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REGGAE AS BLACKSPACE Erna BrodberFebruary 2008
Sixth form students in 1961, about to become Jamaica’s middle class in its post independence period, knew of black students in the US trying with great difficulty to get into high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. They could read about this in the popular evening daily newspaper, the Star. They could also see the advertisement inviting Jamaican young women to choose which of ten types of beauty they belonged and to apply accordingly to be judged and to get the winning prize. This 1961 was the year for the Satinwood type of beauty, the year of ebony and mahogany had either gone or was to come for the next year’s was going to be ‘golden apple’. They would also see the following cartoon on page 13 and wonder whether with their type of beauty –ebony or mahogany they could a job in the hotel on the “naught coast”. They could have read too about Millard Johnson’s party the People’s Political Party (PPP) and its attempts to organize black people or even seen some of his publications in which he shows the faces of African leaders, so different phenotypically from our Bustamante and Manley- thick lips broad nose, black skin, the first Africans they have seen outside of Tarzan’s half naked friends of the comic books, and they would get a chance to test the saying, “Hugly no African”. They might have heard that Rastafarian dreadlocks were being forcibly trimmed by the police, seen Rastas made jokes of in the annual Pantomime, shared jokes about them and their purchase of tickets to take them to Africa or been frightened by the armed insurrection led by Claudius Henry, the repairer of the breach and his son. They might even have been part of Teenage Dance Party on JBC and there danced to Beardman Shuffle, a supposed imitation of the way dreadlocks, Rastafarians danced. In short, the teenager, graduating from sixth form the year before independence, and so about to join the middle class, existed in an environment in which race and colour in the native land, Jamaica, were issues. But were they openly discussed and did they feel that it had anything to do with their lives? Their parents would never have encouraged them to seek a job in the tourist industry on the ‘naught coast’: there was the civil service, there was the library service and there was teaching and university and law or medicine for the very bright who got scholarships or whose parents could afford the fees.
The Star had a section called ‘Sing a Song’. The songs for November 13th of 1961, the day of the cartoon and the beauty queen advertisement, were Wooden Heart and Amor, Amor popular American love songs. The teenager would have cut these out, learnt the tune from the radio and been able to sing along word for word as these songs were aired. From her parents or night-club-going elder sibling, she might have heard of Mapletoft Poule, Baba Motta, Carlos Malcolm or Sonny Bradshaw and their attempts to promote Jamaican music., the same old Linstead Market, Sammy Dead, Come back Liza in jazz format. But here was also Wilfred Edwards and Keith an Enid on the new Radio Station, JBC and their ballads Tell Me Darling and Worried Over You were as lovely and loving as Wooden Heart or Amor, Amor were. This station is said to have been designed to promote the development of Jamaican culture and it did lay down some tracts. Sonny Bradshaw attracted the services of the Aggrey Brown, popular DaCosta cup footballer, headboy, just graduated from Cornwall College, to host his Teenage Dance Party. The ‘Top Ten’ was one of the features of this station. This top ten was a list of the ten most popular tunes according to the analysis of the purchases of the major record shops – Universal Mart, Gordon’s Record Service, Clock Tower, K-G Radio Sales, Stanley Motta and Wonard’s Radio Engineering. Until 1964, no more than three locally created tunes made the top ten in any week. Desmond Dacres’ Honour thy Mother and thy Father was there, though from the 8th of February to the 26th of April and the great rent-a- tile, Jimmy James’ Come to Me Softly on the Gaydisc ruled from May to July of that year. Dacres’s sociological eye was one to watch. Prince Buster was another one: the latter’s Tongue will tell spent several weeks on the Top Ten in 1964. Dacres and Prince Buster came with a new slant in content. They were not crooning love songs to anybody or talking of unrequited love; they were talking of and to the people in their community and the buying public was interested.
This conversation to which the buying middle class was able to listen through the lyrics of artist such as Dacres and Prince Buster,continued through the sixties. Eavesdropping thus, the sixth form graduate learnt about ‘rude boys’ in 1966 and 67 from The Clarendonians and from the Wailers facilitated by Studio 1. It was Peter Black [Fred Nunes] who brought this discourse officially to the attention of the middle class. He did so in an extended letter to the editor. This letter appeared in the Sunday Gleaner of June 11, 1967. Peter Black thought this conversation within the rude boy culture was of great sociopolitical import - “.. our local boys are men of true importance and ought not to be taken lightly”, and he wished, he said, to draw the editor’s attention to this. Black looked at five songs – Gun Man, Tougher than Tough, Judge Dread, Court Dismissed and Train, to compose his article, Community Violence and Jamaican Pop Music. He draws attention to an incident in Tougher than Tough in which the judge passing sentence on Rude Boy, is from Ethiopia. Black interprets this thus: “the first point of note is the association of authority with a personality not of Jamaican origin. He missed the point., The point was that within this culture, Ethiopia was highly rated; it was the source of power; it was according to Psalm 68 vs 31, where the people who would stretch forth their hands unto God, lived and moreover according to Psalm 87 vs 4, “this man was born there”. This was the man selected by God to rule his people. Indeed the year before Black wrote his article, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, clearly the man referred to in the Psalms, had visited Jamaica and had left the establishment amazed at the passion with which ordinary Jamaicans had welcomed him. It should be noted too that this judge was accusing rude boy of and charging him for “shooting black people”. Clearly this judge cared particularly for a kind of person called ‘black people’. He missed the colour reference again in the Ethiopian judge’s statement that “….I am black sulphuric acid/I melt all iron”. This was the opportunity for the sixth form graduate to note that Ethiopia and black were invested with great power in parts of the society. This great power had a colour. It was black and could do impossible things. This/the righteous black man could melt the guns of rude boys. Black also missed the reference to trains in the song Trains. He confesses “I can make little of the trains, boats and planes which are “coming now” … the reference here was to the hope-for exodus out of Babylon, Jamaica, to that country whose hands were stretched out to God and where that man “was born”, an exodus so excellently done years after by Bob Marley.
