematise, on various levels, fundamental demarcations of place. In particular, the issues of who can claim belonging to this place and whose values can and do define territory are not abstract; these are instead very real concerns for repatriates. The answers to these questions will determine access and rights to land, citizenship and opportunities for advancement (Malkki 1995; 1997). In a wider anthropological context, these are questions about origins, roots and identity (Geertz 1973; Clifford 1997; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Anthropologists have argued that the individual-centred and universalist conception of self in the Caribbean must be contextualised within historical processes of imperialism and colonialism in the making of the modern West Indies. Central to these processes was the emergence of hierarchical multiethnic societies with distinct cultural traits, and co-­ constituent egalitarian folk forms (Mintz 1996; Mintz and Price 1985; Trouillot 1995).

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It was under these conditions of the West Indian plantation that the creole individual or West Indian subject emerged. Mass monocrop production made possible with forced, coerced and voluntary labour meant that intense processes of homogenisation and individuation on the heterogeneous plantation occurred simultaneously, and underscored social relations, continuing to characterise postcolonial Caribbean peoples and societies. As Sidney Mintz has argued, “it is not paradoxical to assert that the transplanted peoples of the Caribbean had to be homogenized to meet the economic demands the West imposed upon them, at the same time that they were individualized by the destruction of the institutional underpinnings of their pasts” (1985, 65). These were the conditions under which creolisation occurred in the first “proto-capitalist” enterprises in the modern world (Mintz 1996). The hyper-modern conditions of slavery, indentured labour and colonialism in the functioning of the plantation—the organisation of labour, the differentiation of skill, the agricultural know-how, cultural diversity and overall mono-production, the ethnically diverse enslaved and free labour force—constitute part of the reason that Mintz emphasises the social, as opposed to cultural dynamics of creolisation. The “creole” came to have various meanings in the Caribbean (Mintz 1974, 11). With historical meanings of creole, criollo, Kreyol and crioulo to refer to persons, animals and plants born in the New World of the Old, the overarching meaning became that which was “local” (Brathwaite 1971; Jayawardena 1963; Mintz 1996). In the nationalist metanarrative of postcolonial Caribbean states, creole came to mean mixtures of African and European— of people, things, practices, beliefs to the exclusion of other cultural and ethnic groups such as East Indians, descendants of Indian indentured workers, Chinese and Javanese. Viranjini Munasinghe (2001) therefore questions the applicability of creolisation to indicate inclusivity, external to the Caribbean and in the “global village” when it has come to be narrowly defined in its original Caribbean context. Thinking through implications for social personhood and individual agency in terms of these historical contexts, Wardle (2000) suggests that “cultural openness” characterises contemporary West Indians’ cross-­ cutting cultural differences. In particular, the social milieu of urban Kingston in Jamaica, argues Wardle, is characterised by individualism “economically, morally and aesthetically” (2000, 88). Such expressions of extraterritoriality emerge in the everyday, for example, through stories of adventure. As Wardle aptly puts it, “creolization must refer to a pattern in

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which flux and interplay of cultural elements, disjuncture between formations, and absolute commitment to particular social forms reproduce themselves inter-generatively to create what we recognize as Creole cultural life” (2000, 493). This ethnography provides an entrée into how creolisation in its broad sense must be situated in a historical context of global migration, with reference to the Caribbean. And conversely, how features of creolisation inclusive of cultural syncretism and hybridity are manifest in the Rastafari community in the Jamaica Safar. There are also less visible forms of creole subjectivities that I argue are reproduced in Ethiopia. In such a milieu of creolisation, ambiguity has been a fundamental aspect of value systems, individual efforts to achieve better lives characterised by freedom, dignity and material stability, as well as ritual and everyday expressions of personhood, of which Rastafari worldview is one example. In Shashamane, Rastafari repatriates acknowledge the commonality of their circumstances as descendants of slaves (as black peoples) and as persons devoid of legal status in Ethiopia, with those of other subordinated persons globally. On this basis of exploitation, subordinate groups find common ground. However, this is not simply a claim to a global victimhood, it is an imagined solidarity grounded in narrative, philosophical and everyday acts of pan-African-oriented imagination. It is from this collective recognition of injustice and selective freedoms that expressions of resistance and inventiveness take shape, one of which is Rastafari thought and another, the actual migration to Ethiopia. Such cosmopolitan sensibilities have characterised social movements in the modern Caribbean from the “Black Jacobins” of eighteenth-century San Domingo (James 1963) to Rastafari repatriation in the Jamaica Safar in the late twentieth century.

1.5   Cosmopolitan Theory To further outline this cosmopolitan outlook, I turn to another Rastafari word: outernational. As an inversion of the word “international” (Van Dijk 1998), outernational literally refers to the emergence of Rastafari beliefs and expressions outside of the national context of Jamaica, in accordance with Rastafari usage, and more fundamentally, reflects this shift from Europe to Africa. Paul Gilroy (1993) uses “outer-national” to emphasise that the formation of “national” identities in the Atlantic space has historically been

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influenced by processes outside colonial/postcolonial territories but within the Black Atlantic. This meaning echoes Mintz’s emphasis on the making of the modern Caribbean as oikoumene (1996). While I recognise these significant historical interconnections, in this ethnography, outernational primarily highlights the combined effort of Rastafari in Shashamane and those in foreign to maintain the existence of the repatriate population, both in terms of day-to-day economic sustenance and symbolism. Outernational links are essential to the reproduction of the Rastafari community following this “return” to zion. The concept of foreign in the Caribbean imaginary continues to be relevant in this Rastafari repatriation. In popular Caribbean use, foreign usually refers to the Global North. It connotes opportunities for earning and achieving a better life, of bettering oneself and the family, of a general superiority to the Caribbean and of the American myth of limitless possibilities, although this is applied outside the United States. In Shashamane, though, any location outside Ethiopia is referred to as foreign. Jamaica, the United Kingdom and Tanzania are all “foreign” although the United Kingdom and Jamaica refer also to babylon or hell. I, therefore, argue that notions of foreign and babylon are reproduced intergenerationally in Shashamane, even with its location in the promised land of Ethiopia. Caribbeans have long challenged such global asymmetries, whether taking the form of cosmopolitanism as everyday (Wardle 2000), rooted (Appiah 1997), vernacular (Werbner 2006) or banal (Beck 2002). As Nigel Rapport and Vered Amit underscore, “a ‘cosmopolitan,’ for Immanuel Kant, was a citizen of two worlds: polis and cosmos. Here is the global figure of the individual human being who exercises universal capacities in the negotiation of local social relations and the construction of particular cultural worlds” (Amit and Rapport 2012, xi). Paula Uimonen takes this point further. She argues for recognising that “by insisting on freedom and equality for all of humanity [Ghanaian Pan-­ Africanist and anti-colonial activist Kwame], Nkrumah articulated a more cosmopolitan ontology than the Enlightenment thinker Kant had reason to conjure” (2020).11 In her call for decolonising cosmopolitanism, Uimonen approaches African philosophy as cosmopolitan thought and action, not as “an alternative, vernacular or subaltern philosophy” as compared to Kant’s Eurocentric cosmopolitanism (2020, 4). I argue that such a “thick” form of cosmopolitanism is observable in Rastafari praxis. A cosmopolitan orientation of self entailed recognition of a common humanity, an eschatological focus with the pervasive

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distinction between the chosen few and the rest, and an attitude of openness to movement, and even expectation rather than geographical fixity with a potential for liberation, spiritual salvation and personal reinvention. Such a focus offers the tools to examine contradictions and paradoxes over imagination, identity, movement and citizenship, which are significant concerns globally in the twenty-first century. Building on a discussion of universal sensibilities in the “construction of particular cultural worlds,” to refer to Amit and Rapport, like Kwame Anthony Appiah, I argue that such a cosmopolitan attitude and behaviour does not preclude affective attachments to local places or spaces. Being “rooted” in particular cultural milieus and geopolitical environments meant dialectically engaging in thought and action with the “world as one” (Appiah 1997; see also Uimonen 2020, 2). Appiah rightly asks, however, if everyone is “cosmopolitan,” how do we recognise diversity? As I demonstrate in this ethnographic study, the capacity for global belonging or awareness of worldwide inequalities, as Rastafari attest to, does not preclude attachments to local spaces. Cultural hybridity and social integration are processes that occur in Shashamane with the Rastafari presence, as evidenced in the Jamaica Safar. As Appiah writes, “The cosmopolitan patriot can entertain the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached to a home of one’s own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people” (1997, 618). Certainly, one attribute of liberalism (even if we are critical of others), that of individualism, is not antithetical to a cosmopolitan outlook. Therefore, “the freedom to create oneself” (Appiah 1997, 625) is integral to both this ethnography of Rastafari spiritual and physical repatriation to Ethiopia with the sociocultural as well as place-making in the Jamaica Safar. This sentiment of autonomy and freedom is relevant also to the emergence of Rastafari as a worldview and movement in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries in colonial Jamaica. For Rastafari, this consciousness of unequal freedoms was and continues to be rooted in “full knowledge of the dangerous memories of oppression, exploitation, landlessness, underemployment, and other effects of colonialism” (Murrell 2000, 32), which are maintained in the collective memories of Caribbeans. While this collective consciousness is reproduced within the Rastafari community in Shashamane, in this ethnography, I demonstrate also how individual first- and second-generation Rastafari

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craft distinct self-identities as well as malleable ideas of belonging.12 Consequently, Rastafari cosmopolitanism cannot simply be reduced to humanism. It is the spiritual grounding of Rastafari and the political-­ religious interconnections that coalesce in what Rastafari call “consciousness.” Regarding diversity, cosmopolitanism is not only underscored by the equality of human beings but also an acceptance of diversity among humans; that “there are different local ways of being” (Appiah 1997, 621). Rastafari worldview is primed for incorporating a flexibility towards difference, out of the historical conditions of unequal plantation societies as well as the acephalous organisation of Rastafari. An ethos of a non-­ hierarchical oneness that allows for variation in individuals’ practices, ideas, cultural forms and even status within the collective grouping of Rastafari is replicated in the relationships between Rastafari groups, elders and leaders (Barnett 2002). One foundational tenet of Rastafari philosophy is the opposition to institutional dogma and structures of the Church, for example. Although Rastafari organisations have leaders and elders, the basic philosophy disallows hierarchy and relationships are built on and guided by an ethos of equality (Edmonds 2003; Chevannes 1998; Price 2009).

1.6   Migration Global migratory movements and networks are integral in examining the social reproduction of the Jamaica Safar. Movement is examined in so far as a history of migration has been integral to the structure of West Indian societies, as noted, and to imaginative expressions of self-making on a global scale. I position migration within these two poles of structure and agency in terms of betterment and its corresponding features of liberation and personal reinvention as well as constraints to mobility within global capitalism, and regimes of mobility (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). While some studies of migration have focused on ruptures at familial, household and community levels, Caribbeanist scholars have argued that transmigrant links have long characterised Caribbean lives as well as the ability of Caribbean peoples to ideologically shift and incorporate disjuncture in multiple values and attitudes towards self and world (Wardle 2012; Fog Olwig 2007). Following European colonisation of the Caribbean in the fifteenth century, the systematic extermination of indigenous groups and the introduction of large-scale plantations brought multicultural

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peoples forcibly and voluntarily from Africa, Europe, and Asia. This labour sustained plantation production well into the twentieth century. This history of colonial immigration and later postcolonial emigration from the Caribbean in search of work and opportunities for improvement has had enduring effects on the societies and cultures of Caribbean peoples. In contrast to stasis as a norm, and presented as such in social science research, migration was highly valued even to the extent of being expected in the Caribbean and its diasporas, long before recent globalising processes (Chamberlain 2006; Foner 2001; Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001; Kasinitz 1992; Hall 1990; Mintz 1996). I am not suggesting a linear continuity of these processes and ideology. Rather, I situate Rastafari migratory and imaginative trajectories within a history of Caribbean internal and external migration (Fog Olwig 2007; Philpott 1973; Foner 2001; Chamberlain 2006; Henry 1994). Altogether, these three bodies of literature highlight how cultural mixing is a common feature of twenty-first-century life in many regions, with the impact of the globalisation of capital and technology, that raises new questions of attachment and belonging. Caribbean peoples, on the other hand, have long engaged conceptually, socially and politically with the complexity of their diverse origins, shared practices and distinctive worldview. While contemporary anthropologists have adopted concepts that reflect mixing, under different conditions and to various degrees, such as creolisation, mestizaje and hybridity and broadened the scope, as Ulf Hannerz, Sidney Mintz, Michaeline Crichlow, Huon Wardle and David Scott highlight. This has increased the visibility of these terms without the concurrent attention to the place, both geographic and theoretical, of the Caribbean in social and cultural anthropology, as Kevin Yelvington has argued (2006). I therefore situate creolisation theoretically and ambiguity thematically within the anthropology of the Caribbean and the material conditions of the plantation in the forthcoming chapters.

1.7   Organisation of the Book Following this chapter, through an examination of sociolinguistics, the second chapter “Word-Sound-Power” highlights the oral and aural media of Rastafari cosmological expression. I outline how Rastafari draw upon Christianity and Ethiopianism to refashion this worldview, which, in turn, demonstrates how a Rastafari consciousness is predicated upon

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interconnections. I also show how Rastafari sociolinguistics provide the parameters in which the interaction of repatriates with residents and visitors in the Jamaica Safar takes place. Chapter 3, “Ambiguities of Belonging,” delves into issues surrounding prevailing ideals of belonging as they are expressed from Rastafari perspectives and Ethiopian imperial and post-imperial nationalisms. For example, I discuss how Haile Selassie I is positioned in these discourses, and how this positioning comes to be one source of conflict between Rastafari and local Ethiopians. This divergence does not, of course, preclude the development of social and kinship ties in the Jamaica Safar. Building upon the previous one, fourth chapter, “Narratives of Community: His Majesty’s People,” centres the Rastafari categorical distinction of “His Majesty’s people,” in Rastafari words. Drawing upon concepts of forgetting and remembering, I delineate how Rastafari charter myths are situated in repatriates’ efforts and modes of history-making centred on the land grant. With the aim of keeping the land inalienable for Rastafari, I illustrate a parallel to “family land” in the colonial and postcolonial English-speaking Caribbean. Questions of economy and subsistence are the topic of Chap. 5, “Making a Living.” I relay how first- and second-generation Rastafari generate income and build lives following the sought-after goal of repatriation. I also focus on how wider Rastafari global networks help in this endeavour, and in doing so, help to ensure claims to the land grant in the middle of local and national economic developments in Ethiopia, which impact repatriate opportunities for survival and betterment (improvement). I elaborate upon these topics in the final chapter. Chapter 6, “Family and Kinship: Rastafari Yards,” focuses on kinship and family. I critique the distinction of “productive” and “reproductive” labours through descriptions of Rastafari and Rastafari-local Ethiopian households. A discussion of how values demonstrate the reproduction of African-Caribbean patterns of family and household organisation entails examining women’s experiences of the “triple shift,” and in particular, the work they do to reproduce the community. I also explore intergenerational expectations of masculinity and femininity with reference to the reputation-respectability model of Caribbean gender systems. In Chap. 7, “Rastafari Citizen-Subjectivities,” I examine Rastafari interactions with the Ethiopian state and its representatives. I contrast the legal and subjective approaches to issues of citizenship and belonging. Through these state encounters, I look at how babylon is reproduced in the zion of

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Ethiopia, for example, in how the land grant is policed by the Ethiopian state. However, I suggest that a cosmopolitan citizenship offers an avenue for Rastafari-grounded imaginative responses to contemporary inequalities to be translated into macroinstitutional change, thereby rounding off the text.

Notes 1. Among Rastafari, “Brother” and “Sister” or “brethren” and “sistren” are used to emphasise a global fellowship through an idiom of kinship. 2. I italicise emic terms, in both English and Amharic, when I first use them. Thereafter, they are unitalicised. See Appendix B for a note on transliterations. 3. Initially, although the EWF was not a Rastafari-founded organisation, its composition is now exclusively self-identified as Rastafari. 4. “Mansion” or “House” is a semi-formal grouping of Rastafari centred around a “charismatic leader,” according to Chevannes 1994, 142; Shilliam 2013, 10. 5. Independent of His Majesty’s land grant, under pressure from Rastafari, the first official mission from Jamaica visited five independent African countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria in 1961 to discuss the possibility of accommodating Jamaicans who wished to repatriate. Contrary to the established position that this mission was a result of the report, as it was one of the recommendations, Robert Hill suggests that, in principle, the Jamaican colonial government had agreed to it prior to the publication of the report. In short, Hill argues that the report was an intelligence-based undertaking rather than solely an academic one (https://anniepaul.net/our-­m an-­i n-­m ona-­a n-­i nterview-­b y-­r obert-­a ­hill-­with-­annie-­paul/). 6. In this work I write “zion” and “babylon” in lowercase letters to emphasise the derivation and the distinction from “Babylon” and “Zion” of the Christian Bible. 7. Ethiopia was never formally colonised, as occurred in the Caribbean, although Italy occupied the territory between 1935 and 1941. However, in a conversation with social anthropologist Aneesa Kassam, she noted that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has functioned as an internal coloniser. 8. On 13 October 1935, in an example, 1400 people in Jamaica, still British subjects, signed a petition (unsuccessfully) requesting permission from the British government to enlist in the Ethiopian army “to fight to preserve the glories of our ancient and beloved Empire” (Zips 2006, 48).

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9. The title of Hélène Lee’s book is The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism. 10. The Black Star Line was a shipping company meant to initiate trade between the Americas and West Africa. 11. As cited in Uimonen’s abstract of 2019. “Decolonising Cosmopolitanism: An anthropological reading of Immanuel Kant and Kwame Nkrumah on the world as one.” Critique of Anthropology 40: 81–101. 12. In using the terms “first generation” and “second generation,” I do not mean to suggest a total sociocultural identity. Rather, it points to a Rastafari self-identification by the children of Rastafari repatriates born in Ethiopia. I also use second-generation interchangeably with “the generation born on the land grant.” The latter is an emic phrase.

References Adem, Teferi. 2004. ‘Decentralised There, Centralised Here’: Local Governance and Paradoxes of Household Autonomy and Control in North-East Ethiopia. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 74 (4): 611–632. Amit, Vered, and Nigel Rapport. 2012. Community as ‘Good to Think with’: The Productiveness of Strategic Ambiguities. In Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality, ed. Nigel Rapport and Vered Amit, 3–13. London: Pluto Press. Anderson, Moji, and Erin MacLeod. 2017. Notes on a Branding: Subject and Object in “Brand Jamaica”. Social and Economic Studies 66 (1&2): 79–103. Appiah, Kwame A. 1997. Cosmopolitan Patriots. Critical Inquiry 23 (3): 617–639. https://doi.org/10.1086/448846. Barnett, Michael. 2002. Rastafari Dialectism: The Epistemological Individualism and Connectivism of Rastafari. Caribbean Quarterly 48 (4): 54–61. Barrett, Leonard. E. 1988. The Rastafarians. Massachusetts: Beacon Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2002. The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology in the Second Age of Modernity. In Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, 61–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beyecha, Mahlet. A. 2018. The Rastafari in Ethiopia: Challenges and Paradoxes of Belonging. Masters Thesis, Leiden University. Bogues, Anthony. 1997. Caliban’s Freedom. London: Pluto Press. Bonacci, Giulia. 2015. Exodus!: Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia. Trans. Antoinette Tidjani Alou. Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press. Brathwaite, Kamau Edward. 1971. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Bjeren, Gunilla. 1985. Migration to Shashemene: Ethnicity, Gender and Occupation in Urban Ethiopia. PhD dissertation, Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies. Campbell, Horace. 2007. Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney. London: Hansib. Chamberlain, Mary. 2006. Family Love in the Diaspora. Piscataway: Transaction Publishers. Chevannes, Barry. 1994. Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. ———. 1998. Introducing the Native Religions of Jamaica. In Rastafari and Other African-Caribbean Worldviews, ed. Barry Chevannes, 1–19. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 2006. Betwixt and Between: Explorations in an African-Caribbean Mindscape. Kingston, Jamaica and Florida: Ian Randle Publishers. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edmonds, Ennis. 2003. Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fernandez-Olmos, Margarite, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, eds. 2011. Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo. New York: New York University Press. Fog Olwig, Karen. 2007. Caribbean Journeys: An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks. Durham: Duke University Press. Foner, Nancy. 2001. Introduction. West Indian Migration to New  York: An Overview. In Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York, ed. Nancy Foner, 1–22. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London/New York: Verso. Glick Schiller, Nina, and Georges Fouron. 2001. Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home. Durham: Duke University Press. Glick Schiller, Nina, and Noel B. Salazar. 2013. Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39 (2): 183–200. https://doi. org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.723253. Gupta, Ahkil, and James Ferguson, eds. 1997. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1990. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence Wishart. Hannerz, Ulf. 2006. Two Faces of Cosmopolitanism: Culture and Politics. Documentos CIDOB Dinamicas Interculturales 7: 1–29.

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Hélène, Lee. 2012. The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Henry, Frances. 1994. The Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto: Learning to Live with Racism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hill, Robert A. 2001. Dread History: Leonard P. Howell and Millenarian Visions in the Early Rastafarian Religion. Chicago: Research Associates School Times. James, C.L.R. 1963. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage. Jayawardena, Chandra. 1963. Conflict and Solidarity in a Guianese Plantation. New York: The Humanities Press. Kasinitz, Philip. 1992. Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race. New York: Cornell University Press. Littlewood, Roland. 1993. Pathology and Identity: the Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad. New York: Cambridge University Press. Malkki, Liisa H. 1995. Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of Things. Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1): 495–523. ———. 1997. National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialisation of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees. In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 52–74. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Mintz, Sidney. 1974. Caribbean Transformations. Chicago: Aldine. ———. 1996. Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: The Caribbean Region as Oikoumene. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (2): 289–311. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.032702.131011. Mintz, Sidney, and Sally Price. 1985. Caribbean Contours. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Munasinghe, Viranjini. 2001. Callaloo or Tossed Salad?: East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad. New York: Cornell University Press. Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel. 2000. Memories, Underdevelopment and the Bible in Colonial Caribbean Experience. In Religion, Culture and Tradition in the Caribbean, ed. Hemchand Gossai and Nathaniel Murrell, 9–36. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Nesbitt, Nick. 2008. Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press. Pankhurst, Richard. 2001. The Ethiopians: A History. Oxford: Blackwell. Paton, Diana, and Maarit Forde (eds). 2012. Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing. North Carolina: Duke University Press. Patterson, Orlando. 1969. The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica. Cranbury: Associated University Presses.

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Paul, Annie. 1993. Our Man in Mona: A Conversation Between Robert A. Hill and Annie Paul. Annie Paul (Blog). https://anniepaul.net/our-­man-­in-­mona-­ an-­interview-­by-­robert-­a-­hill-­with-­annie-­paul/. Accessed 27 Aug 2020. Philpott, Stuart. 1973. West Indian Migration: The Montserrat Case. London: Athlone Press. Price, Charles. 2009. Becoming Rasta: Origins of Rastafari Identity in Jamaica. New York: New York University Press. Shilliam, Robbie. 2013. Redemption from Development: Amartya Sen, Rastafari and Promises of Freedom. Postcolonial Studies 15 (3): 331–350. Simpson, George. 1957. Afro-American Religions and Religious Behavior. Caribbean Studies 12 (2): 5–30. ———. 1978. Black Religions in the New World. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, Michael G., Roy Augier, and Rex Nettleford. 1960. Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica. Jamaica: University College of the West Indies. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Uimonen, Paula. 2020. Decolonising Cosmopolitanism: An Anthropological Reading of Immanuel Kant and Kwame Nkrumah on the World as One. Critique of Anthropology 40 (1): 81–101. Van Dijk, Frank. 1998. Chanting down Babylon Outernational: the Rise of Rastafari in Europe, the Caribbean and the Pacific. In Chanting Down Babylon: the Rastafari Reader, ed. Nathaniel Murrell, William Spencer and Adrian Anthony, 178–198. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, Philadelphia. Vertovec, Steven, and Robin Cohen. 2002. Introduction: Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. In Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, 1–24. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wardle, Huon. 2000. An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica. New York: Edwin Mellon Press. ———. 2002. Ambiguation, Disjuncture, Commitment: A Social Analysis of Caribbean Cultural Creativity. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8 (3): 493–508. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.00119. ———. 2012. Ethnographies of Cosmopolitanism in the Caribbean. In Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty, 504–515. Abingdon: Routledge. Werbner, Pnina. 2006. Understanding Vernacular Cosmopolitanism. Anthropology News 47 (5): 7–11. Yelvington, Kevin. 2006. Introduction. In Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora, ed. Kevin Yelvington, 3–32. Texas: School of American Research Press. Zips, Werner. 2006. Introduction. In Rastafari: A Universal Philosophy in the Third Millenium, ed. Werner Zips, ix–xxxii. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers.

CHAPTER 2

“Word-Sound-Power”

2.1   Everyday Performativity The importance of orality and performativity to Rastafari social life is captured in the emic phrase “word-sound-power” and the Rastafari concepts of sighting, citing and reasoning that capture the socially reproductive behaviours of Rastafari. In this chapter I highlight how oral and aural media reproduce Rastafari cosmology in the Jamaica Safar. I refer to these behaviours as everyday performativity. In presenting situations when everyday performativity is daily expressed among locally-born youths and repatriates, with Rastafari and non-­ Rastafari visitors, I demonstrate how Rastafari orators and performers use “word-sound-power” to continuously reiterate the boundaries of selfhood as well as group belonging. How do speaking, behaving, thinking and imagining all contribute to the performance of a Rastafari persona in Shashamane? To help with this analysis, I refer to Roger Abrahams’ (1983) discussion of contrapuntal speech to elucidate sociocultural change and continuity. Studies of oral expression tend to examine this form in relation to wider symbolic meanings and practices (see Bauman and Sherzer 1989; Reisman 1989; Abrahams 1983). Within Caribbean anthropology, contrapuntal speech refers to speech acts that stand in counterpoint, and not only contrast to each other. As Huon Wardle notes, “Typically it is through © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gomes, Cosmopolitanism from the Global South, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82272-9_2

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personal, usually oral, performance that deep contradictions between the hierarchical and the egalitarian are evoked and contested” (2012, 507). Ideas and sentiments of global belonging with Rastafari challenges to oppressive conditions globally and specifically in postcolonial Jamaica have been expressed through word-sound-power, thereby demonstrating another component of a Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibility—one that is elucidated through orality. Situated within the ambiguity of creole social relations, performances of contrapuntal speech demonstrate the enactment of alternative value systems co-existing with dominant Eurocentric norms in the Caribbean—which persist in the postcolonial Caribbean with culturally dominant Afrocentric expressions inclusive of music. These forms are transnationally enacted among first- and second-generation Rastafari in Shashamane. Contrapuntal speech acts are identity performing ones that underscore creole ambiguity, and are significant in social reproduction. There are also new identity forms among youth. These dynamics indicate a “performance complex,” an idea that builds on Roger Abrahams’s earlier work in the 1970s and 1980s in the insular Caribbean. Performativity is evident in the body, through movement, dance, and speech as well as integrally connected to acquiring knowledge. Reading the Bible is foundational to becoming conscious or manifesting Rastafari. The Bible is an ambivalent source of knowledge which must be interpreted accurately or “truthfully,” to quote Rastafari. This knowledge is a key element of sighting Rastafari (acquiring spiritual vision or insight). Only then can one gain social recognition as an adult Rastafari. These status distinctions, which are hierarchical, are fostered among Rastafari as well as between Rastafari and non-Rastafari. In turn, the Bible is used to test peoples’ consciousness. Rastafari speech activity becomes meaningful in everyday and ritual behaviour through words, spoken in reasonings or chanted in music, and through the transmission of these ideas to fellow Rastafari, Ethiopian-born children and visitors. The categorical distinction between Rastafari and non-Rastafari structures this worldview and orders the interaction of repatriates with members of various ethnic, cultural and age groups. Fundamental cosmological elements are reinforced, altered and shaped through the oral and aural expressions, individual and collective actions of Rastamen, Rastawomen and youth who enact this Rastafari ethos in Shashamane. These behaviours are evident in Biblical literacy, Rastafari “dread talk” (Pollard 2000), hybrid speech as well as commodified and amateur music.

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Performativity is relevant conceptually in this chapter because it is in the repetition of these behaviours that Rastafari identities are reproduced, shaped and hybridised (Butler 1990). Sara Salih cogently captures this position in which subjectivities are created in particular contexts, which then extends the possibility that “the subject may be instituted differently in ways that do not simply ‘reinforce existing power structures,’ and therefore has the power to ‘subvert existing power structures’” (2002, 10–11). Such behaviours are positioned in relation to fundamental concepts, particularly that of salvation for Rastafari in a post-apocalyptic world, in which Ethiopia is a central symbol.

2.2   Itiopia/Ethiopia in Rastafari Worldview In Rastafari speech “Ethiopia” or Itiopia is used interchangeably with “Africa” to refer to both the African continent and its eastern region, following its historical and Biblical use. Here Ethiopia symbolises the divinity of Africa and its peoples, thereby having many roles. For Rastafari, Ethiopia is a millennia-old African empire of which His Majesty was the last ruler, the location of the oldest Christian Church in Africa, the origin of humankind, and especially of African-descended peoples around the world whose ancestors were forcibly removed from the continent. In the words of Brother Arnold, an elder repatriate, “we all come out of one place,” meaning Ethiopia. Brother Arnold’s remark is not derived from the archaeological evidence found in Ethiopia of the oldest specimen of homo sapiens, but a more inclusive categorisation of these signifiers. Repatriates and youths only rarely referenced this archaeological find, “Lucy” or “Dinkenesh.” Jean Besson (2002) contends that this image of Africa and Ethiopia was a symbol of resistance in African-derived religions in colonial Jamaica rather than reflective of an actual destination for repatriation. Rastafari today in Shashamane, of the first- and second-generations, continue a version of this argument emphasising that it was the Babylonian condition in Jamaica that led to a consciousness of Rastafari. They continue to encourage actual migration to Ethiopia. This origin in Ethiopia is a belief held by every Rastafari, irrespective of views regarding repatriation. Ethiopia and Africa are often used synonymously by repatriates, unless speaking about the state of Ethiopia, since it is also the birthplace of His Majesty and therefore itself divine. A repatriated Sister, living in Shashamane for over 20 years, casually and resolutely

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asserted that this is the place that “God watches over.” A recently repatriated Brother echoed this belief, indicating that “repatriating means moving from a place that is unsafe to one that is safe.” This idea of safety is premised on the relationship between His Majesty and Rastafari.

2.3   Haile Selassie I This symbolic-historical significance of Ethiopia as an ancestral homeland and well-established African empire is inextricably connected to the figure of Haile Selassie I. Following his coronation as the Emperor of Ethiopia, he became the cornerstone of Rastafari worldview as the divine and human Creator.1 While all Rastafari acknowledge His Majesty’s divinity (His birth on 23 July is celebrated by all Mansions) and the ability of each person to communicate with the Creator directly, there are wide-ranging beliefs regarding the precise form of His divinity. Repatriates referred to His Majesty simply as God, God on earth, the Creator, Jesus Christ, the personality of God on earth or the Black Messiah. For instance, a Twelve Tribes view of His Majesty as the manifestation of Christ on earth who will physically return during his second coming (as foretold in the Book of Revelations) contrasts with a Bobo Ashanti definition of His Majesty. For Bobo Ashanti, Haile Selassie I is likewise divine, in the form of the Almighty and member of a divine trinity of God, Prince Emmanuel (the founder) and Marcus Garvey, the latter designated as a prophet (Bonacci 2011, 210; Barnett 2005, 68). In the view of Twelve Tribes members, His Majesty’s role on earth is “to guide the people.” As the saviour, His Majesty will return following the apocalypse to select the worthy few who will assist him in rebuilding humanity. But we must be patient and alert for signs, a young Brother explained, since “no one knoweth the hour when the Father returns for His Majesty’s return will be like a thief in the night,” referencing Matthew 24 of the Bible.2 While each Mansion develops a particular theology, Rastafari of all affiliations agree that Haile Selassie I is The Lion of the Tribe of Judah referred to in the Old Testament of the Bible. Genesis 49:9–10 reads: “Judah is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall not depart from Judah” and Revelation 5:1–5: “the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.”

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During one of my conversations with Brother Fyah, I asked him to clarify who is Selassie I (pronounced “eye”) for Rastas since I kept hearing various descriptions of Him. In response, he directed me to Revelation 5. “Go and bring the Bible so you can read for yourself,” he instructed. This chapter was written by John shortly after the death of Christ, Brother Fyah continued, and it refers to John’s visions of a ruler (he who sits on the throne) who will be able to “loose the seals”—a formidable task of revealing the truth. John writes of the “Lion of the Tribe of Judah,” a term that had not been used to refer to Christ. Almost 2000  years later, Tefari Mekonnen comes to the throne and refers to himself by this title, Brother Fyah concluded. The Lion of the Tribe of Judah was one that Ras Tefari Mekonnen gave himself in 1930 when he was crowned the Emperor of Ethiopia and took the name Haile Selassie I or “Power of the Trinity.” I gleaned, then, that this person who is able to “loose the seven seals”—irrespective of who prophesies this liberation (whether himself or others)—is one who must be worthy of doing so. This redeemer will fight on the side of “good” in general, as did His Majesty. As John Homiak notes, “In Rastafari discourse, the bursting of the biblical seals is, among other things, intimately related to the idea of the judgement and destruction of the oppressor” (1999, 118). This theme of destruction, and conversely of salvation, were evident in repatriates’ visions. Such reinterpretations of Rastafari personhood and their reproduction through oral expression reinforce the modes of word-sound-­ power and the concepts of sighting, citing and reasoning.

2.4   Sighting Rastafari and “Knowing Your Bible” The seminal vision of Brother Nelson, an early repatriate from the Twelve Tribes, that I quote next will elucidate the interconnected experiences and processes of becoming conscious and performing Rastafari personhood. In an open-ended conversation with Brother Nelson regarding his rise of Rastafari consciousness, he said3: As children we used to go to church, our parents was Christian, we were taught to read the Bible from an early stage, you know? Well, … once, I was about 16 … I start to read and I read something in Revelation, and what I read in Revelation you know, that was on my mind. That night same, I said of all those things that I read, where will I be in those times? That’s what

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came to my mind first … So one night I went to my bed and I got a vision, I look and see a man. I didn’t see the face but just like the uniform that His Majesty wear, that khaki uniform and the top with the red, I see someone like that4 … what he was saying, it was not in English [so] I couldn’t understand … When I started to cry he hold me by my hand and he turn me around three times, you understand? “Yeah, he turn me around three times then after he did that I wake up out of the vision.”5

The conversation turned to how this dream affected his life and raised his consciousness of Rastafari worldview: At that time … I left the country [the rural area] and was living with my sister in the town, Kingston, so in the morning I told her [about] the vision … She said that maybe God is ready for you … no, she ask me what happen to my face, and I said what? She said I have a different look, features in my face, you know? So I went to [look]. I didn’t see it still but she said, you know? … So after, ’bout two weeks after, I have some friends and they went to the meeting, Twelve Tribes meeting, so when they came back they told me that they see a gathering and the man that was gathering the people said that they should read their Bible, one chapter per day. So they say, come man, you can come with us and hear. So I went with them and that was the first time I met the Prophet [Gad], and you know, he was talking, and I’m telling you Sister [shaking his head from side to side] that is the first man that made me afraid when he was talking. And on that same night I joined the Organisation [i.e Twelve Tribes]. (Brother Nelson, interview, 4 November 2008)

Brother Nelson’s “sighting” or recognition of Rastafari, and his newly developed consciousness elucidate epistemological query of his childhood “churchical” teachings, of Rastafari notions of morality and specifically those of the Twelve Tribes House, and ontological questioning of his spiritual state on the day of judgement. Consciousness is a new kind of awareness that entails not only changing the way one views the world and one’s spiritual position in it, but also behaviour. Consciousness is expressed by persons on their own between themselves, those young “in the faith,” and is one way that visitors and strangers, Rastafari and non-Rastafari both, to the Jamaica Safar are tested. In time, Brother Nelson’s reinterpretation of beliefs would lead him towards the new and radical teachings of the Twelve

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Tribes and eventually towards his salvation by adhering to Rasta livity or lifestyle—a morally upright lifestyle, and of repatriating to Ethiopia. Brother Nelson’s choice to relate this dream highlights the influence of visions and dreams6 in manifesting7 or becoming Rasta that has been experienced by other repatriates (see also Bonacci 2011; Chevannes 1998; Price 2009). Sister Carolyn, another early repatriate from the Twelve Tribes, related a series of visions that culminated in her sighting His Majesty. When Sister Carolyn found herself standing alone in a desert she was confused and disoriented. Seeing a figure in the distance, she realised that it was Haile Selassie I. As Sister Carolyn walked towards him though, he ignored her and turned to leave. At that moment she shouted: “Can you take me to Ethiopia with you?!” but he continued to walk away. She realised that she was meant to follow, that his silence and lack of acknowledgement signified that she herself must work towards this move to Ethiopia, without expecting any further assistance from Him. His Majesty had already allocated land in Ethiopia for the purpose of repatriation, as Carolyn explained. Now it was left to Rastafari to move to the land. These sightings are literal as well as metaphorical sightings of His Majesty. Such “encounters” are well documented in written and oral studies of Rastafari (Chevannes 1994; Christensen 2014; Edmonds 2003; Price 2009). Conversion stories of this sort, according to Price, entail a process in which “a person may engage in such an interior dialogue for months or even years before actively pursuing identity transformation” (2009, 102). Within the polarised opinions on physical repatriation among Rastafari globally, that is whether one should repatriate or not, the popular belief that repatriation is a divinely motivated migration is reinforced by repatriates’ stories. They cited dreams and visions as indicators of their burgeoning consciousness and readiness to repatriate, which were just as significant as the content of the encounter. Brother Nelson’s disclosure of his vision and Sister Carolyn’s description evoke the central idea of sighting expressed by Rastafari through word-sound-power. Power in this meaning is synonymous with truth, in its oral and aural expressions. As Pollard summarises, in a “Rastafarian linguistic sense … the word was the “organ” of the movement” (2000, 19). Sighting, “citing up,” “reasoning” and “grounding” name the oral sphere of Rastafari intellectual, societal, political, and spiritual commentary. These words all have multiple connotations of seeing and understanding the truth as well as being guided by basic principles of livity.

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Sighting describes the beginning of Rastafari consciousness that will unveil knowledge previously hidden to repatriates, or of which they were unaware due to the deceit and hierarchy of the babylonian system or “shitstem,” to quote militant reggae singer Peter Tosh from his interviews. A dream or vision or the speech of elders, such as Prophet Gad, has the potential to stimulate a person’s sight. As a result, the visions that each repatriate related had a common theme regarding individual salvation. Saving one’s soul is inextricably connected to manifesting Rastafari and repatriating, thereby reorienting one’s worldview to Ethiopia at its axis and of an Ethiopian-African personhood, as the phrase “sighting Rastafari” captures.8 Although I position Rastafari worldview in an historical trajectory in the formation of the Caribbean, not all Caribbean peoples share the same worldview or share this worldview. Rather, peoples of the ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous region share a historical foundation that has resulted in specific ideas about personhood, interconnections with the global, and expectations and experiences of movement. Taking account of Chevannes’ position that Rastafari is a direct inheritor of West African Revival religions (see also Besson and Chevannes 1996; Herskovits 1941; Warner-Lewis 2003), examining how the sociological environment of the colonial plantation and the postcolonial Caribbean has shaped worldviews can be explored through reference to Rastafari IandI personhood. When Rastafari speak of IandI this denotes the shift to a pan-African worldview from a Eurocentric-based one, and conceptual recognition of a global fellowship of Rastafari and non-Rastafari alike. This concept of “oneness” between the individual-collective situates the speaker as intrinsically connected to global brethren and sistren of Rastafari (Pulis 1999; Pollard 2000; Homiak 1999). In the same spirit, Rastafari refer to those “in the faith” as “Brother” and “Sister.” This discursive tool establishes the mutual connection of the person and the collective Rastafari, referring to not only all Rastafari around the world but also a more expansive concept of oneness referring to humanity or to Rastafari and non-Rastafari alike who are sufferahs (Dawes 1999; Hepner 1998; Lewis 1994). Repatriates quoted examples of Palestinians living under occupation and black South Africans during the apartheid regime. Since one significant aspect of Rastafari worldview is the response to oppression, or downpression in Rasta speech inversion, the figure of the sufferah is essential. These layers of performativity are captured in the

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homonymic use of words that indicate sight and express the relation between consciousness, cosmology and Rastafari: “see,” “eye” and “I,” “I-man” and “IandI” (the latter two as synonyms for Rastafari). “Se” and “sie” at the beginning and end of Selassie’s name, which sound like “see” for Rastafari, further confirm His divinity. And Selassie the first becomes pronounced as “Selassie eye,” as previously noted (Pollard 2000, 28). This connection of sighting Rastafari and salvation emerge clearly in Brother Nelson’s vision. When Brother Nelson alludes to the “something” that will occur “in those times” in the Book of Revelation he is referring to the apocalypse (see Revelation 20–21). He thought about when every man would be judged “according to his works” and potentially being rejected from the “pearly gates” of heaven and instead sentenced to the “fire and brimstone” of hell for a thousand years (ibid). These two chapters of the Bible vividly depict the contrast between an afterlife of beauty and tranquillity in New Jerusalem, heaven, to the “lake of fire” of hell. Brother Nelson realises that it is not a coincidence that he attended the Twelve Tribes meeting shortly after ruminating on his own spiritual salvation and dreaming about His Majesty. In that meeting the Prophet saturated the audience with scripture in which he vividly described the day of reckoning, further motivating Brother Nelson’s sighting. “Where will I be in those times,” Nelson asks himself? After he attends the meeting and sees that the man in his dream is Jah or God, Nelson relates the words of Gad man to his vision. Brother Nelson understands that the man in his dream was His Majesty Haile Selassie I, to whom Prophet Gad refers, who is a brown-skinned African, Ethiopian man and not the Judeo-Christian image of a white Jesus Christ, and correspondingly a white God. Instead of portending death, as his sister implies when she says that perhaps “God is ready” for him, Brother Nelson recognises that God is ready for him in a different way: as an intellectual and a spiritual rebirth. Although His Majesty’s words were unintelligible, He attempted to use these words to guide Nelson towards the right path.9 In order to achieve this rebirth Brother Nelson must decipher the hidden meanings in the Bible that will enable him to manifest Rasta by connecting this reinterpretation to the Prophet’s words. Brother Nelson consequently sights (reads and interprets) the Bible in a different way than that perpetuated by the Church. He begins to imbue the book with new meanings, realising that this is crucial to his spiritual-emotional yearning for the salvation of his soul in particular, and not solely that of his physical

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body. This Rastafari sighting of a fundamental Christian book is one part of a distinct worldview that interprets long-standing texts, and more recent ones such as The Holy Piby (1924) and The Promised Key (circa 1935), written by black men actively reconceptualising African-Caribbean personhood under conditions of imperialism and colonialism. To become conscious and recognise systemic inequality, the Bible must be carefully read. When I asked Brother Fyah about Rastafari beliefs and how he came to live in Ethiopia from the Caribbean he immediately replied, “if you want to reason with us then you have to know your Bible.” Fyah’s frank response reinforced the hints that I had gotten from Rastafari, younger and older, when they realised that I had little knowledge of either the Old or New Testaments. I repeatedly explained that I had not read the Bible since I was a child, and went to church with my family. I distinctly remembered one of these conversations when a Sister calculated that, at my age at that time, and considering my lack of Biblical knowledge, it would take me about ten years to get through the entire book; she advised me to start reading immediately. Rastafari argue that although it is a canonical source of Eurocentric knowledge, the Bible is one of the only “true” and “accurate” historical sources that enables each person to come to the truth himself and in his own time. Although “knowing your Bible” is essential for all Rastas, for the Twelve Tribes this was enforced by Prophet Gad. Twelve Tribes members constantly reminded me that Gad man suggested that each person read the Bible “a chapter a day” in order to realise the truth for themselves through this important medium.10 The Bible is a morally ambiguous text since, according to Rastafari, it is the word of God as well as the distorted result of a babylonian interpretation. Rastafari reinterpretation of the Bible is emblematic of the history of creolisation in the modern West Indies. Although Rastas have particular interpretations of the Book, in order to find the truth each person must engage with the text on an individual level to grasp the truth for himself or herself. This notion of truth refers to realising that His Majesty is the Redeemer, and the one able to “loose the seven seals” (Revelation 5:5). Rastafari are highly engaged in Biblical exegesis, which was obvious in my daily reasonings and conversations in the Jamaica Safar and in rituals such as Twelve Tribes meetings (Barnett 2005; Price 2009; Edmonds 2003; Homiak 1999).

