Rhetoric of Reggae

Finding the Rhetoric in Reggae - Alfred Snider - December, 2011

2011-12-15T13:20:00.001-08:00

Finding the Rhetoric in Reggae - Alfred Snider - December 2011
http://vimeo.com/33727997

"This is an invited lecture at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia given on 15 December 2011.

Alfred Snider is the Edwin Lawrence Professor of Forensics at the University of Vermont. He teaches argumentation, persuasion, debate and rhetorical criticism. He often takes rhetorical criticism and applies it to new and interesting places. For the last 15 years he has taught a course entitled "Rhetoric of Reggae Music." He also hosted a very popular reggae music radio program for 17 years. The current blog for the course is at http://rhetoricofreggaer.blogspot.com/view/magazine .
The website with copies of the radio programs can be found at http://reggaelunch.blogspot.com/ ."

You can watch it here:
http://vimeo.com/33727997

2010 Rastafari Conference in Jamaica

2011-06-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

June, 2011

A crowd of five to six hundred souls—many adorned in their best Ethiopian finery—were assembled in and around the Undercroft, an outdoor pavilion near the center of the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI). A group of Rastafari drummers added color to this spectacle as they warmed up the gathering with Nyahbinghi chants. Rastafari and non-Rastafari visitors from across the Caribbean, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, England, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama and Ethiopia milled about, greeting one another as they made new acquaintances or renewed friendships. The press was in attendance, the event was being videotaped for broadcast on UWI Television, and Rastafari, young and old, were rubbing shoulders with representatives from various embassies, Jamaican officialdom and scholars from around the world. Ras Ivi Wright, one of the Elders present, reminded me that this was the very site upon which the university conferred an hono! rary doctorate upon His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie I during his state visit to Jamaica in 1966. This was a special occasion, to be sure.
But we all knew that the event was historic for other reasons, some not unrelated to the Emperor’s visit. Not only was this day the 123rd anniversary of the birthday of Marcus Garvey, it marked a convergence with the 50th anniversary of the university’s publication of The Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica (1960). Now in its eighth printing, this booklet is easily the most widely circulated and arguably the most influential document ever produced on or about the Rastafari. Amidst the atmosphere of social prejudice and violence directed against members of the movement by a hostile society during the 1950s, a handful of Rasta leaders persuaded then university Provost Sir Arthur Lewis to undertake a study that would clarify the nature and goals of the Rastafari to the wider public. The hope was that the university would make recommendations to the Jamaican government to address the needs and aspirations of the brethren and sistren.!
Ultimately, this is what the three co-authors of The Report did: recommended, among other things, that economic improvements should be made accessible to Rastafari in the areas of housing, social services and education; and that the government assist those who wished to repatriate to Africa by sending a technical mission to the continent to explore possibilities for repatriation. A nine-man mission was, in fact, sent which included three Rastafari delegates: Mortimo Planno, Douglas Mack and Filmore Alvaranga. Departing in April of 1961, the mission visited five African nations - Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ethiopia - and indirectly set the stage for the state visit of His Majesty five years later. It was the university that also published two divergent reports on the findings of the 1961 Mission: a majority report, signed off by the non-Rastafari delegates, and a minority report penned by Planno, Mack and Alvaranga.
Much, of course, has taken place within Rastafari over the past fifty years. It developed its own music - reggae - and a long line of musical ambassadors to the world. As part of this phenomenon, Bob Marley and Rastafari are now synonymous to millions. Rasta culture and livity has “gone international” crossing virtually all continental and language barriers and, as the conferee list attested—the movement has attracted scholars and generated scholarship from all over the globe. In Jamaica, Rastafari are now professors, lecturers and students in the very university that first subjected them to study. While the authors of The Report probably never imagined the global trajectory that Rastafari would take, they did correctly realize that there were those in the movement who would never renounce their attachment to Africa and their desire to return to the land of their ancestors irrespective of how Jamaica might accommodate them. The reality is th! at Jamaica has not fully come to terms with its own Rastafari community (most remain economically marginalized) and, despite the presence of Rastafari communities on the continent, the movement has yet to realize its vision of large-scale repatriation.
Much credit must be given to the Chairman and Coordinators of the conference, Professor Barry Chevannes and Dr. Jahlani Niaah, respectively, for organizing three days of meetings in which Rastafari of all ages, colors and national backgrounds, as well as scholars of Rastafari, could come together in an unprecedented exchange of views. As Barry Chevannes later said, “There are those who came from within and those who came from without…,” but all spoke with each other in dialogue rather than merely at or about each other. The prelude to the keynote address set the tone for the entire dynamic of the Conference as it made the inclusiveness of Rastafari integral to the proceedings. The Abuna from Kingston’s Ethiopian Orthodox Church offered a formal benediction for the success of the sessions t! hat were to take place. Honored Rastafari representatives provided inspiring statements as part of the opening ceremony — all giving thanks for the guidance of His Imperial Majesty. Ultimately, all of their remarks came full circle to emphasize the underlying importance and inevitably of repatriation. Their speechifying set the stage for the keynote address by Sir Roy Augier, the only surviving co-author of The Report. After reviewing the history of positive relations between the Rastafari and the university over the past half century, Sir Roy spoke his mind on the issue of repatriation. “Some of you will not like what I have to say,” he began. “Repatriation made possible with support from abroad [i.e., from the ex-colonial governments] will never happen.[…] No matter what Garvey had dreamt of, what you dream of, these countries could not and have not made any provision, despite the technical mission, to fund any person. […] There is ! much work here. Why not turn Jamaica into the homeland?”
The Rastafari present erupted in protest! Irrespective of what any individual Rastafari might hold on the issue of repatriation (e.g., that one may be reunited with Africa on spiritual or cultural levels), the public commitment to literal and physical repatriation is widely regarded as an article of faith for the older brethren and sistren in Jamaica. Professor Augier’s sincerely held, if unpopular, statement in the face of what was clearly expected opposition, set the tone for a good deal of debate, discussion and reasoning over the next few days and weeks. Sir Roy showed considerable resilience in quelling the uproar, repeatedly imploring, “Let’s try reasoning, let’s try reasoning [about this].” By the time he had finished his keynote, there were no more appreciative members of the ! audience than the Rastafari themselves who resolutely defend their positions as “men-of-words” but who also respect that same quality in others. The brethren and sistren could disagree — and disagree strongly — without being disagreeable! Sir Roy’s address put into play one of the two main themes for the conference: the idea of “negotiating the African presence” in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Diaspora, inviting ones to assess how far Rastafari has come in the past fifty years — and how far I-n-I have yet to go. The diversity of conference participants from around the world itself became a main theme.
There were also some notable backstage intrigues that had played out between the organizers of the university conference and members of the Ethio-African Diasporic Millennium Council (MC), as supported most notably by Bunny Wailer. For the past four to five years, the Millennium Council has emerged as a new Rastafari organization that has been engaged in dialogue with the Jamaican state on matters of cultural equity and economic compensation over the decades of abuse that Jamaican Rastafari has suffered at the hands of government. In addition, the issue of defining and protecting Rastafari intellectual property rights has become a cause célèbre for the Council. The latter emerged as a point of contest between the university and MC based on the desire of the latter to assert ownership of any intellect! ual property generated by the conference. Suffice it to say that when the university and the MC failed to reach agreement on this issue among others, the council decided to hold their own meetings at the site of Bunny Wailer’s yard on Old Hope Road. Events there opened on August 15th, 2010.
For many of us, this became the pre-opening to a week of intensive Rastafari interactions and reasonings that brought together traditional Elders, new faces from the Rastafari Hispanic and Francophone world, younger Rastafari scholars and even some of my own colleagues from Washington, D.C., notably Dr. Peggy Bolger, Director of the Center for American Folklife at the Library of Congress. Dr. Bolger was there to participate with myself and others on a panel organized by Ras Marcus Goffe, the lawyer for the MC, on intellectual property rights. The intellectual property issues raised by the MC and the discussions from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) participants were, in my view, the most substantive contributions to the Millennium Council proceedings that week. The unfortunate side to the Old Ho! pe Yard venue was that at least some of the participants that week were split in two venues.