By late 1968 the government of the day was helping to invest ‘black’ with revolutionary political power in the society. It was making an all-out attack on ‘black’. Immigration officers were charged or felt charged to prevent books dealing with black issues from entering the island – even the children’s story Black Beauty it was rumoured, had been proscribed. It is quite likely that radio and television programmes were censured as reading material was and the word ‘black’ with them. What emotions got a chance to be ventilated was anti-government sentiment such as Everything Crash. This song pictures Jamaica as a place where all the essential services have gone on strike. The then prime-minister’s name was Shearer. It rimed well with Pharoah. A culture which drew a lot on the Bible, and with the Rastafarian influence which tended to see the current world as that prophesied to be by Biblical prophets and which was thinking about an exodus from Jamaica to Ethiopia, had a field day linking the prime-minister and his government with Babylon and other evil conditions. Few of these such as Prince Buster’s Pharoah’s Army get drownded were aired or reached the top ten, but delivered in the attractive ska beat, they were heard in the dance halls. Everything crash commanded the chart in January of 1969.
Look from you deh ya, you nuh know Bongo Nyah. Little Roy’s Bongo Nyah holding its place in the charts for six weeks, seemed to be saying to recently graduated sixth former, eavesdropping on the culture from which most of these singers emerged: Here you are peeping in but Bongo Nyah (Rastafarians, Jamaicans practicing an African culture) has been around you and you around it all our life, why don’t you know us? “Lick it back Jah”, Bongo Niah continues. So the singer was now ‘Bongo Nyah, the Rastaman, the old African, inviting the sixth former to throw off artificial blinders and to look at black people and what they represent and threatening Jah’s wrath on those who didn’t. Nina Simone’s Young, gifted and black made the charts in February 1970 and stayed there until March. A funny thing happened though: by mid March Prince Buster [or was it Marcia Griffiths and BobAndy] had in today’s terminology, ‘bought out’ the argument of this African American and was with her in the charts until mid April when he bought out the argument totally for he was there without her until early May. It was alright now to be called ‘black’. The word had been made to be associated with ‘gifted’ and been so popularised by Nina Simone and even more frequently so by our own Prince Buster. An aspirant to the parliament, later to be a prime minister used this song as his campaign theme. The sixth form graduate, knowing herself to be ‘young’ and ‘gifted’ needn’t be shy about putting a colour-coded adjective in the mix and be ‘young gifted and black’, indeed needn’t be afraid of ‘black’. Could young gifted and black get into a hotel on the ‘naught coast’? He could if he cared to for he was now a ‘duppy conqueror’. This Bob Marley creation stayed in the charts for twelve weeks.
What is a ‘duppy conqueror’? People wanted to know what they were buying and what they were singing about[I had to answer this question in Guyana] Answer: for a black person, the spirit is as potent as the flesh and in fact very potent after the body has passed away. Every sixth former’s parents knew about this and they had tried to shut up grandma when she came in from country with news of what duppy had done what to whom. They knew that to be able to conqueror another’s spirit is really a mark of great power. But this was ‘country ’ and lower class belief. The sixth form graduate now learnt about the power of the spirit and that this faith was part of an authentic system of beliefs, translatable into, ‘you young gifted and black sixth form graduate, if you stick close to your black cultural understanding of the world, and follow the paths of righteousness, can have and exercise great power over others’. Max Romeo’s 1971 creation “Maccabbee Version” appears not to have made the top ten at all. How could it when Malcom X’s life story was banned. This poem/song complained about the mal effect of white culture and economic behaviour on black people. Being a song with a very popular tune, this study in social and political history was more available than the works of George Beckford, who during this period was punished for his anti-colonial stand as shown in his writings, Persistent Poverty for instance. ‘Maccabbee version’s repeating chorus “Black man get up stand up on you foot/And give black god the glory”, stimulated a lot of thought. I watched a dancing/singing mother forced by her eight year old son’s question : Mummy what wrong with black man’s foot?, to give him a lecture on Caribbean history. Riding on the tune of a popular Christmas carol, Good King Wenseslaus which pictured a King who seemed to be learning too late of the distressing conditions of his people, Max Romeo’s Maccabbee Version whether he intended this or not, juxtaposed the colonial condition with a new kind of independence for all to digest as they tightened up or rocked steady.