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Since the divinity of Haile Selassie I is the cornerstone of Rastafari worldview, one cannot profess to be Rastafari without sighting this fact, as Brother Nelson and Sister Carolyn did when they had visions of His Majesty. Knowledge obtained through reading and recognising the truth in the Bible is one way of ensuring spiritual salvation in the afterlife and in the post-apocalyptic time. Repatriates maintained that reading the Bible, acquiring knowledge, and reasoning were central to a Rastafari ethos. Consequently, one cannot simply read the Bible in a hegemonic manner but must insert a Rastafari sighting. Ernest Cashmore’s emphasis on epistemological individualism continues to be relevant to this concept of sighting. Despite his racist argument in Rastaman (1983), which perpetuated the stereotypical image of the drug-addicted, criminal dreadlocked Rastafari man in 1980s Britain, he noted that each person comes to Rastafari consciousness on their own. It is with the influence of those who already manifested Rastafari rather than the doctrine of the Church or other religious intermediaries that this occurs. The role of learned and knowledgeable persons, sometimes without formal education, is noteworthy in sighting Rastafari. People are often misguided by institutions of babylon, such as the Church. Therefore, the guidance of other conscious Rastafari introduces them to a Rastafari epistemology that eventually each person unravels and pieces together as truth. Rastafari in Shashamane also pointed this out with reference to Prophet Gad or even His Majesty himself. As such, epistemological individualism co-exists with ideas about spiritual legitimacy. On the one hand, repatriates spoke about “coming up in the faith.” On the other hand, they adamantly stated that a man or woman cannot “learn Rasta,” but must simply know it “from inside.” These positions coalesced in the understanding that “Rasta” is an inward or “inside thing” that simply needs the right impetus for the person to manifest Rastafari. This was often the role of dreams, visions or hearing the words of those already “in the faith,” particularly elders and prophets, as well as reading the Bible for oneself. However, a person cannot come to this realisation until he or she is “ready,” as Brother Nelson’s vision attests. It was only shortly after contemplating his fate on Judgement Day, having read the Bible, that he dreamed of His Majesty and heard the Prophet Gad’s words. Although the potential is always present within each man and woman to become conscious, various factors need to be present for consciousness to be realised. Each prospective Rastafari’s initiative must be nurtured by

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others and their knowledge augmented by reading the Book. This is precisely Brother Nelson’s experience. Orality therefore becomes important and observable in reasonings, which serve to solidify Rastafari beliefs and practices. It is after Rastafari see and understand that they can participate in reasonings or groundings with fellow Rastafari. Reasoning also functions as a ritual element of grounding. An “informal instruction in Rasta precepts and ideology; the ritual process (reasoning) by which circles of like-minded brethren are formed and maintained … to reflect on their faith or on any current or historical event that affects their lives” (Homiak cited in Edmonds 2003, 74–75) is a concise definition of grounding. For example, one everyday reasoning in Shashamane around the financial crash and its lack of impact on the Vatican Bank took place in 2008.11 This was the time when large international companies, like Lehman Brothers, declared bankruptcy with disastrous economic consequences globally. Many repatriates referred to these events as a sign that the fall of babylon was increasingly imminent. One Brother commented as well that we never heard media reports about the Vatican Bank going bankrupt. Neither did the bank require a financial bailout from the Italian government or an international organisation such as the World Bank Group. This was an indication of the Church’s economic and political stability, he adamantly emphasised.12 Being able to reason convincingly, and to hone one’s skill at wordplay and inversion is one facet of being an elder (man or woman). It is often (but not solely) elders who test, and guide, youths to shape them into adult Rastafari. It is only when a Rastaman or Rastawoman can hold their own in verbal exchanges or reasonings with other IandI that they are regarded as fully “in the faith,” as Rastafari would remark. “These oratorial events are, then, part of a system of performance and language behaviour that continues to place effective speechmaking as a central notion to being a good person and a good community member” (Abrahams 1983, 38). Knowledge and charisma are integral for social acceptance and moral recognition whereby these men-of-words are respected by peers for their wit (ibid). In Fyah’s words, knowing your Bible and then being able to reason are key components of becoming a Rastafari adult. Reading the Bible, Fyah’s exhortation that I bring the book and read the words myself, and the frequent citations from the Bible by Rastafari all reiterate this text as a source of knowledge, but also as a means of testing people. These habits clearly connect reasoning, sighting and citing. Both repatriates and youths “test” groups in Shashamane. Elders in the

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community test youths as a way of ensuring the young peoples’ spiritual knowledge of the word, which is a necessary condition for achieving Rasta adulthood. Both repatriates and youths interrogate Rastafari and non-­ Rastafari visitors in the Jamaica Safar to unearth their personalities or to uncover a person’s “real” character. This knowledge is used to distinguish between strangers who are conscious and those who are not.

2.5   Testing Strangers: To Suss Out a Person Testing a person’s knowledge of the Bible is relevant, not only for the Ethiopian-born and one and a half generation13 but also for known visitors to the Jamaica Safar as well as for strangers. Although the adult Rastafari visitors in Shashamane whom I met would often display the physical markers of their Rastafari identity, such as dreads/dreds14 (dreadlocks or matted hair characteristic of Rastafari), these “outside” manifestations, as Rastafari say, were only one element that influenced repatriates’ opinion of the visitor’s character. As repatriates reminded me, Rasta is irreducible to external characteristics, and the devil himself could be disguised as an angel. (See 2nd Corinthians 11: 13–15 “For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.”) I inferred that this Biblical reference to verses in 2nd Corinthians was both meant as a warning not to trust everyone in the Safar, and as a way of telling me that repatriates themselves would not immediately trust me. Only in time would they suss me out or get to know my character; a character that should be gleaned from people’s “works,” which is the basis of their judgement in the afterlife as well. Revelation 2, “I know thy works …,” not only referred to peoples’ words but meant that their behaviour also would be assessed. This belief that one can never know a person based on external characteristics like appearance guides repatriates’ interactions with strangers, Rasta and non-Rasta alike. This is an attitude that challenges Caribbean mores of respectability in which clothing and grooming are important characteristics (Chevannes 1994; Barrow 1996; Ulysee 2007; Freeman 2014; Wilson 1973; Barratt 2018). Ascertaining a Rastaman’s or Rastawoman’s character therefore entails more than viewing their appearance or knowing if they belong to a particular Mansion. Since an individual can manifest Rastafari at any time, and others must accept this assertion based on his or her word, interrogating a visitor on Biblical knowledge,

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and reasoning about many topics are methods of determining a stranger’s trustworthiness. A useful method to “test the Irits [spirit]” within a person (Homiak 1999, 96), determining if he is “on the side” of good or evil, allows Rastafari to suss out the person as well as test a Rastafari visitor’s proclamation of being Rasta. Testing persons’ knowledge of the Bible, their views on repatriation and His Majesty were integral to accepting them as fellow Rastafari. Repatriates usually expected every Rastafari visitor to concur with certain truths and to hold similar, though not necessarily the same, ideas regarding the injustice of the system. By interrogating the visitor on their reading or interpretation of the Bible, Rastafari would come to build a more holistic image of the visitor sitting in front of them on the land grant. Visitors who professed to be Rastafari and those who were not Rastafari, like myself, underwent this kind of challenge. I was often surprised at how ostensibly open and friendly repatriates and their children were to all visitors, especially as each non-Rasta visitor inevitably asked repatriates the same questions. I realised that repatriates, in turn, usually engaged in an initial period of questioning these visitors about themselves: where they came from and their reasons for visiting Ethiopia and Shashamane. In these conversations I heard elder male and female repatriates also highlight the importance of Ethiopia and Africa as the origin of humankind and as their ancestral land to hear the visitor’s responses as a way of gauging their ideological proclivity and the extent of their consciousness. They segued into questions that tested the visitor’s knowledge of certain events in the Bible. For non-Rastafari visitors especially, their presence in Ethiopia was usually taken as the first reliable indication of their worldview and attitude. Making the effort to come to Ethiopia, and to Shashamane especially, indicated a desire to visit the promised land and the land granted by His Majesty. This was seen as a favourable indicator of consciousness. But it did not necessarily mean that the person was as yet conscious. In my case, during a conversation with Brother Shiloh, a recent repatriate, I could not answer many of his questions about Biblical events. As my conversation with Brother Shiloh indicated, this kind of test was one that I had failed miserably, but I redeemed myself in our other conversations about structural issues regarding inequalities of power, and capital, the historical context of life in the West Indies, and my general consciousness of the “trickery” (“politricks” in Rastafari talk) within the system. It was largely because of this that Brother Shiloh later agreed to be interviewed for my

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study. Since testing usually includes some element of judgement or measurement of how a person actually answers the questions, in this sense it is literally a “test.” This incident indicated the priority given to knowing the Bible and the role of elders in ensuring that this is accomplished. When we did the more structured interview, I asked Brother Shiloh about how he came to be involved with Rasta, when he started to think about repatriation, and how he prepared for coming to Shashamane. Like Brother Nelson, he did not provide a chronological account of seminal experiences that brought him to the moment when we sat in his yard on the land grant. Instead he began with the Biblical verse about building a throne, and the Davidic Covenant that the descendants of King David would rule and that the throne shall never be short of one, a significant verse for many Rastafari. Since I could neither easily follow nor record our session, in line with his preference, I finally put aside my notebook and listened. Brother Shiloh described the Organ or the Twelve Tribes and its purpose as “the true function of a man’s heart,” (from the opening refrain of each Twelve Tribes meeting) once again intermittently asking me questions about events in the Bible. These included asking me to quote the Commandment regarding children’s honouring of parents,15 the sentences describing how the earth is the Lord’s, and finally Brother Shiloh asked me about the righteous living upright in the land. As I reviewed my notes, the few comments that I managed to capture from Brother Shiloh’s account connected particular events in his life with Biblical passages. “Forget bout this interview business and come trod with us, chaaww,” he concluded, sucking his teeth. In this situation Brother Shiloh was taking on the role of a teacher, attempting to guide me towards the truth since I had already taken one decision that demonstrated my potential for consciousness, of travelling to Ethiopia and to the land grant, albeit for the misguided reasons of doing research. For tourists who simply passed through Shashamane en route to other locations in Ethiopia, however, such testing and reasoning was unnecessary. Interacting with these visitors centred on disseminating the message of Rastafari, and expanding visitors’ knowledge rather than accepting them socially, underscoring the everyday performativity of Rastafari reasoning.

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2.6   Chanting: Dread Talk, Morality and the Commodification of the Word (Music) Citing-up is another way of naming the oral sphere. John Pulis notes that “citing-up” refers not only to the content of speech which often combines Biblical verse and political commentary but also to “a way of reading” and changes to the reader’s tone (Pulis 1999, 357). These changes are also indicative of the emphasis that the speaker places on certain aspects of his or her words. This occurs in Brother Nelson’s experience at his first Twelve Tribes meeting. As he continued, it was not only the content of the Prophet’s speech that made him fearful, but the Prophet’s delivery, underscoring this aspect of performativity. Gadman’s passion, which conveyed a staunch belief in his own words, his intonation while delivering this guidance and the varied cadence of his voice all converged to create a formidable persona of the prophet. He was “the first man that made me afraid when he was talking,” Brother Nelson expounds. This is one reason that Nelson did not think it necessary to explicitly quote the Prophet or even relate the gist of his words. Within this oral sphere, “dread talk” exemplifies one significant “organic” expression of the oral and aural sphere of West Indian Rastafari consciousness (Pollard 2000, 19; Nettleford 1978). In its expression, standard English speech patterns are inverted and reinterpreted according to Rastafari beliefs. Edmonds presents a clearer picture of this process in terms of “deconstruction and reconstruction.” The deconstruction component of speech change challenged the superiority of standard English and social values. Dread talk is the reconstruction element. In one common example, “dedicate” is changed to “livicate” to reiterate the positivity of livity in “livicate” as compared to the negativity of “ded” in “dedicate,” which sounds like “dead.” When Rastafari use this speech form, their wider meaning is understood within the community. This sort of “linguistic activism” (Price 2009) is a key expression of Rasta cosmology because the word, hearing and enacting Rastafari beliefs are all expressions of an alternative mode of conceptualising the self and the world. Chevannes additionally explains that “undoubtedly the most offensive word-weapon in Rastafari assault on the social order was its legitimization of the badword, the vulgar expletive” (2006, 98). The most well-known examples of these are the Jamaican words “raas klaat” and “bombo klaat.” Rastafari speech is a way of subverting cultural mores of respectability and expressing a moral position. These speech forms must

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be considered in the context of notions of good and evil. Words can be co-opted to encourage both good and evil, the connotations of which frequently pervade Rastafari oral expressions. Rastafari speech serves as a contrapuntal form within a creole-derived value system since it has emerged out of standard English. It also co-exists with normative expressions which accrue respectable status. Among English-speaking Caribbean peoples, the contrapuntal emerges and exists as a style of speech performance alongside the use of “The Queen’s English” and people often switch between the two depending on situation. The “underlying [linguistic] duality is denied and covered by what is both a historical process and an ongoing symbolic technique of ‘taking on’ dominant cultural forms and ‘remodelling’ them so that the two cultural strands are woven into a complex garment of cultural and linguistic expression” (Reisman 1989, 116–117). This duality of good/evil and life/death is embodied in God, and consequently also present in human beings. In Rastafari speech, words such as “life,” “fire” and “love” indicate coming to consciousness, that is “purification” as well as destruction (Homiak 1999, 96). The typical Rastafari refrain “fyah bun!” (fire burn) is symbolic of this duality. When Nelson uses it, however, in accordance with Biblical use, it is representative of hell and death only. In Ethiopia, this symbolism is also evoked in the song “Bob Marley” recorded by two Addis Ababa-based local Ethiopian singers who use Rasta imagery in their music sung in Amharic and English through the lyrics “we chant Rasta … we say fyah, we don’t need no water” (Haile Roots).16 Rastafari speech in Ethiopia has become a distinct cultural form discursively associated with the Rastafari community in Shashamane. As an example of cultural hybridity and of the reproduction of Rastafari cosmology, the intergenerational transmission of Rastafari identity as well as cultural changes in Shashamane are evident. Another form of oral expression is chanting, an activity that took place on a Sunday afternoon in a repatriate yard during a small gathering. A loud, often group event, chanting can be planned or spontaneous. On this occasion, it involved musical expression in the form of drumming with Nyahbinghi repatriates residing in Shashamane from Europe and Rastamen from French Guiana who were visiting from France, where they lived. A few Brothers who had been invited brought their drums to the yard. While other adults and children talked, laughed and the children played, suddenly yet naturally, I heard the slow, steady beat of the drum.

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A seated Brother jumped up and began to move, shifting his weight from one foot to the other with his long dreads swaying in the wind as he moved to the beat. He raised his head and lowered it while other adults chanted “JaAahhHHHh,” “RAStaFARRRRIII” and “SelAASSSIEEEE EYEE” in tandem with the changing tempo of the drum. Children began to move, imitating the other Rastamen and Rastawomen who had gotten up, influenced by the music, while other children continued their small football match on the other side of the yard. These extended syllables of powerful words, chanted from the booming voices of Brothers and Sisters with an emphasis on the first or last syllables, evoked feelings of strength and enthusiasm in time with the beat of the drums and the cadence of their voices. As Erving Goffman noted decades ago, the spontaneous aspect of performance does not preclude a stylised and therefore iterative set of behaviours and activities (1969, 80). The spontaneity of these behaviours at the lakeside on this particular day will never be repeated in the same way. Yet Rastafari draw on the now well-established performance to “chant down babylon” (Hepner 1998) and express their Rastafari adherence in this everyday situation. In this sense, Goffman’s still valid analysis—when considered in light of the performativity of identity—underscores the relevance of everyday behaviours and acts in becoming and asserting Rastafari. Chanting also extends to musical composition and more formal performances of singing. The development of musical genres of ska, reggae, dub and dancehall, as indicative of the hybrid sounds created in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica (and since indigenised), has been well researched (Cooper 2004; Stanley Niaah 2010; Hope 2006; Bilby 2016; Veal 2007; Partridge 2010; Stolzoff 2000). Music as chanting here is noteworthy in its capacity to formulate “conscious vibes,” as Rastafari say. These “vibes” are a creative expression and function as an extension of consciousness, as well as to spread the Rastafari word. As one Rastafari youth succinctly and emphatically put it, “music is how we spread the message.” This method of chanting down babylon is connected to the words, their rhythms and meanings that are expressed lyrically. Initially, I ignorantly dismissed references to music since popularly in the Global North, Caribbean music in English is associated with reggae and Bob Marley’s music in particular, and then stereotypes of uninhibited sex, self-indulgent decadence and marijuana consumption. These are images that I continue to be confronted with in postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago that reflect the

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hyper-sexualisation of black and brown women and men in the Caribbean, as Kamala Kempadoo (1999) notes. From my casual observations, the songs that are less overtly political such as “Lively Up Yourself” (1978) or “Could You Be Loved” (1980) are usually heard more on airwaves in the West, and on Hollywood film soundtracks. Less often heard are clearly songs with political messages, such as “Zimbabwe” or “Jah live.” Music, which for Rastafari aims at ideological struggle, is used in the West to establish a comforting ethnocentric, neo-colonial image of the Caribbean (see Mohammed 2009). But it is this wide distribution of Rastafari-inspired reggae music that also fosters a Rastafari consciousness outside Jamaica, and not only Rastafari aesthetic elements such as dreadlocks. As a young white Sister from Germany who repatriated to Shashamane explained, “I came to consciousness by listening to the music of Alpha Blondy, Peter Tosh and Bob Marley.” Similarly, Homiak points out that there is a recent generation of multi-ethnic and multi-national Rastafari outside of the Caribbean who have gained knowledge of Rastafari almost exclusively through the lyrics of Rastafari artistes. “The tours of musicians such as Marley, Burning Spear, and others were critical to the spread of the message, along with travel by traditional Elders … [for Rasta to] “burst” [this is a reference to bursting or loosing the seals in Revelation] the confines of its Jamaican Babylon via reggae” (Homiak 1999, 105). One notable example is the Rastafari reference to Bob Marley who was encouraged by IandI to spread the message as a “messenJah” (see Yawney 1999). Musicians therefore are “message-bearers” (Pollard 2000, 35). Songs such as Bob Marley’s “Africa Unite” (1979) composed for the political independence of Zimbabwe from British colonialism, Dennis Brown’s “The Promised Land” (1977) and Peter Tosh’s “Wanted Dread or Alive” (1981) are such examples. Reggae singers have long been known to “protest about food shortages, inadequate housing, crime, police brutality, illiteracy, homelessness and oppression” (King 2002, xiii). Rastafari chanting of this sort with politically potent lyrics has been the basis for reasonings among Rastafari worldwide.17 In another example on the African continent, Werner Zips discusses the role of music in influencing the attitude towards “(re)migration” to West Africa, and as a potential basis for positive social relations between “re-­ migrants” and local residents. He argues that this genre is able to “create a positive sentiment towards national (African) policies to close the historical gap between Africa and her Diaspora. It is therefore no coincidence

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that reggae is considered as a local ‘true’ African music by many Ghanaians” (2006, 134). However, Homiak cautions against conflating internationally disseminated reggae with typical Nyahbinghi Rastafari reasoning sessions, even though both are characteristic Rastafari oral and aural expressions (1999, 99). It was only through conversations with repatriates and youths in Shashamane that I began to understand the role of music in “spreading the message” of Rastafari. A young Brother and amateur musician clearly yet casually stated, “Music is essential to writing about Rasta because it is how people express themselves.” Raffaella Delle Donne (2000) argues that this oral expression is part of a wider epistemological project of centring and reclaiming the oral sphere in contrast to the written in Western thought, a point which is worthy of repeating. As Renato Tomei demonstrates with reference to the making of Rastafari youth identity in Shashamane, everyday speech acts in hybrid languages are significant in interethnic collaborations among amateur musicians, mostly male, as well as in popularising Jamaican patois and Rastafari beliefs. Such amateur musicians include youth of local Ethiopian parentage who have grown in the Jamaica Safar with Rastafari neighbours and create what Tomei calls “Ethiopian reggae” (2015, 78), reggae with Amharic lyrics, and “Ethiopenglish” or an “unrecognized variety of English spoken by Ethiopians” (2015, 156). The vernacular development of new speech forms coupled with the fluidity in speaking by these multilingual speakers emerges in Tomei’s assessment.18 According to Tomei, youth alter their communication to suit the speaking skills of interlocutors. Singing is one way of earning a living that is popular with Rastafari youths, predominantly boys, since it allows them to spread the message, work for themselves thereby maintaining their autonomy, and “make a good living,” as one young person said. (Though I venture that the last comment was heavily tinged with optimism given the limited income earned as an amateur.) While self-identified musicians, of varying degrees of income and fame, were aware of their goal of promoting music as a popular medium through which they could spread “the truth,” they were also cognisant that the music had to be popular in order to achieve this goal. Most musicians accepted, to an extent, changes to lyrics or locations of performances without believing that these changes in any way diminished their role as message-bearers, one that they explicitly embraced.

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Reggae music is a chanting that has become commercialised and well known to non-Rastafari locally and globally. Music production and consumption in terms of performers’ relation to power and capital is another consideration, which emerged in conversations with Rastafari. Music that is produced and recorded in the West, usually in English-speaking North America or the United Kingdom (whether in collaboration with artistes in the Global South or not), is typically brought by Rastafari visitors to Shashamane. These musicians reside in the Global North, chant about repatriation, and occasionally visit Ethiopia and Shashamane to perform. The contradiction of advocating for repatriation to Ethiopia and Africa but living in babylon was highlighted by a young Rastawoman. One day I noticed the signed poster of reggae artiste Luciano on the wall of a repatriate-­owned business, and this youth repatriate replied to my query that when Luciano performed in Shashamane a few years ago, he gave the poster to the community to commemorate the concert. Then she bluntly added, rhetorically, that these musicians like to sing “about repatriation, but which part them live? Inna de west.”19 Well-known, internationally mobile musicians such as Luciano record their music in cities such as Los Angeles, New York or London. This practice extends to Ethiopian-based musicians, such as Brother Lester, who are able to travel across the Global South and North. To a lesser extent they also produce records in Ethiopia, mainly in Addis Ababa. These records would circulate more widely and sell in greater numbers abroad than in Ethiopia or East Africa, an important consideration if this is a primary source of income. These message-bearers use different means of adhering to Rasta ideals while following their own creative initiatives that enable them to earn a living. In the case of local Ethiopian reggae artistes, Erin MacLeod (2014) distinguishes between the political and cultural purposes of Ethiopian reggae. While recognising that these purposes clearly overlap, as exemplified in reggae performed by Rastafari artistes, MacLeod compares two singers, Teddy Afro (Teowdros Kassahun) and Haile Roots. Teddy Afro’s lyrics metaphorically and literally criticise politicians and governance in Ethiopia (e.g. the government manipulation of 2005 elections). Haile Roots draws on characteristic images of Rastafari such as Bob Marley, the Lion of Judah and iconic colours of red, gold and green (also present in the Ethiopian flag) to reinforce messages of global love, peace and solidarity, while also taking on Rastafari characteristics of dreadlocks. Having developed a distinct sound known as “chiggae,” mixing the Ethiopian rhythm of

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chikchika with reggae (MacLeod 2014, 176–177), working with globally recognised reggae singers such as Luciano and Mikey General and filming music videos in Shashamane featuring Rastafari there, Haile Roots cultivates a hybrid young, male, Ethiopian identity in multicultural Ethiopia. MacLeod suggests that this challenges Ethiopian nationhood by taking on Rastafari characteristics, but she argues that it is largely symbolic as no artist interviewed shared the belief in Haile Selassie’s divinity. Locally grown, Rastafari-inspired music in Ethiopia, however, are hybrid expressions that demonstrate the Rastafari cultural impact of Rastafari outside the space of Shashamane, and across Ethiopia more widely. To end, intergenerational performative acts of identity by Rastafari in everyday and ritual spheres emerge in Brother Nelson’s description of sighting Rastafari, and the words and behaviours of Rastafari in manifesting Rastafari or becoming conscious. Brother Nelson’s description of this influential period in his life starts a discussion of how repatriates narrate their arrival to the “word” thereby developing certain key facets of a Rastafari personhood. Rastafari in Shashamane then enact this cosmology orally—in speech, music, bodily movements and dance. These expressions and media are used to categorise visitors, strangers and youth as conscious or lacking in consciousness. Significantly, one cannot become conscious without the knowledge and guidance of others who are themselves aware of the truth. One instance of the contrapuntal speech that constitutes social relations, worldview and cosmology is Rastafari reinterpretation of knowledge, as evidenced in Biblical exegesis, which, in turn, is used to test peoples’ consciousness. Language therefore provides a medium through which creole ambiguity comes to the fore, most clearly in Rastafari dread talk. The universality of oral expression is here tailored to Rastafari worldview and grounded in ideals of equality to counter historical inequalities of modernity. Rastafari speech activity becomes meaningful through words that are spoken in reasonings, chanted in music, or in Ethiopenglish daily among youth, and through the transmission of these ideas to fellow Rastafari, Ethiopian-born children and Rasta and non-Rasta visitors. In these ways fundamental cosmological elements are reinforced, altered and shaped through the oral and aural expressions of Rastafari who reproduce this Rastafari ethos in Shashamane. Such iterative behaviours reinforce what I call the everyday performativity of Rastafari identity-making. The concept of word-sound-power concisely captures these cosmological, oral and aural dynamics, which are reiterated in other notions of consciousness,

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sighting and citing through reasonings with Rastafari and in reading the Bible. Underlying the development of these Rastafari forms is a point worthy of repetition: that such expressions of human and divine inter-relations extend as well as challenge narrow Enlightenment perspectives of personhood, calling back to issues of a cosmopolitan orientation. Hybrid speech also indicates changes in forms and identities in the Jamaica Safar among local Ethiopian and second-generation Rastafari, pointing also to changes within the Ethiopian nation.

Notes 1. Bonacci states that the title and name “Ras Tafari” was used by Leonard Howell in his book The Promised Key before the actual coronation of Ras Tafari Mekonnen. This suggests that the period between 1916 and 1930 was a “crucial time” in the development of Rastafari worldview (Bonacci 2011, 149). 2. Verse 50 also states, “The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of.” 3. I intentionally asked the long open-ended question: “how did you come to learn or hear about Rasta, were there any particular incidents or events that propelled you to join the Organ or to call yourself Rasta, and what about the philosophy of the Organ (the Twelve Tribes) attracted you?” 4. The uniform is Haile Selassie I’s military uniform in which he was photographed on many occasions. As Emperor he was also commander of the royal defence forces (the Imperial Guard or Kebur Zabangna). 5. References to actions done three times and the number three are well known in rituals of death in the West Indies. It is a common folk belief that the number scares “duppies” or evil spirits (see Simpson 1957; Wardle 2012). I presumed that Brother Nelson had been severely injured in the past or had almost died. This did not happen, but my raised eyebrows and blatant expression of astonishment and dreaded anticipation made him chuckle. 6. I use vision and dream interchangeably to maintain Brother Nelson’s use of the two words. Other repatriates also used both terms. 7. I use the word “manifest” in this chapter to highlight the general Rastafari aversion to the term “convert” since it carries fundamental religious, particularly Christian resonances. As I am aware of this, I phrased my question to Brother Nelson in terms of “calling himself Rasta” rather than asking when he converted to Rasta. Researchers have used the word “manifest” in accordance with its emic use in their research (see Homiak 1999; Chevannes 1998). However, in Shashamane I heard more of IandI speaking of their

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“involvement with Rasta,” “learning and hearing” about His Majesty or learning “the truth” as synonymous with becoming Rastafari. 8. Roland Littlewood notes that “radical utopian movements” such as the Quakers and Shakers also engaged in comparable reinterpretations of the Bible and reached similar conclusions. These similarities included beliefs in a quasi-immanentism of god, and rejecting institutions such as well-­ established churches and state institutions, among other beliefs, were shared by Rastafari and these seventeenth century utopians (1998, 241–242). These echoes of autonomy and the refashioning of cosmological relationships were also present in Rastafari worldview, thereby extending as well as challenging narrow Enlightenment-derived views of the self, as Huon Wardle has noted (2000). 9. Presumably Haile Selassie I was speaking in Amharic, his mother tongue, as Nelson explained. 10. Bonacci (2011, 210) corroborates this importance of Biblical literacy especially among Twelve Tribes repatriates in Shashamane. 11. These reasonings were usually difficult to document by writing or recording, partly because they erupted spontaneously, and because most people preferred that I did not record these conversations, as compared to our interviews. I tried nonetheless to capture the gist of this particular reasoning. 12. When Rastafari speak of the Church or “the Pope,” this does not necessarily refer to the Catholic Church but is metonymic of Christianity. 13. Those who moved to Shashamane with their parents and who stayed. 14. This is another homonym characteristic of Rastafari speech, of the standard English verb “to dread.” 15. Which I later understood was related to the Davidic Covenant given the correlation between leadership and primogeniture among the descendants of King David to rule ancient Israel and the role of parents in socialising children. 16. Werner Zips also suggests “when Rastafari reggae artists such as Sizzla, Capleton or Anthony B call for ‘fire’ and threaten to burn the Babylon system, they actually rally for moral repentance, legal acknowledgment for the injustice committed and economic restitutions” (2006, 132–133). 17. It is noteworthy also that reggae has been co-opted by politicians. An oftcited example is the 1976 national elections in Jamaica when Michael Manley and Edward Seaga were famously united on stage by Bob Marley during his Peace concert during a particularly vicious election campaign (King 2002; Kaufman 1987). 18. In terms of practical uses, Rasta speech in the Caribbean “soon became a concerted effort to conceal the meaning of their conversations from the uninitiated, particularly from Babylon’s agents and informers” (Edmonds

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2003, 62). In Shashamane as well, local Ethiopians outside the Jamaica Safar cannot comprehend Rasta talk or Jamaican patois since it is distinct from English. This lack of familiarity and comprehension can be used advantageously. For instance, when I travelled on a public minibus with young Rastafari who were fluent in Amharic, if we wished to converse about private matters in the crowded minibus we could speak in patois. 19. Werner Zips indirectly addresses one aspect of this young woman’s criticism by noting that some Rastafari musicians have agreed to donate a percentage of their record profits to certain Houses: “Sizzla, Capleton, Anthony B, and Junior Reid, as well as other Bobo Ashanti performers, are expected to donate at least one tenth of their revenues gained in the (comparatively still) rich Western music industry to the EABIC [Ethiopia Africa Black International Congress]. These monies are used for preparatory steps towards mass repatriation and the building of EABIC branches in Africa” (2006, 157). Rastafari academic Charles Price notes in the acknowledgements of his 2009 publication that he does the same for the Rastafari Centralization Organization (2009, xx).

References Abrahams, Roger D. 1983. The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Barnett, Michael. 2005. The Many Faces of Rasta: Doctrinal Diversity within the Rastafari Movement. Caribbean Quarterly 51 (2): 67–78. Barratt, Sue Ann. 2018. Reinforcing Sexism and Misogyny: Social Media, Symbolic Violence and the Construction of Femininity-as-Fail. Journal of International Women’s Studies 19 (3): 16–31. Barrow, Christine. 1996. Family in the Caribbean: Themes and Perspectives. In Kingston: Ian Randle. Oxford: James Currey. Bauman, Richard, and Joel Sherzer. 1989. Introduction. In Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, ix–xxvii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Besson, Jean, and Barry Chevannes. 1996. The Continuity-Creativity Debate: The Case of Revival. New West Indian Guide 70 (3&4): 209–228. Besson, Jean. 2002. Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. The Holy Bible [Electronic book]. 1995. Containing the Old and New Testaments Translated Out of the Original Tongues and with the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised by His Majesty’s Special Command. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bilby, Kenneth. 2016. Words of Our Mouth: Meditations of Our Heart: Pioneering Musicians of Ska, Rocksteady, Reggae and Dancehall. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Bonacci, Giulia. 2011. An Interview in Zion. The Life-History of a Jamaican Rastafarian in Shashemene, Ethiopia. Callaloo 34 (3): 744–758. Brown, Dennis. 1977. The Promised Land. Revolution. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cashmore, Ernest. 1983. Rastaman: The Rastafarian Movement in England. London: George Allen and Unwin. Chevannes, Barry. 2006. Betwixt and Between: Explorations in an African-­ Caribbean Mindscape. Kingston, Jamaica and Florida: Ian Randle Publishers. ———. 1998. New Approach to Rastafari. In Rastafari and Other African-­ Caribbean Worldviews, ed. Barry Chevannes, 20–41. London/Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 1994. Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Christensen, Jeanne. 2014. Rastafari Reasoning and the RastaWoman: Gender Constructions in the Shaping of Rastafari Livity. Lanham: Lexington Books. Cooper, Carolyn. 2004. Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dawes, Kwame. 1999. Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic in Caribbean Writing. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Donne, Raffaella. 2000. “A Place in Which To Feel At Home”: An Exploration of the Rastafari as an Embodiment of an Alternative Spatial Paradigm. Journal for the Study of Religion 13: 99–121. Edmonds, Ennis. 2003. Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers. New York: Oxford University Press. Freeman, Carla. 2014. Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class. Durham: Duke University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1969. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Press. Hepner, Randal. 1998. Chanting Down Babylon in the Belly of the Beast: The Rastafari Movement in Metropolitan U.S.A.  In Chanting Down Babylon: A Rastafari Reader, ed. Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony MacFarlane, 199–216. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Herskovits, Melville. 1941. The Myth of the Negro Past. New  York: Harper & Brothers. Homiak, John. 1999. Movements of Jah People: From Soundscape to Mediascape. In Religion, Diaspora and Cultural Identity: A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean, ed. John Pulis, 87–123. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers. Hope, Donna. 2006. Inna de Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press.

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Kaufman, Michael. 1987. The Construction of Masculinity and the Triad of Men’s Violence. In Beyond Patriarchy Essays by Men on Pleasure, Power and Change, ed. Michael Kaufman, 1–16. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kempadoo, Kamala. 1999. Sun, Sex and Gold. Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. King, Stephen A. 2002. Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Lewis, William. 1994. The Social Drama of Rastafari. Dialectical Anthropology 19 (2/3): 283–294. Littlewood, Roland. 1998. History, Memory and Appropriation: Some Problems in the Analysis of Origins. In Rastafari and Other African-Caribbean Worldviews, ed. Barry Chevannes, 233–252. Basingstoke: Macmillan. MacLeod, Erin. 2014. Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land. New York: New York University Press. Marley, Bob. 1979. “Africa Unite.” Track 6 on Survival. Island/Tuff Gong. ———. 1980. “Could You Be Loved.” Track 8 on Uprising. Island/Tuff Gong. ———. 1976. “Jah live.” Track 11 on Rastaman Vibration. Island Records. ———. 1978. “Lively Up Yourself.” Track 9 on Easy Skanking in Boston ‘78. Island Records. Mohammed, Patricia. 2009. Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nettleford, Rex. 1978. Caribbean Cultural Identity: the Case of Jamaica: an Essay in Cultural Dynamics. Los Angeles: Centre for Afro-American Studies and UCLA Latin American Centre Publications. Partridge, Christopher. 2010. Dub in Babylon: Understanding the Evolution and Significance of Dub Reggae in Jamaica and Britain from King Tubby to Post-­ Punk. London: Equinox. Pollard, Velma. 2000. Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari. Montreal: McGill-­ Queen’s University Press. Price, Charles. 2009. Becoming Rasta: Origins of Rastafari Identity in Jamaica. New York: New York University Press. Pulis, John. 1999. Citing[Sighting]-Up: Words, Sounds and Reading Scripture in Jamaica. In Religion, Diaspora and Cultural Identity: A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean, ed. John Pulis, 357–401. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers. Reisman, Karl. 1989. Contrapuntal Conversations in an Antiguan Village. In Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 110–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salih, Sara. 2002. Judith Butler. London: Routledge. Simpson, George. 1957. Afro-American Religions and Religious Behavior. Caribbean Studies 12 (2): 5–30.

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Stanley Niaah, Sonjah. 2010. Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Stolzoff, Norman. 2000. Wake the Town & Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica. Durham: Duke University Press. Tomei, Renato. 2015. Jamaican Speech Forms in Ethiopia: The Emergence of a New Linguistic Scenario in Shashamane. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Tosh, Peter. 1981. Wanted Dread & Alive. Kingston: Dynamic Studios. Ulysse, Gina. 2007. Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-making in Jamaica. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Veal, Michael. 2007. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Wardle, Huon. 2000. An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica. New York: Edwin Mellon Press. ———. 2012. Ethnographies of Cosmopolitanism in the Caribbean. In Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty, 504–515. Abingdon: Routledge. Warner-Lewis, Maureen. 2003. Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Wilson, Peter. 1973. Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro Societies of the Caribbean. New Haven: Yale University Press. Yawney, Carole. 1999. Only Visitors Here: Representing Rastafari into the 21st Century. In Religion, Diaspora and Cultural Identity: A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean, ed. John Pulis, 153–181. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers. Zips, Werner. 2006. Repatriation is a Must! The Rastafari Struggle to Utterly Downstroy Slavery. In Rastafari: A Universal Philosophy in the Third Millennium, ed. Werner Zips, 129–168. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers.

CHAPTER 3

Ambiguities of Belonging

3.1   A Lineage of Ethiopian Royalty, an Abyssinian Pedigree When Ras Tefari Mekonnen was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, he reasserted his descent in the Solomonic dynasty of ancient Israel. This lineage is documented in the Kebra Negast, an “Amharic national epic” (Sorenson 1993, 23), probably first written in the fourteenth century in Ethiopia (by unidentified authors). The Kebra Negast documents the conception of the future Emperor Menelik I with the consort of the Queen of Sheba, Makeda, and King Solomon of Jerusalem (Kebra Negast 1932, 23–76). Menelik I is thus the progenitor of the Ethiopian nation.1 Based on the description in Kings 10:1–13 of the Bible, the epic continues to be orally upheld in different versions by Ethiopians. Each Ethiopian-born youth, Rastafari or local Ethiopian, with whom I interacted was well-versed in the history of Solomon and Sheba. The highlights are: as a young man, Ethiopian-born Menelik I visited his father in Jerusalem bringing back with him the Ark of the Covenant, the tablet on which Moses inscribed the Ten Commandments. Depending on the version related, Menelik I secretly took the Ark of the Covenant or his father gave him the Ark, but in both versions of events King Solomon believed that his son must have had God’s approval to remove the Ark because the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gomes, Cosmopolitanism from the Global South, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82272-9_3

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tablets and travellers arrived safely in Ethiopia. Most youths in Shashamane cited the version in which Solomon gave the Ark to his son, thereby preserving the symbolism of Ethiopia as the legitimate source of Christian principles, as divine, and as the only Christian empire in Africa never to have been colonised—aspects that also appeal to Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. This historiography of Christian Ethiopia is contested by other ethnicities in Ethiopia, as I shortly discuss. This Solomonic narrative at the core of Ethiopian nationhood was revived later from the thirteenth century, and in the fifteenth century the use of titles such as “King of Zion” and “King of Kings” were announced (Levine 2011). Titles of “s’eyuma egziabeher,” “Elect of God” for Emperor Tewodros (1855–68) and “Mo’anbasa zaemnagada Yehuda, The Lion of the Tribe of Judah has prevailed” for Menelik II (1889–1913) were predecessors to Haile Selassie’s use of “the Lion of Judah” (Bonacci 2015, 152). Haile Selassie’s assertion of Solomonic descent was also enshrined in the 1955 Constitution. This document “recognized a direct line of descent from Solomon and Sheba to Haile Selassie; the Emperor’s divinity was acknowledged in Article Four” (Sorenson 1993, 23). This use reproduces notions of divine right, accession and rule that are characteristic of empire. The position of the Crown Council of Ethiopia, the deposed ruling family and its advisors, reinforces this lineage, Emperor Haile Selassie I, who, although he was descended directly from the Solomonic line, was not directly descended from Emperor Menelik’s branch … The Emperor, who is accorded the prefix “His Imperial Majesty” (in its Western translation), is, under the terms of the pre-revolutionary Constitution of Ethiopia, Head of State. He is also accorded the title “Elect of God” (Atsie), and is the Head of the House of Solomon, and holder of the Throne of Solomon. (Ethopiancrown n.d.)

However, the distancing of this position to Rastafari ideology is clear in another statement on the same website of the Crown Council of Ethiopia: as Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate noted: “The phrase ‘Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah’ has never been the title of Ethiopian monarchs. Rather, the words ‘The Lion of the Tribe of Judah hath prevailed’ (see Genesis 49:9) should be seen as the Imperial motto … It is only our Lord Jesus Christ who is accorded this title [‘Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah’], and

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Ethiopian Monarchs used this motto in order to proclaim that they were Christians.” (Ethopiancrown n.d.)

This stance is complicated by the familiarity between Zara Yacob, the son of Asfa Wossen Asserate, and Rastafari organisations. Zara Yacob has peaceful relations with Rastafari, especially of the Twelve Tribes, and I knew of a repatriate couple who resided in his compound in Addis Ababa as assistants and companions (see also Bonacci 2015, 237). Since Rastafari view Zara Yacob as the rightful heir to the Ethiopian throne, they could be a source of popular support for the deposed ruling family in their bid for some sort of political power in Ethiopia, if not for the complete restoration of the monarchy.2 Nonetheless, Haile Selassie’s use of starkly Biblical terms such as “the Lion of the Tribe of Judah” and “King of Kings” (Negus Negast) as titles as well as references in the Bible to Egypt and Ethiopia, particularly (“African” nations) that “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalms 68:31), bolstered the Rastafari assertion that he was the Black King. In this vein, Haile Selassie I, in addition to his declaration of Semitic ancestry, and in view of his self-recognition as “African” (evidenced by his public speeches) for Rastafari, is also Hamitic, one of the sons of Ham. The so-called curse of Ham propagated the belief that the descendants of Ham would be punished for his sins with dark skin and enslavement (see Genesis 9 and Philippians 4). By asserting that His Majesty and that Rastafari themselves were Hamitic, they were defying the racist Hamitic hypothesis (see Curtin et al. 1978) and pseudo-scientific associations of Ethiopians as “white Hamites” (Bonacci 2015, 79). Rastafari also claim descent in this Solomonic dynasty, simultaneously maintaining their Semitic and Hamitic ancestry. For the Twelve Tribes Mansion especially, His Majesty’s use of the title “the Lion of the Tribe of Judah” also lent credence to the Twelve Tribes belief that he was, in fact, one of the members of the ancient Israelite Lost Tribes, that of Judah, which must be distinguished from the existing zionist state of Israel (Van Dijk 1988). For Rastafari, this Solomonic lineage is extended to all peoples, Rasta and non-Rasta, since His Majesty is also the Creator and the father of humanity.