Much of what happens in an event of this kind occurs outside the formal presentation of papers and talks given within the academic setting. An important and welcome venue in this regard were the grounds of the Bob Marley Museum that were opened to participants during the week and served as the site for various meetings in the evening both before and during the formal conference began. One of the most significant of these meetings centered around a presentation on the Rastafari mission to Harar, Ethiopia (the birthplace of His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Selassie I) in November of 2009. The mission or “Trod,” as it is more properly called, involved an international group of participants. The debriefing at the Marley Museum was an event in itself, with the arrival of Mutabaruka, who provided his own views! on repatriation to the African continent at large, as opposed to Ethiopia exclusively.
At the conference opening, Ras Frank-I Tafari of Antigua emphasized the importance of a pan-Caribbean, as opposed to a Jamaica-centric, understanding of contributions to the development of Rastafari. Ras Frank-I emphasized that The Report itself was made possible by Sir Arthur Lewis, a St. Lucian, who was then Provost of the university and that Edmond Hawkins Lake, an academic from Antigua then at UWI, was one of the members of the 1961 Mission. Indeed, Roy Augier himself was not born in Jamaica, although he’d made his home there for most of his life.
Ras Iration I, another well-traveled Elder who has had experience outside Jamaica, drew attention to the role of the Anguillian proto-Rastafari preacher Shepard Robert Athlyi Rogers. Rogers, he pointed out, was the author of The Holy Piby (otherwise, The Black Man’s Bible) that was influential in early Rastafari circles. Ras Iration also sought to “…remind I-n-I for the record that the fundamentals of Rastafari were not exclusively a Jamaican formulation” and that “this suggests to us that the Rastafari success has entailed a higher and deeper level of cooperation and development among I-n-I brothers and sisters that make I-n-I one Caribbean family!”
Presentations on Rastafari in Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Barbados, Panama and the Caribbean generally, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Ethiopia and New Zealand contributed insight and understanding, regarding the dynamic diversity of the movement and how it continues to create new spaces and expressions of Rastafari livity around the world. This was best summed up by Ras Sela Seales saying, “Rastafari is always in a constant state of becoming,” and underscored with the screening of Rastafari at Home and Abroad, a new film by Susanne Moss, soon to be released.
In counterpoint to what might be called Rastafari “outernational” there were a range of outstanding presentations that focused on the continuing struggle of Rastafari in the place of its birth. Ras Ivi gave a heart-rending account of the struggles and triumphs of Rastafari over the past 80 years in Jamaica. Others continued the theme of the history of agonistic and oppressive relations that the colonial and post-colonial state has wreaked upon the sons and daughters of Jah, including Marsha Inubia Hall’s astute offering “From Back ‘o Wall to Tivoli: The Garrisonization of Rastafari Roots.” But among the insightful presentations, nothing exposed the raw pathos of the Rastafari struggle for social justice more so than the much-awaited screening of Bad Friday: Rastafari After ! Coral Gardens, a documentary film by Deborah Thomas and John Jackson.
The Coral Gardens Massacre took place in 1963 when the government of Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante unleashed the Jamaican security forces and constabulary upon the island’s Rastafari population with a directive to “shoot first and ask questions later.” The unrestrained use of force by the Jamaican state followed the murder of a gas station attendant near Montego Bay over what was essentially a personal land dispute with a local Rasta. The brutality directed against the Rastafari community was unprecedented and, to this day, there is no accurate count of how many Rastafari were terrorized or killed. Bad Friday taps into the deep reservoir of community memory over this traumatic event – one that the Rastafari community has kept alive as a cause for reparations.
Two other conference themes, gender and “revolutionary self-criticism” warrant mention. At major Rastafari gatherings it is always heartening to see confident and outspoken Rastawomen, such as Queen Mother Moses and Sister Ijahnya Christian, speaking clearly for the Omega principle within Rastafari. Both were on panels that contributed to reasonings on gender equality in the framework of Alpha and Omega balance within Rastafari. The offerings of Icil Phillips and Rachelle Gray concerning the contributions of RasTafari women to African consciousness in Barbados; and those by Nazli Elena Tovar on Rastafari women in Mexico were similarly welcome. My presentation about the career of my late research partner, Sister Carole Yawney, a Toronto-based anthropologist, made its points about gender. Although Sis! ter Carole had been grounded in the patriarchal settings presided over by Mortimo Planno in Trench Town during the 1970s, Carole joined several Rastafari women (including Sisters Maureen Rowe and Charmagne Montague) in taking on the community for its subordination of women.
While Rastafari certainly have much to agitate for in terms of restorative justice from the state, there are those who came with their own commentary and internal critiques of the community. These talks focused on replacing “victimhood” with the empowering concern to create and build sustainable projects that can develop the community. Here the work of Ras Imo on tofu production and Ras Karl Phillpotts’ work with the Shashamane Foundation, which underscored the Creed of Rastafari (i.e., “the hungry be fed, the naked clothed…”), were much to the point. Bobo Shanti Priest Douglas Smith threw down a challenge for the community to organize effectively and to create a basis for internal accountability for what gets projected to the wider world as “Rastafari.” Leachim Semaj raised similar issues in a presentation entitled “From Peace and Love to Fiya Bun: Did Rastafari Lose its Way?”
It is impossible to characterize fully the body of cultural and intellectual offerings that flowed from this first Inaugural Rastafari Conference. The range and diversity of participants was impressive, to say the least. The specially-prepared exhibition in the UWI Library on Rastafari and the photo montage of Rastafari history and Elders (provided by the International Rastafari Archives Project at the Smithsonian), along with the other art and photography exhibitions mounted by the delegation from Mexico, all expressed a deep interest in honoring and dialoguing with the community. Barry Chevannes and Jahlani Niaah created an ambience that the Rastafari community at large needs to consider more carefully. UWI campus might serve well as a future community space for Rastafari in a deeper way than heretofore consid! ered possible or desirable. In listening to the personal history of Ras Frank I, it’s clear that there has been precedent for this. Frank I spoke nostalgically about his own experience at UWI as both student and teacher during the ‘70s. During that heady decade, the university campus was a place for young students and young Rastafari to intensively and regularly interact with renown Elders like Ras Boanerges, Bongo Time, Pa- and Ma-Ashanti, among others.
Shortly before leaving I traveled with Bongo Shephan Fraser around the island to various Rastafari yards and camps, one of which was the former site of the Golden Jubilee Nyahbinghi at Angel Ites in St. Catherine. It was here in 1980 that the international Rastafari community celebrated another 50th anniversary — the 50th anniversary of the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie I. There I reconnected with Ras Clinel “Ras Lion” Robinson, a bredrin I knew from the early ‘80s. Talk turned to the events at the conference and to the keynote by Professor Augier that had launched it. Ras Lion spared no time in going right to the point of repatriation and what he felt was the disparaging way in which it had dismissed by Augier. Shephan concurred, and I added that Augier probably had little sense of! the frequent connections and the many overlapping networks that Rastafari in the Diaspora now have to Rastafari communities on the continent.
With this, Ras Lion excused himself and disappeared briefly inside his single-room gates only to emerge with a sheath of paper which I immediately recognized as his vernacular “archives.” Shuffling though a pile of correspondence and newspapers, he pulled out a 2003 edition of the Jamaica Daily Gleaner. The headlines read: “Queen Says No to Rastas.” This, as perhaps every Jamaican Rastafari remembers, was the response from Buckingham Palace to the Rastafari appeal for reparations from the British Crown some years back. Holding it up in front of us, Ras Lion simply said, “I doan care if it tek a thousand years, Babylon haffa send wi home. Repatriation is a MUST! Yuh hear mi — yuh feh tell dem dat, Sir.” Argument sealed. Praise Rastafari!
One of tragic laments in the aftermath of the Conference was the untimely passing of Professor Barry Chevannes, a friend and colleague who had always placed himself and his office at the disposal of the Rastafari community in Jamaica. Barry left behind an impressive body of work and a legacy that will continue to serve the community. It is fitting that a delegation of Rastafari, led by Ras Iration I and Ras Ivi Wright, were present at his public memorial held at UWI, and that Ras Iration I spoke on behalf of the Rastafari community.
Jake Homiak is a Smithsonian cultural anthropologist who has lived and worked with Rastafari across the Black Atlantic. In 1980-81 he lived in Bull Bay, JA, spending time with members of the Bobo Shanti commune and also attending Nyahbinghi ceremonies. His long-term association with Rastafari continues to this day. In the mid ‘90s, Jake teamed with the late Professor Carole Yawney (Toronto York University) initiating the International Rastafari Archives Project. The initiative culminated in “Discovering Rastafari!” a first-of-its-kind exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “Discovering Rastafari” traces the orgins and spread of the movement, and has been extended until November 6, 2011.