Maccabbee Version (I read/play)
Maccabbee Version taught you as you tightened up or rocked steady that there was a diety whom we ought to hail. It begins by paying respect to Jah Rastafari, a diety at this time recognized only by black Jamaicans. Max Romeo’s line in his first stanza, ‘I am a black man’ was as declarative and as definitive as Martin Luther’s C17th piece, his 95 theses pinned on the church door, Here I stand. One of Max Romeo’s theses was that there are versions of the Bible specifically given by the Almighty God to the Blackman for his empowerment but that this version has been hidden from him. This is the Maccabbee version. Whether any one could show him the Maccabbee version or not, the graduate from sixth form could understand that black people were not only gifted and had particular ways of doing things and a particular view of the world, they were indeed special to God: there was a version of the Bible specially written for them. The thoughtful did look to Old Dreads, to University of the West Indies lecturers to help them to find the knowledge with the black man’s name written on it, knowledge which Bongo Niah told them was within easy reach of them. Many bright sixth forms, by now about to graduate from universities here in Jamaica and elsewhere, left home to study at the feet of one elder or the other. Max Romeo had said “ Black man get up and know yourself” and they were off to know themselves.
The Melodians Rivers of Babylon spent eight weeks on the top Ten.
By the rivers of Babylon/where we sat down/And where we wept/ When we remembered Zion . Who were these weeping people to whom the psalm 137 turned into a song referred?. Black people of course. That guy who has a bad foot and has difficulty standing. Who else was taken away from their lands and transported elsewhere? The sixth form graduate would sing and dance while better understanding her history and what it meant to be ‘black’. It was Burning Spear who brought Civics, taught in the lower grades of the school into the mix. He created Marcus Garvey which was the most bought tune in March of 1975. Marcus Garvey was the country’s first national hero, the sixth former knew and an unequivocally black-skinned man. He was given prophetic powers in Burning Spear’s creation: Marcus Garvey prophesy say…. This is another thing that black people could do, -see around corners. Apart from his prophetic ability, Marcus Garvey was a published author who had mesmerized the world. Here was a hero whom no one could escape from seeing as black. Here was a role model even one that Babylon could not resist acknowledging and giving to the people.
“Reggae” translated by the most erudite of the eavesdroppers as the dative form of the Latin word for king, ‘rex’, translated to mean “music for a king”, was not the first time that black-skinned people, the descendants of Africans enslaved in Jamaica, were creating ways of defining themselves on the basis of their colour and their history and building and disseminating theories to explain their uniqueness and theories to guide praxis. Marcus Garvey’s UNIA had done this here and abroad; others, not quite satisfied with the Bible had published the Holy Piby and there was The Promised Key written and published by Leonard Howell under the pseudonym G.G Maragh. A little booklet eight by five inches and having just 14 pages, it was inexpensive and easy to store: it could be a bookmark for your Bible. The author interested in addressing a particular people, black people, seems to have wanted to offer them a theory which explained their present status vis a vis people of other colours, to warn them against false ideologies and to present guides to healthy and holy living. The book has on its inside cover, the words quoted by black nationalist as early as the C18th, “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God”. Also there is the charge: “Arise and shin for the light has come, and the glory of the Lord god of Israel is now risen upon us”. The next page has a picture of H.I.M. the Emperor Haile Selassie. The book is now divided into sections, the first of which is entitled “The Mystery Country”. This describes Haile Selassie’s coronation in all its majesty. The next section discusses “The false religion—“My dear Reader you can see that all the foundations of the earth are out of course. Allow me to say that there is no throne for the Anglo Saxon white people, they must come down and sit in the dust on the ground there is no throne for them. See Isiah 47th chapter.” The next is the “The Promised Key”. Here we are told that “His majesty Ras Tafari is the head over all man for he is the supreme God”, and his godly qualities are listed for us. We move on to “Ethiopia’s kingdom” where we are introduced to king Alpha and Queen Omega, Rastafari and his wife, emperor and empress of Ethiopia and the author gets a chance to make a definitive statement linking blacks to this majesty: “King Alpha and Queen Omega are the paymasters of the world, Bible owners and money mint. Do not forget they are black people if you please.” We move on to guides to righteous living in Jamaican society – what is a balm yard and how to approach the notion and the fact. Who are revivalists and how much of what they peddle should be accepted. We are told too how to fast. The section entitled “ Department” is very difficult to understand. The section marked “Government” is easier: we are here introduced to the concept of black supremacy: “Instead of saying ‘Civilization’ we are told, “ hereafter, we shall say Black Supremacy”. It is further explained to us that “Black Supremacy has taken charge of white supremacy by king Alpha and Queen Omega, the king of kings. Herein we are also told that black must not marry white and white must not marry black, that we should not marry divorced persons and that wives and husband must not “watch and peep on each other”. We move on the “Eternal Law Office” Here there seem to be some biblical revisions: Adam, Eve, Abraham and Isaac have been given no books in the Bible and so “according to the clearness of this case there is nobody named Adam Eve and Abraham. These the writer seems to be saying are figments of the imagination of “ministers and lawyers who have no part in the business of Queen Omega and King Alpha. The revision continues with the discussion of “Eve the mother of Evil. She and Adam and Abraham are “white people if you please” and are no family to King Alpha and Queen Omega who have said “ that they are our parents and keeper of the Tree of Life” The next section is “Rapers”. The discussion here is of the Klu-Klux-Klan who “committed boisterous fornication with the black women who were taken as slaves”, so “Both rapers and mob lynchers and Klu-klux-Klan are to be shot from off the face of God Almighty’s beautiful earth”. We come now to ‘the Ethiopian Question’ where we learn that “We gave ourselves to be slaves for hundreds of years. That we had given up King Alpha and Queen Omega and this was, it seems, the cause of our enslavement. ‘The first and the last’ is a ‘praise’ paragraph in which King Alpha and Queen Omega are described as “the type setters for time and eternity…” ‘Matrimonial affidavit’ is a section in which justification is made for treating King Alpha and Queen Omega as “ the first and the last, the beginning and the end”. The final section in this small pamphlet is entitled ‘ Black People, Black People Arise and Shin. We are told here that “The white man’s doctrine had forced the black man to forsake silver and gold and seek Heaven after death. It has brought us to live in disgrace and die in dishonour” but now that we have found out that “their doctrine was only a trick, and all their intention was to make themselves strong and to fool the black man”, we must cleave to H.M. Rastafari.