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3.2   The West Indian God of Rastafari As noted, divinity, antiquity, Africanness and blackness are qualities that Haile Selassie I embodies as human leader and divine personality. The appearance of a “Black,” “African” ruler of Ethiopia in 1930, as Rastafari referred to His Majesty, who quoted from the Bible, ruled over Ethiopia, demanded the equality of all populations, and who fulfilled Biblical prophesies made up elements of a crucial index for Rastafari worldview. This is evidenced in Haile Selassie’s speeches. I realised the poignancy of the Emperor’s public statements one afternoon when I was talking to a youth of Jamaican parentage, Benedict, at a popular Rastafari-owned shop, and he quoted verbatim part of His Majesty’s 1936 speech to the Assembly of the League of Nations. This speech advocated the equality of all peoples through national autonomy when Emperor Haile Selassie I was lobbying for Allied support against Italy following the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. His Majesty talked about fighting racism and making sure all men were equal; as equal as we all are in the eyes of God, Brother Benedict explained. Haile Selassie’s words demonstrated his exemplary dedication, consciousness and effort towards the psychological, economic and political improvement of Ethiopians and of Africans in general. This Rastaman quoted the following: Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another race inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race—WAR.3

The word “War” is the Brother’s inclusion following a song by Bob Marley and the Wailers released in 1976.4 When I took out my notebook to capture these exact words Benedict insisted that I write “war” in uppercase letters. “This is what I believe,” he concluded. Although this was the first time that I heard these words quoted directly, on many occasions I heard repatriates refer to this speech. References to it were usually accompanied by comments that during European colonisation of the continent, Ethiopia was the only part of Africa that had never been colonised by Europeans, and that Haile Selassie was the first black man to stay at the American White House in the 1960s before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These examples were often cited together to show the exemplary leadership of His Majesty, his self-pride, acknowledgement and pride in his people (meaning Ethiopians and

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Africans) and his perseverance in maintaining the sovereignty of his empire. These efforts were meant to ensure that African peoples and nations were not continuously exploited by European powers, which was blatant in the Scramble for Africa (Campbell 2007). Additionally, repatriates from the Caribbean are familiar with Haile Selassie I’s speech to the Jamaican Parliament during his 1966 visit. Repatriates who quoted it highlighted His Majesty’s insistence that each territory’s independence and autonomy should be maintained, his exhortation that “small countries … combine all their energies for prosperity and development,” and his recognition of “a bond of gratitude and brotherhood” between Jamaicans and Ethiopians (1967, 141).5 These bonds are challenged when Rastafari reinterpret Haile Selassie as divine, and not solely as a historical figure of the last Ethiopian monarch. This cornerstone of Rastafari worldview creates conflicts with an Amhara-­ dominated Ethiopian nationalism as well as micro-conflicts with local Ethiopians in Shashamane. The inequities within the Ethiopian Empire during the reign of Haile Selassie I often emerged in local Ethiopian opinions of the Emperor as a bad or unfair king who allowed his people to starve while his lions feasted on meat. I often heard comments such as these from Rastafari, who related Ethiopians’ opinions, and from local Ethiopians themselves in Shashamane and Addis Ababa. Regardless of whether persons view Haile Selassie I as a benign or cruel emperor, His Majesty’s divinity is contested. Outside Shashamane, when Ethiopians learnt that I, a faranji, lived there they assumed either that I was Rasta or that I was not Rasta, but I was one of the many foreign aid workers in Ethiopia. Based on the latter assumption, their comments focused on how “misguided,” “mistaken,” or “wrong” Rastas are in their belief that Haile Selassie is God. Haile Selassie was just a man, they continued, and a bad man who exploited Ethiopians. I usually mumbled a non-­ committal response about respecting everyone’s beliefs, but this was clearly an issue over which passionate disagreements had occurred in the past, and continue to occur. I often heard titbits of popular conceptions about “what Rastas believe” from many Ethiopian men and women of diverse age, ethnicity and occupation with different levels of English proficiency. The version in which Haile Selassie’s visit to Jamaica brought rain during a drought was a popular one, which MacLeod calls a “miracle story” (MacLeod 2014, 67).6 Certainly, the agricultural explanation resonates with Ethiopians, with

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collective memories as well as ongoing experiences of drought, and makes sense in the tropical-like conditions of both Jamaica and southern Ethiopia. Haile Selassie’s visit to Jamaica in 1966, an event that is individually and socially reiterated, and at times commemorated by repatriates, is here derided as emblematic of the fallacy of Rastafari beliefs. By contrast, when repatriates tell this story they also vividly describe when the aircraft carrying Haile Selassie landed in Kingston. At that moment, the rain stopped, the airplane door opened, and when His Majesty emerged on the aircraft steps, the clouds cleared to reveal the bright sun and clear blue sky. For Rastafari, the change in weather is a metaphor for the “rightness,” as they say, of His Majesty’s presence in Jamaica and the clarity that he brought, which accompanies the sighting of Rastafari. Pivoting on miracle-making, Shirlie Gibson relates the experience of an early EWF repatriate woman who notes that on one occasion, local Ethiopians and EWF returnees likewise acknowledged His Majesty’s divine intervention of sorts (1996, 188). When the emperor visited Shashamane to open the Shashemene Comprehensive School in the 1960s, the opening was delayed because there was no water on the compound. As this was the dry season, and Haile Selassie I was already present in Shashamane, Gibson’s interviewee relates that her “sisters from different tribes, the Amharas and Oromos” spoke in Amharic with His Majesty describing the drought, asking for rain, “and then, His Majesty gave them his blessing and promised dem [sic] rain” (1996, 188). Later that day, there was indeed rainfall and both local Ethiopians and EWF returnees celebrated. Here, the interpretation by an early female repatriate posits that Ethiopians also believed that there was some aspect of the Emperor’s personality that was powerful enough to influence nature. Since then, however, dominant views of Emperor Haile Selassie I have changed, and the prevailing national atmosphere is characterised by negative views of the last emperor of Ethiopia. For both groups, local Ethiopians and Rastafari, the belief that Haile Selassie is God, in some form divine or with greater power and ability than the average person, has been replaced with new narratives of post-1991 equality as compared to imperial and Derg exploitation, one that is also contested today. Derg refers to the Provisional Military Council, which governed Ethiopia following the 1974 revolution that ousted Haile Selassie I. This fundamental belief in Haile Selassie’s divinity is seemingly incomprehensible to local Ethiopians at present. I suggest that this chasm stems

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from the inability of local Ethiopians and Rastafari to distinguish between Haile Selassie I as national Ethiopian figure and as Rastafari figure or a West Indian God. Alemseged Kebede and J. David Knotterus (1998) also highlight the symbolism of Haile Selassie I for Rastafari with reference to the Rastafari population in Ethiopia that is not shared by Ethiopians.7 This West Indian Rastafari God is also at odds with the current Ethiopian narrative of post-revolutionary and post-Derg “democracy.” Both Emperor Haile Selassie I and the Derg government are presented as “criminals” in contrast to the current Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF)-led government (Bach 2014).

3.3   An Everyday Micro-conflict The tensions in  local-repatriate relations were most clearly evinced in a verbal exchange that I observed between Simona, at that time a young recent repatriate from Trinidad and Tobago, and a local Ethiopian male job applicant. This conversation took place in a repatriate-owned small business in the Jamaica Safar. The following is from my fieldnotes: As I looked out the (metal) grill window of the small office I saw a tall brown skinned young man walk towards the entrance. I was there with Simona who worked there … and we both noticed his approach, but it became apparent that she knew him whereas I did not. Her disgruntled, barely suppressed sound of irritation was an obvious indicator that they had met before. Before I could ask about the youth though, he purposefully entered the office and headed for the thin metal chair designated for visitors. This meant that he was familiar with the office, I thought to myself. Although I looked up briefly, we did not greet each other, and I bent my head to continue reading. He asked Simona, in English, if there was any “news.” His accent immediately told me that he was not from the Caribbean, his dress and hair indicated that he was not one of IandI, and neither did he preface his question with the usual “Greetings” that is a common form of hello among Rastas.8 Simona replied, in a pained, curt manner that there was not, and as she explained before, when there was news, she would call him. I do not have any more information to give you, she concluded. She went back to her work in front of the outdated desktop computer, but instead of getting up and leaving as I expected him to, the young man remained seated. After about five minutes of silence that seemed much longer, I glanced at him and saw that he seemed to be calm, but was impatiently tapping one leg up and down. After this interval Simona looked up and

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scornfully asked, “Can I help you with something else?” He simply replied “No” and looked away. After another few minutes he suddenly blurted, “Did Jah go to college?” This question was problematic in many ways, the foremost being: who is Jah and what do you mean when you use that term as an Ethiopian who is not Rastafarian, and prompted the following exchange: Simona: I don’t know what you mean by that. Youth: (Repeating the question) Did Jah go to college? While asking he jerked his head toward the poster of Haile Selassie I that was on the wall to his right. Simona: (Noticing his head movement) He was your king … don’t you know? Don’t they teach you history at school?

The young man had no reply to this but staunchly remained seated. A few minutes later he got up and left without a word or a glance in our direction. I wordlessly observed what I perceived as a tense exchange. As soon as he was out of hearing range, I exploded with questions: “Who was that? What was that about? What kind of question is that?” Simona explained that the young man had applied for a job in the business and keeps coming by to ask if she “heard anything” regarding his application. She repeatedly told him no, and that she would call him and the other applicants to inform them of the outcome. This communication exemplifies the tensions and (mis)conceptions surrounding Haile Selassie that permeate social relations between Rastafari and local Ethiopians. The young man was being antagonistic and attempted to insult Simona as Rastafarian, and to generally demean Rastafari beliefs. This kind of provocative interaction is quite common in Shashamane around the figure of Haile Selassie I. These points of conflict centre on “Christianity and the King, marriage and marijuana” in Erin MacLeod’s analysis (2014, 60). With a framework of integrated threat theory, MacLeod suggests that Rastafari present a symbolic threat to Ethiopian identity, which is evidenced in their meanings attributed to the figure of Haile Selassie I, membership in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the use of ganja (marijuana). While Haile Selassie I is deified in Rastafari worldview, from my fieldwork it was noticeable that Rastafari in Shashamane also attend the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, claim membership, baptise children and bury the dead in the Church cemetery, which are practices that MacLeod does not document. I have suggested that these are forms of the ambiguity of Caribbean

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society and personhood that are not contradictory for Rastafari which are reproduced in Ethiopia (2011). These are behaviours that also reflect a cosmopolitan sensibility. Significant examples of this ambiguity include Rastafari reinterpretation of the Bible and the recasting of Emperor Haile Selassie I as divine. For multi-ethnic local Ethiopian adherents to Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and Protestant Christianity, however, this Rastafari figure of His Majesty is misguided and sacrilegious. Such “conflicting narratives of Ethiopian identity” do lead to negative stereotypes and prejudices, which adversely affect Rastafari there (MacLeod 2014, 70). Rastafari use of marijuana or the “sacred herb” is another of these negatively judged practices by local Ethiopians. Until recently, herb has been culturally and ecologically alien to Ethiopia, unlike the Caribbean where it has been integrated into livelihood practices, traditional medicine and life stage, for instance, in rural Jamaica (Comitas 1975, 122–125). Exaggerated tales of marijuana addiction and conflation of ganja with other drugs such as cocaine and heroin circulate widely in Shashamane, and based on my observations, stem from ignorance of the herb and its uses. Religious beliefs and religio-cultural practices of Rastafari (an example of the latter is the everyday and ritual use of marijuana) constitute firstand second-generation Rastafari as “strange” for local Ethiopians and foster negative group stereotypes. Repatriates and youths are well aware of how this Rastafari worldview engenders ideological conflict in Ethiopia, yet this Rastafari narrative and the accompanying practices and behaviours are aspects of reimagining personhood in an effort towards freedom in line with cosmopolitan sensibilities. In the exchange between Simona and the young man, Simona, herself Rastafari, is aware of the varied interpretations held by members of Rastafari Mansions, and is also cognisant of the local Ethiopian perception that all Rastas “worship” Haile Selassie I. She uses Haile Selassie’s role as a former emperor of Ethiopia to test the young man’s knowledge of Ethiopian history, which is also the history of his ancestors. In this way he reveals the inanity of his loaded question and his ignorance. This response allows Simona to successfully deflect and contest the implied ridicule of this fundamental Rastafari belief. The few laudatory remarks from local Ethiopians who praised Haile Selassie as emperor, or the Rastafari deification nonetheless indicate this ideological chasm between the recognition of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia and the Rastafari god Haile Selassie. For instance, one of my

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colleagues at the university in Hawassa conjectured that he could not think of another twentieth-century head of state in the world who had been elevated to the status of a god (although many take on god-like status). How do we close this chasm? Or encourage an understanding of these diverging perspectives? Bonacci (2015) suggests that returnee second-­generation Ethiopian youth from the United States and England in particular, who adopt Rastafari beliefs, whose “parents had fled the revolution … or the regime change of 1991” (2015, 390), may play a role in bridging this lack of understanding among repatriates, their Ethiopian-­ born Rastafari children and local Ethiopians. Such bifurcated conceptions are evident also in a Rastafari claim to being black, both in terms of a diasporic cultural citizenship rooted in spirituality (Castor 2017) as well as ideas of blackness in terms of race. The latter is also important for Rastafari given asymmetrical processes of social reproduction and self-making of modernity, circumstances under which fostered a cosmopolitan outlook was shaped.

3.4   Reclaiming Blackness Black and African are identity categories that are manipulated by Rastafari and local Ethiopians in varying positions of power and status. These categories relate to Rastafari subjective as well as hegemonic constructions of the territory of Ethiopia, their positions in this schema and their relations with each other in Shashamane. For Rastafari, blackness is reclaimed as a powerful signifier of the history of ancient Ethiopian kingdoms, a past that was denied and belittled during European colonialism of the Caribbean. However, in the narrative of the Ethiopian nation, and the preceding Abyssinian Empire, blackness has been ideologically rejected. Here I refer to blackness as a sociological and racial category. At the conceptual level of nationhood and at a psychological level, this internalised pejorative connotation of blackness is expressed by many Ethiopians of different ethnic affiliations. “Blackness,” “Africanness” and darkness of skin colour are not considered as “Ethiopian” characteristics. Most Ethiopians whom I met in Shashamane and in other urban areas of Ethiopia informed me that their ancestors were either simply Semites or Semites from ancient Israel, and therefore they were not Africans, but Ethiopian or Habesha, a word that has come to mean “Ethiopian,” a member of present-day Ethiopia.

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Writing in 1970s, Levine noted that Habesha meant “native Ethiopian” in both Amharic and Tigrinya languages, the latter from the northern Tigray ethnic group. Levine continues, “Although modern-educated Ethiopians tend to object to the use of the English counterpart of this term, Abyssinian, they commonly use the term Habesha among themselves in the traditional meaning” referring to Amhara or Tigray. In an expanded sense, Habesha also referred to “all those who are subjects of the Ethiopian monarchy” (Levine 1974 , 118). This Semitic ancestry was reinforced by the declarations of previous Amhara rulers, including Haile Selassie I. While His Majesty declared his Semitic descent through Solomon, he nonetheless explicitly called himself “African” (see his 25 May 1963 speech at the Organization for African Unity, now the African Union, at https://www.blackpast.org/african-­a merican-­h istor y/1963-­h aile-­ selassie-­towards-­african-­unity/). In this speech he promoted the equality of all peoples as well as reiterated his political support for the implementation of the Pan-African-oriented Organisation for African Unity. For Rastafari, blackness is an essential characteristic of defining Ethiopian and African personhood. This definition creates a contextual historical connection among Jamaicans and Caribbeans of African ancestry which follows His Majesty’s example of defining African and Ethiopian as complementary, not contradictory identities. While for Rastafari in general, and for repatriates in particular, this provides a discursive means of creating a fellowship of Ethiopians, for local multi-ethnic Ethiopians in the Jamaica Safar, being black is an ambivalent designation that may be rejected or embraced situationally. From a Rastafari perspective, the granting of land to “black peoples” as a standing invitation to settle supports a Rastafari definition of being Ethiopian as being black. Historically, the term “Ethiopian” was synonymous with “Amhara,” the ethnic group of Abyssinian rulers until the modern Ethiopian state in the twentieth century. This includes Haile Selassie I.  With the myth of Solomonic descent re-established from the fourteenth century in Abyssinia, Amhara became a social identity, and a prestigious one. Donald Donham clarifies that “Amhara” was a tribal as well as socioeconomic distinction in Abyssinia. Amhara meant persons identified as Orthodox Christians and spoke Amharic. It also denoted a person’s high status as a member of the nobility or holder of a military title. Juxtaposed to Amhara were “Shankilla” (of varied ethnic and clan groupings), Muslim Afar and Muslim Oromo, among other groups. According to Donham, “The label Shankilla had a

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more pointed reference to race: Shankilla were, simply, blacks … who lived in the lowland wildernesses (bereha) unsuitable for plough cultivation” (Donham 2002, 12). Since then, in the twentieth century from her fieldwork among the Dorze in the Gamo Highlands of southern Ethiopia in the late 1960s to early 1970s, Judith Olmstead notes that Orthodox Christianity continues to be associated with a Pan-Ethiopian identity as well as elite status: “these people looked upon themselves as Ethiopians, and their Christianity demonstrated to them and others that this was the case. They claimed high status within the highland on the basis of their strict observance of the fast days and various Christian ceremonies” (1997, 200). Because of Shashamane’s location in the southern Shewa region, which was historically incorporated into the Ethiopian empire in the nineteenth century, and now a multi-ethnic but still largely Oromo-populated city, the Oromo-Amhara juxtaposition continues to resonate on ideological and everyday levels in the Jamaica Safar among both Rastafari and local Ethiopians. Oromo refers to an ethnic identity in contemporary Ethiopia as well as resonating with its historical use as synonymous with “black.”9 Oromo peoples were “long regarded as primitive, backward, and inferior to the Amhara … as savage and warlike invaders, the antithesis of Amhara culture” (Sorenson 1993, 68–69). This hyperbolic Abyssinian-­ constructed image of Oromos reflected the actual threat from Oromos who outnumbered the Amhara elite, constantly resisted Abyssinian invasions of their lands, and the potential for the success of Oromo resistance (cf. Holcomb and Ibsssa 1990, 288). The protests by ethnic Oromos in July 2020 following the murder of popular Oromo singer, Hachalu Hundessa, demonstrated the persistence of such discourse well into the twenty-first century. The mass gatherings deteriorated into looting, arson and violent attacks against other ethnic groups, also in Shashamane. These conceptual boundaries of Oromo and Amhara (Ethiopian), savage and civilised, were represented in the topographic and metaphorical lowlands of Oromo territory, in contrast to the Abyssinian highlands. Such lowlands “were to be avoided  – they were wild and dangerous, infested with disease, and inhabited by savages who did not acknowledge God” (Donham 2002, 20). There were additional distinctions made in terms of hygiene and behaviour that were portrayed as innate qualities of a Muslim, Oromo personhood in contrast to the favourable qualities of an Amhara personhood. For example, derogatory Ethiopian sayings

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comparing unclean stomach lining to Oromos were common (see Donham 2002; Jalata 2008). These attitudes are reproduced intergenerationally among Rastafari youth, even while friends, neighbours and in very few cases, affinal relations or kin by marriage are themselves Oromo. With many Muslim Oromo, I also heard repetitions of Muslims as “dirty” or koshasha from Orthodox Christian local Ethiopians speaking in English, and of Ethiopians in general as dirty from first-, second- and third-generation Rastafari in Shashamane. These identity categories of Amhara and Oromo, Rastafari and Ethiopian, function parallel to each other to delineate inclusion and exclusion. A generalised distinction of skin colour whereby Oromos are dark-­ skinned and Amharas are light-skinned was similarly interpreted and discursively reproduced. Of course, this division was not obvious. This difference relates to the systematic construction of an image of Oromo peoples as “war-like invaders” (Sorenson 1993) as well as the actual historical position of Oromos as slaves in Abyssinia. Given the social processes surrounding Amhara identity, there were of course also Oromo rulers within the Abyssinian Empire, often those who converted to Orthodox Christianity and became “Amharised” thereby integrating into the aristocracy. One noteworthy instance was the paternal lineage of Emperor Haile Selassie I and another was Lij Iyasu, Emperor Menelik’s short-reigning successor in the early twentieth century (Donham 2002; Levine 1974 ).10 This hierarchical distinction is obvious in the Amharic language where the word barya (also transliterated as baria) is used interchangeably to mean both “slave” and “black.” With institutionalised and practised slavery in imperial Ethiopia, Donham explains “Slavery existed across Ethiopia until the reign of Haile Selassie I,” and Donald Levine notes that “although Sudanic tribes like the Nara (=Barya), Kunama, and Berta (= Shanqella) were heavily raided for slaves - so much so that the word Barya came to signify “slave” in Amharic and perhaps other tongues—members of any ethnic group were liable to be consigned to slavery by more powerful members of other tribes, if not their own tribe” (1974 , 56). In one memorable situation when I vicariously felt the effects of this word, a young dark-skinned Rastawoman, Sister Marion, calmly described her former Ethiopian husband’s cruelty towards her and their children: “he used to call me barya and boss me around like I was his slave or something. It was like he didn’t know that the days of slavery done. It used to

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really hurt me.” Marion’s husband was not from Shashamane, but another town in the same region of Oromiyya in Ethiopia, indicating the persistent widespread use of the word. As Marion’s frank remarks indicate, these connotations of bondage, dark skin and low social status persist with the use of barya among the first- and second-generation Rastafari (see also Bonacci 2015, 360). However, I also argue that second-generation youths reframe its meaning among their peer groups. In my presence young people, both Rastafari and local Ethiopians, use barya on many occasions when speaking with each other. But it was not used in a derogatory manner, rather as a word that indicated their familiarity with each other. Although Ethiopian-born Rastafari youths reframe this term, it is abhorred when used by local Ethiopians to describe Rastafari, especially by second-generation Rastafari. Symbolically, also barya connotes oppression, that is babylon, demonstrating how babylon has existed within the zion of Ethiopia. Relatedly, Asafa Jalata’s discussion of “Oromumma” or “Oromocentric worldview, culture, and nationalism” presents one expression of resistance to this Abyssinian historiography (2008, 19). This is a parallel effort to that of Rastafari—to challenge hegemonic narratives of Ethiopian identity and therefore their exclusion from Ethiopian nationhood; one that Rastafari also alter but accept in terms of an Abyssinian historiography. Oromo and Rastafari reject and reframe dominant Abyssinian historical narratives to favourably position themselves as belonging to the contemporary Ethiopian nation. In the imperial twentieth century, one avenue of local Oromo challenges to ideological and material oppression was in the formation of a Mecha-Tulema Self-Help Association. This organisation raised funds for local development projects, but was later “outlawed” and members imprisoned when members made public statements “linking the poverty of Oromo with the northern conquest” of southern territories (Donham 2002, 35). This early example of “Oromo nationalism” has been developed in scholarly as well as popular circles. The Oromo Studies Association (see www.oromostudies.org) publishes the Journal of Oromo Studies, an academic initiative of mainland and diasporic persons who first self-­identify as Oromo, and secondly as Ethiopian (if at all). The construction of a Pan-­ Ethiopian identity by the ruling EPRDF that united the ethnic groups resolved the question of difference which emerged in post-revolutionary Ethiopia as “unity in diversity” (Bach 2014). Ethiopians were encouraged to recognise first their ethnic identities and then second, a national one

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which Oromo activists and scholars have used to their advantage.11 This ethnic nationalism functions in parallel to a retained ideology of Greater Ethiopia as a never-colonised, northern-ruled imperial Abyssinia. The Oromo effort signals the recognition of non-hegemonic versions of history to question the existing ideological basis of the Ethiopian nation. Rather than “incorporation” into historical Ethiopia, the southern territories are recognised as “conquered”: “The Ethiopian state, however, was built by incorporating peripheral peoples into a state which already possessed a strong identity and historical core … This resulted in processes of marginalisation, exploitation, and alienation” (Aalen 2011, 25) as well as assimilation. This counter-history is another ongoing dynamic into which Rastafari worldview is inserted. The edited volume, Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquires (1996), was a ground-breaking one with Oromo and non-Oromo scholars and activists that deconstructed “Oromo” as an ethnic category in eastern Africa. Although some scholars contest the notion of an “Oromo” subjective identification in favour of clan-based affiliations, others utilise the term “Oromo” as a political inter-­ ethnic category (Hassen 1996; Lewis 1996; Bulcha 1996). This position also creates friction with Rastafari since they adhere to the imperial Solomonic narrative of Ethiopian nationhood, despite their own contestations of its narrow definition. These imaginative acts of collective reinvention continue to evince a cosmopolitan sensibility. It is also these distinct Rastafari understandings of Haile Selassie I, in contrast to those of contemporary Ethiopians, that are the basis of community-building narratives centred on the historic land grant. What may appear to be a straightforward recognition of the symbolism of one character, Haile Selassie I, is embedded in polysemic bottom-up and top-down narratives of belonging. Such an understanding requires elucidating not only the different views but also how these are manifested in and impact on social relations in the Jamaica Safar.

Notes 1. Donald Levine argues that the Kebra Negast is the prime text documenting Ethiopian nationhood, disagreeing with scholars who view the Ethiopian nation as a construct of the late nineteenth century with the furthest southern conquest (2011, 317). Levine remarks, “One remarkable feature of this epic is its consistent reference to Ethiopia as a sovereign,

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inclusive polity, ignoring the numerous ethnic divides within historic Ethiopia” (Levine 2011, 315). 2. MacLeod quotes from Prince Ermias Sahle Selassie, a grandson of Haile Selassie I, who headed the same Ethiopian Imperial Crown Council. He unequivocally disputes His Majesty’s divinity and Haile Selassie’s rejection of the divine status attributed to him by Rastafari. However, Ermias Sahle Selassie is sympathetic and grateful towards Rastafari by recognising their loyalty to the Ethiopian monarchy, especially during Derg governance and in popularising positive images of Ethiopia (2014, 70–73). 3. See Selected Speeches of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie First 1918 to 1967. 4. This was an especially violent election year that reflected the concerns of racial and class oppression in postcolonial Jamaica shared worldwide. 5. “A bond of gratitude, a bond of brotherhood … in a broader sense between the people of Jamaica and the people of Ethiopia and Africa” (1967, 141) referred to those who fought in the British forces on behalf of Ethiopia against the Italian invasion. This sentiment took on a special meaning for Caribbean Rastafari. 6. Years later, when I attended a conference in Tanzania where I discussed my research, an Ethiopian attendee working with a government organisation in Addis Ababa absolutely refused to accept my denial that this rain-making was the source of Rastafari deification of Haile Selassie I. Additionally, MacLeod notes that miracles fit the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition of “reading the miracles of Mary as part of the church service” (2014, 67). 7. It is not surprising that none of MacLeod’s local Ethiopian interviewees professed Rastafari faith, for example, although they adopted certain activist and aesthetic expressions of Rastafari such as opposition to political censorship and the adoption of dreadlocks and popularity of reggae (2014, 66). 8. Especially among the Twelve Tribes. This is the beginning of the popular refrain, “greetings in the name of His Imperial Majesty .” 9. Within the Oromo ethnic group there are various groups such as the Borana, Waata and Gabra that cross present-day borders of Ethiopia, Kenya and perhaps Tanzania. I was not aware of these distinctions in Shashamane, likely because of my limited Amharic skills and lack of knowledge of Afan Oromo (Kassam and Bashuna 2004). 10. Lij Iyasu was a relative of Menelik II.  He succeeded Menelik II in 1913. Iyasu’s father “was from a Muslim Oromo background … Shewan nobility … deposed him in 1916, citing his reported conversion to Islam” since he attempted to forge alliances in the south and in Wollo, predominantly Muslim areas, which the Amhara elite viewed as a threat (Donham 2002, 26). 11. Politically, the first Oromo President of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed (2018–), recognises the primacy of ethnic identity while also fostering a national one.

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References Aalen, Lovise. 2011. The Politics of Ethnicity in Ethiopia: Actors, Power and Mobilisation Under Ethnic Federalism. Leiden: Brill. Bach, Jean-Nicolas. 2014. EPRDF’s Nation-Building: Tinkering with Convictions and Pragmatism. Cadernos de Estudos Africanos 27: unpaginated. https://doi. org/10.4000/cea.1501. Bonacci, Giulia. 2015. Exodus!: Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia. Trans. Antoinette Tidjani Alou. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Bulcha, Mekuria. 1996. “The Survival and Reconstruction of Oromo National Identity.” In Being and Becoming Oromo, edited by Baxter, P.T.W, Jan Hultin and Alessandro Triulzi, 48–66. Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press. Campbell, Horace. 2007. Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney. London: Hansib. Castor, N.  Fadeke. 2017. Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifa in Trinidad. Durham: Duke University Press. Comitas, Lambros. 1975. The Social Nexus of Ganja in Jamaica. In Cannabis and Culture, ed. Vera Rubin, 119–132. Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton. Curtin, Philip, Steven Feierman, and Leonard Thompson. 1978. African History. London/New York: Longman. Donham, Donald. 2002. The Making of an Imperial State: Old Abyssinia and the New Ethiopian Empire: Themes in Social History. In The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia: Essays in History and Anthropology, ed. Donald Donham and Wendy James, 3–48. Oxford/Addis Ababa: James Currey/Addis Ababa University Press. Gibson, Shirlie R. 1996. African Repatriation: A Case Study of Rastafarians and the Malcoda Land-Grant at Shashemane. PhD dissertation, Howard University. Hassen, Mohammed. 1996. The Development of Oromo Nationalism. In Being and Becoming Oromo, ed. P.T.W. Baxter, Jan Hultin, and Alessandro Triulzi, 67–80. Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press. Holcomb, Bonnie, and Sisai Ibssa. 1990. The Invention of Ethiopia. Trenton: Red Sea Press. Jalata, Asafa. 2008. Being In and Out of Africa: The Impact of Duality of Ethiopianism. Journal of Black Studies 40 (2): 189–214. Kassam, Aneesa, and Ali Bashuna. 2004. Marginalisation of the Waata Oromo Hunter- Gatherers of Kenya: Insider and Outsider Perspectives. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 74 (2): 194–216. Kebede, Alemseghed, and J. David Knottnerus. 1998. Beyond the Pales of Babylon: The Ideational Components and Social Psychological Foundations of Rastafari. Sociological Perspectives 41 (3): 499–517. https://doi.org/10.2307/1389561, https://doi.org/10.4000/cea.1501.

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Kebra Negast. 1932. The Queen of Sheba and her Only Son Meneylek. Trans. Ernest Wallis Budge. London: Oxford University Press. Levine, Donald. 1974. Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of Multiethnic Society. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2011. Ethiopia’s Nationhood Reconsidered. Análise Social 46 (199): 311–327. Lewis, Herbert. 1996. The Development of Oromo Political Consciousness from 1958 to 1994. In Being and Becoming Oromo, ed. P.T.W. Baxter, Jan Hultin, and Alessandro Triulzi, 37–47. Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press. MacLeod, Erin. 2014. Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land. New York: New York University Press. Olmstead, Judith. 1997. Woman Between Two Worlds: Portrait of an Ethiopian Rural Leader. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Selassie, Haile. 1967. Selected Speeches of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie First 1918 to 1967. Addis Ababa: The Imperial Ethiopian Ministry of Information Publication and Foreign Languages Press Department. Sorenson, John. 1993. Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. The Crown Council of Ethiopia. n.d. http://www.ethiopiancrown.org/. Accessed 5 Apr 2021. Van Dijk, Frank. 1988. The Twelve Tribes of Israel: Rasta and the Middle Class. New West Indian Guide 62 (1/2): 1–26.

CHAPTER 4

Narratives of Community: His Majesty’s People

4.1   Origin Stories Of the many stories that I heard in Shashamane, among the most common was a foundational interaction between His Majesty and residents. The story was repeated by elders and youths, recent and early repatriates alike. On one occasion Brother Thomas articulated these events: In the early days His Majesty came to Shashamane and he gathered the people and told them that some other of “his people” would be coming here to live with them. He asked the people if this was alright, and they replied, “of course, Your Majesty.” So when the early settlers came from America and Jamaica the Oromos living here had no problem with them, but the Oromos who live in Shashamane now were never there when His Majesty came, and they never heard this, so they think that Rastas are taking land that rightfully belongs to them. They don’t know that His Majesty gave us this land.1

On another occasion Brother David related this vignette: One day when His Majesty was passing through Shashamane he got out his car, and looked around and saw that the land was empty. “Where are all my people,” he asked?

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gomes, Cosmopolitanism from the Global South, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82272-9_4

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Brother Thomas’ remarks are from our impromptu conversation one morning outside a locally owned shop in the Jamaica Safar, where we met while buying fresh bread for a typical breakfast with herbal tea. Thomas is an early repatriate from Jamaica who arrived in Ethiopia in the 1970s. Although he had lived in Shashamane for almost 50 years, he did not witness this encounter. Rather, in a ritualised recitation, Thomas echoed what repatriates who arrived in Shashamane before him had related, just as he spontaneously related the story to me. I had heard this story often. Almost every adult repatriate and youth— born in or repatriated to Shashamane—with whom I interacted, if even only briefly, told me that His Majesty “gave the land to us,” “to our people” or “to Black people” for them to “come home.” “Returning home” has a long history in Pan-Africanism (Harris 1993; Campbell 2007). As Rastafari draw from Pan-African thought, they also reframe this historic grant through their actual spiritually motivated “return.” They actively build a locally situated and transnationally oriented community, grounded in such foundational stories. For Rastafari, the story and its ritualised retelling serve to legitimate their presence, and signal that their returning home is sanctioned by divine powers. Regarding Brother David’s vignette, during our open-ended interview at his yard he recounted the follow-up enquiry from His Majesty. Like Brother Thomas, David situated it in his explanation of the significance of the land grant to repatriates and to Rastafari. This second excerpt cropped up many times in my fieldnotes. Like the first story, I had also heard it repeated in conversations with slight variations such as His Majesty asking why the land was “unoccupied” instead of “empty” and where “the people” were instead of “his people.” The basic content of His Majesty’s passing through Shashamane, and impulsively stopping after he noticed the few inhabitants, remained the same. Considering the politics of personhood and narratives of belonging, I examine the frictions and accommodations Rastafari experience as they encounter the hegemonic renditions of Ethiopian national history. Some of these frictions and accommodations are present in what I refer to as Rastafari charter myths (Malinowski 1922, 51) as these relate to the potent symbolism of the land grant, and the everyday material struggles in and over this land. These frictions are situated in broader considerations of the various dynamics in Ethiopian imperial and post-imperial nationalism. In the coming sections I examine how these tensions are evident in the two origin stories.

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I begin by examining the practices of relatedness within “His Majesty’s people,” as Rastafari say.

4.2   Narrative Self-Making It gradually became clear that almost all Rastafari, from youths to elders, repeated the events described by Brother Thomas and Brother David to visitors. While the accuracy of the story is not relevant here, it is likely that the story emerged from these interactions of early settlers with His Majesty in the 1950s–1960s, the period between the donation of the land grant and the coup d’etat. Relating these events to Rastafari visitors ensures that Rastafari internationally will hear the stories, which, in turn, become a source of assurance and pride for repatriates and Rastafari the world over. A notion of community as well as the speaker’s expression of belonging to various gradations of His Majesty’s people is formed and maintained, regardless of whether it is the aim of a Rastaman or Rastawoman to repatriate.2 The framing of these vignettes is worth noting. Words like “empty” and “my people” have different connotations and implications to words like “unoccupied” and “the people.” As in Brother Thomas’ story, this framing was recited by first- and second-generation repatriates, in casual conversations as well as in our more structured interviews. Through oral expressions, repatriates and youths actively sustain a history of the repatriate population. Such oral histories are especially important for this population with limited written records. They also act as a medium for reiterating common circumstances within this spiritually motived migration. “We all come to know each other by asking for accounts [and] by giving accounts,” Paul Connerton writes, “about each other’s pasts” (1989, 21). Connerton identifies the centrality of narrative self-fashioning and comprehension of contextual events and behaviours. The Rastafari community in Shashamane provides examples of these practices in their oral history. Another feature of this oral history-making is in how these stories function as charter myths. From this analytical vantage, Rastafari use the stories to legitimate their position in Ethiopia, physically in Shashamane, and in the Ethiopian national imaginary more broadly. Although Bronislaw Malinowski’s ground-breaking fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands in the Pacific was conducted during World War I, his argument remains relevant: myths serve as charters to individual and group behaviour, thereby

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creating a framework of collective history. Regarding Rastafari behaviours, they accepted His Majesty’s gift of land by settling there, additionally following Haile Selassie’s example of leadership on behalf of “his people,” who are black Ethiopians and Africans. As Malinowski wrote, “it is to the behaviour of the past generations that the Trobriander… looks for his guidance” (1922, 327). In this way, “myths” which relate the actions and behaviours of honourable ancestors become sacred because they act as guides for current inhabitants. Reciprocating to His Majesty’s grant by holding the land is a repatriate strategy that ensures a prolonged Rastafari presence on the land, ideally in perpetuity. With reference to the making of national narratives, Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) has relevant points, especially given his work in the Caribbean. He emphasises the dialectic relation between articulation and silence to draw attention to the role of power in the co-construction of such narratives. A historical narrative, Trouillot argues, “is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly” (1995, 26). However, a “mere chronology of silences” will not elucidate the process through which such a historical narrative has been produced (ibid). My purpose in discussing Connerton, Malinowski and Trouillot is to elucidate how they help point to how a Rastafari identity is reproduced through carefully curated words. I am therefore less concerned with debating myth versus story, as has been the concern within anthropology, than in discussing the role of story-telling in collective self-making. Both Brother Thomas’ and Brother David’s stories emphasise the foundational aspect of the Rastafari claim to the land in Shashamane: that Rastas are His Majesty’s people. It is on this basis that Rastafari, who are a relatively powerless group economically and politically in Ethiopia, claim a right to portions of the historic land grant. This claim is explicitly supported by the words of Haile Selassie I and the gift that he expected “his people” to make use of by moving to Ethiopia. Each prospective repatriate is assured of the legitimacy of their place and position not only as invited by the Emperor but also by extension as “Ethiopians” in Brother Thomas’ rendition.

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4.3   Everyday Practices of Relatedness While interrogating the notion of community and the ideas and expressions of belonging, Karen Fog Olwig suggests focusing on how, through “statements and practices,” people create, sustain and express “different forms of relatedness” (2009, 521). These “forms of relatedness” include parameters of inclusion and exclusion that shift in practice. His Majesty’s people in Shashamane provides a good example of everyday practices of relatedness. Broadly defined, Rastafari, repatriates and Oromos alike are “His Majesty’s people.” The stories from Brother Thomas and Brother David reinforce this categorisation. There is also a narrower definition of His Majesty’s people that refers only to Rastafari. Rastafari position themselves very pointedly and deliberately in these Ethiopian schemata, which impacts their relations with each other and with local Ethiopian wives, relatives by marriage, friends and neighbours. An understanding of the categorical and the everyday elucidates these positions. In these historical events, “Oromos” are portrayed as a group who threaten the access and longevity of Rastafari to the historic land grant. The collective “Oromo” was meant to signify local Ethiopians in general—not only Oromo, but also inclusive of additional ethnic groups, as Thomas expounds. This positioning was echoed by other early residents as well as recent repatriates when they angrily exclaimed that “the Oromos today” are unaware that His Majesty donated this land to repatriates. Oromos therefore believe that repatriates are “stealing” Oromo land. At the same time, interpersonal relations are more complex given the kinship ties and geographical proximity between repatriates and local Ethiopians. For instance, when Brother Fyah (who repatriated in 1970s like Brother Thomas and Brother David) read a draft of this chapter, he immediately disagreed with Brother Thomas’ assessment of conflict between “Oromo” and Rastafari. Brother Fyah suggested that his relations with local Ethiopians had always been “cordial,” at least based upon his interpersonal relationships with neighbours. Clearly, there are different experiences regarding Oromo and Rastafari co-existence, ranging from antagonism and hostility to amiable sociality fostered by bonds of kinship as well as community projects. This variety of everyday interpersonal relations shapes a wide set of narratives about status and belonging. In Thomas’ interpretation, His Majesty convinces “the Oromos” to share land, but subsequently that agreement is reneged upon.

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In this story, repatriates, regardless of citizenship or place of birth, have legitimate rights and claims, but the main affront is that these rights and claims are not recognised. In Brother Thomas’s narration, “the Oromos” living in Shashamane “in the early days” did not have a “problem” with repatriates. As good subjects, they adhered to His Majesty’s wish that all inhabitants share the land. “People took His Majesty’s words to heart,” according to Thomas, but not any longer he disappointingly remarks. With demographic and political changes as well as new nationalisms, Oromos today are ignorant of this gift, and misguided in repatriates’ view about the Rastafari presence in Shashamane. In relaying this story, Brother Thomas implicitly judges the failure of Oromo parents to transmit this aspect of what repatriates view as their collective history to their children. In this regard, they have failed to abide as Ethiopians and His Majesty’s people to Haile Selassie’s PanAfrican commitment to diasporic Africans—welcomed to “return home.” Repatriates, on the other hand, repeat this version of the story to their children and to visitors, thereby continuously reinforcing its significance for the community.3 Referring to Trouillot and the dialectic between articulation and silence is useful. There are two different bases of power in the construction of these different narratives that emerge. For Oromo, their silence on the land grant is telling because it reinforces an Ethiopian national historiography in which rights are circumscribed by birthright. Although local Ethiopians disagree over the content and desirability of this national history, in Shashamane that debate excludes Rastafari. It also diverges from the hegemonic Solomonic narrative. This history also operates authoritatively for Rastafari. Because it takes on this central significance, it is challenged by other repatriates thereby preventing this counter-narrative to function monolithically. The purpose of telling such events, as cited by Thomas and David, differs depending on who is speaking and who is listening, underscoring Trouillot’s point about power in the shaping of history. Anna Tsing’s theory of the “friction of engagement” or “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (2005, 4) is useful here in analysing the contradictions as well as accommodations of Rastafari charter myths. This friction results from and continuously recreates the discursive, social and political-economic yet “creative” clashes that occur in the production of culture. For Tsing, these

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processes take place both at ideological and fundamentally tangible levels that are translated into economic and political inequalities. These processes are evident in ideas and expressions of being Ethiopian.