What a Great Semester! Thank You Everyone!

2011-05-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

The Spring 2011 class Rhetoric of Reggae Music at the University of Vermont was awesome.

It was amazing because of the incredible TAs I had, who led 15 different discussion groups, and who obviously captured the imagination of the students because of the incredibly high attendance rates. That was a great standing ovation you gave them in the last class.

It was impressive because the term papers were so good. I mean, REALLY good. This is the finest group of research term papers I have read since I started teaching this course in 1994. That's a lot of papers that you were all better than. Really compelling, and I liked the way the students put their own hearts and minds into the papers, writing about what was relevant to them.

It was amazing because this is the first time I have been able to integrate Afrocentric rhetorical theory into the class. It just all makes so much more sense after that.

I am humbled by my students, humbled by my TAs, and glad to realize how lucky I am to be where I am, doing what I am doing.

Enjoy the video above.

African Diaspora Press Reggae Offerings

2011-04-15T12:51:00.000-07:00

http://www.african-diaspora-press.com/

NEW BIBLIOGRAPHY ON GLOBAL REGGAE STUDIES AVAILABLE FROM AFRICAN DIASPORA PRESS

Despite its popularity, reggae, and the myriad Jamaican popular music forms from which it springs, has long lacked a bibliographic resource that could aid its legion of fans, students and scholars. Until now.

Based on more than 15 years of research, Jamaican Popular Music, the second volume in ADP’s Black Music Reference Series, offers some 3700 entries on the the island’s commercial music scene from its inception in the 1950s to the present. Idioms covered range from the calypso-like mento of the late 1940s and ’50s to ska and rock steady of the 1960s, roots reggae and dub poetry of the 1970s and ’80s, dub and dancehall from the mid-1980s on, and international offshoots such as British 2-tone, Puerto Rican reggaeton and Brazilian samba-reggae. It also provides in-depth coverage of the music’s diffusion to more than 51 other countries along with a biographical section documenting the careers of some 800 individual artists, producers, and others. Sources range from fanzines and newspaper reportage to books, theses, journal articles, and audio-visual materials from Jamaica, Australia, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Much of this material is cited here for the first time. Particularly notable is the attention given to local reggae and dub poetry scenes in Britain, the US and Canada, along with lesser known, but equally vital, scenes in France, Germany, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Japan.

The result is a ground-breaking effort offering insights into all facets of Jamaican popular music and its local, regional and transnational impact.

The compiler is veteran bibliographer John Gray whose previous works include Blacks in Classical Music, African Music, Fire Music: a bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959-1990, and, From Vodou to Zouk.

To order please visit the ADP website: www.african-diaspora-press.com. The book is also available through most library wholesalers.

Also available: From Vodou to Zouk: a bibliographic guide to music of the French-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora (Black Music Reference Series; vol. 1)

Forthcoming (Fall 2011): Afro-Cuban Music: a bibliographic guide (Black Music Reference Series; vol. 3)

Praise for the author’s previous works:

—From Vodou to Zouk: “...will prove an indispensable, in-hand reference to current French Caribbean music scholarship”—Library Journal

—African Music: “...a truly outstanding achievement...likely to become the standard reference tool on African music for the next decade or so. Supersedes all previously available bibliographies in scope, the clear organization of its data, and of course, in its up-to-dateness”
—Folk Music Journal

Peter Tosh Lecture

2011-04-14T06:42:00.001-07:00

Bob Marley Lecture

2011-04-14T06:41:00.001-07:00

Lecture - Women, Rastafari, Reggae and Social Change

2011-04-08T12:47:00.001-07:00

Women, Rstafari, Reggae and Social Chamge

2011-04-08T12:45:00.001-07:00

WOMEN, RASTAFARIANISM AND REGGAE

LECTURE

One of the most interesting contradictions in reggae is the role of women. For a liberation movement that wants to set people free, it is interesting that there is oppression inside of it – against women.

Many elements contribute to this:

-Role of women in Jamaican society

-Role of women in the Old Testament

-Role of women under slavery

But, it may have a happy ending, as women are more and more becoming a central part of Rasta movements, are becoming more outspoken in reggae music, and are establishing their own cultural norms for liberation.

Historical view on this first:

Jamaica has the same kinds of patriarchal forces that came from Europe and that we confront here in the USA as well. The notion that men are the primary decision makers, that they have more skills and abilities in areas like business and government, contrasts with the roles that women are essentialized into, being nurturing, housekeeping, etc. It has been a difficult struggle in American society to overcome these habits, and in Jamaica it has been even more difficult.

Bible references:

Rastas accept the Bible (especially the old testament) and so are likely to call upon the Bible for guidance as to how women should be treated.

I have acquired a publication from the Theocratic Order of Rastafari in Jamaica that talks about this.

“Rastafari sons and daughters must live in the traditions of the laws given to man by Jah Rastafari. These are found in the prophecy Bible in general and in the books of Genesis, Leviticus and the teachings of Christ and his apostle in particular. “

First Corinthians 7-2 & 3:

Let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband, let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence and likewise the wife unto the husband.

Collossians 3-18 & 19:

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husband, as it is fit in the lord, husbands love your wives and be not bitter against them.

Notice that the role of wives is to submit, but the role of the husband is to love the wife. That establishes a fairly one-sided relationship.

The reality of slavery is also an important historical factor. Women were viewed as means of production because they produced more slave workers. They were seen as a source of wealth as well as a source of sexual satisfaction without consequences for slave owners and masters. These women did not willingly cooperate, most resisted passively and many resisted actively, they tried not to become pregnant and not to have children in slavery. Obviously, they faced the prospect of seeing their children sold away from them at any time. Women under slavery knew they had some power – the power not to produce children for the slavery system. One of the reasons that the slave system had to keep b ringing more slaves from Africa is because of this resistance by women. Women learned and remembered this resistance.

With the end of slavery things were still very anti-women. The colonial government kept policies designed to control women. Jamaican historian Joan French said: Here are the legislative goals for social policies in Jamaica concerning women.

1. They should marry a man to mind them, that way one wage could stretch to two or more and jobs would not have to be found for women.

2. Stay at home and service more workers for the big men to exploit at no cost to them.

3. Accepted men should get their first choice of paid work and women should be dependent.

4. Work for little or nothing to make profits for the big men. Work for women is a privilege not a right, yet women were forced to work because their man’s wages were generally too small to stretch. Thus, in the competition for wages men began to see women more and more as a threat to their jobs. Many joined the big men in fighting against women’s rights in the workplace.

So the result of colonial policy was to keep women in their place and to pit men against women. This was done in the interests of economics. Once slavery ended the population of former slaves began to increase, thus there was too much labor and women needed to be disempowered.

This set the historical stage for women to be thought of as secondary citizens who should submit to men.

The carries over into Rastafarianism. Here are some Rasta faith guidelines indicating the place of women. You may not like these, but here they are. Remember, however, that Rastafarianism is not monolithic, and not all Rasta groups are alike in this and other ways.

Where it is possible to find these guidelines, they indicate a subordination of women and a marginalization of them as spiritual beings.

Here are some commandments that come from a Rasta document called JAHUG, again from the Theocratic Order of Rastafari.