All the theses in the 1930’s The Promise Key were restated in the Reggae. – the existence of a person called the black man; the Bible, a gift to the black man but which has been polluted; the importance to God Almighty of Ethiopia; authority given to H.I.M. Haile Selassie by Almighty God to rule the world; that the black man in Jamaica needed guides to righteous living; and that it is time for him to get up and assert himself in the society. Why did these theses need to be re-asserted? No doubt Howell this early elder preached from his book, bringing his ideas near to his audience. Reading the work by oneself is challenging as punctuation marks are few and far between, words given peculiar meanings and a thorough editing badly needed. The message of the writers such as Max Romeo, Prince Buster, Bob Marley, Burning Spar, the Melodians was easier to get. One listened to words backed by a catchy tune. The philosophers of the days of reggae were gifted with radio and sound system as communication devices: their oral message did not need the intervention of the pen, the print, punctuation marks.
E. N. Burke was a student at Mico College in 1929 when Garvey held meetings nearby at Edelweiss Park. He liked what Garvey was saying: “ We who were black like myself, were [in Jamaican society] down the bottom so it was something great to me, as a very black man to know that somebody was telling me that I could achieve, I could be somebody, that I am somebody. He read Garvey’s Blackman regularly and discussed it with others but he was a Garveyite only ‘in spirit’, “because in those days it was not ‘the thing’ for an aspiring young teacher, to link up politically. Garvey’s treatise could not be made into fact through the up and coming middle class in the 1930’s because they feared loss of jobs. The reggae listeners of the 1970’s dreaded and turned their backs on their establishment homes and situation, with amazing alacrity. Something had changed. The sixth former/university student was not afraid of pennilessness or joblessness. So convincing were the arguments coming out of the lyric of the reggae that he believed indeed that he had to make a stand with his life and that like the lily of the Bible, he would be taken care of and he was. Several have found their places at the pinnacle of the society, having gone through this initiation. The reggae, message to the black man disseminated in sweet rhythmic music, more effectively than the writings of the 1930’s, provided a space for argument and counter argument, for learning that there is something called a black man and for teaching the initiate how to be a black man. Reggae of the 1970’s created a black space; it was an incubator for a kind of knowledge that needed to work its way out of the ground and into the minds of the young descendants of Africans enslaved in Jamaica. Not just chatter among the platters; the early reggae allowed meditation while you danced and even if you did not want to be black, you could at lest understand why others would want to be. Reggae made converts but it also produced an environment that was sympathetic to those who wanted to be more than listeners to the works of the ‘singers and players’, the only professionals mentioned by the Psalms as ‘being there’.
In 1922, the Methodist Recorder published in the United Kingdom , announced that the Jamaican cleric, the Rev R N. Parnther “ a higly honoured negro” had died. Some Jamaicans of his Methodist faith here, were outraged at the description of the reverend by reference to his race, and even thought of ending their association with the church because they found the descriptor insulting. “A black man, educated, gemtlemanly and successful”, his defender the Rev Geddess, head of the church in Jamaica, advised the church in Britain, is never referred to as a ‘negro’. He is referred to by his place of birth. He added that only the apostles of Marcus Garveyism referred to themselves by this term (negro). Ninety years later the people f the class of the Reverends Geddes and Parnther are willing to answer to terms which refer to them by race and ancestry. A great deal of this change has to be attributed to the reggae artists who by variety of literary and musical strategies have pried the word ‘black’ from `poor’, `ugly’, `stupid’ and imposed other and more positive connotations upon it. Before the 80’s was out, we were told that ‘natty was now the head one a UC’. Black man was now the academically bright guy. He issue of wht name to which to answer was on its way to being solved. Reggae rinsed the word ‘black’ and made it a sweet smelling rose that we can today accept.