4.4   Being Ethiopian When repatriates utter the words “the community” they generally refer to Rastafari in Shashamane. Sometimes it may include Rastafarians around the world, although less frequently. In both references, shared ideals regarding morality and spirituality factor into this emic notion of community (Amit and Rapport 2002). It is specifically a Rastafari community. As I described, members of this community maintain a common belief in the divinity of His Majesty, of Ethiopia as the ancestral homeland of humanity and of black peoples. Other precepts include a fellowship of Ethiopians, the sacredness of the land in Shashamane given by His Majesty, and of good and evil and of worthiness to be saved. When used in relation to Rastafari in Shashamane, there is a powerful emotional resonance around the meaning of the word “Ethiopian.” When Rastafari claim to be Ethiopian, they mean to signify that after overcoming much “tribulation,” they have arrived in His Majesty’s land, in Africa, and now live in and on this divine land. Similarly, the word “Shashamane” is imbued with and evokes a similar sentiment when spoken by repatriates and Rastafari. I began to understand this emotional significance when I briefly met Rastafari visitors to Shashamane and Rastafari in Britain. After the latter learnt that I lived on the land grant for a year, although I was not a Rastawoman myself, they expressed surprise and approval. Visitors to Ethiopia that I met in Shashamane reacted similarly to my residence there. For Rastafari around the world the land in Shashamane functions as an “inalienable possession” which gains “absolute value that is subjectively constituted and distinct from the exchange value of commodities or the abstract value of money” (Weiner 1992, 191). As the site of the land donated by His Majesty and of the repatriate settlement following this gift, this land “holds” collective memories of the past. Consequently, “the loss of such an inalienable possession diminishes the self and by extension, the group to which the person belongs” (Weiner 1992, 6). Even for Rastafari who are not full-time repatriates, it is emotionally and symbolically significant to have a material stake in the land.

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However, it is the capitalist exchanges which occur between local Ethiopians, repatriates, and Rastafari visitors when houses are bought and sold that enable recent repatriates to acquire the land; land that was part of the initial grant. This alienability paradoxically allows certain portions of the land grant to remain with Rastafari and to retain its inalienable quality, albeit as property. There are parallels here to family land in the Caribbean. Researchers have emphasised the function of family land in maintaining economic and kin relations with Caribbean peoples in the insular and diasporic Caribbean. Family land demonstrates a creole form of tenure that is an alternative mode of inheritance to colonial primogeniture (Wilson 1973; Besson 2002; Barrow 1992; Crichlow 2005). Family land is meant to be inherited by all children of the landowner, who all have usufruct rights, at least in principle. This land is meant to be indivisible without the consent of all owners, and remains in the family lineage in perpetuity. At the household level in Shashamane, elder Rastafari with children envision individual yards as a legacy for their children, despite the legal obstacles. On a community level, the repatriate presence on the land is meant to ensure this longevity: “providing this symbol of identity for the kin group is a primary function of the family-land,” Jean Besson explains (2002, 295). In practice, however, just as in Shashamane, family land is divided and sold it can be the nexus of disagreement between kin.4 Returning to the stories quoted by Thomas and David, repatriates and youths frequently related these two events on different occasions. When international visitors who were not Rastafari visited the Jamaica Safar and I was present at the JRDC office, my yard, or a popular restaurant, repatriates of all ages and their children explained to visitors that “this land” was granted to them by His Majesty. Occasionally, Rastafari would follow up this claim with Brother David’s example. This was cited as proof that His Majesty, by asking about the whereabouts of “his people” expected them to “fill up” the land grant, as Rastafari explain, and to support the Rastafari position that they have a historically and morally sanctioned right to live in Shashamane. I eventually noticed, however, that while repatriates and second-­ generation adults frequently related the first event to non-Rastafari visitors, the second event—“Where are all my people?”—was usually related to Rastafari visitors living in foreign. Visitors regularly came to Shashamane on their own and from the various Mansions, especially Jamaica and Barbados as well as the United Kingdom and the United States. In one

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year, there were at least two Rastafari visitors each month whom I met or “heard of” who visited for both official and personal reasons.5 Self-funded visitors return to Shashamane for many reasons: to visit Rastafari with whom they have friendly and intimate relationships, to donate items of clothing and other goods to members of the community, to “see about” their investments such as a house that they may have bought on a previous visit, and to gain first-hand experience with “how Shashamane is developing,” as one visitor remarked. Most visitors commented on their plans to repatriate in conversations with other Rastafari and with strangers such as myself. Therefore, these visitors maintained relationships with Rastafari who were already established in Shashamane. Visitors worked on “building up” the community, as Rastafari say, through material and monetary donations to specific persons and local organisations. For example, I met two Rastafari men from Jamaica living in the United States who regularly visit Shashamane, providing in-kind support in the form of school supplies to the Rastafari-­ administered school each year from 2006 to 2009.6 Visitors of this sort encourage Rastafari in foreign, based on moral responsibility, and non-Rastafari on a humanitarian basis to “help out” the community by visiting and sending donations. These behaviours are partly a fulfilment of the moral responsibility to Rastafari in Shashamane who live on the land grant, as well as persons’ desire to ensure the viability of their future repatriation. The few visitors who did not mention repatriation as a goal nonetheless maintained relationships with specific persons who lived on the land grant, fulfilling an obligation to assist their repatriated Brothers and Sisters. Visiting Shashamane and donating to community organisations are symbolic behaviours that reinforce the higher status of repatriates in relation to Rastafari outside Shashamane, in babylon. Travel to Shashamane can be compared to pilgrimage since the land grant takes on a dimension of the sacred because it is in the zion of Ethiopia, and additionally given by His Majesty himself. All Rastafari are the recipients of this grant, and they acknowledge each other as His Majesty’s people. A feeling of communitas, that is togetherness or unity (Turner 1969) is formed between Rastafari and the wider group of His Majesty’s people, including Ethiopians. A fellowship of all His Majesty’s people as well as modes of relatedness specifically between Rastafari in Shashamane and Rastafari in foreign prevail.

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In a methodological discussion of self-reflexivity, researcher Ladan Rahnema, who views herself as Rastafari in terms of consciousness if not in practice, likens her four-week stay in Shashamane to a “spiritual pilgrimage” (2011, 76). It is noteworthy that differentiations are visible among visitors who can, in this sense, act as pilgrims to Shashamane. The ability to visit at the outset is taken as a gauge of some financial means by permanent residents of Shashamane, both repatriates and locals. The frequency of subsequent visits is also closely monitored by repatriates as indicative not only of the visitor’s economic situation, but of the degree to which they fulfil an obligation to financially support any family members and to the community.

4.5   Being Heartical When Brother David arrived in Shashamane as a young man, getting along with local Ethiopians was difficult for many reasons. He was unfamiliar with the place and the language, and there was intense competition over scarce work, he explained. This was exacerbated by the Derg government’s policy of Ethiopia tikildim (Ethiopia first) in which local Ethiopians were hired in the town instead of repatriates.7 Rastafari had to “live off the land” primarily in order to survive, and this was accomplished by planting crops that would hopefully flourish inclusive of corn, potatoes, plantains and peas. These are also staple foods in the Caribbean which enabled repatriates to maintain certain dietary similarities in the new environment of Ethiopia. At first, local Ethiopians called Rastas who settled after the first group of black Americans from the EWF, tukur Americans, because they thought “we were all the same,” another Brother explained to me while recounting his experiences in the 1970s. But, Brother David continued, after living here for decades people got to know him and now local Ethiopians say anta innay in Amharic, which loosely translates to “he is ours.” This use indicates that local Ethiopians claim David as one of their own, in this context as “Ethiopian.” Notwithstanding these remarks, I often heard early repatriates as well as their children comment that Ethiopians still view them as faranji, although they have either lived in Shashamane for decades or they were born and raised in Ethiopia. While Brother David did not need this social assurance of his Ethiopian-ness, he was clearly proud at the transformation of his relations with his local Ethiopian neighbours. An Ethiopian by ancestry,

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according to Rastafari genealogy, Brother David, and by extension each Rastafari, will always remain Ethiopian whether other Ethiopians claim him as “ours,” faranji or tukur American. This change in Brother David’s status to “one of ours” among Ethiopians exists with his status as a pioneer for Rastafari. Both are cultivated over time, and the length of residence in Shashamane is a factor in acquiring status as a pioneer.8 Rastafari from the Twelve Tribes use the term “pioneer” to refer to the earliest repatriates from this Mansion, and from the EWF who remained continuously in Shashamane from their first repatriation. Although I never heard elders use this word to refer to themselves, recent repatriates, youths, and Rastafari visitors frequently used it (see also Bonacci 2015; Soroto 2008). This label of pioneer and the concomitant high status is at times contested by early repatriates themselves. Bonacci cites from a speech made by one of the first EWF repatriates, who was not Rastafari. Rejecting the term “pioneer” in place of “African,” this EWF repatriate framed his move to Shashamane as the legacy of his ancestors. In this way, Bonacci suggests that settlers or repatriates occupy a dual status as “heirs” and “pioneers” (2015, 9). A Twelve Tribes youth born and raised in Shashamane of repatriate parents explained: Pioneers are viewed differently by each Rasta. For example, if you ask a Rastaman in Jamaica he will tell you that pioneers are those who first welcomed His Majesty. If you ask a Bobo[ashanti] he will tell you those like Prince Emmanuel is a pioneer. If you ask a EWF he will tell you those who settled issues with Melaku Bayen [who opened the first EWF branch at Haile Selassie’s behest] and those elders or those who came to live [in Ethiopia] in that time [meaning the 1950s] are pioneers. Even for us those are pioneers. For us the Twelve Tribes of Israel, pioneers are those who came to hold the land and defended it in the Derg time, which no other Bobo or Federation [EWF] or Binghi ever did. Brother Benedict.

This status of pioneer is one that all Rastafari, irrespective of their physical location or group membership attribute to these long-standing Brothers and Sisters. It is a mark of “nuff respect” for their courage to arrive and their tenacity to remain in Shashamane. The term also recognises the initiators of Rastafari, as Brother Benedict alludes to when he notes that a Rasta of the Boboashanti Order would designate Prince Emmanuel as a pioneer. Those in Jamaica “who first welcomed His Majesty” refers to the

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public declaration of Haile Selassie’s divinity in the 1930s, and his popular reception in 1966 by Rastafarians. Pioneers in Shashamane are Rastafari whose actions turned prophecy into reality, a reality that is meant to last in perpetuity, as young Brother Benedict’s comments indicate. In my conversations and interviews with men and women elders, and with their children they often told anecdotes about the Brothers and Sisters who came to Shashamane in the early days, but left shortly after because they were unable to deal with “the hardship.” For instance, Brother Nelson related that when he first arrived in Shashamane in the 1970s, he came with twelve Brothers and one Sister, six of whom were meant to stay and “hold the land.” The remaining Rastafari travellers were supposed to return to Jamaica to pass on information about Shashamane. Nelson further explained that despite this assignment given to Rastafari by the Executive Members of the Twelve Tribes in Jamaica, and accepted by the six Rastafari, only three Brothers, including himself, and the Sister managed to stay. On his first morning in Shashamane, Nelson woke to find one Brother missing. They later learnt that he had secretly left during the night, and returned to Jamaica. This act of fleeing in the dark is a cowardly act at odds with the behaviour of a pioneer who ought to demonstrate physical, mental and moral fortitude. This action of “holding the land” by remaining in Shashamane, on the land grant, is a huge accomplishment. It is one criterion for the status of pioneer. Through their behaviours, pioneers are exemplars for Rastafari. Holding the land is also interpreted by Rastafari as “defending the faith.” Bonacci (2015, 311) highlights the reflections of an early Rastafari male settler regarding the harassment that repatriates confronted at times by the Derg forces who were anti-imperialist, particularly regarding the Rastafari deification of His Majesty. Although officials and soldiers came to repatriate yards and confiscated images of His Majesty that were burnt to intimidate Rastafari, the latter refused to be cowed. Repatriates consistently displayed new images of Haile Selassie I, thereby showing their courage and adherence to Rastafari worldview. These are qualities that the heartical Rastaman also exhibits. This figure is relevant to a discussion of pioneers as they categorically overlap. The heartical Rastaman is a morally superior one who aims to emulate His Majesty’s example of leadership, strength and fairness, and is successful in this endeavour. It is often difficult for a Rastaman to achieve this status though, without a heartical Rastawoman at his side, as one Brother reminded me. He was referring to his wife who had repatriated to Ethiopia

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shortly after he did from Jamaica. This is one reason that Brother Lester, who announced his plan to stage a series of concerts with an entrance fee to honour the role of “the pioneers” in “building up the community,” and to raise funds for each pioneer, mentioned Brothers as well as Sisters. This initiative can be viewed also as an expression of repatriates’ awareness of their moral responsibility to each other since Lester’s economic situation is more stable than many of these elders. In this case Brother Lester creatively devises a means of economically and socially supporting the elders, entertaining the community, and promoting his music as one of the performers. Anyone can be a heartical Rastaman or Rastawoman since it can be achieved cross-generationally, but it is most clearly exemplified in the elders. The reactions of pioneers to hardships that they experienced in the early days, and at present, demonstrate the aforementioned characteristics. For example, Sister Carolyn described when she arrived in Shashamane how shocked she was at the lack of electricity and indoor plumbing and the long walk to the closest river to catch water. Most early repatriates came from urban areas of Jamaica and the Caribbean where although electricity and water services may have been irregular they were still common, and the people were accustomed to these utilities (Gibson 1996; Bonacci 2015). Adapting to the hardship, and even improving their living conditions in Shashamane marked repatriates’ behaviours as pioneer-like. Relatedly, I often heard repatriates reflecting favourably on the early days regarding the “better” relations among “IandI people.” These better relationships with Rastafari as well as with local Ethiopians meant “helping out each other” more, while still acknowledging their hardships of earning a living, and improving lives. For instance, Sister Carolyn who is herself a pioneer, emphasised how difficult it was to earn money by sewing clothes to sell in the town. At times the situation was so dire that she sold her own clothes and then waited for other Rastafari to bring their used clothes to Ethiopia for her to wear. Years later, when she saved enough money to start building her own small house, the robberies that Carolyn was subjected to further impeded her progress, but she persevered. These memories of heartical Rastafari are integral to the continuation of the Rastafari community. Each Rastaman and Rastawoman who described their initial experiences in Shashamane had key themes. When many repatriates spoke of being “closer” to each other in those times, they generally associated these relations with their common experiences of poverty in Shashamane and

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lack of familiarity with their neighbours. These factors ensured that they could commiserate with, and “look out” for each other, helping to maximise the chances of remaining on the land. Although it remains difficult to earn a living, which was evident, elder repatriates of both genders explained that their lives had improved in other respects. They formed friendships and intermarried with their Ethiopian neighbours, learnt Amharic and now are generally familiar with “the runnings” of the place. Not a single repatriate, amidst their narratives about difficulties with living conditions and building lives for themselves, their families and the community ever said or hinted that they regretted repatriating to Ethiopia. Verbally expressing such a thought would have likely meant reneging on their pioneer status. In terms of income also, among these early repatriates, the Brothers who were skilled in woodworking or carpentry carved utilitarian items of furniture, like stools, to sell on the roadside. David related that earning sufficient money and producing enough crops to feed everyone was so hard that as he half-jokingly commented, “we ate so much red pea soup it is amazing that we did not turn red.” Since meat was expensive, Rastafari used to go to the slaughter house in order to take the leftover animal parts that were usually discarded, like the cow foot and ox tail. These were used to make typical Caribbean dishes that were shared communally.9 Again, these narratives of innumerable physical and economic hardships that Brothers and Sisters eventually overcame or mitigated are vital aspects of their pioneer status. One role of pioneers is therefore as vessels of history and the embodiment of individual and collective memory (Connerton 1989; Bourdieu 1986). It is the presence of elders who are alive and actually living in Shashamane that lends legitimacy to the two historical events quoted by Thomas and David, albeit these stories may have been passed on to them from even earlier repatriates who are no longer alive. Although Thomas had not yet repatriated to Shashamane when the two events occurred, his acquaintance with other Brothers and Sisters who were physically present and from whom other elders directly heard these stories, lends credibility to his telling of that period in relation to his long residence in Shashamane. As such, other Rastafari express their respect for and gratitude to these elders and initial repatriates in various ways, such as Brother Lester’s concert series. Rastafari who have repatriated and live in Shashamane, then, accrue an exalted status in relation to other Rastafari globally, including those living

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in Ethiopia but not on the land grant. Rastafari who do not intend to repatriate will still “big up” or respectfully acknowledge those who have repatriated and, most importantly, those who stayed and raised their families in Shashamane. Although Rastafari belief system is characterised by an ethos of egalitarianism, there are gradations of status, which became evident in Shashamane in the role of pioneers. “Holding the land” demonstrates a Rastafari commitment to returning home, and building lives there. When assessing Rastafari efforts in developing such narratives of community identity and belonging, highlighting the roles and status of community members is relevant to how groups are positioned in relation to Ethiopian nationalisms. From a Rastafari perspective, His Majesty’s act of giving indicated his encouragement, and expectation of his peoples’ eventual move to Shashamane. Rastafari narratives of belonging to Ethiopia and specifically to the granted land engender ideological conflict in the Ethiopian context. From Tsing’s ideas about a global citizenship, I draw upon a cosmopolitan belonging that looks beyond limited, unstable discourses of nationalism, multiculturalism or ethnic identification towards new kinds of institutional frames and cultural possibilities that are also evoked in processes of self-­ making among Rastafari in Shashamane. The narration of community historical events demonstrates how the shifting boundaries of His Majesty’s people allow Rastafari to shape their status and re-make this history as well as demonstrating the malleability of inclusion and exclusion in relation to local group dynamics. This is a point which also emerges when considering how Rastafari “earn a living” having returned to this spiritual home.

Notes 1. Another story that circulates regarding the Rastafari presence is that Haile Selassie gave this land specifically in Oromo territory to his supporters, that is Rastafari, as a psychological and physical tactic in response to the threat of organised Oromo resistance to his rule (MacLeod 2014). These supporters would be a reminder of his power and they would be able to monitor Oromo resistance. Although I did not hear of this rationale, such a story exacerbates mistrust between local Ethiopians and Rastafari. It is another factor in the shaping of intergroup relations. 2. Rastafari worldwide hold divergent views about actual repatriation as either heroic by arriving in the promised land of Ethiopia or cowardly by leaving

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the babylonian conditions of Jamaica. However, these views do not alter the symbolic value of Ethiopia or the land grant for Rastafari. 3. Bonacci (2015, 290) cites an example of a second-generation Rastafari youth relating his mother’s interaction with Emperor Haile Selassie I, also demonstrating the intergenerational transmission of this history. In this case the youth reflects on his mother’s brief conversation with His Majesty in 1970, and surmises that the Emperor’s acceptance of the “Jamaican” presence solidified her resolve to stay on the land. 4. In an earlier study, Shirlie Gibson (1996, 185–187) relates the multiple interactions with His Majesty from 1968, during his travels between Addis Ababa and southern Ethiopia, based on the recollections of this early settler who raised her children in Shashamane. One of these interactions addresses the tension between the first EWF land administrator and the early non-­ EWF repatriates regarding the intended grantees of the land. Drawing on the Emperor’s exhortation that the “Jamaican” families should be allowed to stay on the granted land in Shashamane, as they wished, non-EWF members have argued that the land grant was meant for everyone, and not only African-Americans or EWF members. This tension over the right to settle and access land is one that Bonacci (2015) suggests persists between Rastafari organisations in Shashamane, relevant to conflicts over what can be considered as family land. 5. Almost all were visitors from the Twelve Tribes Mansions. One consideration is that my social interaction was predominantly with Twelve Tribes members and their networks. This Mansion also has the largest membership in Shashamane. 6. Up to 2020, they have continued to provide regular donations, albeit to a different school in Shashamane. In addition to the ongoing fundraising in the United States that covers the administrative costs of the JRDC School, individuals sponsor students and donate according to their preferences and the students’ needs (see Rahnema 2011). 7. See Bonacci (2015) for a detailed discussion of the economic-political conditions of the Derg period that affected the lives of repatriates and locals in Shashamane. 8. The word “pioneer” appears in early EWF documents. For example, a 1955 letter from the New York branch indicates: “At present the Ethiopian government is not prepared for mass migration, for this reason the people who are willing and able to go there to settle on the land must be of the pioneer calibre, they must be prepared to forego many of the things to which they are now accustomed” (cited in Smith et al. 1960, 39). 9. For additional descriptions of Rastafari food habits, especially during the rationing of Derg governance, see Bonacci (2015, 316).

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References Amit, Vered, and Nigel Rapport. 2002. The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity. London: Pluto Press. Barrow, Christine. 1992. Family Land and Development in St. Lucia. Belfast/ Bridgetown: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies Press. Besson, Jean. 2002. Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica. Durham: University of North Carolina Press. Bonacci, Giulia. 2015. Exodus!: Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia. Trans. Antoinette Tidjani Alou. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. The Forms of Capital. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson, 241–258. Westport: Greenwood. Campbell, Horace. 2007. Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney. London: Hansib. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crichlow, Michaeline. 2005. Negotiating Caribbean Freedom: Peasants and the State Development. Washington, DC: Lexington Books. Fog Olwig, Karen. 2009. A Proper Funeral: Contextualizing Community Among Caribbean Migrants. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (3): 520–537. Gibson, Shirlie R. 1996. African Repatriation: A Case Study of Rastafarians and the Malcoda Land-Grant at Shashemane. PhD dissertation, Howard University. Harris, Joseph. 1993. Return Movements to East and West Africa: A Comparative Approach. In Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. Joseph Harris, 51–64. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. MacLeod, Erin C. 2014. Visions of Zion Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land. New York: NYU Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge. Rahnema, Ladan. 2011. Emancipatory Pedagogy and the Rastafarian Movement: A Case Study of the Jamaican Rastafarian Development Community School in Ethiopia, PhD dissertation, The George Washington University.

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Smith, Michael G., Roy Augier, and Rex Nettleford. 1960. Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica. Jamaica: University College of the West Indies. Soroto, Solomon. 2008. Settlement and Integration of “Rastafarians” in Shashemene, Oromia Region Ethiopia. M.A. thesis, Addis Ababa University. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge. Weiner, Annette. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilson, Peter. 1973. Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro Societies of the Caribbean. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Making a Living

5.1   Outernational Livelihoods Living in Shashamane, I quickly realised that livelihood activities were not restricted to the local area and were entangled with the economic and emotional support of Rastafari in foreign. For example, in 2009, I had a conversation with Brother Jacob, who had come from Jamaica in 2006 and was one of the first repatriates I had met. He explained that he was waiting for his wife in the United Kingdom to send him “a change.” “Change” connotes small amounts of money, with “small” depending on the person’s financial situation. Typically, it meant about 10–20 Ethiopian Birr (ETB), equivalent to about US$1–2 at the time. When he received this money “in his hand,” Brother Jacob said, he would immediately fix his cell phone. This would allow his wife to easily send the “Western Union number” (the receipt number) required to collect the funds. Brother Jacob’s comments reflect his dependence on his wife’s income to support everyday livelihood activities, as well as the importance of a cell phone to aid these activities. While having a cell phone in Shashamane is a status symbol, it also carries an important function for recent repatriates, like Jacob, many of whom do not have fixed places of residence or a telephone landline. These repatriates may have been building a house, embroiled in disputes over house ownership, or unable to install phone lines without a local identification card. While technologies like internet © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gomes, Cosmopolitanism from the Global South, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82272-9_5

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service providers do exist in Shashamane, the service is generally inconsistent and few families can afford to install an internet connection in the yard. Although many repatriates maintain contact with peoples abroad electronically through apps like Viber and WhatsApp, during my fieldwork, phone calls were their preferred means of communication. Relatedly, Heather Horst and Daniel Miller (2005) argue that cell phones are used by low-income men and women in Jamaica to “link up” with persons who are not relatives, but with whom kin relations are formed and sustained. Dana Diminescu (2008) has demonstrated that such “e-practices” facilitate as well as make visible a “culture of bonds” among migrants as they move, thereby enabling diasporic imaginings and community development that counter stereotypical images of a rootless migrant. As such, Jacob’s story demonstrates how linking up with his wife allows a “culture of bonds” to form.1 After a few months of participant observation, I realised that Jacob’s situation—anticipating these monies for basic needs—was not unique or merely a personal predicament. Rather, it was a common experience for many persons and households in Shashamane. My concept of outernational livelihoods is useful to elucidate these interconnections: capitalist economic structures, the production of local social relations at household and community levels, especially the idea of “looking out for each other,” and the Rastafari aim of maintaining a presence on the land. As Karen Fog Olwig and Nina Sorenson argue, “An important aspect of people’s livelihood strategies is the social relationships and cultural values that various strategies involve, the communities of belonging they circumscribe, and the kinds of movement in time and space they make possible or necessitate” (Olwig and Sorenson 2002, 10). It is useful to consider these cumulative efforts as outernational livelihoods. By this, I mean the translocal networks and relationships between Rastafari that are essential for the Rastafari community on the land grant. These outernational livelihood practices support Rastafari efforts towards spiritual, social and material betterment. Also noteworthy is how these expectations and behaviours effect decisions and choices to actively improve their lives in the zion of Ethiopia. In this chapter, I further explore the outernational livelihoods of first- and second-generation Rastafari, with attention to the gendered aspects of making a living. Describing Rastafari livelihood practices involves examining how persons work and make money to survive and better themselves in this sacred place. I situate livelihood activities within repatriates’ expectations of

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Rastafari outernationally and the corresponding obligations of Rastafari in foreign to repatriates, who occupy the sacred physical site of His Majesty’s land. As Aihwa Ong points out, “political economy” and “human agency” cannot be analytically separated since “political-economic forces [are not] external to everyday meanings and action” (1999, 5). In the case of Shashamane, the entanglement of agency and economy has several dimensions. These emerge for individuals and for the community—as members of households and Mansions, and as individual Rastafari, all of which affect the character of how Rastafari make a living.

5.2   Household Earnings In their efforts to make a living, repatriates tend to be self-employed and rely on multiple sources to meet basic needs and long-term social investments. For example, Matthew, who was a recent repatriate at the time of fieldwork, makes and sells juices as well as alcoholic drinks, paints houses and records music, singing occasionally at paid gigs. Matthew also receives gifts of money and goods from visitors and Rastafari abroad. Pauletta, whose work I describe in greater detail in a later section, runs her family’s restaurant and shop. Likewise, her income is supplemented by monetary remittances. There is a gendered dimension to making a living. While both men and women employ various activities as survival strategies, men usually engage in unpaid work and women undertake socially reproductive labour in addition to their waged labours. Typically, it is the women in first-­ generation Rastafari and Rastafari-local Ethiopian households who do the most consistent waged work. Given the significant unemployment and underemployment in urban Ethiopia, both men and women earn sporadically. Their labour is also persistently undervalued. Rarely are there Rastafari with a stable, liveable income. For men, waged labour involves using skills such as carpentry or masonry in local construction or furniture-building. Men who moved in the 1970s described how they built community buildings together, like the headquarters of the Twelve Tribes; or used their collective labour to construct their own houses. This is one reason that skilled Rastafari from the Twelve Tribes were chosen to repatriate. Although few repatriates had more than rudimentary knowledge of farming since most grew up in the urban Caribbean, in Shashamane they augmented this knowledge with the guidance of local Ethiopian farmers. Many of the Brothers who lived in

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Shashamane for 30 years remarked on the increasing difficulty of meeting the basic need for nutritious food. In the past, subsistence farming and sharing among the small Rastafari community as well as with local Ethiopians just barely met this need. But farming alone is no longer a feasible livelihood. In these circumstances, funds and items sent from Rastafari internationally are essential for surviving in Ethiopia. Additionally, the changing political, economic and labour circumstances initiated with increased urbanisation made it difficult for Rastafari men to acquire steady work. This was the case even for youth born and raised in Shashamane. Significantly, urbanisation also diminished access to the land grant. Rastafari now farm mainly small gardens in each yard. Typically, the yards are planted with crops that have yielded in the past such as potatoes, corn and bananas. Sorrel is common as an additional food source, though not for sale.2 As there is little money in this kind of farming, youths are not inclined to pursue this vocation as a means to make a living. As Brother Lewis highlighted, finding work in Shashamane was the main obstacle to “progress.” Both men and women concurred on this point. Consequently, in our conversations older men focused on describing their non-paid work, such as the administrative and day-to-day running of Mansions, child care and cultivation of provision grounds. The opportunities for making a living were additionally altered following the restructuring of the national economy after the 1991 adoption of neoliberal policies. Since the adoption of a free market policy in 1992 following the TPLF-led coup d’état, the majority Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) government has encouraged private foreign and domestic investment. The government introduced reforms like trade liberalisation, privatisation of state-owned entities and service delivery, and currency devaluation. One change that has significantly impacted Rastafari adversely is that farming and residential land have been earmarked for development by private investors. As I will explain, these conditions erode the availability of the historic land grant for prospective repatriates out in babylon. It also makes holding the land more difficult for Rastafari. With subsistence farming no longer a viable way of meeting the basic need for food, Rastafari have had to sell their labour or become entrepreneurs. However, the only available jobs are in the public sector and due to their lack of Ethiopian citizenship, most Rastafari are ineligible to apply for these positions. Additionally, an Ethiopian public sector worker must be

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fluent in Amharic, and in Shashamane, it is also helpful to speak Afan Oromo, the regional language. At present, there are better prospects for employment with the issuing of national ID cards for second-generation Rastafari. However, these applications are costly, placing them out of reach for many, including those who have more resources or access to funds. Whether these ID cards result in an actual increase in employment for Rastafari youth remains to be seen. Notwithstanding the difficulties of making a living in Shashamane, Caribbean peoples have frequently found themselves in this position. In a late twentieth-century study of West Indian livelihoods, Lambros Comitas (1973) suggested that the rigid distinction between peasant labour and plantation work did not adequately represent the reality whereby many West Indians engaged in multiple forms of work simultaneously. These efforts were necessary to move up in the class-stratified society as well as to protect unpredictable sources of waged work. As a better conceptualisation, Comitas proposed “occupational multiplicity” “wherein the modal adult is systematically engaged in a number of gainful activities, which for him form an integrated economic complex” (Comitas 1973, 157). Occupational multiplicity captures the circumstances of first- and second-­ generation Rastafari households in contemporary Shashamane. I would add that this pattern of work is found for both men and women. Another concept from the Caribbean that is useful to understand how Rastafari make a living is higglering. The usually black Caribbean woman who grows and/or sells produce from the garden known as the higgler (or marketeer) has been the mobile, income generator in households, supporting her family. Originating in the colonial West Indies, the woman higgler represented independence during plantation slavery because she earned a living, supported her family, and typically was mobile enough to travel between the home, marketplace and suppliers. The higgler often did other waged work, inclusive of sewing, in addition to caring for the family. Higglering draws attention to the interconnection of economic activities as these are themselves intertwined with a pattern of gendered work in the Caribbean. While this is not the kind of work associated with the contemporary gig economy, these two conceptualisations do signify a kind of routine precarity that emerges from labour exploitation and marginalisation. What is particularly significant is how broader political, economic, cultural and ecological forces shape which activities Rastafari pursue to make a living. As Fog Olwig writes, “While a livelihood may ultimately be about

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the procuring of a material basis of living, the choice of a particular livelihood is never solely determined by the natural resources available” (Fog Olwig 2007, 125). These ordinary points about the material foundations providing a context for agency reiterate Ong’s view that culture is a product of both.

5.3   Routine Precarity This point about cultural expectations, and I would add individual expectations, is relevant for the high-status generation born on the land grant (the second-generation). Based on my observations, most youths were unemployed. Unlike their parents or the local Ethiopian wives of Rastamen, these youths were not inclined to undertake work that they considered “below them,” as they phrased it. Simply put, they perceived domestic, clerical, or serving to be inferior work. Youths’ self-perception about their high status derives from their birth in Ethiopia, on the historic land grant. They also believe that this higher standing favourably distinguishes them from Rastafari in babylon. Out of 37 households in my study, nearly half (13) had a young adult who worked neither in the formal or informal sector.3 They survived on financial support from natal family members (parents and siblings), community members as well as Rastafari abroad. They also received “small change” as Rastafari say, also from local Ethiopian partners and friends. Beyond small change, parents and fellow Rastafari provided money for the costs associated with education, skills training and overall long-term betterment. Turning to the work that women did and were expected to do, in addition to their waged work, typically, Rastafari women undertook unpaid work. While both men and women hustle in borderline illegal transactions, it is largely women who undertake both “productive” and unpaid socially reproductive labours. These activities enable women to support themselves and their children. Women in their 20s–50s with whom I interacted daily adopted a “matter of fact” attitude about their work to earn money and their work taking care of the household. They did not view these double and triple shifts as unusual. Nor did they object to the expectation that they would contribute their labour to community events and the general functioning of the Mansion to which they belonged. They typically described their work simply as a necessity to make money for their survival and that of their children. It was framed as their responsibility to children.

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To take Sister Pauletta’s hectic daily routine as an example, she ran the family’s restaurant, cared for children and maintained the family house. After making breakfast for her family and getting children ready for school, she went to the market or shops in town to buy ingredients for the homemade drinks and the lunch menu. Or, she would go to the bank in town to collect the money for her family sent by her daughter in foreign. The younger children took the school bus to their private school in a neighbouring town while the older children would catch a Bajaj (a small motorised rickshaw imported from India) to a private college in the town. On returning from school, each child usually helped with cleaning the house. Pauletta’s husband worked in the kitchen garden and did unpaid work at the Rastafari Mansion primarily. At mid-morning, the young Habesha woman who assisted with the cooking would arrive to work on lunch preparation. When Pauletta returned to the yard, she cooked the main dishes and served customers. Sometimes, she had help from her older children and another female employee, while another family member “watched the shop.” Throughout the day, customers dropped by and were attended to by Pauletta’s grown children. These included both Rastafari and local Ethiopian residents of the area who bought basic foodstuff such as salt and cooking oil. From noon to 2 p.m., the bulk of the clientele would arrive for lunch. Sometimes visitors also arrived and needed to be attended to. If one of Pauletta’s children was present at the yard at night, the shop remained open and it became a limin (socialising) spot for local Ethiopian and Rastafari youths. Even the description of Sister Pauletta’s schedule is exhausting. But like other Rastawomen, she asserted that all these activities were vital to earn money and pay bills. At the same time, Pauletta’s routine included a stop to collect remitted funds. As such, women also had expectations that the wider Rastafari community would help to share their expenses. These behaviours were enacted as norms of responsibility and reciprocation. Contributions were expected from Rastafari in foreign, the women’s affines (in-laws) or immediate kin group of baby fathers (fathers of their children) and husbands. This expectation of, and even entitlement to, multiple forms of financial and in-kind support was apparent in Rastafari conversations and behaviours. These external contributions were considered to be obligations. In this sense, both the immediate kin group as well as the wider Rastafari population in foreign were obligated to contribute to Rastafari incomes. But given the unstable work prospects outlined previously, women were not surprised if persons did not fulfil these

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expectations. These circumstances contributed to routine precarity as it emerged in women’s lives. Sister Anna’s and Sister Angela’s remarks add to the discussion of the multifaceted symbolic and economic relationship among Rastafari networks. They point to the concerns for earning a living that are shared by many full-time repatriates in light of limited opportunities. These Sisters’ reflections also highlight the common role of adult women in first-­ generation Rastafari and Rastafari-local Ethiopian households as those who earn most consistently. The following excerpts are from our recorded interviews: You come to Ethiopia, you think, ok, I’m going to be a farmer, I’m going to be this, I’m going to be that because Shashamane is the grant land, you know, people have this idea [that land is free and it is easy to live here]. But when you come here you find it’s a business town. So whatever talent you have, you have to go down and pull that talent out and see what you could become. Sister Anna. They’re [local Ethiopian teenagers and young adults] different from the older ones and the babies simply because they are the path now and they’re seeing the western world. They’re seeing our people walking around with whatever and they feel that we have so much … They feel that we’re all rich and that we all get money from Western Union … You can understand how they come to think that way, [and then] they brand us faranji … A lot of people here are burdens to their families out in the so-called west. We [her immediate family in Shashamane] call them the “Western Union recipients,” including myself. I’m trying to ease up on that. Sister Angela.

Sister Anna and Sister Angela were recently repatriated Caribbean Rastawomen. In their 40s at that time, they articulated myriad sentiments around the efforts to build their lives in Shashamane. Although she and her husband had visited Shashamane frequently since the late 1990s, Sister Anna fully moved in 2005 from the United States. Sister Angela arrived in Ethiopia in 2007 with her family from Trinidad and Tobago. Having fulfilled the goal of repatriating, feelings of pride, frustration and determination emerged in my interviews and everyday conversations with Angela and Anna. Among these feelings were their intentions to create sustainable livelihoods; for Anna, one that was independent, yet allowed them to do their part to build up the Rastafari community, and to develop cordial relationships with multi-ethnic neighbours. These behaviours were meant to ensure that their repatriation was successful. Success

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also meant being spiritually better off and managing to live permanently on the land grant. On a collective level, this goal of remaining in Ethiopia resonates with the act of holding the land, and its inalienability for His Majesty’s people. Angela’s daring description of her fellow repatriates as “burdens” confronts the failure of the community “to develop,” in her words, over the past 50 years. Angela was also questioning her belief in “Rasta values” and her adherence to the Organ (the Twelve Tribes), as she explained to me, having been disillusioned by conditions on the land grant and especially by the deceitful behaviour of Rastafari towards each other. Such open acknowledgement of this facet of social relations among Rastafari and intra-Mansion relations is rare to outsiders (like myself) unless the speaker has an agenda. However, similar experiences have been related in earlier work (see Bonacci 2015; Gibson 1996; Rahnema 2011). These instances point to the tensions between individual and collective Rastafari ideas of improvement on the land grant. A few short months following our interview in 2009, Angela left Ethiopia with her children to return to Trinidad and Tobago. Her husband joined them shortly after. Given the monetary resources and personal strength that repatriates marshalled to return to Ethiopia, they viewed going back to babylon as a mark of failure. As one young man commented with reference to Rastafari generally who move to Shashamane and then return to foreign, “them can’t tek the livity [in Ethiopia].” In my interview with Anna, she too expressed concerns about how successful her repatriation was, and how long it was taking to establish a profitable business. Anna explained that she asked her mother in the United States for money frequently, which was more often than she would have liked or expected at her age. This was because, she clarified, she borrowed money from several Rastafari to start her business. So far, there has not been sufficient profit to repay them. Nonetheless, Anna continues to be indebted to Rastafari and to relatives in foreign, persevering in the hope that soon she will be able to pay off her loans. If a Rasta must borrow money to better herself, repatriates tend to view this indebtedness to each other as preferable to loans from a babylonian financial institution, like a bank. However, as I have demonstrated, banks play a critical role in repatriates’ survival. Like Anna, Angela received Western Union money, meaning remittances from relatives and Rastafari in the Caribbean.4 What was unusual in Anna’s case was that she was critical of what she negatively

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implied was a dependence on these funds, appearing not to share other Rastafari’s feelings of entitlement and reciprocity. Nonetheless, for many, if not all repatriates, remittances were integral for meeting basic needs as well as for long-term betterment.5

5.4   The Western Union Run A trip to the bank to collect Western Union money is a feature of many residents’ routines in the Jamaica Safar. For Rastafari, in particular, “me a go and come quick” or “soon come” are expressions I commonly heard Rastafari say to describe activities, inclusive of going to collect funds. While going to the bank remained a time-consuming errand, several new bank branches were opened in Shashamane between 2009 and 2015, helping to decrease the time one needed for this task. This “quick run” to the bank provides insight into the translocal ties between Shashamane and multiple foreign locations. These ties are most apparent in the money and goods that are sent to individuals and organisations in Ethiopia. Jonathan Fox defines translocal as compared to transnational relationships as “community-based social, civic, and family ties that cross borders despite being geographically dispersed or deterritorialized” (2005, 187). According to Fox, much literature on “cross-border inclusion” may be more aptly described as translocal activities whereby “for many migrants, their strongest cross-border social ties link specific communities of origin and settlement, without necessarily relating to national social, civic, or political arenas in either country” (2005, 187). These relations of Rastafari across state borders constitute socioeconomic networks that are critical to the sustenance of the community in Shashamane. Repatriates need these funds to different degrees. In addition to monies for basic needs, gifts and donations or “contributions,” as Rastafari say, are expected in Shashamane on specific occasions such as birthdays and Rastafari celebrations, particularly for the 23 July celebration of His Majesty’s birth. The basic premise of sending money is that it is essential for the recipient at “home.” The idea of obligation on the migrant’s part and the expectation by the recipient are evident in the financial relationships between Rastafari abroad and those in Shashamane. Some older repatriates especially depend on these remittances from foreign and from small change given by other Rastafari in Shashamane to meet their everyday needs. For example, one repatriate Brother who was married to a local Ethiopian woman and had no children was partly

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supported by monetary donations in Ethiopian Birr. Given that his was an unusual family because they did not have children (biological or adopted), these contributions were particularly important for their family. This Brother was also supported by a short-lived social service support group that had been initiated by repatriates. The group was funded by local and foreign Rastafari, and it was independent of any Mansion, thereby supporting a wide cross-section of Rastafari in Shashamane. Repatriates of modest means have also supported the Brother by providing him with meals or giving him a “little change” (synonymous to small change). Like many other repatriates, he was supported, too, by his relatives and Rastafari in North America and in Jamaica. Rastafari visitors brought him clothing and money in the past. These multiple sources of contributions were not necessarily consistent or scheduled, but they remained critical for Rastafari survival in the promised land. Local Ethiopians in Shashamane also receive monetary remittances, usually from relatives in the Global North. Figures from the World Bank (2014) estimate official remittances to Ethiopia totalled US$387 million in 2008, US$262 million in 2009 and US$624 million in 2013 (econ. worldbank.org). In 2017, personal remittances counted for 0.5% of Ethiopia’s GDP (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF. PWKR.DT.GD.ZS?end=2017&locations=ET&start=2010) of US$81.76 billion. Though I had less contact with members of local Ethiopian households, anecdotal reports suggest that these funds were likewise spent on the household and familial expenses of food, electricity, water, education and transportation. This is supported by data that demonstrates that 57% of recipients use the received funds for “daily expenses only” and only 29% for university education (World Bank and Bendixen & Amandi International 2010). Likewise entangled in transnational relations, during my journeys between Shashamane and Addis Ababa, I met working-class local Ethiopians who had worked in Dubai, expressed a goal to work there or were applying for their American green card through the “green card lottery,” as it is called in Shashamane. This US government scheme randomly selects Ethiopian applicants for emigration. Internationally mobile and wealthier Ethiopians in Addis Ababa also spoke of relatives, friends and colleagues abroad whom they visited frequently in their travels. By contrast, many Rastafari in Shashamane who remain disadvantaged by regimes of mobility (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013) are internationally immobile

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but, like working-class Ethiopians, are also influenced by the transnational movement of capital. As Mark Figueroa notes with reference to the Caribbean diaspora, “remittances are … not simply transfers; they may include market transactions. Remitters may for example, send money to look after business on their own account” (2008, 247). The Western Union run, therefore, encapsulates the connection between Rastafari in foreign with Rastafari in Shashamane, particularly as remittances help to maintain the Rastafari presence on the land in light of limited local employment opportunities.