1. Thou shalt not take more than one woman or daughter into yourself. Anyone who have two is full of lust.

2. Any woman or daughter who has a man and is found lying in the bed of another brethren are guilty of death. Our father Rastafari has one blessed Queen Omega.

3. Brethren must not downgress or brutalize their woman. Do not cause her embarrassment in the congregation.

4. She must not enter the congregation unless her dress cover her knees. The daughter or woman who show her knees or legs in the congregation must be put out of the audience of brethren because she is selling flesh for popularity and contributes to the society of lust.

5. Thou shalt not lie in bed with a put-away daughter or woman (abandoned by her husband, or a woman who has abandoned her husband). It is wrong for a daughter to leave one brethren and then to live with another in bed as wife and husband.

6. A daughter and her king man who cannot live in peace should bring their differences into the upper room of brethren in the theocratic temple. There the brethren hear the confusion and if there is no compassion granted to the accused they should live apart as widow and widower until Selassie I calleth us home.

7. Brethren should not infiltrate ulterior motives into the minds of daughters. The women and the daughter should not appear romantic in the presence of the almighty but should be like unto Queen Omega.

8. Daughters should not eat their holy chalice in the congregation.

Notice the double standards here. Wives must submit.

This is not acceptable to many women. If they are fighting against oppression of one sort, they may also oppose other oppressions against them. In the last 30 years a number of progressive Rastafarian women have called for a different approach.

One of these is Sister Farika Birhan who has started the Queen Omega movement.

Selassie and his wife, Empress Menin, are both sovereigns of Ethiopia. He is King Alpha and she is Queen Omega. Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, so he is the beginning and she is the end and there is a divine continuum in between.

The Queen Omega movement has tried to resurrect the dignity of Rastafari woman through an analysis of the role of Queen Omega and try to project that onto modern Rasta women and relationships.

Sister Farika Birhan writes:

Who is the Rastafari woman? What is she all about? Is there such a person as the Rastafari woman? If she does live where is she? How is it that so little is known about her? Is it because she has no counterpart in Rastafari culture? Is the Rastafari woman therefore nothing but a second hand version of the Rastafari king man?

Babylon has a vested interest in having no queen with integrity, such as the Rastafari woman. But instead, to put up its harlot queens to rule the world and draw the innocent into wickedness. The center of this pollution by the harlot queen is the movie industry and television. It should be no surprise then to learn that the Rastafari woman, as Queen Omega, the rightful queen mother of iration, is a threat to Babylon.

Every Rastafari is the son of King Alpha, father of iration, and rules with the queen, as the daughter is the continuation of the mother. So, a Rastafari woman’s highest title is Queen Omega. Babylon has used every trick to hide Queen Omega from the world.

The most crucial trick is to keep the Rastafari woman from ascending to her spiritual heights as Queen Omega, an African queen, mother earth, mother nature herself. This is accomplished by stealing away the majority of women who have entered into the Rastafari way of life during the early days, back into Babylon, through the jailing of Rastafari and leaving the women unprotected. By the starting of a whispering campaign leading to the scorn of the Rastafari woman by her family and society and the denial of the Rastafari of a land base and women and youths that are the stability of the movement. The overlords therefore encourage the Rastafari movement to be nomadic in order to discourage women from entering into it and stabilizing it. This destabilization on the part of Babylon promoted the Rastafari without family ties as the essence of the Rasta man. The romantic mystic seer priest walking the streets brining judgment and fire upon the peoples of the earth. The Rastafari queen mother symbolized by the moon grew dim in the attention offered to the lion.

Empress Menin, wife of Haile Selassie, is Queen Omega within this dispensation. Makeda, Queen of Sheba, established the Solomonic line through their son Menelik, the fruit of her union with Solomon, was Queen Omega within her dispensation, as was Mary the other of Christ. Empress Menin's name is taken as a sign that she will bring an end to the reign of unrighteous wicked males.

Leonard P. Howell, noted Jamaican historian in his book THE PROMISED KEY writes:

Queen Omega, the Ethiopian woman, is the crowned mother of this world. She hands us the rulebook from the poles of supreme authority. She is the canon mistress of creation. King Alpha and Queen Omega are the paymasters of the world, Queen Omega being the balming mistress of many worlds she charges the powerhouse of the planet right now.

Sister Birhan goes on:

Empress Menin’s effect on the role of women was profound. She referred to all women in the congregation as queen. The Rastafari woman now had a female role model to follow. Her acts were followed with close scrutiny. The Rastafari saw Empress Menin in every Rastafari woman and respect was high. One must realize that on the same day Haile Selassie was crowned emperor of Ethiopia Menin, his queen, was crowned empress of Ethiopia in a separate ceremony after his coronation and received also the homage from the 72 nations of the world. Just as his imperial majesty’s coronation symbolized the black man coming into his kingship, her coronation symbolized the black woman coming into her queenship. The psychological effect upon the black woman on having an African woman ruling in regal splendor and being paid homage has never been stressed by so-called writers on Rastafari culture. It must never be overlooked by those of us searching for the woman’s role in Rastafari culture.

Thus, an effort is being made symbolically to redeem the image of the African woman and the Rastafari woman as not just someone who is subordinate but as someone who reigns in equality with Rastafari king man.

One of the things that has been studied is the actual role that woman play in the Rastafari life – what do they do each day? Originally old-style Rastafari is firm in its commitment to chant down Babylon yet it has sold out to what has been called the “capitalist male deal.” You can see that from some of the government regulations and policies that historian Joan French talked about.

The capitalist male deal goes like this:

Black men, descended from slaves, are kept near the bottom of the social pyramid. They are not given full rights or full economic opportunity. But, in order to keep them in their place it is necessary to give them someone to oppress. Thus, women are put at even a lower social rung. One of the ways to demobilize black men is to give them someone to oppress. Through legal systems and through cultural and social norms it is thought to be appropriate for them to have full authority over someone. What men struggle for in this capitalist society is money, and in pitting men against women, as we saw was the conscious policy of the colonial government, they cannot unite to oppose the oppression that exists.

Now back to the study of what Rasta women actually do. A study was done by the Sister Theatre Collective commissioned by sister Amani Tafari who is a dreadlocks Rasta, and did research on the gender relations among the Rastafari. Her subjects were 80 dreadlocks, evenly distributed among genders and spanning the major groupings of Rasta, including the Nyabinghi House, the 12 Tribes of Israel and the Bobo. The research get separate views from males and females on four topics: domestic roles, sexuality, self-image, and ideology.

DOMESTIC ROLES: Taking care of children is the most consistent feature of a Rastawoman’s life, despite the expectation that the Rastaman would shoulder half the burden. He doesn’t. In addition many women are also breadwinners. Most vexing is the tendency for their men to be involved with other non-Rasta woman. For the men, most admit they fall short of the ideal notion of fatherhood mainly because secret polygamy keeps them from spending adequate time with their children.

SEXUALITY: This research made clear the difference between the recreational and procreational nature of sexual intercourse. Some insist on a contraceptive method or device, others suffer having children. While others become celibate in order to avoid pregnancy. Notice that this is the same reaction women had under slavery. Particularly controversial is the issue of polygamy. Those Rasta sisters who agree with the practice insist on certain conditions – it must not be at their own expense emotionally or financially and they must have a say in the selection of the second wife. Others were unconditionally opposed to the practice. On the issue of menstruation the opinion were fairly uniform, not just about a sense of uncleanness, but as a time when women were under the influence of extensive power and were dangerous to all males above seven years old, and transmissible into food through her vibrations. Hence, she should not cook. Males were in favor of polygamy but believed it should not be indulged in purely on the basis of self-gratification. They felt that a sound economic base was an important pre-condition to polygamy.

SELF-IMAGE: Women reported male opposition to the expression of self-worth. The use of the term “daughter” and the insistence on covering their locks. This last notion was one on which female elders strongly disagreed, and said that uncovering the locks was violating one of the highest principles of rastafari. Male positions on these issues were somewhat open but often contradictory. They opposed any limits being put on Rasta women’s roles in public life, but at the same time wanted to define her role as essentially domestic.