Sixth form students in 1961, about to become Jamaica’s middle class in its post independence period, knew of black students in the US trying with great difficulty to get into high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. They could read about this in the popular evening daily newspaper, the Star. They could also see the advertisement inviting Jamaican young women to choose which of ten types of beauty they belonged and to apply accordingly to be judged and to get the winning prize. This 1961 was the year for the Satinwood type of beauty, the year of ebony and mahogany had either gone or was to come for the next year’s was going to be ‘golden apple’. They would also see the following cartoon on page 13 and wonder whether with their type of beauty –ebony or mahogany they could a job in the hotel on the “naught coast”. They could have read too about Millard Johnson’s party the People’s Political Party (PPP) and its attempts to organize black people or even seen some of his publications in which he shows the faces of African leaders, so different phenotypically from our Bustamante and Manley- thick lips broad nose, black skin, the first Africans they have seen outside of Tarzan’s half naked friends of the comic books, and they would get a chance to test the saying, “Hugly no African”. They might have heard that Rastafarian dreadlocks were being forcibly trimmed by the police, seen Rastas made jokes of in the annual Pantomime, shared jokes about them and their purchase of tickets to take them to Africa or been frightened by the armed insurrection led by Claudius Henry, the repairer of the breach and his son. They might even have been part of Teenage Dance Party on JBC and there danced to Beardman Shuffle, a supposed imitation of the way dreadlocks, Rastafarians danced. In short, the teenager, graduating from sixth form the year before independence, and so about to join the middle class, existed in an environment in which race and colour in the native land, Jamaica, were issues. But were they openly discussed and did they feel that it had anything to do with their lives? Their parents would never have encouraged them to seek a job in the tourist industry on the ‘naught coast’: there was the civil service, there was the library service and there was teaching and university and law or medicine for the very bright who got scholarships or whose parents could afford the fees.
The Star had a section called ‘Sing a Song’. The songs for November 13th of 1961, the day of the cartoon and the beauty queen advertisement, were Wooden Heart and Amor, Amor popular American love songs. The teenager would have cut these out, learnt the tune from the radio and been able to sing along word for word as these songs were aired. From her parents or night-club-going elder sibling, she might have heard of Mapletoft Poule, Baba Motta, Carlos Malcolm or Sonny Bradshaw and their attempts to promote Jamaican music., the same old Linstead Market, Sammy Dead, Come back Liza in jazz format. But here was also Wilfred Edwards and Keith an Enid on the new Radio Station, JBC and their ballads Tell Me Darling and Worried Over You were as lovely and loving as Wooden Heart or Amor, Amor were. This station is said to have been designed to promote the development of Jamaican culture and it did lay down some tracts. Sonny Bradshaw attracted the services of the Aggrey Brown, popular DaCosta cup footballer, headboy, just graduated from Cornwall College, to host his Teenage Dance Party. The ‘Top Ten’ was one of the features of this station. This top ten was a list of the ten most popular tunes according to the analysis of the purchases of the major record shops – Universal Mart, Gordon’s Record Service, Clock Tower, K-G Radio Sales, Stanley Motta and Wonard’s Radio Engineering. Until 1964, no more than three locally created tunes made the top ten in any week. Desmond Dacres’ Honour thy Mother and thy Father was there, though from the 8th of February to the 26th of April and the great rent-a- tile, Jimmy James’ Come to Me Softly on the Gaydisc ruled from May to July of that year. Dacres’s sociological eye was one to watch. Prince Buster was another one: the latter’s Tongue will tell spent several weeks on the Top Ten in 1964. Dacres and Prince Buster came with a new slant in content. They were not crooning love songs to anybody or talking of unrequited love; they were talking of and to the people in their community and the buying public was interested.
This conversation to which the buying middle class was able to listen through the lyrics of artist such as Dacres and Prince Buster,continued through the sixties. Eavesdropping thus, the sixth form graduate learnt about ‘rude boys’ in 1966 and 67 from The Clarendonians and from the Wailers facilitated by Studio 1. It was Peter Black [Fred Nunes] who brought this discourse officially to the attention of the middle class. He did so in an extended letter to the editor. This letter appeared in the Sunday Gleaner of June 11, 1967. Peter Black thought this conversation within the rude boy culture was of great sociopolitical import - “.. our local boys are men of true importance and ought not to be taken lightly”, and he wished, he said, to draw the editor’s attention to this. Black looked at five songs – Gun Man, Tougher than Tough, Judge Dread, Court Dismissed and Train, to compose his article, Community Violence and Jamaican Pop Music. He draws attention to an incident in Tougher than Tough in which the judge passing sentence on Rude Boy, is from Ethiopia. Black interprets this thus: “the first point of note is the association of authority with a personality not of Jamaican origin. He missed the point., The point was that within this culture, Ethiopia was highly rated; it was the source of power; it was according to Psalm 68 vs 31, where the people who would stretch forth their hands unto God, lived and moreover according to Psalm 87 vs 4, “this man was born there”. This was the man selected by God to rule his people. Indeed the year before Black wrote his article, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, clearly the man referred to in the Psalms, had visited Jamaica and had left the establishment amazed at the passion with which ordinary Jamaicans had welcomed him. It should be noted too that this judge was accusing rude boy of and charging him for “shooting black people”. Clearly this judge cared particularly for a kind of person called ‘black people’. He missed the colour reference again in the Ethiopian judge’s statement that “….I am black sulphuric acid/I melt all iron”. This was the opportunity for the sixth form graduate to note that Ethiopia and black were invested with great power in parts of the society. This great power had a colour. It was black and could do impossible things. This/the righteous black man could melt the guns of rude boys. Black also missed the reference to trains in the song Trains. He confesses “I can make little of the trains, boats and planes which are “coming now” … the reference here was to the hope-for exodus out of Babylon, Jamaica, to that country whose hands were stretched out to God and where that man “was born”, an exodus so excellently done years after by Bob Marley.
