Eeenie Meanie Miney Moe, Don't Forget My Toe

"We do not want to be reminded that it is we, the indigenous people, who are poor and exploited in the land of our birth. These are concepts which the Black Consciousness approach wishes to eradicate from the black man's mind before our society is driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds."

 Steve Biko

"Our own wish and desire is to safeguard the unity, independence and internal security of the Congo inasmuch as We uphold the Charter of the United Nations and have abiding loyalty in the principle of COLLECTIVE SECURITY"

Emperor Haile Selassie I

 

 Give thanks for the spontaneous moments of inspiration when we get to converse with like minds.  That was the occasions a few nights ago on reasoning with a sistren of mine regarding life and Rastafari.  We didn't get into any hardcore discussion of faith or such.  Those conversations, valid and necessary as they are, can go all night and day.  And while good reasoning has no end, it does sometimes leave ones wanting.

King Emmanuel and HIM Haile Selassie 1st

However, such was not the case this particular night.  In fact, on reasoning about the nature of the movement to date, some issues arose that are very serious.  One being the nature, or better the perceived nature, of foreign nations in the livity.  It may be abundantly clear to many outsiders, that in the last decade or so, there has been a steady rise of non-African adherents to the principles and doctrine of Rastafari.  Of major significance is the perception that the call for repatriation, the restoration of peoples to their native lands, to Africa.

This is such a salient point for Rastafari.  For the ascendants of the generations of Africans stolen from their homelands and transported against their will to the America's, returning home is a matter of restoring an identifiable nationhood to a much maligned peoples.  It matters little what faith, culture or particular locale respective peoples are currently residing in.  What matters is the identity of the African who cannot change his or her skin.

So the question to ask then amongst Rastafari: Are we faith or nation?  If we are simply faith, does the call for Africa include foreign nations?  If simply a nation, does the foreign representation count in our numbers?  Is there a way to assuage both poles and still address the central issues?

I won't begin to suggest that I have all the answers.  That was made positively clear to me reasoning with my sistren.  Born and raised outside of continental Africa, many of us in the West, have been raised in liberal, multicultural, heavily diverse communities.  So diverse that you are taught that to separate and consolidate to reaffirm your kinship is akin to being a racist.  That to be deemed recognizable, your once Pan-African organizations, need foreign nations intermixed throughout the very leadership and inner workings to gain more broad acceptance.  No wonder the word from the continent is that the colour of Rastafari seems to be getting lighter and lighter.

Let me not pretend that the teachings and livity that Rastafari know to be true and divinely inspired should not have risen up throughout all nations.  The course the world had been on for far too long, was devoid of the love, the Godly love that Rastafari has been teaching and spreading for nearly a century.  It was ripe, the earth that is, ripe for a message of universal love with clean hands and pure hearts.  Love for all peoples.  Love for the earth.

Still, the Nation of Rastafari rose up in the last century amongst the children of the children who had suffered the brutality and inhumanity of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade and the oppressive wickedness of the plantation chattel system.  The early tenets addressed the righting of the wrongs: physical mental and spiritual, that devastated the African peoples who had been carried away.  The tenets sought to restore a people to a sound body of uprightness within all aspects of their lives.

It is not lost on Rastafari, that the "livity" would be seen as a right cause for other "nations".  Salvation, while always personal, is very sweet and hard to keep from other persons.   It even seems somewhat fitting that the children of the former colonial and imperial powers have seen the vileness and errors in their father's ways and have turned to the very people their fathers brutalized for guidance, forgiveness and redemption.  But that does not necessitate that these same children look to Africa as their future and final homeland.  

We had previously been separated into distinct regions and habitats for many reasons.  One could probably give the arguments of culture, language, spiritual philosophy.  Even physiology could be used as an argument for the regional separation.  Yet, the current phase shift of human interaction has pushed or pulled us into these cosmopolitan societies that feed many needs.  Still, while the kinship on a spiritual or principle level has been attained in the Diaspora, who are we to say that those on the continent want a remnant from every nation?

There is however a place within the functioning of the movement for the myriad nations that are presently involved.  That place is in agitating to their respective peoples for the full restoration of rights and full restoration of Nationhood for the ascendants of the African Holocaust.  The world, and I have made this argument and appeal previously, will not begin to repair herself until that breach is repaired.  While the world can seemingly manage effectively without such repair, it is akin to baking bread without a rising agent.  You will likely be able to eat what is produced, but it won't be a proper bread.

Okay, so I've just now equated repatriation to baking bread.  That has got to be a literary first.  Getting back to the point of foreign nations, they are expressly useful in this current dispensation and must be called upon for their usefulness.  There are many issues in the land that have arisen from not only the external African Holocaust but also the internal one of colonialism and imperialism.  Even today, foreign intervention is creating much havoc.  The call for help is not a call for interloping but rather, as stated before, a call to urge their own peoples to make things right.  It is a call to minister to life with justice.

This does not preclude the African people themselves from doing any of the heavy lifting themselves.  We must do a majority of the work.  Firstly, and I give thanks to Empress Marina Blake of the Ethiopian African Black International Congress (EABIC) for taking a first step in this regards, we must begin to see each other as family.  And forgive but never forget any of the injuries that have occurred over these many years.  We must beyond the point of distant cousinhood and remind ourselves that we are brothers and sisters, sons and daughters to one another.

Because as I see it, there is no hope for the African in this world outside of Africa.  Opportunity through the occurrence of debt is no hope.  It is slavery in another form.  By another name.  That is all the West has to offer African peoples.  And while many will never see that reality so plainly, many many of us do.  And many of us have been and are now looking forward to that day when the African continent and Her peoples are fully restored.  We in the Diaspora are willing and able to do what is necessary to facilitate that progress.  We only need to come home to show such.  Bring us home family.  Bring us home.

As naive as these meditations may come across to some, one thing stands above all: "God is love, so let us love."

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