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Culture clash still vexes Rastafarians in Ethiopian 'promised land'

AFP

Rastafarian children pose in one of the classrooms in the school built by the Rastafarian Jamaican Comunity in the Ethiopian town of Shashamena.

Shashamane, Ethiopia Feb 5, 2005 -- With his torn trousers, dirty shirt, unkempt dreadlocks, bad teeth and penchant for marijuana, Christos Christos III is an easy target for ridicule.

Hurled insults, thrown rocks and sneering stares are just part of the harassment he says he endures daily in this impoverished Ethiopian town that he and several hundred other foreigners believe is the Biblical promised land.

"Why? Why? We do nothing to them," Christos asks plaintively as a trio of adolescents fearlessly torment him and a friend as they chat with a visitor to this town about 250 kilometers (150 miles) south of Addis Ababa.

"See, he just kicked me. Why? Why do you do that?" he demands of the giggling 12-year-old who is already basking in approving smiles from his friends before his foot touches the ground.

"He's crazy," the boy explains with a shrug. "They all are."

"They" are arch-conservative Rastafarians, devout believers in the absolute divinity of Ras Tafari Mekonen, later known as "His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie the First, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, Emperor of Ethiopia."

Rastafarian Reggae fans dance, at the begenning of the Bob Marley's 60th birthday concert in Meskel square in Addis Ababa.

"They" are strangers in a strange land, who, inspired by a complex mixture of Pan-African zeal, anti-colonial sentiment and Biblical prophecy, have left the Caribbean and elsewhere to return "home" to Shashamane, their Jerusalem.

"I know that Haile Selassie is the Almighty God, we praise no other," says Papa Rocky, a 74-year-old former metalworker from Kingston, Jamaica and patriarch of Rastafarianism's ultra-strict Nyahbinghi denomination.

"His Imperial Majesty is the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy," he says flatly, strolling through Shashamane's circular Nyahbinghi Tabernacle, a church festooned with green, yellow and red bunting.

According to historians, such talk made the emperor, who died in 1975, uncomfortable, although not enough to prevent him from granting Rastafarians land here to help fulfill the back-to-Africa aspirations of slave descendents.

Many Ethiopians, however, have been less charitable in dealing with the 500 or so Rastafarians that have made Shashamane their home.

"The average Ethiopian doesn't know that they exist and (if they do) regard them as a bit unusual," says Richard Panckhurst, an authority on Ethiopian history.

Apart from their strange appearance, veneration of Haile Selassie and customs, including sacramental marijuana use, Shashamane's Rastafarians live on valuable property deeded them in a land grant many Ethiopians don't understand.

Jamaican Love Stone Sound System leader performs, as the first singer on the stage of the Bob Marley 60th birthday concert in Meskel square in Addis Ababa.

Foreign rastas complain they are discriminated against, ordered by local authorities to halt all construction projects while locals encroach on their land in what they see as an effort to force them to leave.

"They don't want us to build because they want the land," said 56-year-old Ras Solomon, watching a crew of eight workers dig a foundation just 50 meters (yards) from the Nyahbinghi Tabernacle on soil that was part of the land grant.

"This land was given by His Imperial Majesty for the black Africans of the world to return," he says. "Why should I not be here when this is my inheritance?"

"They reject us because they reject His Imperial Majesty as the king of kings," says Solomon, a Nyahbinghi elder who has lived in Shashamane for nearly 13 years.

To be sure, the Nyahbinghi do not represent the entire Rastafarian community here: at least three other sects with varying opinion's on Haile Selassie's divinity and younger members are also present.

Eighty percent of the 500 students who attend an elementary school run by the Jamaican Rastafarian Development Association are non-believers, according to the institution's director, Albert "Teach" Allen.

Assured that religion was not in the curriculum, that marijuana use is barred on campus and impressed by the emphasis on English as a foreign language, parents have embraced the school despite initial reservations.

"I think now the school is helping to change these problems," said the 48-year-old rasta from Kingston who moved here seven years ago.