Diaspora =

But, according to the Kebra Nagast or The Book of the Glory of Kings – the Ethiopian literary national epic composed between the 6th and 12th centuries AD – the Queen of Sheba was a beautiful Aksumite queen called Makeda. She went to Jerusalem to visit the great Jewish king, Solomon, who made her pregnant. She gave birth to a son, Menelik I, and therefore divinely established Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty. Menelik is said to have brought back the Jewish sacred Ark of the Covenant which contained the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God after visiting his father in Jerusalem. Its transfer, according to believers, means the glory of Zion passed from the children of Israel to the Ethiopians. The Ark is allegedly still in Aksum, in the church of St Mary of Zion. Ethiopia’s last emperor, Haile Selassie, who is lionised by Rastafarians, claimed he was a direct descendant of King Solomon. By the mid-19th century, Ethiopianism had firmly taken root in the United States. Notable African-American adherents of the philosophy during the era included the celebrated scholar, Frederick Douglass, the poet Phyllis Wheatley and the writer Martin Delany whose novel, Blake, was one of the period’s most Ethiopianist works. At the turn of the 20th century, the African-American intellectual grandees, W.E.B Du Bois and Booker T. Washington were among blacks espousing the philosophy. But it was Marcus Garvey, a radical Jamaican civil rights worker who had moved to New York, who dramatically advanced the philosophy around the same time. Garvey’s rallying cry, “Africa for the Africans”, inspired a worldwide mass movement which protested against Europe’s colonisation of Africa. By then, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained unconquered by European powers.Garvey’s separatist ideology was not only a demand for African independence from European colonialism but also a call for diasporic Africans to return to the “motherland” to help in its political and economic affairs. Garvey set up various enterprises under the auspices of his two diasporic organisations, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the African Community’s League (ACL) to help achieve his goal. In Britain, the Black Power Movement filtered through several important black consciousness movements, including the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM),

The steady growth of Black consciousness movements has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry, including Bob Marley soaps

which aimed to aesthetically move away from European ideology and influence and create a new black audience in Britain. Its line-up of talented but largely neglected black artists included the modernist Jamaican wood sculptor, Ronald Moody, who had moved to Britain in 1923, and the prominent Guyanese abstract painter, Aubrey Williams. Across the channel in France, La Negritude, a literary and ideological movement, had plugged into Ethiopianism as far back as the 1930s and gained ground during the 1940s and 1950s. It began among the Paris-based French-speaking African and Caribbean writers and intellectuals as a protest against French colonial rule and assimilation policy. La Negritude’s founders included Leopold Sedar Senghor who later became president of Senegal, the Martinican poet Aime Cesaire and Guinean writer Leon Damas. Other key figures in the movement included the Senegalese writer Alione Diop and filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, the Guinean leader Ahmed Sekou Toure and the outspoken women writers Jane and Paulette Nardal and Suzanne Cesaire. Like other Ethiopianist movements, La Negritude had its critics. Franz Fanon, the acclaimed Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary theoretician, described it as too simplistic, while the Nigerian poet and novelist, Wole Soyinka, maintained that by outspokenly taking pride in their blackness, people of African descent were putting themselves on the defensive.

Rastafarianism In the late 1970s and early 1980s, dreadlocks replaced Afros as Rastafari, the most Ethiopianist of all the black consciousness movements, became the latest popular symbol of black pride. The political and religious

movement began in the slums of Jamaica following Emperor Haile Selassie’s coronation on 2 November 1930. Its followers believed that Marcus Garvey’s prophecy which said a black messiah would be crowned in Africa had been fulfilled. Haile Selassie was crowned with several names, including “Lord of Lords”, “Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah”, and “Emperor from the Dynasty of Solomon”. Rastafarianism takes it name from Haile Selassie’s pre-coronation name, Ras Tafari Makkonen. The Rastafarian religion is largely based on the Old Testament. Its followers believe that black people are the true descendants of the ancient tribe of Israel who have been enslaved and kept in exile by white oppressors or “Babylon”. They prefer to use the Holy Philby, or “black man’s bible” which was compiled by an Anguillan, Robert Athlyi Rogers, between 1913 and 1917. They also give special significance to the Ethiopian holy book, the Kebra Negast. Frequently misunderstood and maligned, strict Rastafarians are peace-loving vegetarians. Originally perceived as a “cult of outcasts”, Rastafarians publicly condemned Jamaica’s exploitative colonial society. They believed in repatriation to Ethiopia where in 1948, Emperor Haile Selassie had given them 500 hectares of land in Shashamane. Leonard Howell, one of the religion’s earliest leaders, was arrested and imprisoned several times for his revolutionary doctrine. Hundreds of other Rastafarians were arrested and humiliated by being forced to have their dreadlocks cut off by Jamaican police in the 1950s and 1960s in a bid to suppress their dissident message. When Emperor Haile Selassie visited Jamaica in April 1966, thousands of Rastafarians turned up to welcome him. Ras Iqulah, a reggae musician who was a youth at the time, says he had a mystical experience when he saw the “Rasta God”. “When his majesty arrived by train,” Iqulah says, “the door was opened and a red carpet was laid on the floor. When I looked, I saw this noble character, his left foot came out and when he was walking his majesty was walking in midway. I was amazed. I jumped and ran to my mother. And she said to me, the prophecy says the whirlwind shall be at his feet. This man is the man.” Haile Selassie was once described by the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, as the “only enlightened Abyssinian prince”. When he was smothered to death by army

82n NEW AFRICAN February 2008
The “Rasta God”, Emperor Haile Selassie (centre), and President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana at the founding of the OAU in 1963

officers in 1975 (at the age of 83), many Rastafarians thought it was a media hoax. He had been deposed in a military coup in 1974 led by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam whose “Dergue” regime erased all record of the emperor from public view. His bones were unearthed following Mengistu’s downfall in 1991 and later reburied in Addis Ababa. A debate over how the emperor should be remembered in the pantheon of Ethiopia’s political history continues between Rastafarians, Ethiopian royalists and the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

In 1982, Shemelis Desta, the emperor’s official court photographer in the 1960s (who is now 70 years old), fled Ethiopia leaving behind 7,000 negatives of his work which, fortunately, were smuggled out to him a few weeks later. His work is an important historical record not only for Ethiopians but all Africans. Some of his large collection of rarely-seen black and white and colour photographs were recently exhibited at the Photographer’s Gallery in London. Self-taught, he documented Ethiopia’s political history from Haile Selassie’s rule, including the establishment of the OAU

and the troubled end of his reign. Nonetheless, the spiritual movement Haile Selassie inspired has grown phenomenally since his death, boosted by Rastafarian reggae icons like Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Burning Spear. Rastafari currently has millions of followers across the globe from the United States and South Africa to China, Japan and Brazil. Even armed rebels in the African bush are listening to Bob Marley’s unforgettable roots reggae music, pulled by its refractory status, social and political consciousness and powerful Biblical message of brotherly respect.

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