IDEOLOGY: Males were very firmly in support of the authority of the Bible, females unhesitatingly blame the negative Biblical sources for the imposition of an inferior status on them. This system of authority they said was wrong and needed to be sorted out.

So we see the social roles that actually exist.

BUT…these are times of change and times are changing.

Barry Chevannes, one of the most prolific writers on Rasta culture, writes:

“Up to the mid 1970’s the ritual subordination of the rastafari woman to her Rastafarian Kingman precluded any role outside of the domestic sphere. She took no part in public reasoning, seldom made the trip to a celebration, could never acquire the status of an elder in the house, covered her locks from public scrutiny, and observed menstrual taboos and so forth. But all this has now been changing.”

Rasta women have been very outspoken about this. Here is a publication called RASTA VOICE, a magazine, and here is an article by someone calling herself Daughter Loi.

“African women are in double jeopardy. My black brothers, your black sisters are not your enemy. Your black sisters are not a threat to your masculinity. In this system she is in double jeopardy. Just as the white man system is for the use, abuse and refuse of the black race, so too is the system of the black man on the black woman. At this point in time black sisters are forced to recognize their role in the black brethren scheme of things to be one of inferiority. She now sees herself at the mercy of black men who unfortunately have inherited much of the white man attitudes. Worst of which is now manifest in the use, abuse and refuse of black sisters. For black sisters to recognize themselves as assets to our liberation struggle the role of inferiority is unacceptable. In the quest for the liberation and oneness of our people the black man must discontinue the practice of subordination of the black sisters and come to grips with the facts – we are just as needed as the brothers in the struggle for the liberation and the continuous prosperity for the black race..”

Chevannes goes on to put it this way:

“The rastafari woman is becoming increasingly conscious of and opposed to her inferior status in the movement. They often use the Marxist paradigm of the double oppression of women to score the point that black, including rastafari women, are oppressed first as blacks and second as women. They challenge the meaninglessness of black liberation if at the same time black brothers oppose their black sisters when they call for equality.”

In fact, they are coming forward and changes are being made, even in the heart of the rule-bound Theocratic Order of Rastafari there have been changed. Now a women is allowed to bring the male symbol of authority the rod into the Black Rock tabernacle on the occasion of celebrating Selassies crowning. She takes up her position with the elder males at the front of the service. During singing she danced with the rod firmly in her hand and no man objected. No man seemed to care, and it seemed to be a very important change.

In an early reflection on the status of the Rasta woman Sister Ayalou offers what she believes to be the reason for the internally generated change in the movement.

“Traditionally, there was no such person as the Rasta woman, there was a Rasta man and the Rasta man HAD a woman, a woman taken from outside the movement and fashioned in the Rasta man’s ways. But since the 1970’s women have been coming into the Rastafarian movement independently of any man and this has created a situation where there needs to be a challenge to the role of women within the movement.”

There is, in fact, a new role for women in the Rastafarian movement, a new Rasta consciousness. Terisa turner in her book THE NEW SOCIETY talks about this new role for Rasta women.

“A decade before Bob Marley made reggae a powerful weapon for revolution Professor James pointed to the future in the present. He saw that the rejection of mainstream capitalist relations among black Muslims , rastafari, African Mau Mau and white hippies and beatniks constituted a new global watershed from which would emerge a new global society. James recognized that Rasta was a part of this new world society emerging from the disarray of the old. And he linked rastafari with other expressions of the universal new society Mau Mau black power, and the revolt of white youth. 20 years after this Honor Ford Smith of the Sistren Theater Collective pointed out the emergence of the secular new rastafari. The culture has influenced many who are not believers in Selassie to adopt elements of the way of life such as vegetarianism, locked hair, and the use of words developed within the group. Irie is an example. The tremendous expansion of rastafari as a secular movement was impelled by the teaching of James, Walter Rodney, and especially by Bob Marley, who used his music as a vehicle for mobilization.

Reggae is a powerful force for social and political change. It has been so for a very long time. Marley’s 1979 album SURVIVAL linked reggae music to the struggle against racism and imperialism with songs like Wake up and live, Africa unite, So much trouble, Babylon system, and especially Africans liberate Zimbabwe. African guerillas that were in the bush fighting against repressive white governments heard this song and claimed it as their own. Countless reggae singers have linked the struggle of the African peoples to their own blight in the western hemisphere. But Marley’s song actually intervened in an on-going struggle against technological inhumanity, atomic idiocy insisting that blacks and rastas will be the survivors.

This is a powerful concept that already exists in Africa at this time. Nigeria’s famous musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti was talking about Marley and his music when he said, “Music is the weapon of the future.”

Historian Kimais states,

Such is the power of the power of art that Bob Marley’s music has done more to popularize the real issues of the African liberation movement than several decades of back breaking work of Pan Africanists and international revolutionaries. Reggae is a weapon of revolution because of the power of art but also because of the power of capitalist communication technology. Reggae cannot be banned, censored or repressed because audiocassettes and duplication are available to everyone. The severe repression by third world military cabals in the post-independence period cannot silence the analysis and upliftment contained in dub and raps of poetry and political reggae and in the world music of the 1990s and beyond. Marley sang freedom songs as did Paul Robeson in the 1940s, but now to hundreds of millions of people amplified by computer technology and the super-villagization of the globe. Rastafari is a political social movement. It is not being treated here as a religious phenomena. It has changed. It is now rather a way of life which emerged when peasants were faced with land seizures and forced into cities especially in Jamaica in the period since 1930. But also in Africa since the turn of the century the same thing has been happening. Far from being a millenarian flash in the pan Rasta has grown exponentially in the last half of the 20^th century.

Terisa Turner:

George Lamming states that Rastafarianism has extended into a dominant force which influences all levels of Jamaican national life. Today Rasta is one of many expressions of indigenous people fighting for their rights. It unites first nations peoples with the descendants of the African Diaspora, it unites refugees, migrants, and their children. For instance, some of the aboriginal peoples of New Zealand are identifying themselves as rastafari and are pursuing land claims based on this faith. New rastafari is a global cultural practice of black people and especially black woman, but is also inclusive of revolutionary white women and men. The new rastafari has come from a global fight back against the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, structural adjustment programs, especially by women because these things hit women and children especially hard. New Rasta has come from the realization that central to the struggle for women’s rights is the resistance of black women, north and south, against the gendered and racially gendered hierarchies of slavery, colonialism and today’s super exploitation that exists through global capitalism. In sum, new forces have adapted and transformed rastafari into a different and even more potent world social movement.

Not sure I agree with everything she says, but she makes an important point that Rasta has become more than just a millenarian end times movement, but a broader social movement that is particularly appealing to women and indigenous peoples.

Now to examine the role of women in reggae music. It is clear that reggae is a force for social change. There has been an increasing involvement of women in reggae music.

ELENA OUMANO, writer for Billboard magazine:

Reggae music may appear to be a bastion of masculine supremacy, but women are increasingly shaping the genre. "Women really rule on that little island (of Jamaica)," says Olivia "Babsy" Grange, president of Epic-affiliated Specs-Shang Musik, with a laugh. "We just let our men believe they do." From top U.S. label positions to jills of all trades (jobs within the indie grass-roots industry) women are increasingly shaping today's reggae music. And while some cite the presence of a "glass ceiling" limiting their professional opportunities, women are beginning to make inroads in the remaining macho holdouts--the recording studio and the stage.

"This is a really great time," says New York-based Loose Cannon president Lisa Cortes, who, in her former position as Mercury VP of A&R, signed top reggae artist Buju Banton, now part of her label's small, diverse roster. "Women are involved from management to running labels to being very intimately involved on the creative side," Cortes says.

This does not mean that there is still not a lot of discrimination against women in reggae music. Certainly the kinds of attitudes that exist in Jamaican society and within traditional Rasta bleed over into reggae music.