5.5   The Neighbourhood Shop The most common form of self-employment in Shashamane is the small neighbourhood shop or restaurant. This is also a typical feature of the Caribbean landscape. In the Jamaica Safar, these shops are owned by both repatriates as well as local Ethiopian men and women. In the shop (or souk, a word of Arabic origin), a variety of goods are generally sold which include locally manufactured or packaged dry foodstuff. If there are restaurants attached to the shop, as in Pauletta’s family, they will also sell cooked food. A few repatriate-owned shops sold homemade juices like soursop, mango, sorrel and pineapple, some of which they supplied to restaurants in the town. Repatriate-owned shops also stocked “Rasta” clothing and accessories such as head tams and t-shirts with the characteristic red, gold and green colours. These items were more often sourced from Addis Ababa and received from foreign but from Rastafari in Shashamane too (e.g. from Matthew). Shop-keeping is a type of self-regulated work that is a legal way of earning a living “outside the system.” It enables Rastafari to maintain their autonomy, which as they emphasised, is important. “Looking out” for and “helping out” each other refer to the expectations of behaviour among community members and within the household, not only between Rastafari in foreign and in Ethiopia. “Helping out” refers to behaviours and activities that include informal money-­ lending, knowledge exchange, child care and visiting those imprisoned locally. These behaviours are underscored by an ideal of the collective responsibility to hold the land—even while households and persons compete for limited resources. One such example is Sister Pauletta’s shop and restaurant. As I mentioned, this venture drew upon the labour and effort of all members of the

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household. Their responsibilities ranged from buying ingredients, cooking and attending to customers. “Watching the shop” was an important task when Pauletta had to travel to acquire stock or perishable goods like fruits, vegetables and meats. Pauletta’s adult children also purchased preserved items on their personal or business travels between Shashamane and Addis Ababa. When Pauletta was unable to undertake the 500  km round trip journey to Addis Ababa she bought ingredients from shopkeepers in Shashamane.6 These social and family relations can be examined in terms of what I call dual obligations. In this case, the obligations were to Pauletta’s household and to the wider Rastafari community in the Jamaica Safar. Pauletta’s business needed to be profitable to support her family, but in principle, she had an obligation to look out for fellow Rastafari. Conversely, Rastafari patronised the shop as much as they could precisely because it is a Rastafari-­ owned business, even if Sister Pauletta occasionally had higher prices. Certainly, proximity to repatriate yards is one reason for this patronage. For recent repatriates, in particular, their limited Amharic skills were a barrier to buying from local Ethiopian shops. Nonetheless, there remains a practice of supporting the community and “our people.” For example, a few times when I went to Addis Ababa I would be asked to buy specific items that were necessary for Rastafari livelihoods. These items may have been unavailable in Shashamane at that time. If I bought spices for a Sister who sold baked goods as a primary source of income, she would give me a discounted price if I later bought these goods. Others would directly repay me. Without these sorts of mutual interactions, repatriates would often be unable to consistently maintain their business ventures. Notwithstanding these realities, local Ethiopians tend to associate Rastafari with wealth. As Sister Angela bluntly stated, “they feel that we’re all rich and that we all get money from Western Union.”7 The popular conception is that Rastafari men are wealthy and thus desirable spouses. This perception is related to factors such as regular Rastafari visitors and visible markers of well-being, including clothing, vehicles and houses. It contrasts sharply with the experience of poverty for many Rastafari. There is another side to this alignment of wealth with Rastafari, here coded as faranji, that means Rastafari will be taken advantage of in certain situations. This implied vulnerability emerged in the daily conversations between Rastafari, and between Rastafari and local Ethiopians. One Brother who had repatriated in 2005 explained that his most recent domestic electricity bill (after a few months of arrears) was an exorbitant

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sum. He planned to query it since faranjis are often charged higher rates for public services than local Ethiopians. A young local Ethiopian Brother, who grew up in the Jamaica Safar and had manifested Rastafari concurred with this statement. In a combination of English and Jamaican Patois, he remarked that if officials see a foreign name, then the amount on the bill is automatically increased. A repatriated Brother concurred. On other occasions, I heard similar comments regarding the increased prices quoted by locals to repatriates for the sale and rental of houses. For example, one Sister asserted that she heard Ethiopian owners directly requesting higher prices for land from faranjis than from “them own people.” These daily examples of boundary-making do not negate the ideals of fellowship that Rastafari espouse nor ideas of belonging to Ethiopia. The reproduction of these ideas relies on Rastafari translocal relationships.

5.6   Translocal Reciprocity This mutually beneficial relationship between Rastafari in Ethiopia and those in foreign extends to Rastafari who reside abroad, owning houses in Shashamane. Rastafari in Shashamane act as caretakers for that property. Caretaking can include looking after (maintaining) a house, collecting rent money and overseeing the “watchman” (an untrained security guard) hired to “watch the yard.”8 Of primary importance was maintaining the ownership of the property. In particular, ensuring that the watchman, tenant or any other “thiefing” Ethiopian, as Rastafari have said, did not attempt to sell the house to another Rastafarian who was also residing in foreign. This occasionally happened in the past, according to the incidents that visiting house owners and permanent repatriates had related. Caretaking work of this sort provides a small income, typically for Rastafari men. This income is often used to supplement the household income. As such, at the micro level, a simple producer-consumer analysis provides only a partial account of economic activity in Shashamane. Remittances are equally important to the local economy as is waged labour. Rastafari house owners in foreign often view the relationship with Rastafari in the promised land as contributing to community development by providing short-term employment. This relationship is implicitly guided by a Rastafari ethos of fairness and trust, at least in principle, reflecting a Rastafari expectation of helping out each other. In practice,

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money and dishonesty around such transactions are often the cause of disputes and physical altercations among Rastafari as many repatriates can barely meet daily needs. For example, the trusting relationship between the house owner in foreign and their repatriate liaison can be juxtaposed to the presumption of a deceitful relationship between the house owner and the local Ethiopian. If “Ethiopians” are stereotypically “thiefing, lying” people in a Rastafari view, they ought not to be trusted especially in financial dealings. A moral distinction is made between the heartical Rastaman and the thiefing Ethiopian. In this Rastafari-constructed image, whereas the heartical Rastaman will not deceive the Brother or Sister abroad, the categorical thiefing Ethiopian man will inevitably attempt to. There have also been incidents of monetary theft in which this trust between Rastafari has been broken. And it was not only local Ethiopians who “sold” houses that they did not own but other Rastafari who act as caretakers as Rastafari reported. When the owners arrived in Shashamane, their disappointment at being homeless was worsened by recognising the betrayal of a fellow Rastaman, not that of a thiefing Ethiopian. However, this hyperbolic rhetorical distinction between the dishonest Ethiopian and the honest Rastafari reinforces a differentiated morality between these groups, favouring Rastafari as morally upstanding. Recognising these social and affective elements of economic relations is also important in understanding how Rastafari make a living. Returning to remitted funds, receiving these monies and items was interpreted in an orthodox economic analysis as evidence of the failure of individuals to survive, instead of state economies to provide for the population.9 As early as the 1970s, however, anthropologists drew attention to the social context of remittance behaviours with reference to Caribbean immigrants in the Global North. Stuart Philpott (1973) highlighted the obligations of immigrant sons in London to provide for mothers remaining at “home” in Montserrat in fulfilling expectations to be a dutiful son.10 Sending money and goods demonstrated a son’s love for his mother and fulfilled an expectation of care by children to repay elderly parents, particularly mothers, for their care during childhood. “Mechanisms of social control” (Philpott 1973, 175) like shaming (see also Wilson 1973) ensure the migrant continues their economic obligations to kin at home. It is here that translocal social networks are significant in reproducing values and norms among migrant communities. Such mechanisms also operate among Rastafari globally regarding financially

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supporting repatriates who hold this symbolic land. Communication, over the telephone mostly and through word of mouth via visitors, is constantly maintained between Rastafari in Shashamane and in foreign. This means it is often well known to what extent and with what frequency persons in foreign send money and things, thereby helping to ensure the longevity of the repatriate population. Both recorded and unrecorded remittances of goods and money are sent through financial organisations and brought by visitors. Angela and Anna, for instance, emphasised that their dependence on monies from Rastafari and relatives in foreign was temporary. For them, remittances were an initial step in a strategy for the Rastafari community to be self-sufficient in the future. However, as previously noted, this attitude was not shared by many Rastafari. Support from Rastafari outernational is expected and is often received by almost every repatriate without a specific end date. This adds another dimension to the extensively researched flow of remittances from the United Kingdom and North America to the Caribbean since Rastafari who are not biological kin in both the Global North and the poorer Caribbean countries in the Global South supported individual Rastafari and Mansions in Shashamane.11

5.7   Material Betterment, Status and In-Kind Remittances Turning to non-monetary remittances, these are brought to Shashamane by Rastafari visitors or occasionally shipped from foreign. Along with monies, these items are also crucial for Rastafari on the land grant. Regular and first-time visitors brought different items such as clothing, toys and cell phones for specific persons and families, stationery and school supplies for the JRDC-administered school as well as items that individual persons may have asked for, inclusive of electronics, toiletries such as perfume, and luxury items like chocolate. Visitors may or may not be reimbursed for goods depending on their relationship with the Rastafari recipient or their agreement on each occasion. In most instances, these items were brought as gifts, and visitors were not reimbursed for the cost nor did they expect payment. The number of visitors substantially increased during the July 23 celebrations as well as during the typical holiday months of July and August. The bulk of visitors I met were Rastafari from foreign who stayed at other

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Rasta yards or in a Rastafari-owned hotel. These were Rastafari visitors whom repatriates knew by name or by face, either because they had visited Shashamane before or because they had common Rastafari contacts in Shashamane and in foreign. In one yard alone during my year’s residence in Shashamane, I met at least ten Rasta visitors from abroad. This also highlights the constant presence of visitors in the Jamaica Safar and the frequent movements of Rastafari visitors between Shashamane and abroad. Another source of income for repatriate households is renting rooms to tourists or to Rastafari visitors. Tourists may briefly stop in Shashamane en route to or from the south, have meals at repatriate-owned restaurants or may stay overnight at repatriate-owned hotels, all ways of spending locally and contributing to the household income. Visitors would stay anywhere from one week to six months, and would often bring goods as well as cash for persons. Almost every household that I was familiar with had at least one visitor from foreign who was well known to household members, and who financially contributed to the household expenses. The amount of the contributions depended on the sender’s finances and willingness. While goods are usually brought by visitors or smaller items sent in the mail, occasionally family members in foreign also send barrels to relatives in Shashamane. Anecdotes abound regarding the danger of sending goods in the mail, especially smaller electronic items, which are more likely to be stolen by underpaid workers along the delivery route. Rastafari related experiences whereby post office workers state that packages have gone missing. The barrel was less common because it was more expensive and time consuming to fill and send by air freight. Barrels must also be opened by customs officials and the contents checked, whereas packages may not be scrutinised as minutely, at least in principle. The barrels I saw contained clothing, kitchenware and dry foodstuff, including items unique to the tastes of household members. One example is preserved ackee, a popular fruit in Jamaica which is available in the United Kingdom and North America in preserved form, but unavailable in its natural form in Ethiopia. In the one year I lived in Shashamane, apart from my yard, there were only two other households that had received barrels. Two years later, the arrivals of barrels remained few and far between. One sender was Bernice, Fyah’s wife. The frequency of Bernice’s barrels is one indicator of her dedication to providing for her children and reflects favourably on the fulfilment of maternal responsibility. The amount and frequency of remittances of money and goods are not only an essential source of income for

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repatriates and households but also carry a high status for recipients in Shashamane. This status is shared by both recipients and senders. If the barrel is taken as less of a routine than a ritualised occurrence, Shashamane is the site not only of “barrel children” but barrel families. “Barrel children” is a term that refers to children who receive goods from migrant parents and relatives (Crawford-Brown and Rattray 1994). It was meant to describe the experiences of children, mainly in poorer households, whose mothers often worked in low-wage employment in the Global North but sent necessities and desirable goods in barrels to children in Jamaica. In working-class families, it is usually women who migrate to the Global North to work in service sectors such as care work and domestic work. The effect of asymmetrical global processes of labour use and production means that global value chains necessitate global care chains. This labour is typically provided by women from the Global South (Anderson 2002; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002; Lutz 2011; Romero 2002). Mothers in foreign send barrels to their children “left behind.” While barrel children do not quantitatively represent a similar situation in Shashamane, it indicates a marked Rastafari dependence on persons in foreign. Repatriates and youths can claim this economic support from Rastafari abroad precisely because of their high status derived from holding the land. This reciprocated relationship reinforces the outernational livelihoods of the Rastafari community. The barrel becomes symbolic of wealth and maternal affection. Items are carefully chosen by senders based on the needs and wants of recipients. These goods from foreign afford greater status than those locally purchased and are therefore usually items that can be displayed on the body, like clothing, or in the home. Rastafari who are legal residents of Ethiopia and able to travel internationally also bring small items back to Shashamane, usually for individuals in response to specific requests or as gifts when they travel outside of Ethiopia. Regardless of the length of the trip, the distance travelled, or the reasons, whether to visit relatives, children, or for medical purposes, they are expected to bring some item for certain people or community use. This behaviour is similar to that of working-class and middle-­ class families in the insular Caribbean who bring consumer items, both requested and non-requested, for relatives and friends at home. These material things from foreign are likewise more prestigious than local products.

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In Shashamane, these foreign-bought items distinguish between households and persons who can materially demonstrate their connections to foreign and those who cannot show comparable relations because they do not have such human resources, locally or abroad. When Angela remarks that her Ethiopian neighbours “think we have so much” she accurately captured this local perception based on the foreign goods that Rastafari families own as well as Rastafarians’ frequent trips to Western Union. These items ranged from the variety of clothing that is unavailable in Shashamane (although there are numerous clothing shops in the town) to the conspicuous use of baby strollers and plastic baby carriers. At the time of my fieldwork, I saw only comparatively privileged young Rastafari women in Shashamane, and middle-class or wealthy women in Addis Ababa using the latter.12 The cost is high in Ethiopia compared to significantly lower prices in foreign. Since baby strollers are usually bought abroad, these women must either purchase them while travelling to Europe, the United Kingdom, North America or the UAE or have them sent by persons living there. One afternoon when I saw an unfamiliar young woman, who could have been Ethiopian or faranji based on her dress and skin colour, walking along the main road in the Jamaica Safar with a male companion, I guessed that they were foreigners because she was pushing a baby pram.13 Returning to the reciprocity between Rastafari abroad and Rastafari in the Jamaica Safar, the visit of a Jamaican Rastawoman from the United Kingdom exemplified this relationship as well as the influence of transnational capitalism and global socioeconomic precarity on Rastafari lives. This visitor lived in the same city as Bernice, and she was well known to repatriates, having previously visited Shashamane. On this occasion, she brought small items that could easily fit in her suitcase for Bernice’s family, taking photographs of Bernice’s husband, children and grandchild to give Bernice when she returned to the United Kingdom. These enabled Bernice to watch her children grow from her location in foreign. Since then, internet and technological applications have expanded, and although expensive to access, they allow users to see and speak with each other in “real time electronic communication” (Plaza and Henry 2006, 158). Peter Lawrence notes that among Garia in Papua New Guinea, “security circles” are composed of persons whom ego categorises as “distant” and “close” kin (1984). As a network among Rastafari, the security circle entails obligations for prestation that are formed among Rastafari in Shashamane—those who hold the land—and those in foreign. These

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obligations are both collective and individual-oriented. Each repatriate and Ethiopian-born youth develops such a security circle throughout their lifetime. Bernice’s translocal Rastafari network is one example. Anna is another example. Anna is financially and emotionally supported by her mother and relatives in various locations abroad, her husband and other Rastafari in Shashamane and the United States. This security circle is integral to Anna’s business start-up in Ethiopia. The JRDC School is another example that depends on fundraising mainly by Rastafari in the United States who appeal to members of their own security circle as well as fellow Rastafari who are directly unknown to fundraisers. Like many Caribbeans in various locations, the economic relations of Rastafari with each other in Shashamane, relatives and Rastafari globally are embedded in transnational capitalism and global socioeconomic precarity. The comments by Jacob, Angela and Anna demonstrate these relations. However, this spiritual repatriation and the Jamaica Safar also transform economic ideas about the direction of capital from the Global North to the Global South. I suggest that the idea of outernational livelihoods captures this reciprocated relationship between Rastafari in Ethiopia, specifically those who hold the land in Shashamane, and Rastafari in foreign. Making a living is not reducible only to the money earned. The symbolism of holding the land grant pivots on an economic relationship with Rastafari in foreign. These translocal networks among people, households and community organisations are integral to the survival of the repatriate community and instantiate outernational livelihoods. They also call into question the applicability of anthropological categories of kinship to understanding these relationships.

Notes 1. See Diminescu’s abstract. 2. Sorrel (hibiscus sabdariffa) is called “hibiscus” in English in Ethiopia. 3. Work in the informal sector or “hustling” to generate income typically meant participating in borderline illegal transactions and activities, inclusive of sourcing goods such as scarce food items, to sourcing services such as transportation for example, for those who need these services. 4. I use the word “remittances” to draw attention to the structural inequalities between the Global North and the Global South that impact on

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national economies as well as persons and households including, but not limited to, peoples’ ability to earn a living and provide for children. 5. Remittances are defined by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) as “private funds” sent from individuals or organisations generally in developed countries to those in developing or less developed countries (IOM 2006, 2). In this ethnography, “remittance” refers primarily to money and goods sent or brought from foreign to Rastafari in the Jamaica Safar. 6. For instance, in 2008 1 kg of sugar in town, at its highest retail price, was 10 Birr in town and 12 Birr at shops in the Jamaica Safar. 7. While “mobile money” or funds that can be transferred via mobile phones, in partnership with telecommunications companies and financial institutions, is available in the neighbouring countries of Kenya and Tanzania, this service is not in Ethiopia. In Shashamane collecting money still entails going to the local banks. Sekei et al. (2014) note that in East Africa “mobile money is the preferred remittance method and that in the United Republic of Tanzania, fairly large amounts are remitted” (25). 8. Men in general watched their family’s yards, and not only watchmen hired for this job. 9. This position has since changed and the international development infrastructure now positions remittances as development tools, oftentimes in place of development assistance to the poorer economies of the Global South (see Bréant 2013; Kunz 2008). 10. In addition to monies, social remittances point to an intangible aspect of return migration (Levitt 1998; Sekei et al. 2014). In addition to personal obligations, social remittances refer more to the non-financial aspects of remittances such as changes in attitudes, behaviours and roles that the money stimulates. For example, women’s changing roles in urban Ethiopia. 11. Similarly, Figueroa notes that remittances from the Caribbean to the Global North are ignored or under-analysed by researchers (2008, 252). 12. Ethiopia’s position as a landlocked country is another consideration in higher prices for consumer items and development programmes (Faye et al. 2004). Changing political relations with Eritrea from 2018 and its Red Sea port may have a positive impact. 13. I later met this couple in a neighbour’s yard, and they were in fact visiting from United States.

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References Anderson, Bridget. 2002. Just Another Job? The Commodification of Domestic Labor. In Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, ed. Barbara Ehrenrich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, 104–114. New  York: Henry Holt. Bonacci, Giulia. 2015. Exodus!: Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia. Trans. Antoinette Tidjani Alou. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Bréant, Hugo. 2013. What if Diasporas Didn’t Think About Development?: A Critical Approach of the International Discourse on Migration and Development. African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 6 (2): 99–112. Comitas, Lambros. 1973. Occupational Multiplicity in Rural Jamaica. In Work and Family Life: West Indian Perspectives, ed. Lambros Comitas and David Lowenthal, 157–173. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Crawford-Brown, Claudette, and Melrose Rattray. 1994. The ‘Barrel Children’ of the Caribbean: The Socio-Cultural Context of the Migrant Caribbean Family. Sistren 16 (3/4): 13–27. Diminescu, Dana. 2008. The Connected Migrant: An Epistemological Manifesto. Social Science Information 47 (4): 565–579. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0539018408096447. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. 2002. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co. Faye, Michael, et  al. 2004. The Challenges Facing Landlocked Developing Countries. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 5 (1): 31–68. Figueroa, Mark. 2008. Migration and Remittances: Typologies and Motivations. In Freedom and Constraint in Caribbean Migration and Diaspora, ed. Elizabeth Thomas-Hope, 235–257. Kingston/Miami: Ian Randle Publishers. Fog Olwig, Karen. 2007. Caribbean Journeys: An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks. Durham: Duke University Press. Fog Olwig, Karen, and Ninna Nyberg Sorenson. 2002. Mobile Livelihoods: Making a Living in the World. In Work and Migration: Life and Livelihoods in a Globalizing World, ed. Ninna Nyberg Sorenson and Karen Fog Olwig, 1–19. New York: Routledge. Fox, Jonathan. 2005. Unpacking “Transnational Citizenship”. Annual Review of Political Science 8: 171–201. Gibson, Shirlie R. 1996. African Repatriation: A Case Study of Rastafarians and the Malcoda Land-Grant at Shashemane. PhD dissertation, Howard University. Glick Schiller, Nina, and Noel B. Salazar. 2013. Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39 (2): 183–200. https://doi. org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.723253.

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Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 2001. Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press. Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller. 2005. From Kinship to Link-Up: Cell Phones and Social Networking in Jamaica. Current Anthropology 46 (5): 755–778. International Organisation for Migration Info Sheet. 2006. IOM and Remittances: Definition, Scale and Importance of Remittances. http://publications.iom. int/bookstore Kunz, Rahel. 2008. Remittances Are Beautiful? Gender Implications of the New Global Remittances Trend. Third World Quarterly 29 (7): 1389–1409. Lawrence, Peter. 1984. The Garia: An Ethnography of a Traditional Cosmic System in Papua New Guinea. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Levitt, Peggy. 1998. Social Remittances: Migration-Driven Local-Level Forms of Cultural Diffusion. The International Migration Review 32 (4): 926–948. Lutz, Helma. 2011. The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy. London: Zed Books. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press. Philpott, Stuart. 1973. West Indian Migration: The Montserrat Case. London: Athlone Press. Plaza, Dwaine E., and Frances Henry. 2006. An Overview of Return Migration to the English-Speaking Caribbean. In Returning to the Source: The Final Stage of the Caribbean Migration Circuit, ed. Dwaine E.  Plaza and Frances Henry, 1–29. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Rahnema, Ladan. 2011. Emancipatory Pedagogy and the Rastafarian Movement: A Case Study of the Jamaican Rastafarian Development Community School in Ethiopia, PhD dissertation, The George Washington University. Romero, Mary. 2002. Maid in the U.S.A. New York: Routledge. Sekei, Linda, Annette Altvater, Jacob Mrema, and Adelaide Kisinda. 2014. Sending Ideas Back Home: Exploring the Potential of South–South Social Remittances in the United Republic of Tanzania. Brussels: ACP Observatory on Migration Research Report. The World Bank. 2014 “Annual Remittances Data.” Migration and Remittances Data. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/migrationremittancesdiasporaissues/brief/migration-­remittances-­data. Last modified October 2014. Wilson, Peter. 1973. Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro Societies of the Caribbean. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Family and Kinship: Rastafari Yards

6.1   Creole Kinship The family provides a microcosm for understanding wider social dynamics. I consider how kinship is lived and how Rastafari cultivate these relationships to ensure social reproduction. There is a particular “dual character” (Fog Olwig 2007, 250) of Caribbean kinship that entails commitments to broad groupings of “family” inclusive of community members and “extended” relatives as well as the “immediate” family unit. This is observable in Rastafari yards in Shashamane. This character is situated within a dual value system. Anthropologists have referred to this as the folk-elite model in which dominant, elite Eurocentric values remain aspirational for most West Indians, as well as the lived kinship and family forms among the poor (Douglass 1992; Henriques 1949; Rubenstein 1987; Smith 1988, 1956; Wilson 1973). In this Rastafari spiritual repatriation, certain characteristics are present also within intercultural households and families in Shashamane. Noticeable as well is the reproduction of and change in gendered behaviours (though not expectations), which I will demonstrate with regard to Rastafari yards. “Yard” is a colloquial term used in the Caribbean to refer to a house and its surrounding area, and not only to the outdoor area around the house. During colonialism, particularly within the British West Indies, “tenement yard” referred to overcrowded housing areas for the enslaved © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gomes, Cosmopolitanism from the Global South, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82272-9_6

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population. In an influential study of the Afro-Caribbean yard (house and household), Sidney Mintz states, “to relate the concrete, material character of the house and the yard to the activities which go in and around them” is essential in examining social reproduction (Mintz 1989, 231). In the post-emancipation era (1838–1960s) and later postcolonial period (1960s–), “yard” referred to poor urban areas where multiple families shared one physical yard. There, certain household activities were completed together such as cooking, especially given the sharing of a water source. Yard residents behaved as kin. At present, the word also refers to a private yard. With these historical factors in mind, I emphasise the continued importance of the family and household in social reproduction among diasporic Caribbean peoples, thereby demonstrating how Rastafari global networks function also as kin. The expansion of Rastafari kinship comes with both support and conflict. While “an acknowledged feature of Creole kinship is its open-­endedness, its inclusivity, and the ability of those who draw on its idioms to stretch and combine the values it entails” (Barrow 1996), Huon Wardle explains, “in practice, values may be, and often are, stretched to their elastic limit: for the individual, kinship is frequently a tense balancing and negotiation of near irreconcilables” (Wardle 2002, 497). I attempt to pay attention to Wardle’s caution about “balancing and negotiation” in connecting “modes of relatedness” (Forde 2011, 85) to “fictive” kin or the community to show the reproduction of this elasticity among diasporic Caribbeans. An analysis of household spaces within a Caribbean culture of migration (Fog Olwig 2007; Forde 2011; Horst 2011; Mintz 1989) can add to ongoing anthropological debates over cultural production and representation as well as the distinction between biological and fictive kinship. I will elucidate these dynamics through the examples of the yard and the beit (house) by focusing on the spatio-temporal characteristics of intercultural households. I pay attention to two households, one of Brother John and Sister Adina in central Shashamane where they live among local Ethiopian neighbours, and another of Brother Matthew and Sister Tirunesh in the Rastafari-inhabited Jamaica Safar. I spotlight these households to show processes of intercultural exchange and social reproduction occurring in the wider neighbourhood. Therefore, temporality is another noteworthy factor in the life course of the house, its inhabitants and environment. Although located in different areas of Shashamane, these two households were similar in many respects. Both were coded as “intercultural.”

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They consisted of a Rastafari repatriated father, a Christian local Ethiopian mother, and children born and raised in Ethiopia. But one difference is that one household was a Rastafari “yard” and the other an Ethiopian “beit.” As I will explain, cultural and material factors shape this differentiation, which involve religion, language, food, family organisation as well as house-building materials, layout and the garden. I build on descriptions of the yard to intercultural interactions and a gendered division of labour to discuss continuities and changes in the Caribbean yard. In so doing, I demonstrate the sociocultural dynamics that go into identifying one space as “Rasta” and another as “Ethiopian.” Family organisation and residence type indicate the reproduction of working-class Caribbean and African-Caribbean patterns. These forms are observable as well as everyday instances of cultural hybridity, for example in language. I therefore concur with a more recent position by Barry Chevannes that in the postcolonial Caribbean, yard or “yaad … is a central reference point of self-identification among African-Caribbeans … as the summary of memory, life and hope” (Chevannes 2001, 129–130). As I have shown in the previous chapters, historical, material and ideological contexts matter in understanding this contemporary Rastafari spiritual repatriation. I also highlight the role of identity in reproducing social systems and cultural traits, in this instance between Rastafari “migrants” and “local” Ethiopians. I engage with ethnography’s long-standing concern with emplacing persons, particularly in  local situations of power asymmetries where “stasis and purity” (Clifford 1997, 7) have been actively reproduced in emic and etic descriptions. James Clifford’s (1997) critique of anthropology’s obsession with constructing immobile and sedentary subjects is exemplified in ethnographies of both the geographic and diasporic Caribbean.1

6.2   My Yard: Family and Household My yard was located in the Jamaica Safar where neighbours consisted of local Ethiopians and Rastafari. I interacted regularly with Brother Matthew and Sister Tirunesh and two of their three children as well as Brother John, whose business was in the Jamaica Safar, but who resided farther away in ketema. My contact with Sister Adina and their children was limited as her social and kin groups were located in ketema and abroad, particularly in the United States. However, on different occasions I met two

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of John and Adina’s children in their twenties. Between 2012 and 2015, one of Brother John’s children moved to the United States to join a sibling. This migration from Ethiopia demonstrated the changing composition of the yard and the extension of cross border networks that are common to both Rastafari and local Ethiopian families. In general, with marriage and childbearing between Rastafari repatriates of several nationalities and local Ethiopians of various ethnic affiliations, these two households exemplified the intercultural exchange and social reproduction in the neighbourhood. The social integration and cultural hybridity of the second generation also was evidenced by many features and institutions. These included language ability and speech patterns, diet and food tastes as well as values as seen in marriage and residence patterns. Regarding speech for instance, in my yard, the primary language of communication was Jamaican Patois. Amharic was also used between Ethiopian-born children and grandchildren. This interchangeable use of Amharic, patois and English was observable in Brother Matthew and Sister Tirunesh’s yard as well. This scenario of language presents one example of how bodies, spaces and places in these yards are connected to processes of cultural change and continuity. I consider how kinship is lived and how Rastafari cultivate these relationships. Janet Carsten’s critique of the anthropological distinction between biological and social kinship is relevant to the Rastafari use of “Sister” and “Brother” to address persons “in the faith,” as Rastafari say or for fellow Rastafari, as noted in the introductory chapter. Recognising that “kinship is constituted out of everyday small acts and events in time” (Carsten 2000, 698), anthropologists have turned to “modes of relatedness” or “cultures of relatedness” to understand how persons constitute multiple relationships socio-spatially over the life course. Maarit Forde (2011) notes that while the nuclear family form was instituted in the colonial Caribbean as an ideal, a large number of mostly working-­class Caribbean people live in “extended family households that do not necessarily consist of biological relatives” (Forde 2011, 82). The demarcations of “fictive or artificial kinship to distinguish between biological and imagined or pretended kin relations” (Forde 2011, 85) do not adequately capture the expectations and behaviours of persons across such households. Such “socially recognized forms of kinship” (Forde 2011, 88) are evident in religious communities and “ritual families.” In Forde’s study, these function among Spiritual Baptists, Orisha and Revival Zion in Trinidad

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and Tobago, Jamaica, St Vincent, Grenada and New York City. I suggest that such relationships function for Rastafari in Shashamane as well. As Forde summarises, “Analytically distinguishing between these relationships and other types of kin relations may not reflect actual lived practices” (2011, 86). For instance, many repatriates in Shashamane have lost contact with their biological relatives in countries of origin and transit. Instead, repatriates communicate regularly with Rastafari in Shashamane, other locations in Ethiopia and in the Global North. As noted previously, the visitors to Rastafari households were themselves also Rastafari who were not biologically related to repatriates. For the second generation born in Ethiopia, Rastafari religious communities and transnational networks also are significant, as well as their parents. These youth regularly communicate through social media and cell phones with Rastafari of the same age range in the Global North, rather than with their relatives in the Caribbean and the diaspora. Many have a vague knowledge of these relatives. At the same time, youth are curious to learn about relatives or “half-siblings” abroad, in line with “the positive value of ‘knowing where you’ve come from’” (Carsten 2000, 689). This sentiment is attributed not only to the lineage of Ethiopian divinity as embodied in Emperor Haile Selassie I and to understanding Rastafari and Ethiopian histories, but also to families typically considered as related by blood. Biological ties are significant for Ethiopian-born children, but more specifically between parents and children than with “extended” relatives such as parents’ siblings and cousins. This significance can be seen in parents’ financial, moral and physical labours, which are indispensable for children’s wellbeing and the care of grandchildren. For example, Rastafari parents care for grandchildren as well as financially support their children. Additionally, typical Caribbean expectations of children caring for elderly parents function in terms of a reciprocity of care. The expectation is that parents cared for and raised the children, who must then do the same for elderly parents (Goulbourne 2002; Fletcher-Anthony et  al. 2018; Chamberlain 1998). Rastafari in Shashamane and abroad function as kin with obligations and expectations of support, just as in Shashamane within Rastafari and local Ethiopian-Rastafari households. Relationships among Rastafari transnationally and locally as well as “blood” relatives function together to ensure the continuation of the Rastafari community. In the next sections, through micro-level attention to the household, I develop these related spatial and temporal issues.

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6.3   A Rastafari Yard and an Ethiopian Beit There are several types of household composition and a well-established pattern of relationships that is reproduced between repatriated men and local Ethiopian women; the latter is detailed in other work (Bonacci 2015). For example, Rastafari repatriates co-habit with spouses and/or children or reside alone. Both consanguineous and affinal households can be found in Shashamane. Rastafari there do not make this distinction or differentiate between blood relatives, relatives by marriage or persons whom anthropologists characterise as fictive kin. This is one point that emphasises how modes of relatedness are lived and shaped among Rastafari in Ethiopia and in the diaspora. As in previous research of Caribbean families, I adopt the position that “households … may be best understood in terms of the interrelationships arising between adult men and women” (Gonzalez 1969, 83; R.T. Smith 1956; Clarke 1966; Fog Olwig 1993; Wilson 1973). As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, this organisation is significant for Rastafari economic survival and long-term improvement, for which translocal networks are critical. The reproduction of Caribbean-derived traits is also seen when Ethiopian-born youth of Rastafari parents have children, and in their residence and marriage patterns. When repatriates’ children have their own children, especially when daughters have children, they usually reside in their parents’ house with young children as this facilitates child care. While this arrangement is common among Ethiopian-born children, they also engage in varied residence practices including legal marriage with co-­ residence, “visiting” while living in separate residences (which can include co-parenting) and co-residence without legal marriage. Visiting suggests an ongoing relationship in accordance with typologies derived from Caribbean marriage and kinship studies (Smith 1962; Henriques 1949; Clarke 1966). In the life course and inter-generationally, household composition changes to suit the material and emotional needs of persons and families. For example, Tirunesh and Matthew’s son was in a visiting relationship and co-parented with his girlfriend who lived separately in her family’s home. None of John and Adina’s children who lived in Shashamane were married or co-residing with their partners. In another example of an intercultural household consisting of a repatriated father and Ethiopian mother in the Jamaica Safar, their son’s local Ethiopian wife lived with him, in his family’s home.

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Regarding anthropological kinship categories, Carsten notes that “birth does not imply ‘diffuse, enduring solidarity’, in Schneider’s (1980) terms, emptied as it is of the connection to certainty, longevity, or obligations and rights” (2000, 693). From the perspective of adopted children who are now adults and trying to reconnect with birth relatives, they “must somehow reorder the symbols of kinship. The ways in which they do so do not suggest the heavy reliance on a genetic content of kinship which we might expect. A concern about physical attributes plays a part in motivating searches, but apparently loses significance once reunions have occurred” (Carsten 2000, 693). The idea of “choice or preference” that is typically attributed to “fictive” kinship or friendship is here applicable to biological kin. The yard of Brother Matthew and Sister Tirunesh demonstrates the blurriness of these kinship categories. Their networks include Sister Tirunesh’s local “blood” relatives, fellow Rastafari abroad, Rastafari repatriated “affines” (son’s girlfriend’s parents) through their grandchildren as well as other repatriates who live in Shashamane. Brother Matthew, from Jamaica, and Sister Tirunesh, who is an internal migrant to Shashamane, have raised their three children together over the past 25 years. Initially residing in rented houses in the same Jamaica Safar, they own their current house.2 The children are now teenagers and young adults in their 20s and 30s with their own children out of visiting and childbearing relationships—children who claim themselves as Rastafari, like Brother Matthew. Tirunesh was raised in the Orthodox faith and the children have been baptised in the Orthodox Church in Shashamane. While calling themselves Rastafari, the children also identify as both Jamaican and Ethiopian, in contrast to the children of Brother John and Sister Adina who do not identify as Rastafari but primarily as Ethiopian, which I shortly expand on, although these are both intercultural households. Tirunesh’s and Matthew’s yard is a spacious one, bordered by a metal fence and concrete blocks, which contains the house and the garden. The type of fencing or boundary, how residents maintain the land surrounding the house, the size of the outdoor yard, the type of flora, the crops in the kitchen garden all matter in whether the house and its inhabitants are coded as “Rasta” or “Ethiopian.”3 These features contribute to the image of a typical Rastafari yard, and the social perception of the yard. In particular, the material used to build the house, its size, and its facilities (including indoor plumbing), are major indicators of a household’s finances. This house itself is made of concrete (or of chika or mud that may be overlaid

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with concrete) with designated rooms such as an indoor kitchen, front room with a television for leisure, separate bedrooms and an indoor toilet and bath. There is a similar layout in Brother John’s yard, with the addition of an outdoor kitchen. The size, facilities and furnishings in both houses indicate the relative wealth of these families.4 The local perception of Rastafari wealth, and Rastafari projection of this façade through items like clothing, shoes and electronics, as compared to perceptions and experiences of local Ethiopian poverty, shapes the image of a Rastafari yard. The Rastafari house, for instance, is envisaged and expected to be made of concrete as opposed to the more common chika house or if the latter material is used, at least a sizeable chika house with identifiable rooms. Demarcated for the purposes of eating (kitchen), socialising (sitting room), sleeping (bedroom) and hygiene (indoor or outdoor latrine), the house is also expected to be located on a large plot of fenced off land with a concrete wall, instead of the usual thin wooden posts weaved together with a latticed wood outer layer. In reality though, these features are observable only in a few Rastafari houses, such as that of Matthew and Tirunesh.

6.4   Making Place, Reproducing Culture The fruit trees planted in Tirunesh’s and Matthew’s yard, of mango and sorrel (hibiscus), are common to the Caribbean landscape, which are replanted in Shashamane. Other crops grown at the yard include potato and peas. Since these also grow well in this region of Ethiopia, they serve as visible connections to the Caribbean and to repatriates’ childhood homes in the Caribbean. In my yard, for instance, Fyah asked Rastafari for seeds of a particular breed of mango that had grown around his home in Kingston, Jamaica. These were brought by a Rastafari visitor to Shashamane from Jamaica, supporting Barry Chevannes’ point that the yard serves as “metaphor for home” (2001, 129). In planting seeds from his childhood home, Fyah reproduces a sense of his childhood in Jamaica, for his children and grandchildren as well, who themselves have never physically visited Jamaica. Tim Ingold’s emphasis on the interconnection of nature and society is encapsulated in landscape, where nature is of course socially constructed, and culture also adaptive to the environment. Through his theorisation of taskscape as an “array of activities that weave in and out of one another, variably in harmony and in discord” (Ingold 2000, 17), thinking of body

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and landscape also meant recognising these “as essentially temporal phenomena” (Ingold 2000, 23) that people inhabit. In re-conceptualising temporality, Ingold presented a perspective from those who “dwell” in the landscape, both unconsciously and consciously. As situated within landscapes, houses “have dynamic, processual characteristics encapsulated in the word dwelling” (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995, 1). “Houses are frequently thought of as bodies, sharing with them a common anatomy and a common life history” (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995, 3). The size and facilities in Matthew’s and Tirunesh’s house have changed with the composition and needs of household members. They have built a well-equipped indoor kitchen, sufficient bedrooms for the children (where grandchildren may also sleep), there is electricity throughout and indoor plumbing for new washrooms. More recently, ensuite bedrooms for visitor accommodation have been constructed adjacent to the main house. The symbolism of the yard as a tangible, inhabited space in the zion of Ethiopia underscores its meaning for Rastafari who demonstrate their Rastafari affiliation through other symbols. At the yard of Tirunesh and Matthew, the well-known colours of red, gold and green and images of the Lion of Judah also demarcate this space as Rasta. For instance, a painting of the Lion of Judah figures prominently on a zinc gate or a fence or, in a more understated manner, the outline of the African continent is incorporated into ironwork on house windows. These features depend on residents’ personal tastes as well as artistic proclivity and training. Other practices and habits such as language and diet are significant in the identification of households and their residents. The dominant language at Brother Matthew’s and Sister Tirunesh’s yard is Jamaican Patois, and all members of the household, including Sister Tirunesh who learnt it over time, usually communicate in this medium. The children speak both Amharic and patois fluently. To describe other behaviours and labours at the yard, Sister Tirunesh usually takes on the cooking responsibilities, with Brother Matthew cooking occasionally. In the past, however, Matthew cooked more often, teaching Tirunesh to prepare Caribbean foods. The diet is usually a mixture of popular Ethiopian and Caribbean meals, and those particular to Sister Tirunesh’s ethnic group. These meals include rice and peas, stewed beef or ox tail. As a related point, food reflects sociocultural identity through everyday behaviours.

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Cooking and eating in the household of Tirunesh and Matthew, for example, reinforces a cultural identity as Rastafari for household members and in particular reflects Matthew’s Jamaican tastes cultivated during childhood and adulthood in Kingston. Cooking also signals Sister Tirunesh’s incorporation into the Rastafari community. Through food, Rastafari also assert cultural difference to multi-ethnic local Ethiopians, reinforcing the contrastive aspect of ethnic and cultural identity (Barth 1969). Frederik Barth (1969) has argued that the social and political aspects as well as the cultural ought to be incorporated in defining ethnicity as concept and in practice rather than biological reductionist arguments. It is “the ‘ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses’ (1969, 15). It is, in other words, the relationship between groups, not the culture of groups, that gives them meaning” (cited in Eriksen and Nielsen 2001, 127). Turning to the house of John and Adina, it is close to the childhood home of Sister Adina surrounded by mainly local Ethiopian neighbours, as noted. John and Adina raised their four children there, two of whom continued to live in the spacious house in proximity to Adina’s extended biological family. Sister Adina’s family is well-established in Shashamane. With a house that is divided into well-designated rooms, the organisation of space and the size of the house all indicate the family’s higher class and social status. An outdoor kitchen signifies the cooking style more common in local Ethiopian homes. In contrast to the yard of Tirunesh and Matthew, diet in Brother John’s home usually adhered to local Ethiopian meals of the staple injera with beef or vegetarian wat (sauce) and rarely popular Caribbean meals, according to Brother John’s two children, although their father does know how to cook these foods. Regarding language, Amharic predominates in everyday communication and the children speak negligible patois with a working knowledge of English acquired at school. One of their daughters gave an example of childhood interaction that underscores the use of language in the home. When her father, Brother John, spoke to her in Jamaican Patois growing up, she understood enough to reply, but to reply in Amharic, and was unable to reciprocate in patois: “When my father talked to me in patois I answer [sic] in Amharic.” Although these children know the members of other local Ethiopian-­ Rastafari households, they have relationships of greater familiarity, intimacy and trust with their mother’s family than with any “Jamaican family,” as their daughter explained. While Brother John’s children self-­identify as

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“Ethiopian,” their last name, which is Brother John’s Anglo first name, identifies them as faranj or “foreign.”5 The household and the socio-spatial environment, as indicated by these factors, shape how John’s and Adina’s children see themselves as well as their status. As Karen Fog Olwig (2007) notes: “from the point of view of the logic of social fields, family and kinship as well as places—regarded as the bedrock of social life—therefore do not exist in and of themselves. Rather, they become defined and attain meaning as individuals’ lives take social form and place within specific networks of social relations” (2007, 12). In Shashamane, then, Ethiopian-born children in Rastafari-local Ethiopian households self-identify as Rastafari and/or as Ethiopian, depending on socialisation as well as individual sentiments and worldviews. The visible marking of space and social reproduction shape ideas and perceptions. One house is a yard and one is a beit. Fog Olwig’s position on social fields complements Heather Horst’s point that “home is not just a place, but becomes a site for imagining several key relationships” in the lives of occupants (2011, 30). Bourdieu’s discussion of the Kabyle house (1970) shows that the symbolic ordering of space becomes intertwined with habitus or, in a simplified meaning, the systemic reproduction of structure, thereby merging spatial and temporal concerns. As such, the activities and roles of household members over time are crucial to understanding social reproduction. The function of the household cross-culturally in reproduction is evident not only in biological reproduction and as a source of labour, but in the sexual division of labour, and value systems around the gendering of place and role differentiation (Boserup 1970; Barriteau 2001; Mies 1982).

6.5   Gender, Class and the Sexual Division of Labour A Caribbean gendered division of space is observable in Shashamane in both Rastafari and Rastafari-local Ethiopian households whereby the yard or house tends to be a female sphere and the road a male one. Although the yard serves as both private and public on different occasions, it is generally considered a site of domesticity and thus private. It is associated with women’s reproductive labour and activities which are devalued economically and socially in the market economy (Mintz 1989; Barrow 1996).