By late 1968 the government of the day was helping to invest ‘black’ with revolutionary political power in the society. It was making an all-out attack on ‘black’. Immigration officers were charged or felt charged to prevent books dealing with black issues from entering the island – even the children’s story Black Beauty it was rumoured, had been proscribed. It is quite likely that radio and television programmes were censured as reading material was and the word ‘black’ with them. What emotions got a chance to be ventilated was anti-government sentiment such as Everything Crash. This song pictures Jamaica as a place where all the essential services have gone on strike. The then prime-minister’s name was Shearer. It rimed well with Pharoah. A culture which drew a lot on the Bible, and with the Rastafarian influence which tended to see the current world as that prophesied to be by Biblical prophets and which was thinking about an exodus from Jamaica to Ethiopia, had a field day linking the prime-minister and his government with Babylon and other evil conditions. Few of these such as Prince Buster’s Pharoah’s Army get drownded were aired or reached the top ten, but delivered in the attractive ska beat, they were heard in the dance halls. Everything crash commanded the chart in January of 1969.
Look from you deh ya, you nuh know Bongo Nyah. Little Roy’s Bongo Nyah holding its place in the charts for six weeks, seemed to be saying to recently graduated sixth former, eavesdropping on the culture from which most of these singers emerged: Here you are peeping in but Bongo Nyah (Rastafarians, Jamaicans practicing an African culture) has been around you and you around it all our life, why don’t you know us? “Lick it back Jah”, Bongo Niah continues. So the singer was now ‘Bongo Nyah, the Rastaman, the old African, inviting the sixth former to throw off artificial blinders and to look at black people and what they represent and threatening Jah’s wrath on those who didn’t. Nina Simone’s Young, gifted and black made the charts in February 1970 and stayed there until March. A funny thing happened though: by mid March Prince Buster [or was it Marcia Griffiths and BobAndy] had in today’s terminology, ‘bought out’ the argument of this African American and was with her in the charts until mid April when he bought out the argument totally for he was there without her until early May. It was alright now to be called ‘black’. The word had been made to be associated with ‘gifted’ and been so popularised by Nina Simone and even more frequently so by our own Prince Buster. An aspirant to the parliament, later to be a prime minister used this song as his campaign theme. The sixth form graduate, knowing herself to be ‘young’ and ‘gifted’ needn’t be shy about putting a colour-coded adjective in the mix and be ‘young gifted and black’, indeed needn’t be afraid of ‘black’. Could young gifted and black get into a hotel on the ‘naught coast’? He could if he cared to for he was now a ‘duppy conqueror’. This Bob Marley creation stayed in the charts for twelve weeks.
What is a ‘duppy conqueror’? People wanted to know what they were buying and what they were singing about[I had to answer this question in Guyana] Answer: for a black person, the spirit is as potent as the flesh and in fact very potent after the body has passed away. Every sixth former’s parents knew about this and they had tried to shut up grandma when she came in from country with news of what duppy had done what to whom. They knew that to be able to conqueror another’s spirit is really a mark of great power. But this was ‘country ’ and lower class belief. The sixth form graduate now learnt about the power of the spirit and that this faith was part of an authentic system of beliefs, translatable into, ‘you young gifted and black sixth form graduate, if you stick close to your black cultural understanding of the world, and follow the paths of righteousness, can have and exercise great power over others’. Max Romeo’s 1971 creation “Maccabbee Version” appears not to have made the top ten at all. How could it when Malcom X’s life story was banned. This poem/song complained about the mal effect of white culture and economic behaviour on black people. Being a song with a very popular tune, this study in social and political history was more available than the works of George Beckford, who during this period was punished for his anti-colonial stand as shown in his writings, Persistent Poverty for instance. ‘Maccabbee version’s repeating chorus “Black man get up stand up on you foot/And give black god the glory”, stimulated a lot of thought. I watched a dancing/singing mother forced by her eight year old son’s question : Mummy what wrong with black man’s foot?, to give him a lecture on Caribbean history. Riding on the tune of a popular Christmas carol, Good King Wenseslaus which pictured a King who seemed to be learning too late of the distressing conditions of his people, Max Romeo’s Maccabbee Version whether he intended this or not, juxtaposed the colonial condition with a new kind of independence for all to digest as they tightened up or rocked steady.