According to Tuff Gong International U.S. president Cassandra Goins, gender discrimination is an equal-opportunity problem. "It's not exclusive to the reggae industry," says Goins. "I have never personally experienced it (in the reggae industry). However, I have experienced it in other facets of corporate America. This problem is not endemic to any specific type of company, be it music or otherwise. Rather, it is a problem promulgated by unhealthy individuals."

Still, while many women in positions of power insist that they're getting respect, their younger peers tell a different tale.

Def Jam A&R director Drew Dixon entered the music industry four years ago as an intern. Despite her meteoric rise through company ranks, gender discrimination remains an issue for her.

"I think men, particularly in (the music) business, have a hard time dealing with women as peers and not as sexual objects," says Dixon. "I'm sure the objectification of women in reggae and hip-hop cultures has a lot to do with this. It's very difficult. I'm a lot wiser than my 25 years might suggest."

Many women working in the reggae indie arena in the U.S. and Jamaica also report an uphill battle against a prevailing attitude of male entitlement.

The last strongholds are the studio and the stage. Many female artists experience discrimination and often sexual harassment. It is something that many young female artists confront.

"It's really rough, so rough that at one point all the female singers had affairs with the producers," says singer Diana King, who chose to establish her solo career stateside with Stowe at Columbia. "They don't want you to move outside of what they're doing. They always want to hold you back. It's so common, and it's so hard. When I was working the hotel circuit, sometimes I'd have my job for only one day--often without my pay--and have to look for another, just because I refused to sleep with the entertainment manager or the bandleader."

One of the things that women have to confront in reggae music is objectification and the characterization of this through a concept called slackness. Slackness is where the music tends to focus on an objectification of women’s bodies and the carnal aspects of male-female relationships. It can be very explicit, very specific, and far beyond what we are used to experiencing in modern American pop music.

Lady Saw is one example of this, and she can be as slack as any man.

"I'm trying to get more women front and center," says Burke, who works with such female artists as Nadine Sutherland, Brick & Lace, Rene Davis, and top reggae rapper/singer Lady Saw. "They haven't done so before because they've been too reserved. The men are much bolder, and in the highly competitive Jamaican music business you have to be very aggressive."

Specs-Shang Musik's Grange plans a series of compilations featuring only female artists. "We have some of the most fantastic (female) singers," says Grange. "If we can focus attention on them, it will add another dimension to the music."

Some women in the business say that dimension won't mean much, though, if the growing number of female artists aren't allowed to express their own voices--if their only route into the dancehall is mirroring male DJs' portrayal of women as sex objects.

"The female artists who have gotten attention, like Patra and Lady Saw, are the ones who match the men as far as slack (sexually explicit) lyrics are concerned," says Jamaican-American Pele Lanier, artist manager, promoter, and coordinator of the Jamaican stand at MIDEM. "They've been willing to play the man's game, and that's the way through the door to the dancehall. "

Now it is one thing for us from our context in the USA to say that slackness music is a problem, to say that objectification of women is wrong, but in the context of Jamaican society it may be different. This is one of the first things that we need to understand. We cannot judge the things that we see in Jamaican Rasta and reggae culture based on the standards of our own culture. We need to try and understand what is taking place there before passing judgment.

One of the important points is that if you grow up in the ghetto, if you grow up in a specific cultural context the portrayal of slackness and the willingness to affiliate with slackness is a little easier to understand.

"When I first got together with Lady Apache, I was cynical about women who did lewd lyrics and slackness, but Apache showed me that sometimes they have to do that to survive," says Christie Barber, an American who does a variety of work in the stateside indie industry, including managing promising New York-based Jamaican DJ Lady Apache. "We came to an agreement that now she's on a label (Nervous Records), she can do that act in the dancehall, where she makes her money, because that's what the people want, but in recordings, she will big up women and do no slackness."

This controversy over sexually expli-cit lyrics is tangled up further with reggae's roots and dancehall culture.

Reggae has always been the poor man's party, with its creative force located in the "downtown" Kingston ghetto dancehalls. The music's lyrical subjects "reflect the class struggle between the uptown 'upper class' and the downtown 'lower class,'" says Burke. Those lyrics also reflect a mentality shared by some "lower class" women.

Many of the women who pack those dancehalls see little hope of achieving real power in their lives. But while they're young, they do wield the power of their sexuality. So they preen in skimpy outfits while male DJs chant rhythmic, X-rated praises to their bodies. In that way, at least, even dancehall "ghetto gals," at least as a group, are a force to be reckoned with in the reggae world.

"When you go to a dancehall in West Kingston or Brooklyn," says Gordon, "you hear lewd lyrics like Terror Fabulous' 'Position': 'Hold up your head and cock out your bottom/Hold onto the bed head and hold on strong.' The women go nuts and start doing exactly what the song tells them to do. That's what the girls want to hear. You have to understand their mindset. These are not cosmopolitan, sophisticated women. It's all about their sexuality; it's about giving the man 'the wickedest slam,' as Beenie Man would say. Since they're ghetto girls, they have to have the wickedest slam in their outfits, their styles, their dance moves. People have to understand that dancehall the way . . . it has evolved reflects their everyday life. Now, they're trying to sanitize the dancehall, but if you do, it's no longer the dancehall. It's something else."

The role of women in reggae music has been expanding and growing. Sonya Pottinger, a successful reggae music producer and distributor, illustrates the struggle, but also shows that it can be done.

Overall, the status of women within the reggae industry is growing in more significant ways, and most agree that, as Burke says, "The sky's the limit for me."

"There are glass ceilings only if you see yourself as existing in somebody else's world," says Cortes. "Maybe the challenge to us as women is to build our own world. It's not about separatism, but if we don't fit into the man's world, then we have to reclaim our share of our world. Ultimately, though, we as human beings are not going to empower ourselves by division. If we all get together, we can find solutions. A team accomplishes more than an individual."

We see this same theme that has been developed within Rastafarianism, that if we are to struggle against oppression men and women need to work together, in equality and in unity, and this theme has been picked up in the reggae music scene. In order to further the struggle there is a need to work together.

The last area here concerns reggae music as it relates to women and social change. It seems clear to me that in many instances women have had a powerful role in making reggae music more progressive, more interested in social change, and more effective in fighting against downpression.

Third world feminisms have emerged from the simultaneous limitations of male controlled state policy and liberation movement efforts and expanding internationalism. This historical trajectory roots women’s movements of today in the Tran global transformation of rastafari. This was promoted by women reggae artists especially after Bob Marley’s death in 1981, and the continuation of this work by the I-Threes, Marcia Griffiths, Judy Mowatt and Rita Marley. Feminist reggae has been increasing around the world to join a flood of womanist expression in a broad range of media. The magnitude of this power is illustrated by a Mandela concert broadcast live from Wembly stadium in London by CNN, where the largest television audience at that time saw Tracy Chapman in dreads singing, “Let us all be free, poor people gonna rise up and take their shar, talkin’ ‘bout a revolution.” In seeking to explain Chapman’s popularity in the early 1990’s

Some explain that because she is a black woman at the bottom of the worldwide hierarchy of power Chapman can sing about all oppressed people – she is the oppressed singing about oppression, she is poor singing about poverty, she is black singing about racism, she is a woman singing about battering, she is a lesbian singing about love, and most poignant she is an ordinary person singing about revolution. And herein lies the unprecedented popularity of Tracy Chapman at that time, and it is something that has been shared to a lesser degree by other women.

Transformational feminist movements are not limited to rastafari, but all share the same foundations in the defense of land, self-sufficiency, local markets and women’s autonomy. It transcends the definition of the domesticated woman, the dependent housewife, whether she be in the first world or the third world. This catapults the new Rasta to the forefront of today’s global resource defense movements. The material basis for the true global solidarity among women is approximated in the actual processes of daily life as lived by the new rastafari.

It is clear that the forces of Babylon, as we have observed, from Sister Birhan, will operated to try and keep Rasta women and men separate. But, since the 1990’s a new Rastafarian movement is growing, especially in Africa, where indigenous people, those concerned about oppression can join together in a gendered unity to try to work for social change. In this process the Rasta philosophy has become less religious and more secular. More focused on policies and goals than it is on cosmology and religious ritual. Inside of these movements woman have had a very powerful role.