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This spatial ordering is generally observable in urban Ethiopia as well, given the cross-societal institutionalisation of patriarchy. But as “Ethiopia’s population … is diverse, Ethiopian women experience a number of variations in gender roles [and] status differences are evident across gender, ethnic, economic and political roles” (Berhane-Selassie 1997, 184). The gendered dimension to waged labour in working-class urban Ethiopian households sees women and men responsible for earning in the formal and informal economies (Gomes 2017; DeRegt 2010). Based upon Konjit Kifetew’s country survey conducted at the beginning of the twentieth century regarding gender roles, expectations and attitudes to work in urban and rural locales, “Ethiopian males prefer women who are income-generating. Rural women are expected to help their husbands in farming, animal husbandry, etc. Urban men suggest that their wives should get as much employment as possible in order to support their families” (2006, 127). Most urban and rural Ethiopians in Kifetew’s sample indicated that men should take on the breadwinner role in families, demonstrating a shared ideal between Caribbean and Ethiopian patriarchal societies, although a sizeable percentage said that both husbands and wives should be “considered as breadwinners” (2006, 127): “About 46% of the respondents said the husband should be the main breadwinner, and only 11% thought it should be the wife. But 34% stated that both the husband and the wife should be considered as breadwinners, and 3.9% put such a responsibility on children, too” (Kifetew 2006, 127). These figures indicate the necessity of both men and women’s productive labour to household maintenance. These ideals may be shared cross-culturally, but they do not reflect the actual experiences of many persons of modest income, as Kifetew’s data shows. It is worth underscoring the significance of class in understanding the interplay of ideal behaviours and lived experiences, particularly within social structures and market economies that are based on this gendered division of labour. An accompanying public/private distinction has been critiqued with reference to women’s “triple shift” (Freeman 2014; Moser 1993). In contrast to women working the “second shift” (Hochschild 1989), itself an important recognition of women’s invisible and therefore undervalued labour, the third shift acknowledged that many women, particularly across the Global South, worked in the “informal” industries. Divisions between public and private spheres were not as easily identifiable. Such informal work provides even less benefits and structural protections in the form of health care or in doing care work (child care and elder

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care for example), which further undermine women’s ability to raise and financially support families. “In the traditional [Ethiopian] state, the majority of women were invisible producers of goods and providers of services” (Berhane-Selassie 1997, 184). In the Caribbean, there is a history of women’s productive labour on the colonial plantations, in poor households of the postcolonial Caribbean as well as “professional” sectors following “second wave” feminism (Katzin 1959; Mintz 1989; Freeman 2000; Mohammed 2002; Ho 1993). Women’s triple shift is observable also in diasporic Caribbean households in Shashamane. While the gendered distinction between productive and reproductive work persists in both Rastafari and in Rastafari-local Ethiopian households, women do engage in more regular waged labour outside the yard than men, taking on the breadwinner role that is associated with a patriarchal-derived ideal of masculinity. As one repatriate who lived alone with his children remarked, “you see how the [typical gender] roles are reversed” since his wife’s earnings from waged labour supported the family, and he cared for their children. Here this Rastaman who repatriated from Jamaica, cognisant of Eurocentric gender roles, phrases his domestic division of labour in terms of lived Caribbean gender behaviours. Peter Wilson’s (1973) discussion of the reputation and respectability value system characteristic of Caribbean societies is relevant. Wilson conceptualised a value complex based on intersections of gender, class, occupation, race, colour and age. Competing Eurocentric elite values of “respectability” and in this case, Afrocentric “folk” ones of “reputation” ensured that those of low status (the poor) could counteract their exclusion from “respectable” status, meaning those who typically could not fulfil juxtaposed ideals of masculinity and femininity within a capitalist heteropatriarchal system. Women were positioned as “carriers of respectability” in Jamaica, for instance (Davenport 1961, 430 cited in Wilson 1973, 78). In attempting to achieve respectability, women especially aimed to fulfil Eurocentric-­ derived values and behaviours of sexual chastity, sexual relations within monogamous marriage, entering legal marriage through a church wedding, working indoors for the family, as well as wifehood and motherhood. However, poor women (mostly but not entirely black and brown i.e. Amerindian, African, Asian) could not fulfil these ideals, surviving by doing “productive” work in formal or “informal” economies. By contrast, men acquired reputation through performative acts of strength in public among peers, and acquiring popularity. These behaviours included

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drinking, sexual relationships with women, siring children, being witty and so forth. In short, men demonstrated their dominance where they were able to, given their constrained circumstances to earn a living and financially support families, as did wealthy men. Despite this intermixing of typical Western gender roles and expectations with the alternative creole values, the characteristics of strength, protectiveness and enforcing discipline continue to be associated with masculinity and fatherhood. This expectation is observable in Rastafari yards, for example, in the masculine role of watching the yard. While Rastamen do domestic work such as cooking, cleaning and caring for children when wives work outside the home or men live alone, they are less likely to clean nor are they perceived as “nurturers,” which is a feminine quality. Although certain aspects of Wilson’s strict gendered and classed dichotomy have been successfully critiqued by feminist scholars, it remains a valuable social analysis. One of these critiques is that reputation is not an innate personal quality, but rather “the opinions of men shared by others” (Makiesky-Barrow 1976, 107). Instead, the factors of “appearance, wealth, occupation, behaviour in social relations, manner, accent, deportment, family background” (ibid) were all relevant in assessing reputation. Reputation was therefore applicable to both men and women, also supported by the existence of the colonial era woman higgler whose reputation was important in her work success. Contemporary women informal commercial importers in Kingston, Jamaica also fashion self-identities that combine ideal masculine and feminine qualities: as “tough” businesswomen, international travellers and sophisticated “ladies” (Ulysse 2007). The pernicious characteristic of dominance in men’s “reputation” emerged in the interpersonal violence between women and men, parents and children, and generally in relationships characterised by inequalities of power. In Shashamane, the silence around violence against women in particular operated to maintain these toxic gender behaviours, which were reproduced among the second generation. Rarely spoken of, though observed in public and private spaces, both local Ethiopian and Rastafari women experienced this male aggression through physical violence. My local Ethiopian friend, for example, once remarked that she was “lucky” her husband, who was second-generation Rastafari, did not “beat her” as her friends’ husbands of any ethnicity did. Physical violence against women by men is refracted as women’s responsibility and accepted of men as

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fitting expectations of aggression, protection and discipline. It is women who were shamed, not men.6 Coming out of this value system, Rastafari too inherited these expectations. As Rastawoman Imani Tafari-Ama in Jamaica writes, “physical abuse is another taboo issue in Rastafari; it is spoken of in hushed tones, if ever at all … I might even be considered irreverent for mentioning it in writing” (Tafari-Ama 1998, 99). She states that such silencing is unhelpful in working collectively towards gender equality: “The attempt to deny the existence of domestic violence in order to protect the holy image of Rastafari is not likely to contribute meaningfully to the application of effective response management to ensure that sistren and brethren do not perpetuate this insidious form of self-annihilation” (Tafari-Ama 1998, 100). Without denying this significant systemic and interpersonal issue, in contrast to one-dimensional scholarly and popular representations of Rastafari women as oppressed, Twelve Tribes Rastawomen in Shashamane were steadfast in expressing a commitment to gender equality. In sum, the “treatment of women in Rastafarianism is a complex and controversial issue,” Stephen Glazier explains, and “some Rastas claim that there is total equality between brethren and sistren: ‘Jah say we should treat all the same.’ Other Rastas complain that while sexual equality is an ideal, it is seldom practised” (Glazier 2006, 273). These socioeconomic structures and cultural expectations that retain ideal gender behaviours situated within heteropatriarchal capitalism mean that women’s labour is persistently undervalued, even into the twenty-first century. Women do “productive” work given the need to earn money in situations where men’s work does not provide sufficient family or household income. But this means that women earn less than men’s already low wages, and have less income to contribute to families, although it is necessary income (Barriteau 2001; Ho 1993). There appears to be a significant similarity in gender roles and the gendered division of labour at the household level between Rastafari and local Ethiopians, which warrants further research in multi-ethnic urban Ethiopia. To reiterate, considering productive labour as it is linked to social reproduction is useful. Earning a living in Ethiopia’s wage economy often means doing precarious work in formal and informal sectors, but especially in the informal sector. As I discussed in the previous chapter, for Rastafari in Shashamane, this chronic uncertainty is experienced by both repatriate women and men.

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However, in Adina and Tirunesh’s households sufficient income proscribes their need to earn. Instead, both women focus on domestic, reproductive and care work. Their networks of social relations, particularly with Rastafari who function as kin globally, through their husbands, and with children and relatives in the United States mainly for Adina and John, provide financial support. Matthew and Tirunesh have a licensed small business, rooms to let, and receive remittances. John and Adina similarly have a registered food business. In both households, although small crops are grown, livelihood activities in the waged economy predominate, and the income is supplemented by remittances from Rastafari abroad, also demonstrating the transnational dimension to earning a living. Relatedly, kinship behaviours and household composition change to suit economic conditions. Occupational stereotyping, the demand for women’s labour, its undervaluing as well as macroeconomic factors have led Rastafari women to migrate to wealthier economies following their spiritual repatriation to Ethiopia. Up to 2015, I was familiar with three households in which women repatriates and one second-generation Rastawoman migrated to the Global North primarily to work in domestic and care “industries.” These Sisters engaged in what I refer to as post-­ repatriation migration. As compared to seasonal repatriates who did not reside “permanently” in Ethiopia, the Sisters returned to babylon following their full-time repatriation to Ethiopia. At present they travel and live between Shashamane and foreign. Both post-repatriation migrants as well as seasonal repatriates are internationally mobile groups who “visit” Ethiopia for up to three to six months on each occasion.7 While these small numbers cannot be said to describe a pattern, they do point to the importance of women’s (undervalued) commodified socially reproductive labour in the functioning of global economies (Parreñas 2005; Anderson 2000; Lutz 2011; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Lutz 2011; Mies 1986; Sassen 1988, 1998)— typically black and brown women from the Global South in cities of the North and South. For example, Sister Bernice who initially repatriated with her husband in the 1970s subsequently migrated to the United Kingdom in the 1990s. After ensuring that Fyah would remain to care for their children in Shashamane, this carefully considered joint decision was meant to explore the possibility of better providing for their growing family in light of the macroeconomic and political changes in Ethiopia. Bernice secured a temporary residence permit for Ethiopia through the Derg

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government, renewed her Jamaican passport and was issued a tourist visa to enter the United Kingdom. With the help of Rastafari of many nationalities in a British metropolis, Bernice worked odd jobs, doing domestic and care work primarily, until she acquired residency. This status brought new entitlements to state housing and medical care, for instance. And while Bernice continued to work full-time in the “care industry,” she was able to move across international borders again and to finally visit her family regularly in Shashamane. Within the context of spiritual repatriation, these patterns of emigration from the South to the North appear as well as a Rastafari commitment to maintaining both immediate families and the Rastafari community on the symbolic land grant. There are also Rastawomen who repatriated with their husbands in 1970s and shortly thereafter left Ethiopia permanently either to return to their natal countries in the Caribbean or migration destinations in the Global North. As well, there are Rastafari women from the United Kingdom and the United States who reside for specified periods of time in Shashamane and abroad. When they do private short-term administrative or care work in the United Kingdom, for instance, this income is supplemented by social security programmes such as a pension or rent-controlled housing in their Northern homes. This helps to provide financially for families in Ethiopia thereby extending the household translocally. In the next section I will turn to the broader interconnections of community and yard.

6.6   Being Rooted: Locating Identities in Time and Space In building up an image of the yard, issues of identity and symbolic-­ material linkages feature significantly. The sociocultural changes and continuities previously described link to Clifford’s critique of the rootedness of culture and therefore identity in anthropology. As an identity category and as an everyday expression of belonging, the fluid embodiment of Rastafari, Ethiopian, Jamaican and faranj are imbued with ideas of entitlement, which most clearly emerge in conflicts over the land. From my observations, when local Ethiopians of various ethnicities say “Jamaican” or “Rasta” in everyday conversation, it is culturally juxtaposed with

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“Ethiopian” and coded as faranj. Among local Ethiopians too, “Ethiopian” is juxtaposed to a hegemonic Ethiopian identity as “Habesha.” From a local Ethiopian perspective, Rastafari are not only faranj but also territorially “uprooted” from their homes in the Caribbean—unable to prove Ethiopian ancestry. Consequently, claims to land, especially land that was historically granted by a deposed Ethiopian emperor, are seen as null. If “culture” is equated with fixity, then “uprooted” people are seen as having lost culture: “violated, broken roots signal an ailing cultural identity and a damaged nationality” (Malkki 1995, 15). Within Rastafari worldview, however, Rastafari are historically tied to Ethiopia, and this specific space in Shashamane. Rastafari also actively create home through the yard and its kin networks, thereby “rooting” themselves within present-­day Ethiopia. Despite the dispossession, the land grant symbolises dignity, recognition of black and Ethiopian identities and equality for Rastafari globally, as I described in previous chapters. In this moral landscape, the tension between Rastafari and local Ethiopians around the land is noticeable in stories, remarks and anecdotes that circulate in Shashamane. As Giulia Bonacci (2015) notes, two of the terms given to early (at that time non-­ Rastafari) Ethiopian World Federation settlers, “sädätäñña färänjoch” and “balabbat,” which mean foreigners and landowners, provide insight into local attitudes, state classifications of repatriates and social inequality. Used in written sources in 1959, Bonacci argues that the term “sädätäñña färänjoch” characterised repatriates as not only “different” from locals and hence faranj but also different from white European faranjoch (the plural of faranj) who lived in Ethiopia. “Sēdätäñña expresses agency and means refugee, immigrant or emigrant … sēdätäñña färänj … identified them as coming from elsewhere like the färänjočc,̌ but they were also perceived as migrants and refugees in Ethiopia where they were planting new roots” (Bonacci 2015, 40–41). She continues, “They were not white but some of their everyday practices were seen as such – or simply as different. They talked English, drove a car, were sometimes dressed in suit, tie and hat, cooked standing, and ate with knives and forks” (Bonacci 2015, 40). This excerpt demonstrates that the present-day attitude towards black Rastafari as faranj was nuanced in the past. When the first repatriates arrived, local Ethiopians recognised their difference from preceding white and European settlers. However, these “migrants” had a privileged position as recipients of land. In the imperial period, gult land tenure practices meant that landowners and labourers were of different strata. In

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Shashamane, these initial settlers took on the role of landowners (balabbat). In imperial Ethiopia, following the conquest of independent southern territories and incorporation into the Empire, “balabbat” were typically local residents who were granted lands and administrative authority. “It is only because they were beneficiaries of imperial politics over southern lands that the Caribbean settlers were named balabbat by their neighbors” (Bonacci 2015, 42). Although this term is no longer used in post-imperial Ethiopia, especially following the 1974 revolution and subsequent changes in governance and land tenure, these historical terms indicated the variable status of early non-Rastafari repatriates. The changing local perceptions of non-Rastafari settlers and Rastafari repatriates around access to and ownership of land manifest in what MacLeod refers to as a widely circulated story in Shashamane, in which the imperial state granted Rastafari land to spy on Oromo residents either as “punishment” or a form of intimidation (2014, 101). These negative rumours and stories circulate within the Jamaica Safar while at the same time repatriated Rastafari and multi-ethnic locals interact daily. Whether buying food in the local ketema market, subjected to increasing prices, through intermarriage and childbearing, attending school or participating in community savings schemes, there is constant communication, support as well as conflict in institutional and everyday spheres among these “locals” and “migrants.” However, MacLeod (2014) suggests that changing perceptions of social space, and of claims and entitlements to land in Shashamane between local Ethiopians and Rastafari, can be interrogated in terms of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space as lived and perceived. In twenty-first-century Shashamane, local political projects for the development of the city emphasise “the practical, economical, financial, and developmental side - the perceived space.” MacLeod writes in explaining the difference in perceptions of space between the developmental state and Rastafari that the latter “are using what could be called old maps to locate their space” (MacLeod 2014, 111–112). This creates dissensus in how the space is lived between Rastafari, local Ethiopian residents and the contemporary state. Although acknowledging the inter-relation between ideological underpinnings and the use of public space in social interaction in Shashamane, MacLeod’s relegation of “old maps” to assess Rastafari imaginative selfand place-making is limited. Rather, as Miriam Kahn writes, “Places are complex constructions of social histories, personal and interpersonal

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experiences, and selective memory” (Kahn 1996, 167). This applies to the wider spaces of the Jamaica Safar, ketema as well as the household. The impacts of diverse and diverging conceptions of place are observable in the changing status of Rastafari and initial repatriates as foreigners, landowners, refugees and Ethiopians, with the development of kin relations as well as in conflicts with kin and neighbours. These behaviours indicate that issues of social reproduction, kinship and cultural change are pertinent. Through a discussion of the making of a Rastafari yard in Shashamane, I have attempted to highlight how Rastafari emplace themselves on an everyday basis, and how the social identities of Rastafari or Ethiopian are useful inter-connected strands to consider. With focused examples from two intercultural Rastafari-local Ethiopian households, I highlighted the factors deployed in categorising a yard versus a beit, even while recognising the similarities between these households, such as in a sexual division of labour. The symbolism of the land grant for Rastafari globally and cultural-­ material issues that shape the yard resonate with how place is sensed and the house itself is experienced and made by different actors. The house and neighbourhood continue to be important loci of socialisation as well as individual attitudes, thereby extending the discussion of kinship and relatedness to those with whom we live and build relationships locally and translocally, which has been a feature of Caribbean kinship. This feature is especially important for Rastafari, who are categorised as “foreign nationals” even as they claim rights within present-day Ethiopia.

Notes 1. An example of the counter-analysis to the represented fixity of typical ethnographies of “native” groups (as if such sedentary groups existed) is Janet Carsten’s ethnography with residents of a Malay fishing village, Langkawi. This ethnography demonstrated the interconnections of physical and social mobility. “Although the community can be seen as modelled on the house,” Carsten writes, “it is also true that in many respects relations between houses in the wider neighbourhood contrast with those within them. Instead of a sharing of consumption, resources and labour based on principles of hierarchy, houses in the wider community are involved in directly reciprocal exchanges which are conceived as occurring on an equal basis” (1995, 118). 2. More accurately, Tirunesh owns the house with the title deed in her name as she is an Ethiopian citizen unlike Matthew.

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3. “Kitchen garden” is a term commonly used for food that is grown to be eaten in the household, such as vegetables and spices, as compared to non-­ edible plants. 4. Whether there are workers to cut the grass, plant flowers and vegetables, and tend to it are other considerations. 5. Naming practices in Ethiopia mean that the father’s first name is adopted as the child’s surname. 6. Women’s shaming also extends to the transmission of sexually transmitted infections, such as HIV/AIDS.  It is women, rather than men, who are framed as sexually and morally “loose” in line with ideals of women’s chastity versus men’s promiscuity which is admired. 7. In line with the time allotted on their entry visas for Ethiopia.

References Anderson, Bridget. 2000. Doing the Dirty Work?: The Global Politics of Domestic Labour. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Barriteau, Eudine V. 2001. The Political Economy of Gender in the Twentieth Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Barrow, Christine. 1996. Family in the Caribbean: Themes and Perspectives. Kingston/Oxford: Ian Randle/James Currey. Barth, Frederik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Long Grove: Waveland Press. Berhane Selassie, Tsehai. 1997. Ethiopian Rural Women and the State. In African Feminism: the Politics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Gwendolyn Mikell. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bonacci, Giulia. 2015. Exodus!: Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia. Trans. Antoinette Tidjani Alou. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Boserup, Ester. 1970. Woman’s Role in Economic Development. London: Earthscan. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1970. The Berber House or The World Reversed. Social Science Information 9 (2): 151–170. Carsten, Janet. 2000. ‘Knowing Where You’ve Come from’: Ruptures and Continuities of Time and Kinship in Narratives of Adoption Reunions. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6 (4): 687–703. https://doi. org/10.1111/1467-­9655.00040. Carsten, Janet, and Stephen Hugh-Jones. 1995. About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chamberlain, Mary. 1998. Caribbean Migration: Globalized Identity. London: Macmillan. Chevannes, Barry. 2001. Learning to Be a Man: Culture, Socialization and Gender Identity in Five Caribbean Communities. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press.

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Clarke, Edith. 1966. My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study of the Family in Three Selected Communities in Jamaica. London: Humanities George. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davenport, William. 1961. The Family System of Jamaica. Social and Economic Studies 10 (4): 420–454. DeRegt, Marina. 2010. Ways to Come, Ways to Leave: Gender, Mobility, and Legality among Ethiopian Domestic Workers in Yemen. Gender and Society 24 (2): 237–260. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243209360358. Douglas, Mary. 1992. Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge. Eriksen, Thomas, and Finn Nielsen. 2001. A History of Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. Fletcher-Anthony, Wilma, Kerri-Ann Smith, and Mala Jokhan. 2018. Transnational West Indian Mothers: Narratives of Parent-Child Separation and Subsequent Reunification Abroad. The Global South 12 (1): 14–30. Fog Olwig, Karen. 1993. Defining the National in the Transnational: Cultural Identity in the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora. Ethnos 58 (3-4): 361–376. ———. 2007. Caribbean Journeys: An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Forde, Maarit. 2011. Modes of Transnational Relatedness: Caribbean Migrants’ Networks of Child Care and Ritual Kinship. In Everyday Ruptures: Children, Youth, and Migration in Global Perspective, ed. Deborah Boehm, Julia Hess, Cati Coe, Heather Rae-Esoinoza, and Rachel Reynolds, 79–96. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Freeman, Carla. 2000. High Tech and High Heels. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2014. Entrepreneurial selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class. Durham: Duke University Press. Glazier, Stephen. 2006. Being and Becoming a Rastafarian: Notes on the Anthropology of Religious Conversion. In Rastafari: A Universal Philosophy in the Third Millennium, ed. Werner Zips, 256–281. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers. Gomes, Shelene. 2017. Meseret’s Story: Women, Work and Betterment in an Ethiopia-Saudi Arabia Return Labor Migration. African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 11 (1): 51–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/1752863 1.2017.1342981. Gonzalez, Nancie. 1969. Black Carib Household Structure: A Study of Migration and Modernisation. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Goulbourne, Henry. 2002. Caribbean Transnational Experience. London: Pluto Press. Henriques, Fernando. 1949. West Indian Family Organization. American Journal of Sociology 55 (1): 30–37.

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Ho, Christine. 1993. The Internationalization of Kinship and the Feminization of Caribbean Migration: The Case of Afro-Trinidadian Immigrants in Los Angeles. Human Organization 52 (1): 32–40. Hochschild, Arlie. 1989. The Second Shift. New York: Viking Adult. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 2001. Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press. Horst, Heather. 2011. Reclaiming Place: The Architecture of Home, Family and Migration. Acta Anthropologica 53 (1): 29–39. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Kahn, Miriam. 1996. Your Place and Mine: Sharing Emotional Landscapes in Wamira, Papua New Guinea. In Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, 167–196. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Katzin, Margaret Fisher. 1959. Higglers of Jamaica. PhD dissertation, Northwestern University. Kifetew, Konjit. 2006. Gender and Cross Cultural Dynamics in Ethiopia. Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 68: 122–127. Lutz, Helma. 2011. The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy. London: Zed Books. MacLeod, Erin. 2014. Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land. New York: New York University Press. Makiesky-Barrow, Susan. 1976. Class, Culture and Politics in a Barbadian Community. PhD dissertation, Brandeis University. Malkki, Liisa. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Mies, Maria. 1982. The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market. London: Zed Press. ———. 1986. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women and the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books. Mintz, Sidney. 1989. Caribbean Transformations. New York: Columbia University Press Morningside Edition. Mohammed, Patricia. 2002. Gender Negotiations Among Indians in Trinidad, 1917–1947. New York: Palgrave. Moser, Caroline. 1993. Gender Planning and Development. London: Routledge. Parreñas, Rhacel. 2005. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rubenstein, Hymie. 1987. Coping with Poverty: Adaptive Strategies in a Caribbean Village. Boulder: Westview Press. Sassen, Saskia. 1988. The Mobility of Labour and Capital. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: The New Press.

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Schneider, David. 1980. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Raymond T. 1956. The Negro Family in British Guiana. London: Routledge. Smith, Michael Garfield. 1962. West Indian Family Structure. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Smith, Raymond T. 1988. Kinship and Class in the West Indies: A Genealogical Study of Jamaica and Guyana. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Tafari-Ama, Imani. 1998. Rasta Woman as Rebel. In Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader, ed. Nathaniel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony McFarlane. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ulysse, Gina. 2007. Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-Making in Jamaica. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wardle, Huon. 2002. Ambiguation, Disjuncture, Commitment: A Social Analysis of Caribbean Cultural Creativity. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8 (3): 493–508. Wilson, Peter. 1973. Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro Societies of the Caribbean. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Rastafari Citizen-Subjectivities

7.1   Modes of Belonging On most days I walked along the new road in the Jamaica Safar and often passed by Brother Peter. I would not characterise our relationship as particularly close, but we shared greetings regularly and had exchanged ideas on occasion. One day, however, he abruptly stopped me in the searing midday sun and began to speak earnestly about the need for proper and effective diplomatic representation for the Rastafari community. I did not know what, if any, particular events from the previous day could have brought on this concern, but I presumed that Brother Peter must have recently had a discussion about legality with a state official or a lay person. “We Rasta people need some kind of legal or diplomatic representation to get papers for the land where the pickney [children] dem a grow so dem could become legal,” he insisted. Peter explained that this would ensure that repatriates and youths have some measure of “protection.” Repatriates’ children, especially those “who don’t know babylon” (here referring to Jamaica and the West), in Peter’s words, would be able to inherit the houses where they grew up, and continue to live on the land grant without the ever-present possibility of eviction, imprisonment or deportation. At that time, I was a well-educated though unemployed student who could potentially “assist the community,” as repatriates would say. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gomes, Cosmopolitanism from the Global South, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82272-9_7

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Brother Peter’s emphasis on trying to secure a legal certainty for the younger generation to enhance Rastafari stability was partly derived from being a father who anticipated upcoming struggles. While he had achieved repatriation to Ethiopia, Peter conveyed that he wanted to leave an inheritance for his children, especially one that would leave them materially and spiritually better off than himself. From my conversations with other Rastafari, Peter’s concerns were widely shared. Guided by a desire to see a continued Rasta presence on the land grant, these goals for future generations hinge on gaining legal residency or citizenship in the state of Ethiopia or at least documentation of house ownership, such as a title deed or carta.1 This anecdote was emblematic of Rastafari sustained concerns around legal status as well as the material components of this symbolic and spiritually motivated return. In this final chapter I therefore detail how Rastafari carve out new citizen-subjectivities in the local spaces of the Jamaica Safar, within the regional boundaries of Oromiyya state and the Ethiopian federal state. How do repatriates and youths experience and embody diverse modes of belonging while living as “undocumented migrants?” How are efforts towards spiritual and material freedom obstructed by this status? In focusing on everyday interactions and specific events between Rastafari and persons in differing positions of power and authority in local and state institutions, I demonstrate dialectical modes of belonging. When I refer to subjectivities, it is precisely this interaction between Rastafari ideas and the structural categories into which they are fit, pivoting on ideas and expressions of belonging. The main concerns that repatriates and Ethiopian-born youths expressed to me were acquiring “papers,” meaning title deeds to family houses and gaining citizenship to be eligible for an Ethiopian passport or residency. Another concern was the return of land that was initially granted. Many early repatriates focused more on the first since these family houses are envisioned as a material legacy. Some repatriates built these houses and they hope to remain there until death when, ideally, the houses will be inherited by their children. The adult children of repatriates highlighted their lack of residency rights or citizenship. These are potential barriers to legally earning a good living to support their own families, in particular their own children, spouses and younger siblings and eventually also to support their parents in old age. They spoke too of a hope that parents would eventually acquire papers for family yards. These discussions all echo some aspect of claiming place and sentiments of belonging revolving around the legal and

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accompanying socioeconomic concerns felt by repatriates and their children, but cannot be reduced solely to issues of legality in light of this spiritual repatriation. This undocumented status has changed recently for some first- and second-generation Rastafari. Following years of multilateral discussions, in 2017 the Ethiopian government declared that Rastafari would be eligible to apply for national identification (ID) cards of the same type given to other locals.2 The typical fees associated with tourist or business visas that Rastafari had not renewed would be waived by the state as well as fines for residing in Ethiopia without permission. However, applicants had to hold a valid passport. For many Rastafari whose passports had expired, this requirement was an insurmountable challenge. For example, a Sister who had arrived in Shashamane almost 15 years ago explained to me that she had not renewed her passport since then. Settling in Shashamane meant overstaying her tourist entry visa to Ethiopia. Machine-readable passports for her country of citizenship, Trinidad and Tobago, were being issued, but there was no embassy in Ethiopia and each applicant had to appear in person. The Sister had none of the required documentation to even attempt leaving Ethiopia for nearby Uganda or South Africa where the diplomatic missions were located. She was therefore unable to apply for an identification card. For Rastafari who can afford to apply for passports, however, this ID comes with the benefits of Ethiopian residence. The first one was issued in 2018 (Beyecha 2018, 93). While in principle Rastafari can now travel internationally—exiting and entering Ethiopia legally—many Rastafari cannot do so in practice. A critical approach to citizenship helps to elucidate these complex conceptual and lived experiences within this repatriation context. In raising questions of belonging for diasporic Caribbeans in Ethiopia, positioning modes of belonging within creole imaginings and West Indian sociality remain important concerns. To help in connecting and developing these linkages, which I raised in the introductory chapter, I draw from Michaeline Crichlow’s notion of “citizenness.” By citizenness, Crichlow means “the struggle for humanity, dignity, economic survival, a place in and through the world economy, in short, all the interrelated processes that implicate the ‘flight to modernity,’ a rehoming of place, and the development of a creole identity.” She adds that citizenness occurs “within and across power relations” (2009, 77–78). This concept usefully bridges a gap between what is ideologically true for Rastafari and their existing legal status. It also positions Rastafari ideology in the rise of late industrial capitalism and modernity.

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In Crichlow’s discussion of creolisation and place-making, she suggests that “homing” is one facet of the dialectic of “fleeing” and “homing.” Citizenness expands the analysis of the place and space of the plantation in the West Indies to include agency and imagination as well as tackling biopolitical technologies of power (see Foucault 1979). One component of “citizenness” in other words includes “the right to have rights,” to use Arendt’s well-known phrase, and “to be recognized as full persons … and hence as full citizens” (Kabeer 2005, 4). Rastafari demand these rights within the Ethiopian state while redefining Ethiopian nationhood. Citizenness therefore encompasses a range of criteria for the formation of political rights, civic participation and conceptual belonging to the nation—a nation composed of members in a shared, (un)equally constituted “community.” For repatriates and Ethiopian-born children, becoming a citizen incorporates more than these criteria—from the conceptual belonging to the nation of Ethiopia to claims of belonging to local places as well as the expectation of social acceptance and better lives in the promised land—even while Rastafari maintain their cultural and ideological difference. This emic approach is more congruent with conceptualisations of flexible citizenship (Ong 1999) and spiritual citizenship (Castor 2017). Regarding the latter, in discussing Ifa/Orisha practitioners in Trinidad and their transnational spiritual networks across the Caribbean, the Americas and West Africa, N. Fadeke Castor argues that one limitation of Aihwa Ong’s notion of cultural citizenship is its lack of challenge to liberal concepts of citizenship. Instead, Castor suggests “what is at stake in an emergent spiritual citizenship [is]: the freedom to construct liberated subjectivities that radically imagine (by going outside of strictly Western thought) ways of belonging, being, and becoming” (2017, 13). I suggest that Rastafari also “construct liberated subjectivities” within constraining and constrained material conditions that I examine here in terms of the inter-linked issues of legal status and property ownership. In the coming sections, I briefly review debates on citizenship before delving into ethnographic examples of “citizenness” in Shashamane. Out of her ethnography of elite Chinese entrepreneurial families’ transnational lives, Ong defines flexible citizenship as “the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions” (Ong 1999, 6). Interrogating “human practices and cultural logics,” she demonstrates how these elites situate themselves materially, geographically

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and politically “in relation to markets, governments and cultural regimes” within globalisation (Fox 2005, 189). In contrast to this discussion of flexible citizenship, Jonathan Fox points to Bruno Frey’s (2003) “dramatically different approach to “flexible citizenship” … in which Frey develops “the concept of “organizational and marginal” citizenship, in an effort to account for multiple and partial kinds of rights and obligation-based participation in a wide range of formal institutions” (Fox 2005, 190). Clearly, citizenship entails substantially more than legal status. It involves obligations to and concern for relatives, as well as individual and familial goals for increased capital and social capital, which, in turn, ensure greater flexibility in decision making. I delineate these goals for Rastafari as they work towards varying degrees of citizenness in this locale.

7.2   The Legal Face of Citizenship In an interview with Sister Anna who fully repatriated to Shashamane in 2006 after visiting regularly over the previous ten years, I asked about her citizenship and residency status. She replied, “I’m an American citizen … but I’m still a citizen of Jamaica because my country gives dual citizenship. In Africa I’m from Jamaica. When trouble hits, I’m an American,” she responded with a slight laugh. In Ethiopia she has a residence permit. Anna explained that her business permit in Ethiopia entitles her to a conditionally issued annual residence permit. Provided that officials at the Investment Bureau in Addis Ababa are satisfied with the revenue of her business, their counterparts at Immigration will renew her residence permit “without a hassle,” she continued. Renewing both permits up to 2015 had been mostly hassle-free, because the government was trying to encourage “foreign investment,” Anna clarified. However, for Rastafari who are economically unable to demonstrate access to a minimum of US$50,000 start-up capital for a business (http://www.investethiopia.gov.et/ investment-­process/starting-­a-­business), there is no alternative route to attaining legal residency. Sister Anna’s concise, clearly articulated responses capture her practical approach to living in Ethiopia, exemplifying her flexible tactics to ensure wellbeing. Anna combines her desire and determination to make a life for herself in Shashamane, and to “build up the community,” as Rastafari commonly say, as well as addressing her concerns about safety with the volatility of internal Ethiopian politics. The decision to retain her American

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citizenship ensures that she can move relatively unrestrictedly between Ethiopia and the United States, where she lived for most of her adult life, and to Jamaica and Britain where her mother and other relatives reside. She uses citizenship in the wealthy state of the United States to circumvent restrictions on cross-border movements. These documents enable Anna to travel frequently across the Global North and South, demonstrating how national subjects may use state-issued identification documents or other state devices of surveillance in ways that challenge their purpose of inscription. The passport itself has become one of the most effective methods of controlling movement and its means as well as surveillance, which is central to the ethos and functioning of the state. Digital surveillance extends this functioning: The migrant is also at the root of a surveillance culture, which ICT extends largely beyond national territories in both its hard version (retention centers) and its soft version (electronic surveillance via databases for visa applications and entry). The ‘technologization’ of border controls has led to the actual transformation of their nature. (Diminescu 2008, no page)

Sister Anna, who is not a citizen of Ethiopia, and is a contested Ethiopian national subject, uses these codified icons of belonging to her advantage. Her Jamaican and American passports and conditionally issued Ethiopian residence permit allow her to navigate through obligations, responsibilities and goals. These include building a business in Shashamane with the long-term goal of bettering herself and the community while actively maintaining relations with relatives and Rastafari outernationally. Additionally, Anna’s legal citizenship provides a measure of reassurance if there is an unfortunate escalation of Ethiopian internal conflict. Although she has arrived in this sacred land, she is aware of the potential for clashes among armed groups in Ethiopia. Prior to the 2018 election of Abiy Ahmed, the first Oromo chairman of the EPRDF, Oromo groups categorised as terrorist or rebel groups were one among many oppositions. The recent political, if not economic, reforms have also brought new factionalisms.3 Relatedly, more recent residence types of seasonal repatriation and post-repatriation migration are examples of similar ways that Rastafari use their citizenship advantageously. In this way Anna, who lives in the state of Ethiopia, and views herself as Ethiopian, African, Jamaican and West Indian, persistently builds a life for herself and her family in Shashamane. For repatriates who hold dual citizenship in typical Anglo-Caribbean

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migrant destinations such as the United Kingdom and the United States, or who have renounced their citizenship of birth to become citizens in states of the Global North, this is an advantage which facilitates their movements across national borders. Repatriates who retain their citizenship in countries of the Global South though must constantly apply for tourist visas and fulfil increasingly restrictive immigration requirements of various developed states, processes which make their movements between Ethiopia and foreign more difficult. As Nina Glick Schiller and Noel B. Salazar note, “regimes of mobility” function even within globalisation, reproducing differential cross-border movements, constraints and accessibilities (2013). Almost all repatriates retain their initial citizenship while living in Ethiopia, because they wish to or for necessity. Those who moved during the second period of organised repatriation in the 1970s also explained that they wanted their children to inherit their citizenship, primarily to avoid mandatory drafting of sons into the defence force. That was the only advantage, especially in the time following the 1974 revolution.4 Parents applied for national passports from their countries of citizenship, like Jamaica, for both sons and daughters, whereas other parents simply never applied. Many of those passports have since expired. There are Rastafari who would like to become citizens of Ethiopia, however, for various reasons that I will discuss, but the few who applied were unsuccessful. I did meet one repatriate who had successfully applied during Derg rule when he was a farmer. Bonacci (2015, 374) names three Rastafari repatriates who acquired Ethiopian nationality by “imperial decree” prior to the revolution. MacLeod (2014, 194) also relates that one Rastawoman from Europe was given citizenship or residence by special dispensation. These examples are exceptional, as citizenship can be applied for only based on lineage or marriage (Constitution 1995). Ten years ago, a repatriated Sister also explained that to apply for citizenship, an applicant is required to show proof of employment, a minimum amount of funds, knowledge of Amharic and possibly knowledge of national history. Even though she had proof that she met these requirements, this Sister was unable to speak Amharic at the required level, and therefore did not apply. However, even for Rastafari who meet these criteria, actually getting past the gatekeepers to sit in a room with an official and undergoing the requisite interview is a significant obstacle to applying for citizenship. This was evident in the stories of Rastafari youths who were born in Ethiopia.

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7.3   The Generation Born on the Land Grant With this precarious and diverse situation regarding residence permission and citizenship among Rastafari repatriates, it is not surprising that children have inherited these challenges. Children who do hold passports have their foreign parent’s citizenship of Trinidad and Tobago or Jamaica, for example. Most do not have passports and have consequently never travelled outside Ethiopia. In the case of the Jamaican state, citizenship via certification policy allows persons born of Jamaican parents or grandparents to apply for citizenship without currently residing or previously having resided in the country (jis.gov.jm). The Consulate of Jamaica in Addis Ababa is authorised by the Jamaican government to address new passport applications or renewals, which are then sent to Kingston, Jamaica for processing.5 Repatriates may choose to initiate this process directly through the Passport, Citizenship and Immigration Agency of the Ministry of National Security in Jamaica instead of applying through the Honorary Consul in Addis Ababa. These passports must be held in conjunction with forms of local identification which are generally quite accessible. Each repatriate and youth with whom I spoke held an identification card from the kebele and a handful of youths had valid Ethiopian driver’s licences though few held national residence permits. At the age of 18, one is supposed to apply for permission to reside from the Ethiopian government separately instead of as a dependent of a parent. Without such nationally issued identification, the result of the state requirement for each person to be documented, repatriates and their children would be unable to complete mundane activities like connecting electricity and water services to a house as well as activities that lead to betterment such as enrolling in school and registering for national examinations. In this case, the local kebele ID serves this purpose. On a practical level, possessing an Ethiopian passport enables an individual to access jobs or opportunities that lead to betterment which are reserved for or are more accessible to Ethiopian citizens. As foreign nationals, youths become ineligible for jobs in the public sector, for example, in government administration or in international organisations such as United Nations agencies that reserve certain administrative and service posts for nationals. I knew only of one youth born in Shashamane of repatriate parents who worked for a government-owned business. Aware of these limitations, some youths whose parents are documented have

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attempted to apply for Ethiopian citizenship. They described their thwarted experiences when officials at the Office of Immigration “turned dem away” refusing even to share the application form. These youths were deemed ineligible to apply for Ethiopian citizenship by these gatekeepers, and most never reached the application stage. In 2018 these circumstances changed and young people who could afford to meet the costs were able to re-apply for residence permission. According to officials a decade prior at the Main Department of Immigration and Nationality Affairs in Addis Ababa, only a person who can be categorised as Ethiopian “by origin” or “by marriage” can apply for citizenship. By origin entails having an ancestor who was born in the territory of Ethiopia, and this biological relationship must be proved with a legal document, such as a birth certificate. By marriage means that the applicant’s spouse must be an Ethiopian citizen, and this must be demonstrated with a legal marriage certificate.6 Rastafari regularly confront officials who stymie their access to these rights at not only the federal but also the kebele levels. While the kebele may be more straightforward to navigate with the greater familiarity between Rastafari and local officials, the federal institutions are more insurmountable. Accordingly, the office of immigration becomes symbolic of the archetypal oppressing system. For Rastafari, “dem at Immigration” is yet another encounter with babylon. The word “immigration” becomes imbued with resonances of intimidation that Rastafari feel, and their resulting derision when they must repeatedly present themselves at the immigration office or to “face the courts.” The latter occurs when repatriates are legally required at the federal level to explain their reasons for lapsing on the annual renewal of the residence permit for themselves or their dependents, and when Rastafari visitors to Shashamane overstay their tourist visas. While the Ethiopian-born children of repatriates have been born on the land grant, thereby escaping the babylonian captivity of their parents’ lives in the Caribbean, as Brother Peter pointed out, they confront new structures in the form of institutions that reproduce this dynamic of babylonian oppression, which threaten spiritual and material betterment. The presence of Immigration is pervasive: it filters through stories told and re-told, even though many Rastafari do not physically travel to the immigration offices in Addis Ababa or Hawassa or travel internationally. As a foreigner living in Ethiopia for one year while I conducted fieldwork, and later when I worked there, I also had the experience of presenting myself at Immigration. When my visa was about to expire during my

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residence in Shashamane, Rastafari encouraged me to apply for a new one rather than allowing it to lapse, as they did, to avoid the possibility of being fined or imprisoned for staying in the country “illegally.” While no one whom I knew was deported, those found guilty in court of overstaying visas had been fined and/or imprisoned in Ethiopia. Shortly after I completed fieldwork in 2009, I learnt that a repatriate couple from Trinidad and Tobago had attempted to enter Kenya as a transit point to return to the Caribbean as citizens of Trinidad and Tobago are permitted visa-free entrance. However, they were imprisoned at the Ethiopian border due to lack of Ethiopian immigration documents. Up to 2015 there was no further news of their situation. ‘Illegality’ is a status of which Rastafari are constantly aware, which brings economic and psychological implications. These include the direct consequences of imprisonment, fining and deportation, long-term consequences associated with inability to expand businesses or private houses as well as feelings of rejection and exclusion in their home—the only home that Ethiopian-born youths experientially know. This undocumented status affects everyday situations, and its impacts are registered in every aspect of Rastafari lives. It not only impedes opportunities for acquiring work in the formal economy, but also has the potential to curtail other prospects towards improvement, as evidenced in an example regarding education. The following is an edited paragraph from my fieldnotes when high school students and their families heard through word of mouth that examination results and government-assigned university placements were released: Mariah and Thomas went to school to find out their university assignments, but when they came back in the afternoon Mariah said that their names were not on the list. She thinks the computer did not register their names since they are not Ethiopian names because none of their Jamaican friends’ names were on the list either. Trisha also told me the same thing, that “none of the Jamaicans” showed up on the list. I was struck by how blasé these young people were when they appeared at the yard without their highly anticipated university assignments. Knowing that their local Ethiopian friends had received this information, I was concerned and even asked one Brother who had similar experiences with his older children if they should travel to the Ministry of Education in Addis Ababa the following day, a weekday, with an adult to enquire about their results. He calmly replied that this would be unnecessary since this sort of

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uncertainty is frequent. Eventually, between the school and the government office, this problem would be solved. These kinds of situation often arise with “Jamaican youths,” but it will work out since the students were registered for the exam and the school has proof of this, he reassured me. Over the next three days these graduates and their parents persistently called the principal of their private high school as well as the Ministry of Education and, speaking interchangeably in Amharic and English with registration cards at hand, received a favourable result. The youths were allocated spots in assigned university programmes where they would read for a Bachelor’s degree, without paying tuition at that time. Only upon graduation would they be required to re-pay a portion of tuition fees or work for a state organisation, per the government’s cost-sharing programme. Although this situation was resolved to their advantage, there was the potential to hinder their access to government-subsidised tertiary education that would be difficult, though not impossible, to otherwise access with their families’ finances and contributions from Rastafari in foreign.