Maccabbee Version (I read/play)
Maccabbee Version taught you as you tightened up or rocked steady that there was a diety whom we ought to hail. It begins by paying respect to Jah Rastafari, a diety at this time recognized only by black Jamaicans. Max Romeo’s line in his first stanza, ‘I am a black man’ was as declarative and as definitive as Martin Luther’s C17th piece, his 95 theses pinned on the church door, Here I stand. One of Max Romeo’s theses was that there are versions of the Bible specifically given by the Almighty God to the Blackman for his empowerment but that this version has been hidden from him. This is the Maccabbee version. Whether any one could show him the Maccabbee version or not, the graduate from sixth form could understand that black people were not only gifted and had particular ways of doing things and a particular view of the world, they were indeed special to God: there was a version of the Bible specially written for them. The thoughtful did look to Old Dreads, to University of the West Indies lecturers to help them to find the knowledge with the black man’s name written on it, knowledge which Bongo Niah told them was within easy reach of them. Many bright sixth forms, by now about to graduate from universities here in Jamaica and elsewhere, left home to study at the feet of one elder or the other. Max Romeo had said “ Black man get up and know yourself” and they were off to know themselves.
The Melodians Rivers of Babylon spent eight weeks on the top Ten.
By the rivers of Babylon/where we sat down/And where we wept/ When we remembered Zion . Who were these weeping people to whom the psalm 137 turned into a song referred?. Black people of course. That guy who has a bad foot and has difficulty standing. Who else was taken away from their lands and transported elsewhere? The sixth form graduate would sing and dance while better understanding her history and what it meant to be ‘black’. It was Burning Spear who brought Civics, taught in the lower grades of the school into the mix. He created Marcus Garvey which was the most bought tune in March of 1975. Marcus Garvey was the country’s first national hero, the sixth former knew and an unequivocally black-skinned man. He was given prophetic powers in Burning Spear’s creation: Marcus Garvey prophesy say…. This is another thing that black people could do, -see around corners. Apart from his prophetic ability, Marcus Garvey was a published author who had mesmerized the world. Here was a hero whom no one could escape from seeing as black. Here was a role model even one that Babylon could not resist acknowledging and giving to the people.
“Reggae” translated by the most erudite of the eavesdroppers as the dative form of the Latin word for king, ‘rex’, translated to mean “music for a king”, was not the first time that black-skinned people, the descendants of Africans enslaved in Jamaica, were creating ways of defining themselves on the basis of their colour and their history and building and disseminating theories to explain their uniqueness and theories to guide praxis. Marcus Garvey’s UNIA had done this here and abroad; others, not quite satisfied with the Bible had published the Holy Piby and there was The Promised Key written and published by Leonard Howell under the pseudonym G.G Maragh. A little booklet eight by five inches and having just 14 pages, it was inexpensive and easy to store: it could be a bookmark for your Bible. The author interested in addressing a particular people, black people, seems to have wanted to offer them a theory which explained their present status vis a vis people of other colours, to warn them against false ideologies and to present guides to healthy and holy living. The book has on its inside cover, the words quoted by black nationalist as early as the C18th, “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God”. Also there is the charge: “Arise and shin for the light has come, and the glory of the Lord god of Israel is now risen upon us”. The next page has a picture of H.I.M. the Emperor Haile Selassie. The book is now divided into sections, the first of which is entitled “The Mystery Country”. This describes Haile Selassie’s coronation in all its majesty. The next section discusses “The false religion—“My dear Reader you can see that all the foundations of the earth are out of course. Allow me to say that there is no throne for the Anglo Saxon white people, they must come down and sit in the dust on the ground there is no throne for them. See Isiah 47th chapter.” The next is the “The Promised Key”. Here we are told that “His majesty Ras Tafari is the head over all man for he is the supreme God”, and his godly qualities are listed for us. We move on to “Ethiopia’s kingdom” where we are introduced to king Alpha and Queen Omega, Rastafari and his wife, emperor and empress of Ethiopia and the author gets a chance to make a definitive statement linking blacks to this majesty: “King Alpha and Queen Omega are the paymasters of the world, Bible owners and money mint. Do not forget they are black people if you please.” We move on to guides to righteous living in Jamaican society – what is a balm yard and how to approach the notion and the fact. Who are revivalists and how much of what they peddle should be accepted. We are told too how to fast. The section entitled “ Department” is very difficult to understand. The section marked “Government” is easier: we are here introduced to the concept of black supremacy: “Instead of saying ‘Civilization’ we are told, “ hereafter, we shall say Black Supremacy”. It is further explained to us that “Black Supremacy has taken charge of white supremacy by king Alpha and Queen Omega, the king of kings. Herein we are also told that black must not marry white and white must not marry black, that we should not marry divorced persons and that wives and husband must not “watch and peep on each other”. We move on the “Eternal Law Office” Here there seem to be some biblical revisions: Adam, Eve, Abraham and Isaac have been given no books in the Bible and so “according to the clearness of this case there is nobody named Adam Eve and Abraham. These the writer seems to be saying are figments of the imagination of “ministers and lawyers who have no part in the business of Queen Omega and King Alpha. The revision continues with the discussion of “Eve the mother of Evil. She and Adam and Abraham are “white people if you please” and are no family to King Alpha and Queen Omega who have said “ that they are our parents and keeper of the Tree of Life” The next section is “Rapers”. The discussion here is of the Klu-Klux-Klan who “committed boisterous fornication with the black women who were taken as slaves”, so “Both rapers and mob lynchers and Klu-klux-Klan are to be shot from off the face of God Almighty’s beautiful earth”. We come now to ‘the Ethiopian Question’ where we learn that “We gave ourselves to be slaves for hundreds of years. That we had given up King Alpha and Queen Omega and this was, it seems, the cause of our enslavement. ‘The first and the last’ is a ‘praise’ paragraph in which King Alpha and Queen Omega are described as “the type setters for time and eternity…” ‘Matrimonial affidavit’ is a section in which justification is made for treating King Alpha and Queen Omega as “ the first and the last, the beginning and the end”. The final section in this small pamphlet is entitled ‘ Black People, Black People Arise and Shin. We are told here that “The white man’s doctrine had forced the black man to forsake silver and gold and seek Heaven after death. It has brought us to live in disgrace and die in dishonour” but now that we have found out that “their doctrine was only a trick, and all their intention was to make themselves strong and to fool the black man”, we must cleave to H.M. Rastafari.