I want to review a few of these now. Turner writes:

The new Rasta of East Africa consists of dozens of autonomous groups which above all provide for survival. They are communities, they are not revolutions. They combine study, artistic creation, childcare, economic activities, community service and politics. These are part of a larger and older Rasta network with links to London, Lagos, the Caribbean and elsewhere. In Nairobi feminist Rasta women work as maids, vegetable sellers, traders, seamstresses and even as prostitutes. They are influenced by Christianity, Islam, indigenous religions, and many strands of spiritualism. Political reggae is of central importance to them. Lyrics are studied carefully in Saturday afternoon reasonings in slum yards all over Africa. Marley’s teachings are seen as primary to those seeking to learn how to speak English. While often repression discourages the display of Rasta symbolism, or the Garveyite colors, phrases such as beat down Babylon, may be seen as wall graffiti or as traced in the dust on a city bus in places like Nigeria. Kenyan rastas commemorate Bob Marley each year. Small events are held in bars, parks, open spaces, and in the streets. “Marley’s continuing power, commented one popular East African DJ, is proportionate to political oppression. Marley says for us what we can’t say.” Concert videos of various reggae artists are accompanied by DJ narrations in Swahili, Kiki, and other languages for those who do not understand patois or English. The new rastafari culture has merged with the rising of Kenyan women and poor men which is the popular democratic movement since social need surpassed the capacities of voluntary women’s organizations and necessitated the financial support of the state. Violence against women is increasing in almost all parts of the world. One expression of this is sex tourism and the flesh trade of third world women to first world customers and the increasing sadistic nature of this market. In Germany 52% of the home video market consist of horror, war and pornography films. Violence against women itself becomes a new commodity along with the trafficking of women with the open advertisement of submissive, non-emancipated, docile Asian women as wives for European men. All over Africa and the world Rastafarian movements often led and powered by progressive women are working against this. We cannot say that they are majority movements, they do not hold seats in parliament, they don’t create revolutions that topple governments, but on the other hand they have, especially throughout Africa and the Caribbean created communities in which their values can be represented, so that the oppression of an outward global society can be limited within these communities, and where they can achieve the traditional Garveyite goals of self-sufficiency, self-fulfillment and pride in who they are instead of reliance on images from someone else.

These sorts of movements are spreading among indigenous people, such as in New Zealand and in the USA, for example the Hopi, and the Inuit in northern Canada. They have all heard the call of reggae music and relate it to their own situation.

We have come a long way from the beginning – the roles for women dictated by the Bible, slavery, and neo-colonialism. Even the barriers erected to women by the Rasta movement have been steadily dealt with and eroded, first symbolically and then actually.

The lyrics and the power of reggae music calling for the chanting down of Babylon is heard throughout these movements and struggles.

Terisa Turner puts it this way:

The new rastafari has emerged through a process whereby black feminisms have garnered the weight and media access necessary to enable them to appropriate rastafari and redesign its content. This has also been a process of rediscovery of the history of women in struggle and an excavation of global gender, class and race relations. While the theories and practices of the struggle for a new society are much broader than the new rastafari and exist separate from it, they are to a remarkable extent expressed globally through the cultural movement of rastafari making it a fertile social force for the 21^st century.

The thesis of this course is that reggae music is an example of rhetoric that calls for change. In examining the role of women in rastafari and reggae music we can see this process at work.

Rasta Speaks

2011-03-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

Ras Pidow Speaks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiXJWMP1S8c

Rastafari Elders Sing "King's Highway"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSv0mODfdIk

Dub Poetry

2011-03-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

Definition of Dub Poetry

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD9UagiQY-M

Dub Poetry Background

http://www.spike.com/video-clips/g2qj5s/dub-poetry

dub poetry
Tags: dub poetry

Sankofa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpmy0nCkrhM

Patois Poetry - Who own the Oil?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfBeG6HIRm0

Schoolgirl Dub Poetry

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSiSSV0kvHs

Sister Breeze - Aid travels with a bomb

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo4FHakmoIk

Sister Breeze - Get Back

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOzrxhK80Mg

Dub Poetry from the USA - Reparations

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xe88a1_reparations-now-spoken-word-dub-poe_music

Reparations Now! (Spoken Word Dub Poetry) by cipherkam

Older Mutabaruka Material

2011-03-16T07:50:00.001-07:00

Mutabaruka via last.fm

Mutabaruka - Dis Poem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn-f8PgLVjU

Mutabaruka - November 21 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBPSC1KRU_Y

Mutabaruka - It No Good to Stay in a Whiteman Country Too Long
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhpXZZJnvY4

Mutabaruka - People's Court
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNAsWtVdEI8

Reggae Vibes for Spring Break

2011-03-07T16:21:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaWith the students all at home or else relaxing here in snow-locked Burlington, I thought some of you might want to check up on some of the stuff I have on the website. Every day is a day for roots education.

In the video folder, you will find:

Awake Zion
Rasta offshoots from all over the world show the power of Reggae.

Marcus Garvey - Black Nationalist
More about Marcus, from a different perspective, more about his ideology of self-sufficiency.

Peter Tosh - Behind the Music
A soft rock look at a hard, hard musician.

Studio One Story
Complete and comprehensive story of the legendary Jamaican studio.

At our password protected website you can examine these resources if you are enrolled in the class.
https://www.uvm.edu/~asnider/reggaereadings

Enjoy!

Western Rhetoric in Reggae Lecture Video

2011-03-03T12:32:00.001-08:00

Western Rhetoric and Reggae Music

2011-03-02T07:29:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaHere are the notes for my lecture.

RHETORIC LECTURE FOR REGGAE

Common meanings of rhetoric as a term:

Indicates talk but nothing else.

Indicates form without substance.

Generally a negatively charged word.

More academic definitions:

Aristotle:

Aristotle defines the rhetorician as someone who is always able to see what is persuasive (Topics VI.12, 149b25). Correspondingly, rhetoric is defined as the ability to see what is possibly persuasive in every given case (Rhet. I.2, 1355b26f.). This is not to say that the rhetorician will be able to convince under all circumstances. Rather he is in a similar situation as the physician: the latter has a complete grasp of his art only if he neglects nothing which might heal his patient, though he is not able to heal every patient. Similarly, the rhetorician has a complete grasp of his method, if he discovers the available means of persuasion, though he is not able to convince everybody.

Covino and Jolliffe define rhetoric as "a primarily verbal, situationally contingent, epistemic art that is both philosophical and practical and gives rise to potentially active texts"

Used in three ways:

1. Abstract, empty and bombastic public statements.

2. Written and oral discourse that intentionally or unintentionally alters attitudes and mobilizes actions.

3. Academic disciplines that study the techniques, principles and practices of persons who deliberate, argue and advocate in order altering attitudes and actions.

Five aspects of rhetoric:

1. Propositional. Complete thoughts with the sentence as the basic unit. Prose that is planned and structured.

2. Problem-solving. Problem is the difference between what is desired and what exists. In this sense it deals with values – the way things ought to be. It gives advice on how to get to where we wish to go.

3. Public. Addressed to others. It deals with ideas and issues that call for concerted action, usually by more than one. Many problems require action by others, and usually concern social questions.

4. Practical. It has a goal – to influence and alter the ideas and behaviors of others. It usually seeks a concrete and relevant response from those who hear it.

5. Poetic. Discourse is more poetic when it displays ritualistic, aesthetic, dramatic and emotive qualities. It should be pleasing to the ear. While not purely poetic like many works of literature, good rhetoric needs poetic elements to be effective and stir the feelings of the audience.

These features as applied to reggae music:

1. Propositional. It has complete thoughts and is planned. It makes arguments. List.

2. Problem-solving. It identifies things that are wrong now, criticizes, and then provides solutions. List.

3. Public. It is performed; it is for others to hear. It calls out issues that require a public response. It concerns social questions. List.