Ethiopian citizenship mitigates against this sort of systemic neglect, and the harrowing psycho-social consequences. Holding an Ethiopian passport for the children who were born and bred in Shashamane is not only a practical means towards improvement. The passport symbolises the holder’s legitimacy within the Ethiopian nation.

7.4   The Passport: Inclusion and Exclusion Nations may be imagined in the influential conceptualisation by Anderson (1983) but belonging is also codified in the passport. This “thing” symbolises inclusion and exclusion (Appadurai 1986). Carrying a passport with the words Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia embossed on the cover in English and Amharic has great emotional significance for many. This affect does not take the same form for repatriates since their childhood memories are located in the Caribbean. By contrast, their children’s memories are centred on particular sites in the safar, Shashamane town, and other locations in Ethiopia that become conflated with Ethiopian nationality in the object of the passport. Rastafari generally perceive the actions of the federal government towards the community as a complacent neglect (see also MacLeod 2014, 198–199). They have not been “kicked out” of the country, as Rastafari

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explain, but the government had not helped this community to acquire residency rights or citizenship, at least until 2018. In fact, these applications were directly rejected when Rastafari enquire or apply. These actions have changed over the past couple years with the government agreement that Ethiopian-born Rastafari with international parents can apply for local Ethiopian IDs. Between the imperial period, which ended in 1974, and 2018, this situation had changed. His Majesty’s rule is viewed partly as a utopian period or at least an “easier” time because repatriates were confident that they would be well-treated by neighbours since they were “invited” to Shashamane, as Brother Nelson reminded me. Following the revolution, long-term residents who repatriated in the 1970s during Derg governance describe government policies regarding land distribution and land use as harsh, necessary, and fair all at the same time. These policies and programmes such as villagisation were intended to ensure a stable food source for the country and equitable land distribution for the masses, as compared to the elite who were the landholders. As one long-resident Brother bluntly phrased it, the principle behind the policies was meant to make sure that “every man [farmer] who grew food for the country [for the elites and for export] had food to eat too.” This repatriate attitude to the Derg contradicts the one-dimensional image presented by the current Ethiopian government of Derg rule as merely tyrannical since it was guided by communist policies. There is an implied affinity in this repatriate view between the communalism that has tended to guide Rastafari worldview with the politics of the Derg period, even if the resulting redistribution of land hindered Rastafari aims regarding the land grant.7 The next government was headed by Meles Zenawi and supported mainly by the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF) and a coalition of interest groups that formed the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). This government is predominantly seen and discussed among repatriates and Ethiopian-born children with both contempt and ridicule as well as hope. This attitude stems from a distinctly Rastafari perspective on politricks but it is also specific to the repatriate context. The current government at the time of writing in early 2020 has facilitated a significant change in Rastafari legal status, at least for those born in Ethiopia. In principle, this change was meant to facilitate Rastafari development initiatives for both Shashamane and the Rastafari community.

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7.5   Local Development In referring to local development, I draw upon Rastafari experiences rather than development models to discuss how the issues of land use and house ownership in particular affect Rastafari plans for development. There has been considerable development in Shashamane since Brother David arrived, particularly in the last decade. The town has recently been connected by a new asphalt paved road to the main highway from Addis Ababa. This road, called the “King’s highway” in English, connects Shashamane with other Ethiopian towns and southern Africa. The area at the side of both the old road and the new road is called the “front page” by English speakers. The highway that leads to Kenya in the south is interspersed with dirt roads leading into neighbourhoods built up with concrete and chika or mud houses inhabited by the emerging middle class as well as urban-based pastoralists of more modest means. On a smaller scale, the development plan for the city of Shashemene, known as the “Master Plan,” promotes increasing investment in financial, industrial and service sectors.8 It demands the “building up of the front page,” as Rastafari say, with highly visible multi-storied buildings (Boere et al. 2015). When long-resident repatriates speak about the land having been “empty” in the past, this is not the colonising view of the “empty” lands that were inhabited by indigenous peoples of the Americas, or more recently, of the Zionist-constructed “empty land” of Palestine. Instead, this reference implicitly compares a scarcely populated area in the 1950s and 1970s to increasing numbers of people at present settling in Shashamane, with the accompanying impacts on the landscape. Since the earliest repatriates moved to Shashamane in the 1950s, the area has urbanised through internal migration leading to demographic, infrastructural and economic changes (Bjeren 1985). In 1970 the town’s population was about 11,900 (Bjeren 1985, 86). As the Ethiopian population increased, so did Shashamane. In 2007, the year before I arrived, the population was about 100,000 according to the 2007 national census with the wider wereda approximately 246,000. Due to population movement and political restructuring, the periphery of Shashamane continues to change. At a national level, following the 1991 Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front-led coup d’état, Ethiopia was divided into “broadly decentralised ethnically based units called national regional states” (Adem 2004, 611). The towns of Shashamane and Melka Oda, for instance, are

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in Oromiyya Regional State since historically the largest population there were Oromo. The city of Hawassa, although only 25  km from Shashamane, falls within the State of Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR). On a smaller scale, the Master Plan for development in the city of Shashemene promotes increasing investment in financial, industrial and service sectors and demands the “building up of the front page,” as Rastafari say, with highly visible multi-storied buildings (Boere et al. 2015). One example of this ambivalent relation is the government’s plans for the development of Shashamane town and the local initiatives for Oromiyya Region. These plans, especially the “building up of the front page,” include encouraging foreign and local investment. This forms part of a wider project of attracting international investment to Ethiopia.9 In Shashamane these plans have been implemented in the areas of telecommunications and agriculture. Fibre optic cables for wireless internet were installed by a Chinese firm a decade ago and there were reports of 4G technology in 2015.10 It is well known that there are hundreds of acres of land available for lease in the nearby areas of Bale Goba and Wondo Genet for large-scale agricultural investment. There are resulting architectural changes that transform the landscape of Shashamane. For example, all residential and commercial buildings on the front page must now be at least two stories high. When Sister Anna started planning for her business, she was required to show that the structure would be at least two stories in order to get planning permission when she started four years ago. These plans affect all inhabitants of Shashamane. These top-down changes have impacted on how people make a living, their ability to hold onto land, and the location and size of each yard. In a direct example of these impacts, while I lived in Shashamane, kebele officials came around to each yard on the front page explaining that this new regulation had to be followed or the land would be forcibly taken without compensation to owners. In response to the potential threat of losing the land on which he built his simple chika (mud) home for himself and his family, Peter told me that he would prefer someone to purchase his house since it is on the front page and he cannot afford to extend the structure vertically. He would rather sell and get money that would enable him to rebuild somewhere else in the Jamaica Safar, than have the government confiscate his land without compensation. The implications of government initiatives also emerged clearly in a meeting in 2009, which I attended that a new kebele chairman convened

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especially for Rastafari who were not citizens of Ethiopia and lived in Kebele 01. This meeting was inundated with codes regarding relations and attitudes between repatriates and local authorities. The following is an edited selection from my fieldnotes: There was an introductory meeting between “Jamaicans” and the new chairman of the 01 kebele who grew up in the safar and is well known to Rasta people … Since his English does not seem to be very good the meeting was in Amharic with Brother James translating. There were five kebele officials there, including the new chair. He seemed quite sympathetic to Rasta people, and he emphasised the importance of filing official papers with the kebele for any reason – applying for a kebele identification card, starting a small business, registering residential land in children’s names, and registering children for their ID cards. Rastafari’s questions revolved around land since there is a rumour that the government will start taking away residential land in excess of the standard allocation for each house. Questions were asked about the fate of small businesses on residential land, how to ensure that children inherit the land, the allowed size of a residential plot, and if “planting the land” would avoid confiscation. The chairman said that a certain portion of the front page must be developed measuring from the new road inward, and that it is “mandatory” according to James’ translation. I wonder if this is a directive from the federal government? If anyone living on the front page cannot afford to build up as required at least they could come together and build on one plot, the chair suggested. But, in my opinion, this is a problem for many reasons. It means that people will still lose their individual plots and children of each family would not inherit their own yards … The chairman went on to say that children over 18 years old can lease land so if the size of a family’s yard goes over the allowed 250-500m2 they can put the extra land in their children’s names … After setting out their plans for increased community involvement in sports activities etc the chairman also expressed the hope that Rastas could become the 81st tribe of Ethiopia. This seems to me to be his own long-term goal.

This excerpt highlights the questions that Rastafari asked, which were guided by the central concern to acquire legal ownership of their houses and to retain their existing land. Compared to the chairman’s comments which were dominated by grandiose suggestions, though he did not neglect practical matters, questions by Rastafari revealed their diverse interests. However, one common concern was expressed. Every Rastafari man and woman who attended the meeting wanted a definitive answer

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about the government’s new initiatives regarding land. The prospective changes would affect each family’s occupancy of their home, the size of their yards or the small businesses established on their residential land. These new directives had circulated as rumours rather than as official statements. As I walked home from the meeting with neighbours, a long-­ resident Rastaman accounted for this lack of clarity, explaining that officials in these kebeles and in the Microbeit (Municipal Office) are frequently replaced. The new chairman’s future plans would most likely not come to fruition. Given their experiences, Rastafari have a degree of disregard towards local state-designated authority figures, even while they may know these persons as neighbours or acquaintances. Although Rastafari at the meeting appeared to dismiss such plans, I later heard the suggestion for ethnic group status being discussed by two young Ethiopian-born Rastafari women around 18  years from separate households whose parents had attended the meeting. They repeated the chairman’s comment, that Rastas “should become the 81st tribe of Ethiopia,” while we were liming in a group. At the time I opined that, despite the poor English translation that I (and repatriates who were not fully fluent in Amharic) had relied on, the chairman himself was not going to advocate for this official recognition from the federal government. The statement appeared to be more symbolic of his inclusive and flexible attitude towards his Rastafari neighbours who were foreign citizens, than suggestive of the beginning of an actual legal-political process. No actual suggestions for initiating the process were given. MacLeod (2009, 2014) does, however, note similar discussions among repatriates who were encouraged by local officials to petition the Ethiopian government for recognition as an “ethnic minority” within the parameters of the government’s policy of ethnic federalism.11 The parents who had attended the kebele meeting had evidently discussed the content of the meeting and the implications for residents with their older children. This seemingly trivial example also demonstrates the almost instantaneous transmission of information intergenerationally and laterally between youths. Lack of residency status and lack of title deeds are issues that are the foremost concerns not only for repatriated Rastafari, but for their locally born children as well. Outside of their more confrontational encounters with local authorities such as police officers, young people are constantly aware of and keep up to date with politricking or with events that impact on their legal status and wellbeing. This political

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consciousness is shared intergenerationally with repatriates, underscoring the shared legal status as well as the reproduction of symbolism. Late in 2009 after I left Shashamane, I learnt that kebele officials made another announcement. This time it was about the construction of a new road that would cut through about six adjoining plots of land so that each fence would need to be licked down. In the face of potentially losing the land on which their family houses sit, these families complied. Most repatriate houses are included in the Shashemene Master Plan which provides a measure of security. This suggests that, on some level, repatriate “ownership” of their houses is acknowledged by each kebele. Despite this, in Kebele 01 their concrete and barbed wire fences were demolished and rebuilt in accordance with changing local government specifications. When I returned to work in nearby Hawassa, a few short years later, I knew of two more repatriates who unofficially sold their land on the front page to local Ethiopians. By 2015, more Rastafari had sold land and title deeds again were issued to local Ethiopian spouses, and not to Rastafari. As of 2018, there had not been new title deeds issued directly to first- or second-generation Rastafari. Rastafari of varying ages also espouse “development” that both coheres with and diverges from the government rhetoric. Development refers to the physical improvement of infrastructure like roads and commercial buildings, their businesses and houses as well as opportunities specifically in the community such as improving and expanding the JRDC School. Often the last takes precedence in light of the long-term goal for maintaining a Rastafari presence on the land grant and providing young people with a solid educational foundation.12 “Community development,” as Rastafari phrased it, included donations sent from individuals and persons to the JRDC, the School and Mansions in Shashamane. But not only that. They invested in economic and social development on a small scale, organising programmes such as rainwater harvesting (MacLeod 2014), opened mostly small businesses and a few large ones such as hotels, a soya factory and ital food production. In terms of Houses, the Twelve Tribes Mansions around the world generally send funds to the Mansion in Shashamane, whereas the Nyahbinghi and Boboshanti Houses receive funds less frequently. Two unfinished concrete buildings close to the JRDC School that were walled, gated and locked were envisioned as Twelve Tribes-subsidised projects that were inactive at the time. One building was supposed to be a communal health centre and the other a guesthouse, but construction had to

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be suspended because funds stopped coming from the Mansions. Fundraising for the JRDC School to cover teachers’ salaries, operational expenses and school supplies appears to take place mainly in the United States with the efforts of the locally based JRDC School board in Shashamane. Community activities to raise funds have also taken place in the form of major celebrations such as July 23 and JRDC clothing sales.

7.6   Babylon Is Everywhere While repatriates and their children are generally well known to local government officials and police officers as neighbours and classmates, for instance, institutions of the system, like the police force, also become downpressers (in the Rastafari inversion of the word oppressors). While reviewing my fieldnotes I noticed that incidents of Rastafari men and women being fined or locked up recurred. Repatriates or visitors who were foreign nationals and overstayed their visas were ketch (caught) at police checkpoints while travelling internally or at the airport for international travel. Being fined or imprisoned also happened for the possession of herb (ganja or marijuana), which is illegal in Ethiopia. Interactions between Rastafari and two state institutions, the police and the judiciary, show how behaviours are culturally reframed in line with Caribbean age and gender expectations. These behaviours are particularly evident in young Rastafari men, again demonstrating the reproduction of Caribbean values within this diasporic environment. One interaction between Rastafari and local Ethiopians revolves around the Rastafari use and the local Ethiopian cultivation of ganja. The growth and consumption of ganja result in police searches of people in public spaces as well as houses and yards. In conversation in 2009 with a Jamaican foreign service officer who had worked in Ethiopia, he explained that the Derg government (1974–1991) tended to “turn a blind eye” to repatriate use of ganja and its small-scale cultivation. Aware of only one major incident that involved the government and Rastafari, related by his predecessor, it occurred when an Ethiopian teacher smoked ganja and “went crazy.” At that time the government interceded because the use of herb adversely affected an unsupervised novice local Ethiopian user, the Jamaica Safar was raided and Rastafari were imprisoned. However, when they were released some were issued with residence permits, which have long since expired. According to Rastafari, this act also demonstrated the Derg support of the repatriate presence.

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More recently, young male Rastafarians as well as residents of Jamaica Safar were searched by the police in Shashamane for the possession of ganja. While I lived in Shashamane there were two organised searches specifically in the Jamaica Safar. Police searches were also undertaken in other neighbourhoods seeking out contraband items, though these ranged from arms and ammunition to taxable goods like coffee, but it is well known that ganja is the most widespread illegal item in the neighbourhood. Rastafari were clearly familiar with these hunts and were aware that babylon (here meaning the police) was looking for ganja. As Edmonds reiterates, “The police are considered Babylon’s agents, because through their use of force, they maintain the pattern of oppression and inequity in the society” (2003, 45). On at least five occasions within one year I heard of youths or adults who were locked up or taken by the police for interrogation on suspicion of having ganja. Only one of these was the result of the police discovery of herb during a search in the Jamaica Safar since residents were usually aware of impending searches via word of mouth warnings. They prepared accordingly. What happened more often was that Rastafari youths and elders were caught with ganja while on the road—walking, driving or in public transportation when vehicles were searched as part of the regular checkpoint searches. On these occasions state officials attempted to enforce laws through profiling. Persons assumed to be Rastafari, with dreadlocks or wearing typical colours of red, gold and green were stopped and searched. To expand on the significance of ganja here, Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas note, “extremely complex botanically, cannabis yields a variety of products” including textiles and paper as well as being used in soap making and in various foods (1975, 9). Rubin and Comitas broadly define the “ganja-complex” in Jamaica as consisting of “methods of preparation and use, the role of ganja in folk medicine, in divine origin mythology, in pragmatic and ritual uses and the social class framework of use and attitudes toward ganja” (1975, 16). This ganja complex is part of a working-class lifestyle that incorporates being sociable, working hard and industriously and generally being healthy. Ganja is therefore not only smoked but included in everyday uses in the form of tea and in healing practices for illness. First-generation Rastafari from the Caribbean and second-­ generation Rastafari in Ethiopia continue the habit of smoking, with its spiritual significance.13 However, when ganja use is persecuted in Ethiopia, Rastafari not only circumvent the intended surveillance behind such actions but also reframe the consequences of arrest and imprisonment.

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My understanding of ideas and behaviours surrounding imprisonment crystallised after living in Shashamane for a few short months. One morning I walked by a neighbour’s yard with two Rastafari girls on their way to school. They stopped to chat briefly with a young man, Malik, who I realised lived in the Jamaica Safar, and was standing outside his family’s yard. While I saw Malik’s parents and siblings regularly, his face was unfamiliar. Only after we had walked away did my companions explain that he was Brother Peter’s son who was locked up and apparently had been just released from jail. I was astonished at this calm explanation of what I would expect to be a psychologically and physically harrowing experience, but their manner indicated a multitude of meanings about imprisonment that I came to recognise the longer that I lived in Shashamane. The predominant connotation was that of normality, evident when these young women did not express any surprise upon seeing Malik outdoors. They simply asked if he was “alright” and talked about everyday matters relating to school and the neighbours. About six months later, when other youths were jailed for carrying herb, I was not as alarmed. I presumed that they would be freed within days or months. Their release would depend on factors surrounding the arrest, the amount of herb involved, the young men’s legal record, and their familiarity with local police officers. In other cultures, there are various rituals surrounding a young man’s release from prison. For example, Julie Peteet (1994) suggests that the regular detention and imprisonment of Palestinian boys in the Israeli-­ occupied West Bank and the beatings they undergo form a ritual cycle towards manhood. They are caught, imprisoned, released and welcomed back home with community gatherings. Israeli actions that terrorise the Palestinian population and are meant to “assure a quiescent population … give rise instead to an oppositional political agency … These were experiences of transformation and empowerment, not humiliation and pacification” (Peteet 1994, 33).14 In Shashamane there is no ritual acknowledgement of a young man’s release from jail and return to his family’s yard. While the situation of occupation, dispossession and minority rule differs in the occupied West Bank and Shashamane, for Rastafari, the acts of being held, facing the courts or being locked up by police are normalised through a lack of ritual marking or observation. These occurrences and the behaviour of relatives and friends are incorporated into daily activities that involve going to town; to buy food at the market or at the butcher’s, for instance. Visiting

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incarcerated Rastafari, cooking food and taking clean clothing for them are everyday activities. After Pauletta returned to the Jamaica Safar from ketema to do her regular shopping at the market, she had also dropped off food for a young man at the jail. As Sister Pauletta was going to town and the youth’s mother was unable to go on that day, she had asked Pauletta to deliver it. The assimilation of these tasks into routine activities is one way of coping with persecution for Rastafari. It is also an act of resistance to a babylonian imposition on Rastafari livity, of which smoking ganja is a significant practice. It divests imprisonment of its efficacy either as punishment or as a means to reduce or halt the use of ganja and to punish the user. This behaviour is another instance of “helping out each other” through local Rastafari social networks. Such activities are essential to both daily life and long-term community existence. Socially as well, a young man proves his toughness by adhering to the Rastafari practice of smoking ganja, and his neglect of state sanctions for the continued use of “the holy herb.” Police searches of young male Rastafari on the streets, their forced hustle into a police vehicle, and subsequent shoving into a jail cell, instead become alternative signifiers of resistance to an unjust authority. The reason for being caught by the police makes a difference to the symbolic register of imprisonment such as smoking herb as compared to stealing. The first is viewed as a Rastafari ritual and the second as morally wrong. In addition to youths, middle-aged men (40–60  years of age) also have physical altercations. For example, the clashes between middle-aged Rastafari and local Ethiopian men are ostensibly over women and money. In these cases, those involved are either taken to the police station or the parties involved willingly go to lodge a complaint. By comparison, when a youth is locked up for defending the seizure of an older Rastaman’s land, which is legally defined as violence against the police, or for carrying or smoking ganja, which is illegal, he may be tried in court under the criminal code. However, these actions develop entirely different meanings for Rastafari regarding age and gender expectations. Young men embody the quintessential Rastafari figure who opposes the unjust agents of babylon, another characteristic of the heartical Rastaman. This sort of militancy tends to be the domain of the young. Older Rastamen and Rastawomen would remark, “we’re too old for that now” or “that is young people business,” while they themselves described incidents of their youthful altercations with police in Kingston, Jamaica.

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One story revolved around the basis for The Wailers’ song “3 o’clock roadblock.” A young Rastafari man of Jamaican parents related that his father was with Bob Marley and many other Rastafari who accompanied the Wailers to the airport. However, the police blocked the road in the early morning hours and attempted to search the crowd of Rastas en route, including well-known Bob Marley. For this youth, the story provided one example in which his father behaved as a heartical Rastaman. Stories of this sort from young men as well as young women were common. They would reference “the early days” when their fathers stood up to the police in Jamaica; how they refused to “take shit from the system.” Many early repatriates themselves also stressed that they were the only ones in the past who were brave enough to walk around the unsafe ketema at night. Although these young men did not directly contrast their fathers’ past behaviours to their seeming quasi-inaction at present, the implication could be that their fathers no longer act with the same sort of overt protest. Now, these elder Rastamen negotiate with local government officials over issues inclusive of ownership of their houses, residency, security and police harassment. I never heard of an elder Rastafari repatriate being locked up while I was in Shashamane, although in 2015 two recent, mature male repatriates were locked up for cultivating ganja in their yards. Imprisonment therefore becomes not a deterrent to certain actions as intended by the police and legal authority, but another method of confronting and subverting babylon. It also reinforces a stereotypical masculine West Indian identity, bordering on the toxic (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). This is observable also in the physical and verbal fights between men and men’s physical violence against women. The male Rastafari body represents the failure of state disciplinary techniques that characteristically designate Rastafari as ferenjwoch criminals in this context. Instead, this body becomes symbolic of the quintessential Rastafari struggle against babylon. MacLeod’s position (2014, 86) that the Rastafari narrative of escaping babylon for zion does not make sense in the Ethiopian context is limiting. It takes a rather narrow view of Ethiopian historiography that privileges a narrative of Greater Ethiopia as a never-colonised, northern-ruled imperial Abyssinia, thereby omitting centuries of slavery with corresponding social stratification and mental enslavement (Levine 1974; Jalata 2008; Zewde 1991). Rather, I argue that these circumstances demonstrate the reproduction of babylonian conditions, even within zion.

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When I quoted Peter at the onset of this chapter, he referenced the spatial dimensions of babylon with accompanying social and spiritual dimensions. Recognising how these overlap, intersect and stand alone means understanding the duality of zion and babylon. A processual approach elucidates this worldview. As Raffaella Delle Donne notes, “zion is therefore a state of freedom from oppression and subordination and can exist simultaneously everywhere and anywhere” (2000, 102). For Ethiopian-born Rastafari especially, their sentiments of belonging to Ethiopia and attempts to access official recognition of citizenship like the passport co-exist with their more confrontational relations with babylon. These particular antagonistic encounters with babylon—the police, judiciary and immigration—then become invested with distinct cultural interpretations, for example, around masculinity and youth behaviours. In this respect, the struggle for citizenness among Rastafari in the Jamaica Safar: to live equitably with dignity, to better oneself and the next generation, and to keep the land inalienable, figure prominently in Rastafari behaviours. However, these goals are impeded by the legal status of Rastafari repatriates and Ethiopian-born youths as foreign nationals. As inhabitants of Shashamane in the state of Ethiopia, Rastafari must engage with local and federal institutions, as they cogently recognise, employing strategies to shape these interactions and mitigate the impacts on their daily experiences as well as long-term goals. Nonetheless, ideological movements such as Rastafari, and their actual spiritual repatriation that challenge narrow ideas of belonging and citizenship continue independently of legal actualisation. This Rastafari imaginative reinvention also demonstrates the significance of community bonds to these everyday and institutional experiences of exclusion and inclusion. These local and translocal links with a global consciousness, a praxis of solidarity and ideals of equality elucidate a cosmopolitanism from the Global South, in particular, Rastafari pan-African cosmopolitan sensibilities.

Notes 1. As it is called in Amharic, presumably derived from an Italian word. 2. See MacLeod (2014) for more details on the bilateral and multilateral discussions. Diplomatic missions were involved in discussions, for example the government of Jamaica with the Ethiopian government, Rastafari appealed to the African Union, the different Rastafari organisations and

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Mansions such as the Rastafari Centralisation Organisation and the Ethiopian World Federation appealed separately also (2014, 194). 3. Despite the new Oromo political leadership, in 2020 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, largely Oromo-led, anti-government protests in Oromiyya Region, sparked by the killing of a popular Oromo singer, descended into looting and rioting. These adversely effected both Rastafari and local Ethiopian families. While Rastafari generally support the return of the Amhara-led monarchical state, they also sympathise with Oromo collectively as sufferahs. Given the decades of Rastafari residence in Shashamane, and the kinship and community ties that have been built between Rastafari and multi-ethnic local Ethiopian residents of the Jamaica Safar and Shashamane more widely over the past decades, these positionalities and reactions are constantly negotiated, publicly and privately. Additionally, with the formation of the new Prosperity Party under Ahmed’s chairmanship in place of the ruling EPRDF, even with steps towards the normalisation of political and diplomatic relations with neighbouring Eritrea (Ylönen 2019), the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front has presented a formidable challenge to the present administration. By the beginning of 2021, the widespread violence against ethnic Tigrayans across the country, and in particular violence against women and girls in Tigray region, led to even more persons fleeing from northern Ethiopia into the Sudan. These complex interethnic and intraethnic conflicts, political machinations and manoeuvres underscore the material as well as symbolic dimensions to these conflicts that I have discussed. 4. Acquiring citizenship was not significant for Rastafari to participate in civic life such as in voting. The government and state institutions, including the military, are viewed as part of the babylonian system. 5. This was formerly a High Commission of Jamaica that was opened circa 1969–1970. In 1992 it was downgraded to a Consulate headed by a local Ethiopian male Honorary Consul. 6. This information concurs with Article 6 “Nationality” of the Ethiopian Constitution. The English translation reads: “1. Any person of either sex shall be an Ethiopian national where both or either parent is Ethiopian. 2. Foreign nationals may acquire Ethiopian nationality” (1995, 78). However, number 3 of this Article states that this must be accomplished by adhering to the law which regulates these provisions. MacLeod (2014) states that there is no accompanying law because there have never been significant numbers of applicants for Ethiopian citizenship to warrant passing one. 7. On a micro-level, see Bonacci’s (2015, 312) discussion on the amiable relations between Derg soldiers and repatriates. Rastafari status as foreigners meant that they had no rights or opportunity to advocate for or against the new government. Rastafari were viewed as neutral by the soldiers,

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despite their belief in His Majesty’s divinity, thereby encouraging good relations in this particular location. 8. “Master plan” is the local term in English for the city plan that designates agricultural, residential and commercial areas of Shashamane. 9. The Ethiopian Embassy in London identifies the following areas for investment in Ethiopia: agriculture, food crops, beverage crops (like coffee), cotton, horticulture, livestock, fishery, agricultural services, manufacturing, mining, tourism and infrastructure. 10. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-­e thiopia-­t elecoms-­i dUSKBN 0MH0KC20150321 11. There are already 85 ethnic groups recognised by the government. 12. Gibson (1996) also points out that repatriates spoke of development in the 1990s with similar features. 13. Imprisonment is an act of punishment and subordination meant to produce an ideal national Ethiopian subject who does not smoke ganja, the foreign herb, but instead would more likely chew qat, a socially acceptable plant grown locally. “Chewing” is a common practice that is expected of male Ethiopians of any class. Qat or khat (Catha edulis) has a substantially longer history of use in East Africa and neighbouring Yemen than ganja. It is cultivated widely and provides revenue for the Ethiopian state through taxation. Qat exports earned US$138.7 million in 2008/9 (Ethiopia Investment Guide 2010) and Chat (9.3%) of exports in 2017/2018 and almost US$300 million “in recent years,” according to Cochrane and O’Regan (2016, 28). 14. Peteet also astutely notes, these processes while “upsetting established hierarchies of generation, nationality, and class yet [are] reproducing and reaffirming other hierarchies such as gender” (1994, 34).

References Adem, Teferi. 2004. ‘Decentralised There, Centralised Here’: Local Governance and Paradoxes of Household Autonomy and Control in North-East Ethiopia. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 74 (4): 611–632. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beyecha, M.A. 2018. The Rastafari in Ethiopia: Challenges and Paradoxes of Belonging. Masters thesis, Leiden University. Bjeren, G. 1985. Migration to Shashemene: Ethnicity, Gender and Occupation in Urban Ethiopia. PhD dissertation, Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies.

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Boere, Auke, Maryn Kleingeld, and Dawit Kidane. 2015. Business Opportunities Report Construction #8. https://www.rvo.nl/sites/default/files/2015/11/ Rapport_Construction_Ethiopi%C3%AB.pdf. Accessed 5 Nov2015. Bonacci, Giulia. 2015. Exodus!: Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia. Trans. Antoinette Tidjani Alou. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Castor, N.  Fadeke. 2017. Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifa in Trinidad. Durham: Duke University Press. Cochrane, Logan, and Davin O’Regan. 2016. Legal Harvest and Illegal Trade: Trends, Challenges, and Options in Khat Production in Ethiopia. International Journal of Drug Policy 30: 27–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo. 2016.02.009. Connell, Raewyn, and James Messerschmidt. 2005. Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept. Gender and Society 19 (6): 829–859. Crichlow, Michaeline, and Patricia Northover. 2009. Globalization and the Post-­ Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation. Durham: Duke University Press. Delle Donne, Raffaella. 2000. “A Place in Which to Feel at Home”: An Exploration of the Rastafari as an Embodiment of an Alternative Spatial Paradigm. Journal for the Study of Religion 13 (1/2): 99–121. Diminescu, Dana. 2008. The Connected Migrant: An Epistemological Manifesto. Social Science Information 47 (4): 565–579. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0539018408096447. Edmonds, Ennis. 2003. Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ethiopia Investment Guide. 2010. Addis Ababa: Ethiopian Investment Agency. http://ethioembassy.org.uk Ethiopian Investment Commission. n.d. Starting a Business. http://www.investethiopia.gov.et/investment-­process/starting-­a-­business. Accessed 27 Aug 2020. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books. Fox, J. 2005. Unpacking “Transnational citizenship”. Annual Review of Political Science 8: 171–201. Gibson, Shirlie R. 1996. African Repatriation: A Case Study of Rastafarians and the Malcoda Land-Grant at Shashemane. PhD dissertation, Howard University. Glick Schiller, Nina, and G. Noel Salazar. 2013. Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39 (2): 183–200. Jalata, Assafa. 2008. Being In and Out of Africa: The Impact of Duality of Ethiopianism. Journal of Black Studies 40 (2): 189–214. Jamaica Information Service. Applying for Jamaican Citizenship—Jamaica Information Service (jis.gov.jm). Kabeer, Naila. 2005. Inclusive Citizenship: Meanings and Expressions. London/ New York: Zed Books.

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Levine, Donald. 1974. Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of Multiethnic Society. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. MacLeod, Erin. 2014. Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land. New York: New York University Press. MacLeod, Erin Christine. 2009. Leaving out of Babylon, into Whose Father’s Land?: The Ethiopian Perception of the Repatriated Rastafari. PhD dissertation, McGill University. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Tansnationality. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Peteet, Julie. 1994. Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian “Intifada”: A Cultural Politics of Violence. American Ethnologist 21 (1): 31–49. Rubin, Vera, and Lambros Comitas. 1975. Ganja in Jamaica: A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marihuana Use. The Hague: Mouton. The Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. 1995. Addis Ababa. Ylönen, Aleksi. 2019. Is the Horn of Africa’s ‘Cold War’ over? Abiy Ahmed’s Early Reforms and the Rapprochement Between Ethiopia and Eritrea. African Security Review 27 (3): 245–252. Zwede, Bahru. 1991. A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1974. London/Addis Ababa: James Currey/Addis Ababa University Press.



Appendices

Appendix A: Note on Methodology Stories of Shashamane circulate in the countries of the English-speaking Caribbean where I am from. “Shashamane” is code for “returning home” for diasporic Africans in the popular imagination. Aware of these views, while not Rastafari myself, in 2008–2009, I lived in Shashamane, Ethiopia, where I conducted fieldwork for a year. This was my second visit to the area. The first was two months before when I briefly visited and stayed in a modest hotel in the ketema. My first stop was the Black Lion Museum in the Jamaica Safar and then the Twelve Tribes of Israel Headquarters (HQ) where I met early and recent repatriates from different Rastafari organisations, and their repatriated and locally born children. These included members of the Braithwaite1 family, in whose yard I later resided on my return to Shashamane in the kiremt (summer) of 2008, following Brother Fyah’s invitation. Brother Fyah and his children were accustomed to visitors dropping by and staying at the yard. His children, who ranged in age from late teens to late twenties, were not surprised when their father announced that I would be staying indefinitely. Some of his children lived in other areas of Oromiyya Regional State, where Shashamane is located, or in Addis Ababa but visited frequently. This was a transnational yard composed of Brother Fyah’s wife, Sister Bernice, who lived in foreign (and whom I first met in 2012 in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gomes, Cosmopolitanism from the Global South, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82272-9

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the United Kingdom), children and grandchildren. Brother Fyah and Sister Bernice claimed membership in the Twelve Tribes Mansion with their Ethiopian-born children self-identifying as Rastafari, Jamaican and Ethiopian. In this yard the primary language of communication was Jamaican patois. Amharic and Amharic-patois combinations were also used between the Ethiopian-born children and grandchildren, as noted by Bonacci (2015, 377–378). I developed a basic Amharic vocabulary that facilitated my movement in Shashamane and Ethiopia. Among Rastafari generally in the Jamaica Safar, communication was in Caribbean patois (not necessarily derived from Jamaica) and English. Since ethnography is characterised by in-depth investigation through fieldwork aimed at understanding, interpreting and analysing informants’ experiences by privileging emic perspectives, I engaged in participant-­ observation as a primary method of collecting information.2 In practice this meant participating in and observing daily activities inclusive of household activities such as cooking, cleaning and going to the weekly market for food shopping as well as ritual and community events such as Twelve Tribes monthly meetings. I also attended Rastafari celebrations, and other local events such as a kebele meeting and a meeting with a foreign-based Rastafari aid organisation. I was incorporated into Twelve Tribes social and kin relations and my daily interactions were dominated by this group. Almost all my interviewees were adults and youths of the Twelve Tribes Mansion. Local perceptions of me as a young-looking, brown Caribbean woman of “mixed race” and “coolie” looking (a colloquial West Indian term for South Asian that can have a pejorative meaning depending on the situation) followed accordingly. At that time, I was an educated though unemployed student who could potentially “assist” the community, as Rastafari would remark. Rastafari from other Mansions assumed that I was Rasta, particularly of the Twelve Tribes,3 until we became more familiar. They soon realised that I was not Rasta nor a practising Christian, but from the English-speaking Caribbean and therefore shared certain cultural schema. They also presumed a middle-class upbringing with my regular use of standard English in speaking. As time went on, of course, I learnt to speak Jamaican patois and modified my vocabulary, depending on the interlocutor. Local Ethiopians began to view me as “Jamaican” (Jah-mike-kan in a local pronunciation) as well, in this case synonymous with Rasta. In the altered socio-economic and legal-political context of Shashamane and Ethiopia, new modes of living and imaginative expressions are

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created, flourished and confronted. These are especially evident in the use of the local term, “Jamaican,” pronounced as Jah-mike-kan and Jah-make-­ kan, that has come to mean Rastafari faranji or foreigner, when used by local Ethiopians, demonstrating the homogenisation of Rastafari from an Ethiopian perspective. This is a designation that many repatriates reject. Second-generation Rastafari situationally accept and reject this moniker. As I had declared that I would be doing research leading to a dissertation and prospective future publications, Rastafari in Shashamane were also very transparent about their expectation that this study would help in their “works” towards greater social, legal and civic participation and acceptance in Ethiopia. Discussing the complexities of life means including tensions, conflicts and disagreements which reinforces and demonstrates their integration and bonds of kinship, friendship and intimacy among Rastafari and local Ethiopians who all live side by side, sharing in the hardships and celebrations of everyday life. Out of respect for the confidentiality of our discussions, I adhered to informants’ preferences regarding recordings of our interviews, and I have used pseudonyms for each person. During my time in Shashamane, I volunteered for a few hours each week with the JRDC. This was primarily to assist with fundraising for the school, to acquire short- and long-term sponsorship of the subsidised lunch programme. Volunteering entailed writing letters and submitting a funding proposal. Some of these initiatives were successful while others were not.4 Though I had little interaction with staff and students of the school, my location in the JRDC office provided the opportunity to communicate with other repatriates and visitors whom I may not have socialised with (at my yard or other locations), and in a different situation that focused more on legal and economic matters such as finding work, funding, and legalising house ownership and prospective applications for Ethiopian residence or investor permits. I visited different yards in the Jamaica Safar to interview household members. In this way I engaged in a rudimentary household survey. Through participant-observation, unstructured and semi-structured interviews, household surveys and life narratives, I become familiar with at least one member of 73 first- and second-generation households cumulatively. As with all demographic information, this must be considered as a snapshot of the repatriate population that captures one time period in the Jamaica Safar.

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In this ethnography I focus on the experiences, narratives and interview excerpts from a portion of these persons to provide greater analytical and descriptive depth to salient themes identified in the study, based on my daily and ritual interactions with residents over one year and visits during three years. During fieldwork I selected repatriates and Ethiopian-born youths to interview. Eleven were repatriates who came in the 1970s (three Sisters and the remaining Brothers) and sixteen were repatriates (divided equally between men and women) who came to Shashamane from the 1990s onwards of varying ages, with their families, as well as young Rastamen who repatriated alone. Of those Ethiopian-born, known as the generation born on the land grant by Rastafari, I interviewed eight young men and women (four women and four men) who lived in Shashamane and in Addis Ababa between the ages of 18–30 of Caribbean parents as well as with Caribbean and Ethiopian parents. In all, I conducted 35 interviews. In unstructured or open-ended interviews, I asked persons to begin by simply talking about their lives—where they were born and raised—and about their initial experiences with Rasta or what propelled them to Rastafari. Such life stories and personal narratives are useful methods of acquiring qualitative data from a cross section of repatriates since “voices are not seen as products of local structures, based on community and tradition, alone, or as privileged sources of perspective, but rather as products of the complex sets of associations and experiences” (Marcus 1998, 66). Through repatriates’ life stories, their outernational and global networks to Rastafari and their social relations in the Jamaica Safar and in Ethiopia emerged. This allowed me to make analytical connections between their experiences of movement in shaping worldview and self-identifications, inter-personal relationships and economic and legal conditions. Life histories therefore unearth the events that are significant not only to individuals, but collectively to repatriates who have arrived on the land grant in different times. This is a useful method of acquiring qualitative data from a cross section of repatriates. Interviewees spoke of their childhood and adult experiences around structural racism and micro-prejudices as black and brown West Indians as well as their introduction to Rastafari and personal sighting of Rastafari (in other words, how they “became” Rastafari). Their initial experiences in Ethiopia included: struggling to earn a living, to hold or acquire land on which to build a house, being unable to renew entrance and tourist visas to Ethiopia or applying for residence permits, acquiring local identification

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cards without state residence permits, learning Amharic and forming and navigating relationships with local Ethiopians and other Rastafari—neighbours, friends, local officials, spouses and spouses’ kin. Residents spoke of relatives outside Shashamane, either locally born children in the case of repatriated parents or siblings of Ethiopian-born youth who were studying or working in  locales such as Addis Ababa, Hawassa and Adama in Oromiyya Regional State or further north in Tigray Regional State and Amhara Regional State. The relative mobility of Ethiopian-born youth, however, was locally contained as compared to the international movements of visitors and recent repatriates to and from Ethiopia. In 2012–2015 I returned to Ethiopia to teach at a regional public university in the neighbouring urban locale of Hawassa, capital of the Southern Nations and Nationalities Peoples Regional State. During these years, I visited Shashamane at least once a month; more often if there was an event, thereby maintaining relationships from the previous years. I continued to attend community events such as the July 23rd celebration of His Majesty’s birth, a popular one for Rastafari in Ethiopia, and for many residents of Shashamane. I treasure my time and enriching experiences in the Jamaica Safar where I will always have family among IandI. I am now able to contribute to the continued stories of “Shashamane life.”

Appendix B: Note on Transliteration and the Use of Italics In detailing the imaginaries, efforts and strategies of Rastafari globally, and on the land grant, to carve out literal and symbolic places in Ethiopia, I have used the spelling “Shashamane” for the place name. While the more accurate transliteration is “Shashemene,” Rastafari, by contrast, tend to inflect the word as Shash-ah-mah-ney and as such it is spelt as Shashamane or Shashamene in repatriate writings. This occurs, for example, on the website of the Shashamane Community Development Foundation at shashamane.org, or the Shashamane Sunrise Facebook page a volunteer organisation initiated by Rastafari outside Ethiopia for educational sponsorship. This compares to non-Rastafari pronunciation as Shash-eh-meh-ney. In this way Shash-ah-mah-ney (Shashamane) is recast as a distinctly Rastafari place and as the site of the land grant. To adhere to this emic meaning, I use “safar” rather than transliteration of “sefer” from Amharic

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to English when referring to the Jamaica Safar. Words that are not proper nouns signalling the name of the ethnographic site, “Jamaica Safar,” and the location of the land grant in Shashamane conform to accepted simplified transliteration of Amharic into English (see Pankhurst 1992). I have also used italics when introducing emic terms such as “land grant” as well as including ambiguous words in English, such as “repatriate” and “Jamaican.” Thereafter, these words are not italicised. For the latter, “Jamaican” refers to the emic word used by Rastafari to culturally and nationally identify inter-generationally as well as the homogenous local Ethiopian categorisation of Rastafari in Shashamane—one that the second generation engages with selectively and which is rejected by many Rastafari who are not from the country of Jamaica. Italics allow the reader to stay close to Rastafari meanings.