All the theses in the 1930’s The Promise Key were restated in the Reggae. – the existence of a person called the black man; the Bible, a gift to the black man but which has been polluted; the importance to God Almighty of Ethiopia; authority given to H.I.M. Haile Selassie by Almighty God to rule the world; that the black man in Jamaica needed guides to righteous living; and that it is time for him to get up and assert himself in the society. Why did these theses need to be re-asserted? No doubt Howell this early elder preached from his book, bringing his ideas near to his audience. Reading the work by oneself is challenging as punctuation marks are few and far between, words given peculiar meanings and a thorough editing badly needed. The message of the writers such as Max Romeo, Prince Buster, Bob Marley, Burning Spar, the Melodians was easier to get. One listened to words backed by a catchy tune. The philosophers of the days of reggae were gifted with radio and sound system as communication devices: their oral message did not need the intervention of the pen, the print, punctuation marks.
E. N. Burke was a student at Mico College in 1929 when Garvey held meetings nearby at Edelweiss Park. He liked what Garvey was saying: “ We who were black like myself, were [in Jamaican society] down the bottom so it was something great to me, as a very black man to know that somebody was telling me that I could achieve, I could be somebody, that I am somebody. He read Garvey’s Blackman regularly and discussed it with others but he was a Garveyite only ‘in spirit’, “because in those days it was not ‘the thing’ for an aspiring young teacher, to link up politically. Garvey’s treatise could not be made into fact through the up and coming middle class in the 1930’s because they feared loss of jobs. The reggae listeners of the 1970’s dreaded and turned their backs on their establishment homes and situation, with amazing alacrity. Something had changed. The sixth former/university student was not afraid of pennilessness or joblessness. So convincing were the arguments coming out of the lyric of the reggae that he believed indeed that he had to make a stand with his life and that like the lily of the Bible, he would be taken care of and he was. Several have found their places at the pinnacle of the society, having gone through this initiation. The reggae, message to the black man disseminated in sweet rhythmic music, more effectively than the writings of the 1930’s, provided a space for argument and counter argument, for learning that there is something called a black man and for teaching the initiate how to be a black man. Reggae of the 1970’s created a black space; it was an incubator for a kind of knowledge that needed to work its way out of the ground and into the minds of the young descendants of Africans enslaved in Jamaica. Not just chatter among the platters; the early reggae allowed meditation while you danced and even if you did not want to be black, you could at lest understand why others would want to be. Reggae made converts but it also produced an environment that was sympathetic to those who wanted to be more than listeners to the works of the ‘singers and players’, the only professionals mentioned by the Psalms as ‘being there’.
In 1922, the Methodist Recorder published in the United Kingdom , announced that the Jamaican cleric, the Rev R N. Parnther “ a higly honoured negro” had died. Some Jamaicans of his Methodist faith here, were outraged at the description of the reverend by reference to his race, and even thought of ending their association with the church because they found the descriptor insulting. “A black man, educated, gemtlemanly and successful”, his defender the Rev Geddess, head of the church in Jamaica, advised the church in Britain, is never referred to as a ‘negro’. He is referred to by his place of birth. He added that only the apostles of Marcus Garveyism referred to themselves by this term (negro). Ninety years later the people f the class of the Reverends Geddes and Parnther are willing to answer to terms which refer to them by race and ancestry. A great deal of this change has to be attributed to the reggae artists who by variety of literary and musical strategies have pried the word ‘black’ from `poor’, `ugly’, `stupid’ and imposed other and more positive connotations upon it. Before the 80’s was out, we were told that ‘natty was now the head one a UC’. Black man was now the academically bright guy. He issue of wht name to which to answer was on its way to being solved. Reggae rinsed the word ‘black’ and made it a sweet smelling rose that we can today accept.
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