Rasta Vibrations

Pick a person at random anywhere in the world and ask them about Jamaica and I reckon they’re most likely response will be to talk about reggae and Rastafari (not Rastafarianism, by the way). But what most of the outside world knows about Rastafari is limited to its outward symbols – dreadlocks, red, green and gold, Bob Marley and ganja. I for one only have a very vague grasp of its inner workings as a religion, its belief systems and its values – I know it’s based around believing the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia is a human incarnation of Jah (God) and steeped in the ideology of black emancipation and even repatriation to Africa, but that’s about it.

The weekend before last I was extremely privileged to be invited to a Rastafari ‘nyabinghi’, an all-night spiritual ceremony. I’ll be honest and admit I didn’t have a clue what it was exactly I was going to – I’d been told it would involve music and assumed it would be some kind of concert or dance, so off I went loaded up with rum ready for another party.

Stretch at Salt River

It all started because all the heat and sunshine was giving me a yearning to hit the beach and have a swim. I’d got talking to Stretch, one of the Rasta guys who lives in the yard and owns a car, asking him if he’d be up for driving me out somewhere one day. The next morning he came up to me asking if I fancied heading out for a swim at Salt River in the neighbouring parish of Clarendon – if I paid for some petrol, he’d also take me along to a ‘singing’ that same night where some ‘big man’ was making an appearance, and that way we could kill two birds with one stone.

So me, Stretch, Bones, Kara and Stretch’s baby daughter Akeeba piled into his old Nissan and hit the road, with a pumping soundtrack of Dennis Brown and, aherm, Celine Dion (with Stretch and Bones wailing all the words like a pair of neutered cats). I still thought we were heading to the beach – I knew Salt River was right on the coast – and to be fair our first stop was the beach, a flotsam-strewn narrow strip of neglected sand backing onto thick mangrove which wasn’t exactly your typical idyllic Caribbean bathing spot. We took a quick walk along it as Stretch explained that the beach had been ravaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2007, and had never been properly cleared up. It was then that he explained that our final destination was a mineral pool a couple of miles up the road fed by the eponymous Salt River.

Bones doing some dodgy dancing

Too small and far away from the main tourist trail to make it into any guide books, the Salt River pool is actually pretty beautiful and popular with the local community. The main pool is perhaps the size of a typical swimming pool, with warm, shallow, crystal clear water letting you see the rocky bottom and the usual Jamaican shacks selling snacks and drinks all around. Even prettier is the small tributary from the river proper which feeds the pool, shaded by thick mangroves and trees growing out at bizarre angles into and out of the water. We spent a relaxing few hours swimming and playing a bit of football, while the hills surrounding the thin strip of coastal plain were regularly lit up with lightning, despite the blazing sunshine and clear blue skies above us.

Me looking pasty and pale

That evening we returned to Clarendon, but this time headed out further along the coast road, down the hook of land that sticks out from the middle of Jamaica’s underbelly. Our destination was a place called Portland Community, not far from a lighthouse bearing the same name that marks one of Jamaica’s southern-most points. Here we really were getting off the beaten path – most of the coastal road we took was little more that a rough single track hemmed in by high hedges, with little sign of life on either side. Then, out of nowhere, we came to cars parked on the verge on either side of the road, people walking and milling about, and then lights at what looked like some sort of small community centre (I never did work out where the rest of the village was).

The nyabinghi was being held in the yard of this building. Under a small open-sided marquee stood and sat a group of Rasta elders, dressed in brightly coloured robes and with their grey dreadlocks and beards flowing, beating drums and chanting. People were stood or sat all around, swaying gently in time with the steady, hypnotic beat of the drums or singing along, while others either milled about the yard or stood further back at a couple of fires, smoking and ‘reasoning’ in the typically animated Jamaican style.



Grade 6 cricket at Marlie



To be honest, nothing much else happened for the rest of the night, which kept going until dawn. There was one extended gap in the music while passages from the scriptures were read, but the main focus was the drumming and chanting. I didn’t follow a lot of the significance of what was going on – I never did get a proper explanation of who the old guys were and why they were important – but the repetitive, syncopated rhythms of the drumming and low, gentle, sometimes mournful singing had a very otherworldly feel to it. I can’t think of a better way of explaining it - with the effect of still-persistent lightning in the distance and a strong wind making the palms trees in the yard dance as if they too were swaying along to the music, it did kind of feel as if something profound and mystical was happening. Or maybe that was just the effect of the ganja and rum.

Seeing Rastafari for what it really is, a living, breathing religion and not just a fashion statement, made the night probably the most interesting I’ve had here so far. I didn’t learn much more about the belief system per se – from what I can gather, it borrows elements from Judaism and Ethiopian Coptic Christianity, using the Old Testament as its main religious text and throwing in a lot of West African spiritualism. But I got to see its role in a social and cultural context, and one of the things that struck me was that the event wasn’t just attended by people sporting dreads and African robes – most of the people there were ordinary Jamaicans in their designer T’s and jeans, suggesting how deep an influence Rastafari still has on society at large.





Although I couldn’t buy into the main ideas of Jah and Haile Selassie being an incarnation of God, a lot about Rastafari appeals to me. I loved listening to the ‘reasonings’, the continuous, lively debates about religion, philosophy, morality and politics that took place round the fires – they were certainly more interesting than your average Saturday night conversation down the pub back home.