Notes 1. As with all personal names in this text, this name is also a pseudonym. 2. Tim Ingold (2017) is critical of this reference to ethnography as method. Instead, he argues for recognising that while there are distinctive methods of doing ethnography, notably ways of participating and observing social life and cultural practice, ethnography is not a method that is used to make generalisable claims about particular groups. Certainly, ethnography is dedicated to collecting particular empirical information. The trouble arises, according to Ingold, in turning “observation” into “objectification.” 3. Van Dijk (1988, 2) notes that the Twelve Tribes early on in its formation in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1968 accepted Rastafari who were not ostensibly black or of African descent, unlike other Mansions. 4. The lunch programme is one immediate benefit of a JRDC education for parents and for students. It is an economical option for families that provides well-balanced meals to students at a reduced price. It has started and stopped because of funding limitations, and at times Rastafari in foreign have also provided support for the programme.

Glossary

Anta innay  “He is ours” or “he is one of us” in Amharic. Babylon/babylon/the system  Derived from the Biblical Babylon, the term refers to physical states of bondage and surveillance as well as social conditions of oppression in Rastafari speech. Bajaj  A three-wheeled, motorised vehicle imported from India. Barya  “Slave” and “black” in Amharic. Being locked up  Being incarcerated. Bettering/betterment  Improvement or improving the material condition of a family or household, and not only for one person. Chanting  Singing that typically involves drumming among Rastafari. Chika  Mud or a mixture of mud, wattle and daub, often used in house building. Consciousness/conscious  An awareness of the Rastafari belief in the divinity of Haile Selassie. Dinesh  Potato in Amharic. Downpression  the Rastafari inversion of “oppression.” Dreadlocks/dreds/dreads  Matted hair that is a common Rastafari hairstyle. Symbolic of a lion’s mane. Ethiopia tikildim  Ethiopia first. Ethiopian World Federation  An organisation founded in 1937 by Emperor Haile Selassie I and administered by Dr Melaku Bayen. The

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purpose of the EWF was to facilitate communication with black peoples and Africans outside Ethiopia and in the diaspora who advocated military and popular support for Ethiopian sovereignty. Faranji/faranj  Foreigner. A word used generally in Ethiopia. A man or woman who is not from Ethiopia and does not natively speak a language spoken in Ethiopia. It usually refers to white peoples, but can also refer to black Rastafari. Foreign  In Shashamane, any location outside Ethiopia usually synonymous with the global north and thus babylon. Front page  The strip of land facing the old road and the new road in the Jamaica Safar. Ganja-complex  Rubin and Comitas broadly define the “ganja-complex” in Jamaica as consisting of “methods of preparation and use, the role of ganja in folk medicine, in divine origin mythology, in pragmatic and ritual uses and the social class framework of use and attitudes toward ganja” (1975, 16). Grounding  An informal instruction in Rasta precepts and ideology. Habesha  The Amharic word for Ethiopian. Heartical  From/of the heart. This word often refers to a morally superior man or woman who aims to emulate His Majesty’s example of leadership, strength and fairness, and is successful in this endeavour. Herb/ganja/marijuana  “Extremely complex botanically, cannabis yields a variety of products” including textiles and paper as well as used in soap making and in various foods (Rubin and Comitas 1975, 9). Holding the land  Living on the land grant to ensure a continual prolonged Rasta presence on the land. House or Mansion  A semi-formal group of Rastafari. IandI  Rastafari and humanity. A more expansive concept of oneness referring to humanity or to Rastafari and non-Rastafari alike who are sufferers. Injera  A flat, round spongy bread that is an Ethiopian staple. Ishi or Ishee  Okay in Amharic. Ital  Natural and/or vegetarian in Rastafari speech. Itiopia  Ethiopia or Africa. Jamaican  Rastafari/faranji, not necessarily from Jamaica (specific to Shashamane). Kasal  Coal in Amharic. Kebele zero-and (01)  District One. Kebele  Sub-district.

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Livity  “Lifeways” that “encapsulates an underlying philosophy, a blueprint for a total way of life” (Homiak 1999, 128). It is both an intrinsic or internal characteristic as well as a learned quality. It also refers to both an aptitude for living well according to Rastafari principals and the perseverance to live on the land grant, outside babylon. Microbeit  Municipal Office. Minding  Caring for children. Nyahbinghi  Usually considered to be the founding House or Mansion of Rastafari. Oneness  This concept between the individual-collective situates the speaker as intrinsically connected to the global brethren and sistren of RastafarI (Pulis 1999; Pollard 2000; Homiak 1999). Papers  Official documents, ranging from property title deeds to residency documents. Pioneers  The earliest repatriates from the EWF or a Rastafari Mansion who arrived in Shashamane. Politricks  Refers to “trickery” within the political system. Promised land  Symbolises the most sacred and divine earthly land that repatriates could possibly physically inhabit. Qat  A socially and legally acceptable plant grown locally in Ethiopia. It supposedly induces a sense of euphoria and curbs the appetite. Reasoning/grounding/groundation  Verbal exchange about everyday concerns or events locally and internationally using Rasta speech. Shemagleh (singular) or shemaglehwoch (plural)  In Amharic, this is a group of or at least two elder men from a community invested with authority that is recognised by the Ethiopian state. Sighting  Seeing/recognising His Majesty’s divinity or manifesting Rastafari consciousness. Souk  Shop. Sufferer (pronounced sufferah)  A person who is exploited by the system or babylon. The community  The multi-ethnic, multinational Rastafari population in Shashamane in particular, Ethiopia and globally. The meaning depends on the situation in which the word is used. The land grant  The land given to the Ethiopian World Federation by Haile Selassie which was meant to be distributed among “African” peoples outside Ethiopia who wish to settle. The word  The truth in Rastafari speech, in particular the divinity of His Majesty.

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Tukul American  Black American. Twelve Tribes of Israel/the Organ/Organisation  A Rastafari House or Mansion founded by Prophet Gad or Vernon Carrington around 1968 in Jamaica. The twelve sons of historical Israel who were “scattered abroad” were Jacob’s twelve sons: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, Dan, Gad, Asher, Napthali, Joseph, and Benjamin. Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, is also given a position of the 13 person executive committee that represents Twelve Tribes Mansions around the world. Yard (house in English or beit in Amharic)  A Jamaican colloquial term usually for a house and its surrounding area. Yengna sow  “One of us” or “our people” in Amharic. Zebeniya  Watchman or untrained security guard. Zion  Heaven or the promised land, the place of Ethiopia and Africa as well as Jerusalem, depending on which House of Rastafari, if any, the speaker belongs to.

References

Bonacci, Giulia. 2015. Exodus!: Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia. Trans. Antoinette Tidjani Alou. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Homiak, John. 1999. Movements of Jah People: From Soundscape to Mediascape. In Religion, Diaspora and Cultural Identity: A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean, ed. John Pulis, 87–123. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers. Ingold, Tim. 2017. Anthropology Contra Ethnography. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 21–26. Marcus, George. 1998. Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pankhurst, Alula. 1992. Resettlement and Famine in Ethiopia. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pollard, Velma. 2000. Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari. Montreal: Mc Gill-­ Queen’s University Press. Pulis, John. 1999. Citing[Sighting]-Up: Words, Sounds and Reading Scripture in Jamaica. In Religion, Diaspora and Cultural Identity: A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean, ed. John Pulis, 357–401. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers. Rubin, Vera, and Lambros Comitas. 1975. Ganja in Jamaica: A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marihuana Use. The Hague: Mouton. Van Dijk, Frank. 1998. The Twelve Tribes of Israel: Rasta and the Middle Class. New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West Indische Gids 62 (1/2): 1–26.

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Further Reading Aalen, Lovise. 2011. The Politics of Ethnicity in Ethiopia: Actors, Power and Mobilisation Under Ethnic Federalism. Leiden: Brill. Abrahams, Ray. 1987. Sungusungu: Village Vigilante Groups in Tanzania. African Affairs 86 (343): 179–196. Adem, Teferi. 2004. ‘Decentralised There, Centralised Here’: Local Governance and Paradoxes of Household Autonomy and Control in North-East Ethiopia. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 74 (4): 611–632. Alexander, Jacqui, and Chandra Mohanty, eds. 1997. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York/London: Routledge. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1993. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. London: Oxford University Press. Amit, Vered, and Nigel Rapport. 2012. Community as ‘Good to Think with’: The Productiveness of Strategic Ambiguities. In Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality, ed. Nigel Rapport and Vered Amit, 3–13. London: Pluto Press. Anderson, Moji, and Erin MacLeod. 2017. Notes on a Branding: Subject and Object in “Brand Jamaica”. Social and Economic Studies 66 (1&2): 79–103. Arendt, Hannah. 1959. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Asante, Molefi. 1998. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Austin, Diane. 1983. Culture and Ideology in the English-Speaking Caribbean. American Ethnologist 28 (2): 223–240. Bach, Jean-Nicolas. 2014. EPRDF’s Nation-Building: Tinkering with Convictions and Pragmatism. Cadernos de Estudos Africanos 27: unpaginated. https://doi. org/10.4000/cea.1501. Barrett, Leonard. E. 1988. The Rastafarians. Massachusetts: Beacon Press. Barrow, Christine. 1992. Family Land and Development in St. Lucia. Belfast/ Bridgetown: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies Press. Basch, Linda, Nina Schiller, and Cristina Blanc. 1994. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-­ States. London: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. Beck, Ulrich. 2002. The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology in the Second Age of Modernity. In Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, 61–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berg, Mette. 2005. Localising Cubanness: Social Exclusion and Narratives of Belonging in Old Havana. In Caribbean Narratives of Belonging: Fields of Relations, Sites of Identity, ed. Jean Besson and Karen Fog Olwig, 133–148. London: Macmillan. ———. 2009. Homeland and Belonging Among Cubans in Spain. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 14 (2): 265–290. Beriss, David. 2004. Black Skins: French Voices. Denver: Westview Press.

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Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 1974, 60, 65, 67 1966, 59, 60 3 o’clock roadblock song, 160 A Aalen, Lovise, 69 Abrahams, Roger, 27, 28, 38 Abyssinian Abyssinia, 55–57, 64–68 Accent, 61 Accommodations, 74, 78 Ackee, 107 Addis Ababa, 43, 47, 57, 59, 70n6, 101–103, 109, 143, 146–148, 151 City of, 5–7 Adem, Teferi, 151

Adina, 116, 117, 120, 121, 124, 125, 130 Adult, 28, 38, 39 Afan Oromo, 8, 95 Affinal affine, 120 Africa, 56, 58, 69, 70n5 African, 58, 59, 64, 117, 123, 127, 144, 161, 161n2 African-derived, 29 African Union, 65 Africa Unite, 45 Afrocentric, 28, 127 Age, 28, 36, 59 Agency, 11, 14, 18 human, 93, 96 Almighty, 30 Alpha Blondy, 45 Ambiguity, 28, 48, 55–69 American, 143, 144

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gomes, Cosmopolitanism from the Global South, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82272-9

195

196 

INDEX

Amerindian, 127 Amhara, 6, 60, 67 Amharic, 95, 103, 118, 123, 124, 145, 149, 153, 154, 161n1 Amit and Rapport, 79 Ancestry, 57, 65 Anderson, Benedict, 58, 83, 149 Angela, 98, 99, 103, 106, 109, 110 Anna, 98, 99, 106, 110, 143, 144, 152 Anta innay he is ours, 82 Anthropology sociocultural, 3, 19 Antiquity, 58 Apartheid, 34 Apocalypse, 30, 35 Appiah, Kwame A., 16–18 Aristocracy, 67 Ark of the Covenant, 55 Arnold, 29 Arrest, 157, 158 Arson, 66 Articulation, 76, 78 Asian, 127 Asserate, Asfa Wossen, 57 Augier, Roy, 88n8 Aural, 27, 28, 33, 42, 46, 48 Autonomy, 58, 59 Awareness, 32 B Baby fathers, 97 Babylon, 81, 94, 96, 99, 139, 147, 157, 159–161 Babylonian, 29, 34, 36 Bach, Jean-Nicolas, 61, 68 Back to Africa, 11 Bahir Dar, 7 Bailout, 38 Bajaj, 97

Balabbat, 132, 133 Bale Goba, 6, 152 Banana boats, 10 Bank community/loans, 97, 99, 100 Baptist, 11 Barbados, 6 Barnett, Michael, 30, 36 Barrel, 107, 108 Barrett, Leonard, 9, 11, 12 Barriteau, Eudine V., 125, 129 Barrow, Christine, 39 Barth, Frederik, 124 Basic needs, 92, 93, 100 Bauman, Richard, 27 Bauxite, 10 Beit house, 116, 117, 125, 134 Belief, 57, 59, 60, 62–64 Belonging, 55–69, 74, 75, 77, 87 narratives, 74 personhood/place-making/ repatriation, 2, 9, 13, 17–20 Bermuda, 6 Besson, Jean, 29, 34 Betterment, 92, 96, 100, 146, 147 Beyecha, M.A., 6, 141 Bible, 28, 30–41, 49, 50n8, 55, 57, 58, 63 Christianity/King James version/ Rastafari, 11, 21n6 Bilby, Kenneth, 44 Birth certificate, 147 Bjeren, G., 151 Black, 58, 64–67 African/Ethiopian, 4, 9–12, 15 Black Jacobins, 15 Black Messiah, 30 Blackness, 58, 64, 65 Black people of the world, 4 Black peoples, 79 Blood, 119–121

 INDEX 

Bobo Ashanti, 30, 51n19 Boboshanti, 155 Bodies, 118, 123 Bogues, Anthony, 3 Bonacci, 4, 7, 30, 33, 49n1, 50n10, 56, 57, 64, 68 Book of Revelations Bible, 30 Border, 144, 145, 148 Boserup, 125 Bourdieu, Pierre, 125 Bourgeoisie, 10 Breadwinners, 126 Bréant, Hugo, 111n9 Brethren, 34, 38, 129 Brother/Rastafari, 9, 21n1 Brown, Dennis music/Rastafari, 45 Bulcha, Mekuria, 69 Business permit, 143 Butler, Judith, 29 C Campbell, Horace, 9, 10, 59, 74 Canada, 7 Capital capitalism, 102, 110 Capitalism, 141 Care, 119, 120, 126, 130, 131 Caribbean, 27, 28, 34, 36, 39, 43–45, 50n18, 59, 61–64, 70n5, 76, 80, 82, 85, 86, 142, 144, 147–149, 156, 157 West Indians, 65 Carolyn, 33, 37, 85 Carsten, Janet, 118, 119, 121, 123, 134n1 Carta, 140 Castor, N., 64 Cellphones, 92, 106, 119 Cemetery, 62

197

Chamberlain, 19, 119 A change, see Remittances Change and continuity, 27 Charter myths, 74, 75, 78 Malinowski (see Origin stories) Chevannes, Barry, 9, 10, 12, 18, 21n4, 33, 34, 39, 42, 49n7, 117, 122 Chiggae music/Ethiopia, 47 Chika, 121, 122, 151, 152 mud/wattle and daub, 4 Children, 96, 97, 99, 100, 103, 105, 107–109, 111n4, 117–128, 130 Christ, 30, 31, 39 Christensen, 33 Christian, 56, 66, 67 Christianity, 62, 63, 66, 67 Church, 29, 35, 37, 38, 50n12 Churchical, 32 Citing-up, 42 Citizenship, 78, 87, 140–147, 149, 150, 161, 162n4, 162n6 Citizen-subjectivities, 140 Civilised, 66 Clarke, Edith, 120 Class-stratified society, 95 Clifford, James, 117, 131 Clothing, 101–103, 106–109, 122 Cohen, Robin, 2 Collective, 60, 69 Colonial, 29, 34, 44, 45, 118, 127, 128 colonialism/decolonisation, 4, 9, 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21n5 Colonisation, 58 Colours gold and green/red/Rastafari, 102 Comitas, 63, 95 Commodified music/commodity, 28 Communalism, 150 Communication cellphone/electronic, 92, 109

198 

INDEX

Communitas Turner, 81 Community, 2–4, 9, 11, 15–18, 20, 73–87, 92, 93, 96–100, 102–104, 106, 108, 110, 139, 142–144, 149, 150, 153, 155, 158, 159, 161, 162n3 Community-building acts/narratives, 69 Conflicts micro-conflicts, 59 Connerton, 75, 76, 86 Consanguineous, 120 Consciousness, 28, 29, 31–35, 37, 40–45, 48, 58 Conscious vibes music/reggae, 44 Continent, 58 Continuity, 118 Contrapuntal orator/speech, 27, 28, 43, 48 Conversion, 33 Cooper, 44 Co-residence, 120 Coronation, 30, 49n1 Cosmological cosmology, 28, 48, 50n8 Cosmopolitan, 63, 64, 69 cosmopolitanism/Global South/ pan-African cosmopolitanism/ sensibilities, 2, 13, 15–17, 21 Cosmopolitanism, 1–3, 9, 16, 18 Cosmopolitan sensibilities, 28, 63, 69 Cosmopolitics, 3 Counter-narrative, 78 Coup d’etat, 75 Courts, 147, 158 Creator, 57 divine/human, 30 Creole, 14, 15, 28, 43, 48, 115–117, 141 Creolisation, 2, 4, 9, 14, 15, 19, 36

Crichlow, Michaeline, 141, 142 Crops, 121, 122, 130 agriculture/subsistence farming, 82, 86 Crown Council of Ethiopia, 56 Cultural culture, 28, 42, 43, 47, 48 Cultural identity, 124, 132 Curtin, 57 D Dance, 28, 48 Dark-skinned, 67 Daughters, 120, 124 Davenport, 127 David, 1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 19, 73–78, 80, 82, 83, 86, 151 Dawes, Kwame, 34 Decolonial, 3 Defending the faith holding the land/pioneers, 84 Dependency, 3 Deportation, 139, 148 DeRegt, Marina, 126 Derg, 60, 61, 70n2, 82–84, 88n7, 88n9, 130, 145, 150, 156, 162n7 Deterritorialized, 100 Development, 141, 150–152, 155, 163n12 Dialectic, 76, 78 Diaspora, 45, 119, 120 Diasporic, 116, 117, 127 Diasporic cultural citizenship, 64 Diet, 118, 123, 124 Dignity, 4, 15 Diminescu, 92, 110n1, 144 Dirty, 67 Diversity, 14, 17, 18 Divine, 56, 58–60, 63, 70n2, 74, 79 Divinity, 29, 30, 35, 37, 48, 56, 58–60, 70n2

 INDEX 

Domestic, 127–131 Domesticity, 125 Dominica, 6 Donations, 81, 88n6 Donham, Donald, 65–68, 70n10 Donne, Raffaella, 46 Dorze, 66 Downpressers, 156 Downpression, 34 Dread talk, 28, 42, 48 Drought, 59, 60 Drugs, 63 Dual value system, 115 Duality, 43 E Early repatriate, 4, 8, 10, 73, 82, 83, 85, 86 Earn a living, 47, 86, 87, 128 Earning a living, 129 Economies, 141, 148 formal/informal, 126, 127, 130 Edmonds, Ennis, 3, 9, 11, 18, 33, 36, 38, 42, 50n18 Education school/schooling, 148, 149 Elder, 7, 18, 29, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 73, 75, 83–86, 160 Electricity, 85, 146 Electronics, 122 Elite, 66, 70n10 Emic, 117 anthropology/insider/Rastafari, 3, 8, 21n2, 22n12 Emperor Haile Selassie, 119 Encounter, 33 Epistemological, 32, 37, 46 EPRDF, 144, 150, 162n3 Equality, 58, 60, 65 Ethiopenglish communication/speaking, 46, 48

199

Ethiopia, 1–12, 15–17, 20, 21, 21n5, 21n7, 22n12, 29–31, 33, 34, 36, 40, 41, 43, 47, 48, 51n19, 74–76, 79, 81–87, 87n2, 88n4 Ethiopia Africa Black International Congress Bobo Ashanti, 7 Ethiopia first Ethiopia tikildim, 82 Ethiopian Empire, 59 Ethiopian Orthodox, 56, 62, 63, 70n6 Christian/Christianity/Church, 1, 21n7, 62 Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), 61, 94 Ethiopians, 55, 57–60, 62–69 Ethiopian World Federation (EWF), 4, 60 Ethnic ethnicity/group, 28, 45 ethnicity/multi-ethnic, 6, 14 Ethnic federalism, 154 Ethnic groups, 77 Ethnicity, 59 Ethnographies, 2, 4, 15–17, 117, 134n1, 142 Eurocentric, 28, 34, 36, 115, 127 Eurocentrism, 11, 16 Europe, 6, 7, 10, 12, 15, 19 Everyday, 63, 66 Evil, 40, 43, 49n5 Exceptionalism Ethiopia, 12 F In the faith, 32, 34, 37, 38 Family, 115–118, 120, 124, 125, 127–131 Family houses yard, 140, 155

200 

INDEX

Family land, 80, 88n4 Faranji, 82, 98, 103, 109, 125, 131, 132 Farmers farming/subsistence, 6 Fast days, 66 Faye, Michael, 111n12 Federal state, 140 Femininity, 127 Feminism, 127 Fernandez-Olmos, Margarite, 11 Fictive kinship, 116 Fieldwork, 147 Figueroa, Mark, 102, 111n11 Fire fyah/fyah bun (burn), 35, 43, 50n16 First- and second-generations, 29, 157 First-generation Rastafari, 98 Flexible citizenship, 142, 143 Fog Olwig, Karen, 18, 19, 77, 92, 95 Foner, Nancy, 19 Food, 117, 118, 123, 124, 130, 133, 135n3 Forde, Marrit, 11, 116, 118 Foreign, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 106–110, 111n5 Foreign nationals, 134 Fortitude holding the land, 84 Foucault, Michel, 142 Fox, Jonathan, 100 Freedom, 140, 142, 161 Freeman, 39, 126, 127 Frey, Bruno, 143 Frictions, 74 Friendships, 86 Front page, 151–153, 155 Fruit trees, 122 Fyah, 31, 36, 38, 77, 122, 130

G Gad, 32, 34–37 Gamo Highlands, 66 Ganja marijuana, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163n13 Garia, 109 Garrison town, 6 Garvey, Marcus, 30 Garveyism, 11–13 Gashas hectares/land grant, 4 Genealogy, 83 Germany, 45 Gibson, Shirlie, 60, 85, 88n4 Gifts, 93, 100, 106, 108 Glazier, Stephen, 129 Glick Schiller, Nina, 18, 19, 145 Global, 28, 34, 47 Global networks, 3, 20 Global North, 44, 47 Global South, 126, 130 Goffman, Erving, 44 Gome, Shelene, 126 Gonzalez, Nancie, 120 Good, 31, 38, 40, 43, 46 Goulbourne, Henry, 119 Greater Ethiopia, 69 Green card lottery, 101 Greetings, 61 Grenada, 119 Groundings, 33, 38 Gult, 132 Gurage, 6 H Habesha, 64, 65, 97, 132 Hachalu, 66 Hadiya, 6 Haile Roots, 43, 47

 INDEX 

Haile Selassie I, 55–63, 65, 67, 69, 70n2, 70n3, 70n6 His Majesty, 30–31, 33, 35, 37, 49n4, 50n9 Hall, Stuart, 19 Ham Hamitic hypothesis, 57 Hannerz, Ulf, 2, 19 Harris, Joseph, 74 Hassen, Mohammed, 69 Hawassa, 147, 152, 155 City of, 5 Heartical, 84, 85, 105 Hegemonic, 74, 78 Heirs Bonacci, 83 Henriques, 115, 120 Hepner, 34 Herb sacred herb, 63 Herskovits, 34 Heterogeneous, 34 Heteropatriarchal capitalism, 129 Hibiscus, 122 Hierarchical hierarchy, 28 Higgler marketeer, 95 Hill, Robert, 12, 13, 21n5 His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I, 1, 4, 9 His Majesty, 29–33, 35–37, 40, 50n7, 73–87, 88n3, 88n4 His Majesty’s people, 20, 73–88, 99 Histories, 55, 62–64, 69, 74, 75, 78, 86, 87, 88n3, 119, 133 Historiography, 56, 68, 78 Hochschild, Arlie, 126 Holcomb, Bonnie, 66 Home, 2, 4, 8, 12, 17, 74, 78, 87 Homeland, 79

201

Homiak, John, 31, 34, 36, 38, 40, 43, 45, 46, 49n7 Homo sapiens Dinkenesh/Lucy, 29 Hope, 44 Horst, 92 Household, 92, 96, 101–104, 107 House ownership, 91, 140, 151 Howell, Leonard, 12, 22n9 Humanity, 30, 34 Hybridity, 117, 118 Hygiene, 66 I IandI, 34, 35, 38, 45, 49n7, 85 Rastafari, 7 Identification card (ID), 91, 141, 146, 153 Identity, 65, 68, 76, 80, 87 performance/performative, 28, 33, 39, 43, 44, 46, 48 Ideological, 117, 133 Ideological conflict, 63 Ideology, 56, 69 Imaginative, 2, 3, 9, 18, 19, 21 Imaginative acts, 69 Immigrant, 105 Immigration and Nationality Affairs, 147 Imperial, 132, 133 Imperial decree, 145 Imprisoned jail/prison, 148, 156, 158 Income, 91–93, 95, 103, 104, 107, 110n3, 126, 129–131 Individualism individual/liberalism/modernity, 2, 14, 17 Individually, 60 Inequalities, 79

202 

INDEX

Infrastructure, 155, 163n9 Injera, 6, 124 Injustice, 40, 50n16 Integration, 3, 17, 118 Intercultural, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 134 Intermarried intermarriage, 86 Internal migration, 151 Interpersonal, 77 Inversion, 34, 38 Investment, 143, 151, 152, 163n9 Invitation land grant, 65 Ethiopia/land grant/ Shashamane, 4, 12 Itiopia, 29–30 Ityopian, 1, 4 J Jacob, 91, 92, 110 Jah, 35, 45, 62, 129 Jalata, Asafa, 67, 68, 160 Jamaica, 1–12, 14–18, 20, 21n5, 21n8, 27–29, 32, 36, 39, 44–46, 49, 50n17, 51n18, 59–61, 63, 65, 66, 69, 70n4, 70n5, 73, 74, 80, 81, 83–85, 88n2, 116, 117, 119–122, 127–129, 133, 134, 139, 140, 143–146, 152, 156–161, 161n2, 162n3, 162n5 Jamaicans, 59, 65 Jamaica Safar, 1–8, 15, 17, 18, 20, 27, 32, 36, 39, 46, 49, 51n18, 61, 65, 66, 69, 100, 102–104, 107, 109, 110, 111n5, 111n6, 116, 117, 120, 121, 133, 134, 139, 140, 152, 156–159, 161, 162n3 James, Cyril Lionel Robert, 3, 15 Jesus Christ, 30, 35 John, 116, 117, 120–122, 124, 125, 130

Judah Lion of, 30, 31, 47 Judiciary, 156, 161 K Kabeer, Naila, 142 Kahn, Miriam, 133 Kasinitz, Philip, 19 Katzin, Margaret Fisher, 127 Kebede, Alemseghed, 61 Kebele, 146, 147, 152–155 Kebra Negast, 55, 69n1 Kembata, 6 Kempadoo, Kamala, 45 Kenya, 148, 151 Ketema, 117, 133, 134, 159, 160 town, 5 Kifetew, Konjit, 126 Kin, 67, 92, 97, 105, 106, 109 King, 41, 45, 50n15, 50n17 King of Kings Haile Selassie I, 12 Elect of God/emperors/Lion of Judah, 56, 57 King’s highway, 151 Kingston Jamaica, 9, 10, 12, 14, 122, 124, 128, 146, 159 Kinship, 77, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 125, 130, 134 Kitchen, 121–124 Knotterus, David J., 61 Kunz, Rahel, 111n9 L Labour, 10, 14, 19 exploitation, 95 gendered division, 117, 125–127, 129, 130, 134, 134n1 Land, 33, 40, 41, 65, 69, 73–84, 86, 87, 87n1, 87n2, 88n3, 88n4, 88n8

 INDEX 

Land grant, 1, 4, 7, 13, 20, 21, 21n5, 22n12, 74–81, 84, 87, 88n2, 88n4, 92, 94, 96, 99, 106, 110, 139, 140, 147, 150, 155 Landowners, 132, 134 Landscape, 123, 151, 152 Langano, 6 Language, 117, 118, 123, 124 Lawrence, 109 Leadership His Majesty, 58 League of Nations, 58 Lee, 12, 22n9 Legality, 139, 141 Legal status, 140–143, 150, 154, 161 Lester, 47, 85, 86 Levine, Donald, 56, 65, 67, 69n1, 160 Levitt, Peggy, 111n10 Lewis, Herbert, 69 Lewis, William, 10, 34 Liberation, 31 Life course, 116, 118, 120 Light-skinned, 67 Lij Iyasu Iyasu/Menelik, 67, 70n10 Limin liming/socialising, 97 Lineage, 55–57, 67, 145 Lion of Judah, 123 Littlewood, Roland, 12 Livelihood, 91, 92, 94, 95 earn a living, 63 Livicate dedicate, 42 Livity, 33, 42, 99, 159 Local Ethiopian, 6, 20, 55, 59–61, 63, 64, 68, 70n7, 93, 94, 96–98, 100–105, 116–120, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 132–134, 148, 150, 155, 156, 159, 162n3, 162n5 Locked up jailed, 156–160

203

Looting, 66 Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna, 78, 87 Lowlands, 66 Lutz, Helma, 108 M MacLeod, Erin, 47, 48 Make a living, 93–95, 105 Making a living, 92–95 earning a living, 91–110 Malik, 158 Malkki, Liisa, 132 Manhood, 158 Manifest, 35, 37, 39, 49n7 Manifestation, 30 Manifesting become/conscious/manifest/ Rastafari, 28, 33, 34, 48 Mansion, 30, 39, 63, 83, 88n5, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 101, 106 House/Mansion/Rastafari, 4, 155, 156, 162n2 Marginalisation, 95 Mariah, 148 Marijuana ganja, 62, 63 Marion, 67, 68 Market, 94, 97, 102, 125, 126, 133 Market economy, 125 Marley, Bob, 43–45, 47, 50n17 music/reggae, 58 Marriage, 62, 67, 77, 118, 120, 127, 145, 147 Martinique, 6 Masculinity, 127, 128 Master Plan, 151, 152, 155 Matthew, 93, 102, 116–118, 120–124, 130, 134n2 Meles Zenawi EPRDF, 150 Melka Oda, 5, 6 Memories, 60, 117, 134, 149

204 

INDEX

Menelik I, 55 Men-of-words, 38 Message-bearers, 45–47 Mies, Maria, 125, 130 Migrants, 117, 130, 132, 133 Migration, 1, 2, 5, 6, 10, 15, 18, 19, 29, 33, 45 Miller, Daniel, 92 Mintz, Sidney, 13, 14, 16, 19, 116, 125, 127 Miracle-making, 60 Modernity, 64 Modes of Belonging, 139–143 Mohammed, Patricia, 45, 127 Monarch, 59 Money donations/remittances, 79, 85, 86 Morality, 32, 79 Morally upstanding, 105 Moser, Caroline, 126 Mosque Islam/Muslim/, 4 Motherhood, 127 Mothers, 105, 108 Movement, 28, 33, 34 Multi-ethnic, 63, 65, 66 Munasinghe, Viranjini, 14 Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel, 17 Music, 28, 43–48, 51n19 Musicians, 45–47, 51n19 Muslim, 65–67, 70n10 N Narrative, 56, 61, 63, 64, 69, 75, 76, 78 Community (see His Majesty’s people) identity/nation, 60, 63, 68, 69 Narrative Self-Making, 75–76 Nation, 55, 64, 68, 69, 69n1 National imaginary, 75

Nationalism, 59, 68, 74, 87 Nationalities, 118, 131, 145, 149, 162n6, 163n14 Nationhood, 3, 56, 64, 68, 69, 69n1 Nature, 122 Negus Negast, 57 Neighbourhood, 116, 118, 134, 134n1 Nelson, 31–33, 35, 37, 38, 41–43, 48, 49n5, 49n6, 49n7, 50n9 Neoliberal, 94 Nesbitt, Nick, 3 Nettleford, Rex, 42, 88n8 Networks, 92, 98, 100, 105, 110 cross-border, 116, 118–121, 125, 130, 132 New road, 139, 151, 153, 155 New York, 119 Norms, 28 Nuff respect elders, 83 Nyahbinghi, 43, 46, 155 O Occupation, 59 Occupational multiplicity, 95 Old road, 151 Old Testament, 30 Olmstead, Judith, 66 Omo National Park, 6 Oneness, 34 Ong, Aihwa, 9, 142 Ontological, 32 On works, 7 Oppression, 34, 45, 68, 70n4 Oral histories, 75 Orality, 27, 28 Organ, 33 Twelve Tribes, 41, 49n3 Organization for African Unity, 65 Origin, 119

 INDEX 

Origin stories, 73–75 See also His Majesty’s people Orisha, 118 Oromiyya Regional State, 5, 6 Oromos, 5, 6, 8, 60, 65–69, 70n9, 70n10, 70n11, 73, 77 Oromo Studies Association, 68 Oromumma, 68 Outernational, 92, 106, 108, 110 international/Rastafari, 15, 16 P Palestine, 151 Pan African Pan African thought, 74, 78 Pan African cosmopolitanism, 3, 9 Pan-Ethiopian, 66, 68 Pankhurst, Richard, 12 Papers residence, 139, 140, 153 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 11 Parents, 96, 105, 108 Parreñas, Rhacel, 130 Participant observation, 92 Passport, 140, 141, 144, 146, 149, 161 Patois, 118 Paton, Diana, 11 Patriarchy, 126 Patterson, Orlando, 3 Paul, Annie, 15 Pauletta, 93, 97, 102, 103, 159 Pentecostal, 4 Performativity everyday, 27, 34, 41, 42, 44, 48 Performers orators, 27, 47, 51n19 In perpetuity land/Rastafari, 76, 80, 84 Personhood, 31, 34, 36, 48, 49, 63, 65, 66

205

Peteet, Julie, 158, 163n14 Peter, 139, 140, 147, 152, 158, 161 Philpott, Stuart, 19, 105 Pioneers, 83–87, 88n8 Place-making, 142 Places, 118, 125, 133 Plantation, 95 Plantation societies Caribbean/West Indies, 2, 18 Police, 154, 156–161 Political economy, 93 Politricks, 150 Pollard, Velma, 28, 33–35, 42, 45 Popularity, 127 Population, 5–7, 16 Postcolonial, 3, 14, 16, 19, 20, 28, 34, 44, 116, 117, 127 Post-repatriation migration, 130, 144 Poverty, 85, 122 Power, 29, 40, 47, 57, 60, 64, 76, 78, 87n1, 117, 128 Practices of relatedness everyday practices of relatedness, 75, 77 Praxis, 2, 4, 16 Precarious, 129 Prejudices, 63 Price, Charles, 9, 13, 18, 33, 36, 42, 51n19 Prince Emmanuel, 30 Private, 116, 125, 126, 128, 131 Progress, 94 Promised land, 142 Prophet, 30, 32, 34–37, 42 Protestant, 63 Provision grounds, 94 Public, 125–128, 133 Pulis, John, 34, 42 Q Queen of Sheba, 55

206 

INDEX

R Race, 58, 64, 66 Radical, 32, 50n8 Rain, 59, 60, 70n6 Rastafari, 27–48, 49n1, 49n7, 50n8, 50n12, 50n14, 50n16, 51n18, 51n19, 55–69, 70n2, 70n5, 70n6, 70n7, 74–87, 87n1, 87n2, 88n3, 88n4, 88n9, 91–110, 111n5, 115–134, 139–161, 161n2, 162n3, 162n4, 162n7 Rastaman, 75, 83–85 Rasta/Rastafari, 2 Rastamen, 28, 43, 44 Rastawoman, 28, 44, 75, 79, 84, 85 Ras Tefari Mekonnen, 55 Recent repatriate, 8, 61 Reciprocity, 100, 109 Red, gold and green colours, 123 Reggae, 34, 44–47, 50n16, 50n17 Reinvention, 69 Reisman, Karl, 27, 43 Relatedness, 116, 118, 120, 134 Everyday (see Family; Kinship; Yards) Religion, 117 Remittances, 93, 99–102, 106, 107, 110n4, 111n9, 111n10, 111n11, 130 Repatriate, 27–29, 31, 33, 34, 37–40, 43, 46–48, 49n6, 50n10, 57, 60, 61, 74, 75, 77–86, 88n4, 88n7, 91–94, 98–100, 102–109 Repatriation, 29, 33, 40, 41, 47, 51n19 Repetition, 29, 49 Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica, 9 Reputation, 127, 128 Residence, 117, 118, 120, 130 Residence permit, 143, 144, 147

Resistance, 9, 11, 12, 15, 66, 68 Respectability, 39, 42, 127 Restaurant family-run, 93, 97, 102 Return, 30 Returnee, 64 Revelation Book of Revelations, 30, 31, 35, 36, 39, 45 Revival Zion, 118 Revolution, 145, 150 1974, 7 Ridicule, 63 Ritual, 28, 38, 48, 63, 158 Robberies robbery/theft, 85 Romero, Mary, 108 Roots routes, Geertz, 3, 13 Routine precarity, 95–100 Royalty, 55–57 Rural, 126 S Sacrilegious, 63 Sädätäñña färänjoch, 132 Safar Jamaica Safar, 149, 153 Safety, 30 St. Vincent, 119 St. Vincent and the Grenadines, 6 Salazar, Noel, 145 Salih, Sara, 29 Salvation, 29, 31, 33–35, 37 Sassen, Saskia, 130 Savage, 66 Schema cultural, 64 Schneider, David, 121 Scramble for Africa, 59 Scripture, 35

 INDEX 

Seasonal repatriate, 8, 130, 144 Second generation, 63, 64, 68, 118, 119, 128, 141, 155, 157 Second-generation Rastafari, 92 Sekei, Linda, 111n7, 111n10 Self-making, 64 Shankilla, 65 Shashamane, 1–9, 12, 15–17, 27–29, 37–41, 43, 45–48, 49n7, 50n10, 50n13, 51n18, 56, 59, 60, 62–64, 66–68, 70n9, 73–87, 88n4, 88n5, 88n6, 88n7, 115, 116, 119–122, 124, 125, 127–134 Sherzer, Joel, 27 Shewa, 66 Shilliam, Robbie, 21n4 Shiloh, 40, 41 Shop souk, 93, 97, 102, 103 Shop-keeping shop/souk, 102 Sidama, 6 Sighting, 60 citing/reasoning/sight, 27, 28, 31–38, 48, 49 Silence, 76, 78 Silencing, 129 Silte, 6 Simona, 61–63 Simpson, George, 9 Sistren, 129 Skin colour, 64, 67 Slave barya, 67 Slums ghetto/slum/urban, 10 Smith, Michael G., 9, 88n8 Smith, Raymond T, 115, 119, 120 Sociality, 77, 141 Socially reproductive labour, 93 Social relations, 62, 69

207

Social reproduction, 3, 18, 28, 64, 115, 116, 118, 125, 129, 134 Social status, 124 Solidarity, 2, 3, 12, 15, 121 Solomonic King Solomon, 78 Solomonic dynasty, 55, 57 Soon come, 100 Sorenson, John, 55, 56, 66, 67, 92 Soroto, Solomon, 83 Southern cosmopolitan sensibility Caribbean/cosmopolitanism/ history/place, 2 Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Regional State, 5 Spaces, 116, 118, 128, 134 Speech, 118 Speechmaking, 38 Spiritual, 28, 32, 33, 35, 37, 39 Spiritual Baptists, 118 Spiritual citizenship, 142 Spirituality, 1, 11, 64, 79 Spiritually motived migration, 75 Spiritual pilgrimage pilgrim/pilgrimage/Rahnema/ Rastafari/ Turner, 82 Spiritual repatriation, 1–4, 115, 117, 130, 131, 141, 161 Stasis, 117 Status, 28, 43, 64–66, 68, 70n2, 77, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91, 96, 108 Stereotypes, 63 Story-telling, 76 Strangers, 32, 39, 48 Structure, 18 Subjectivities, 29 Subsistence farming, 94 Surveillance, 144, 157 Survival, 93, 96, 99, 101, 110 Survival strategies, 93 Suss Out, 39–41

208 

INDEX

Sustainable livelihoods, 98 Symbolic, 62 symbol, 98, 106, 108 Symbolises colours/gold and green/Lion of Judah/red/symbol, 4 Symbols, 121, 123 T Tafari-Ama, Imani, 129 Tea ganja/healing, 157 Teddy Afro, 47 Tefari Mekonnen, 31 Temporality, 116, 123 Tenement yard, 115 Territory, 59, 64, 66 Theocratic Order of Nyahbinghi, 7 Theology, 30 Thiefing, 104, 105 Third-generation, 67 Thomas, 73–78, 80, 86, 148 Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF), 5, 150 Tirunesh, 116–118, 120–124, 130, 134n2 Title deeds, 140, 154, 155 Tobago, 6 Tomei, Renato, 46 Tosh, Peter, 34, 45 Tourists, 107 Traditional medicine, 63 Transatlantic slave trade, 10 Transit, 5, 6, 119 Translocal, 92, 100, 104, 105, 110 community/networks/ transnational, 2 Transnational, 100, 101, 109, 110, 119, 130 Tribulation, 79

Trinidad and Tobago, 6, 44, 61, 98, 99, 118–119 Trobriand Islands, 75 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 76, 78 Silence (see Narrative) Tukur Americans, 82 Twelve Tribes, 30–33, 35, 36, 41, 42, 49n3, 50n10, 83, 88n5, 93, 99, 155 Mansion/Rastafari, 6, 7 U Ulysse, Gina, 128 Underemployment, 93 Undocumented, 140, 141, 148 Unemployment, 93 Uniform, 32, 49n4 United Kingdom (UK), 7, 10, 16 United States of America (USA), 4, 7, 10, 11 University, 148, 149 V Value systems, 28 Van Dijk, Frank, 57 Veal, Michael, 44 Vertovec, Steven, 2 Violence, 9, 128, 129 Visa, 141, 144, 147 Visions, 28, 31–35, 37, 49n6 Visiting, 120, 121 Visitors, 27, 28, 32, 39–41, 47, 48, 79–81 Vulnerability, 103 W Wardle, Huon, 12–14, 16, 18, 19, 27, 49n5, 50n8

 INDEX 

Wat sauce, 124 Water, 146 house/indoor plumbing/river, 85 West Arsi Zone, 6 Western Union, 91, 98–103, 109 West Indian God, 58–61 West Indians, 115, 141, 144, 160 Wifehood, 127 Wilson, Peter, 39, 115, 120, 127, 128 Wollaita, 6, 8 Wondo Genet, 152 Wordplay, 38 Word-sound-power, 27, 28, 31, 33, 48 Work, 120, 126–131 income/livelihood/unpaid work, 92–97, 99, 101, 102, 104, 108 Worldview, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 40, 48, 49n1, 50n8, 58, 59, 62, 63, 68, 69

209

Y Yards, 6, 41, 43, 44, 94, 103, 107, 111n8, 115–125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 134, 148, 152, 153, 158 house, 140, 153, 154, 156, 160 Yawney, Carole, 45 Yelvington, Kevin, 19 Youths, 27, 29, 38, 46, 73, 75, 80, 83, 94, 96, 97, 108, 139, 140, 145, 146, 148, 149, 154, 157–159, 161 Z Zara Yacob, 57 Zewde, Bahru, 160 Zimbabwe, 45 Zion, 68, 92 heaven/heaven on earth/Rastafari, 11, 21n6 Zips, 45, 50n16, 51n19