I also really like the strong value placed in natural living, using what the land can provide, particularly in terms sticking to a vegetarian diet free from artificial additives and eschewing modern medicine in favour of the age-old skills of the herbsman. I love the fact that people here eat and use so much of what grows around them, varying their diets with the seasons, and knowing exactly what plants and fruits have different beneficial properties. I’ve had direct experience of this in the past few days after picking up a cold – needing a vitamin C fix, I’ve only had to step out the door to pick limes off the trees in the yard, making a spicy and invigorating tea out of them, ginger and lemongrass. Considering how green and fertile Britain is, our knowledge about and use of what grows around us is pathetic.

On the flipside, Rastafari seems, like many religions, to have some confused views about equality. Although it preaches equality for all, there were some mutterings about a ‘whitey’ being brought to a spiritual gathering. I should stress that the complaint came from one guy, that he was quickly put in his place by the guys who were with me, and that the Rasta guys who work in the yard here have gone out of their way to explain that we are all ‘bredren’ and they all reject notions of division based on skin colour. But it was interesting that it cropped up, and although I have no doubt that the Rastas I’ve spoken to do genuinely believe in racial equality, the fact is that Rastafari symbolizes the evil, oppressive world of ‘Babylon’ as Western and white, while the promised land of ‘Zion’ is African and black.



French Cricket



Attitudes to racial difference are difficult to unravel generally here. Despite being a colonized country made up of different immigrant communities, Jamaica is much less cosmopolitan than the UK. I do feel quite literally like the only white guy in town in Old Harbour – there are no other white faces to be seen, and only a handful of Chinese and Asian. And yet I’ve come up against virtually no animosity, no sense of resentment that I’m a stranger in town, no evidence of prejudice. One guy shouted ‘cracker’ after me after I declined his offer to sell me some weed outside the local grocery shop, and some kid in school, no doubt feeling the safety of anonymity as he shouted it from a crowd, called me ‘white nigger’ on one of my first days at Marlie Mount, but that has been it.



Bam-Bam, Jason, Austin and a goat



On the other hand, labeling people according to the difference in the colour of their skin is just a normal, everyday thing here. I am just ‘whitey’ or ‘white man’ – there’s no malice or intent in it, it’s just what I am. It makes me wonder why or when terms like ‘darkie’ or ‘brown man’ became so socially unacceptable back home. Jamaicans believe in calling a spade a spade (no pun intended) – an overweight person is ‘fatty’, a short person ‘shorty’ (also a general term for an attractive girl), etc. The attitudes of the kids at school are pretty funny – a lot of them assume I’m American and therefore must speak Spanish, so a lot of them still say ‘hola’ to me when they pass me, while some of the younger ones call me ‘Chiney Man’, probably because Chinese are the only light-skinned people they’ve seen before. I had to laugh last week when two American boys arrived, what we’d call mixed race – there was great excitement as kids kept running to me asking me if they were my children.

Akeeba and Mumsil

The other thing you can’t escape from, an insidious hangover from the deep-seated racial hierarchies of slavery, is that light or white skin is still widely associated with privilege and success, to the point where a lot of people still see having light skin as being an indication of being better somehow. Bleaching skin is not uncommon, most notoriously in the case of current dancehall superstar Vybz Kartel. This is just bizarre – next to all the rich and varied hues of black and brown skin I see everyday, I’ve never felt so self-consciously pasty, pale and sickly. They look strong and healthy, I just go red if I stay in the sun too long. Go figure. But it’s not how a lot of Jamaicans see it. The kids at school want to touch my arms or stroke my hair because they think it’s softer than theirs. Women want to talk to me for no other reason that I’m white and they see me as rich – I’ve been told straight out that white men make better husbands than black guys, by a girl who admitted she’d never even dated a white guy.

Anyway, on the school front things have improved since the first week of summer school. I spoke to the principal and I’ve had more to do, be it sitting in with classes in the mornings or taking longer PE classes. I even got to try out my grammar bingo (I wasn’t going to let that go to waste the amount of time it took to make the bloody cards), although I think it was probably a bit ambitious trying it out on Grade 3. Although we spent time running through what prepositions, conjunctions and adverbs were before the game started and they all seemed to know well enough, about half the class failed to grasp that the point of the game was I’d read out a word, and they had to cross out the type of word it was on their bingo card, if they had it. Most of them just ended up guessing and I got inundated by people calling ‘house’ at random times, just in case they had fluked a win without noticing.

As I’m writing this I’ve only got two days left of summer school, and then I’m a free man until September. I’ll miss the kids at Marlie Mount, even if I haven’t felt I’ve had the sense of purpose I had at the deaf school – despite driving me to distraction at times by their inability to stand or sit still for two seconds and their insistence on arguing over everything, most of them are very warm, engaging, sweet and often very, very funny. I know there is a lot I will miss about Old Harbour in general, and I have wavered about going back to Mandeville because I know it will be lonelier up there and I’ve had a lot of fun here. But I didn’t come here for a holiday, I came here to do something useful and to learn. There’s a definite objective to me going back to the deaf school, something I can put in place and leave behind, whereas at Marlie Mount I’d just be lending a helping hand they could do just as well without.