4. Practical. It tries to influence listeners. It wants a response. List.

5. Poetic. It takes place within a primarily poetic domain, music, and strives to be pleasing to the ear. List.

Rhetoric can become shared across speakers and become a rhetorical movement.

Leland Griffin and the Movement Study

If there is a rhetorical movement, the critic will find these elements. Do we find them in reggae music?

1. Crystallization of fundamental issues

2. Successive emergence of argument, appeal, counter‑argument, counter-appeal

3. Sanctions invoked by opposing rhetoricians

4. Persuasive techniques are shared which are effective, ineffective techniques shunned

5. Invention may run dry, and forms are used and re-used

6. Organizations are established to spread the argument

7. Movements grow in circulation, appeal, creation of audiences, and expansion of social and geographical stratification of the audiences.

This technique is for the analysis of argument on a grand scale, beyond just a single performance or speaker.

Critic should use the practice of historical relativism. Judge the tactics and actions of the speakers based on the tactics, actions, and theories available to them: available at that point in history, available based on their training and experience, etc.

Methods of social change called for my reggae music – a continuum:

· Personal change

· Language use

· Singing and chanting

· Departure

· Community action

· Divine action

· Revolution

Music & Rhetoric

· Chant down Babylon

· Inner change vs. outer change

· Gandhi vs. King

· 20^th century revolution issues: people power, long struggle, and music and revolution examples

Examination of one rhetorical device: Babylon

Babylon as icon and myth:

· Slavery: Babylon, Egypt, New World

· Whore of Babylon in the Bible

· Rome: killed the savior, Catholic Church focus on wealth & hierarchy.

· Versus Zion. Promised land, Africa, live in harmony with nature and each other.

· Role of prophets.

Babylon as a modern reality:

· Racism

· Poverty

· Police

· Pollution

· Mechanization

· Politics

· Violence – tribal war

Social change responses and Babylon:

· Banish Babylon from yourself

· Speak language that denies Babylon

· Sing and chant for Babylon’s fall

· Depart out of Babylon – back to Africa

· Community action – work together to limit Babylon’s influence where you are.

· Divine action – Jah will bring down Babylon

· Revolution against Babylon

Rastafarianism Lecture Part 2

2011-02-24T10:47:00.001-08:00

Reggae - Rastafarianism Part 2 (2011) from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

Buju Banton Facing 20 Years on Drug Charge

2011-02-23T05:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.rwdmag.com/2011/02/buju-banton-found-guilty-of-three-drug-charges-and-faces-20-years-in-prison/

Buju Banton who collected a Grammy for best Reggae album last week was yesterday convicted of three of the four drug charges brought against him after an earlier trial brought no result.

According to jamaica-gleaner.com “Buju has been found guilty of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of a mixture and substance containing a detectable amount of cocaine, knowingly and intentionally possessing a firearm in furtherance of and during the course of a drug-trafficking crime, and aiding and abetting others in using a communication facility in the commission of a felony.”

On the plus side, Buju was found not guilty of attempting to acquire five kilograms more of cocaine. The controversial reggae star maintains he was “just talking” to an informant and that none of his claims, later used against him in court were true.

Fellow reggae star Wayne Wonder offered his support yesterday “Lets all keep the prayers going for Mark, we all have to stay strong and stand by him!”

Lecture on Rastafarianism Part One

2011-02-17T12:30:00.001-08:00

Reggae - Rastafari Part 1 (2011) from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

Origins of Reggae Lectures from 2000

2011-02-10T05:52:00.000-08:00

They are a bit grainy, pixelated and strangely off center, but they work and the audio is good. This is what happens when you try and translate RealMedia files into Vimeo.

Reggae - Origins Part One from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

Reggae - Origins Part Two from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

Reggae - Origins Part Three from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

Reggae - Origins Part Four from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

Origins of Reggae Music

2011-02-09T12:48:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

These are my lecture notes.

ROOTS OF REGGAE MUSIC/ORIGINS OF REGGAE MUSIC

INTRO:

What carries culture? What of JA is African and what is European? Rex Nettleford – Anglo-European culture dominated.

'Africa is indeed tolerated in spurts of syncretised or reinterpreted folk-lore -- a little bit of dance, a little bit of music, a little bit of' story telling, and a few words lacing the Anglo-Saxon tongue with exotic tone and colour. But our formal education system, our accepted belief system, our art, law and morals, the legitimate customs and so many Of Our habits and perceived capabilities - all indices of a so-called cultural sense are dominated by the European heritage."

But not music. Music is where the African stuff lived on.

As Pamela O'Gorman points out, the performance style of authentic folk music in Jamaica is African, no matter what the origin of the music. This is readily seen in Rastafarian or Revival performances of European hymns - the percussive accompaniments and use of complicated rhythmic figures, the syncopated treatment of melodies that were originally written in equal note values, the absence of variety in dynamics and the tendency to adhere strictly to meter and tempo. But what makes these performances unmistakably African in style is the open, somewhat relaxed vocal timbre obtained by directing the sound to the face rather than the head .

THEMES:

1. Music evolves, out of many one. Forms develop and then merge and influence each other. America, Europe, Africa, etc. Rock n roll.

2. Music as social commentary.

Quadrille, mento, reggae all critique society.

The beat critiques society. Downbeat as oppression of Babylon, light upbeat is promise of salvation and rescue.

3. Independence. Control of the music leads to development. Not corporate or market based, but grew out of the corners & niches where black music was allowed. The more independent, the more it leads to reggae.

EARLY MUSICAL FORMS

Africa: drum, loose vocal, call & response, free dance

One African legacy extremely common in Jamaican music is the 'call and answer' group vocal technique, which has been called 'the most salient characteristic of African, or at least West African music.' And as musicologist Garth White points out, in both Africa and Jamaica virtually all music is conceived vocally and the human voice is of overriding importance. Even ordinary speech has a relationship to African music and there is often a 'sing-talk' style of rendering which is reminiscent of dancehall deejays. Then there is the interest in improvisation, and the tendency to use a variety of tone colours in the vocal technique, especially harsh, throaty singing - again African characteristics. Many of these features in Jamaican music follow very closely those listed by Bruno Nettl as having been carried into the New World.' Quite a few are found in ska, rocksteady and reggae, though they are present more as Jamaican characteristics individualized in rural folk music and later incorporated into popular music.'

Work songs from slave times.

Kumina/Pocomania/Revival Zion

The most prominent cultural legacy of these 'direct' African migrants is Pocomania, or Kumina, an African ancestor worship cult emphasizing both singing and dancing.

Pocomania also has antecedents in the Myal cult, an African religion which survived among slaves and whose followers were some times called Native Baptists. Myalism played a prominent part in a number of slave revolts, and laws enacted in 1774 prescribed death form anyone attending these ceremonies.' Zion Revival or Zionism, is similar to Pocomania but more Christian oriented. The term pocomania is sometimes said to be a corruption of poco mania, Spanish for 'little madness'. Edward Seaga opposes this and considers it a derivative of Pu-Kumina. Leonard Barrett traces the term Kumina to two Ashanti Twi words: akom, 'to be possessed', and ana, 'by an ancestor'. (Obeah is another word of Ashanti derivation, combining Oba, 'a child', and Yi, I to take'.) Pocomania first became prominent in the 1860s when the great religious revival, which began in Ireland, swept through the Anglophone world. The spiritual intensity of the Great Revival, where worshippers physically experienced the Holy Spirit, infused Afro Jamaican beliefs with a religious fervor which expressed itself in ecstatic music and dance." In 1988 Leonard Barrett identified three types Afro-Christian sects - Pukimina is mostly African in its rituals and beliefs, Revival Zion is primarily Christian, and Revivalism mixes both." But nowadays most Jamaicans use the term Pocomania, Revivalism, Zionism, Pukimina and Kumina interchangeably.

Maroon influence.

The Maroons were also a source of authentic African music. A 1924 study identifies African derived work and grave songs in western Jamaica's Cockpit Country as featuring pai singing, antiphonal call-response chanting, an the repetition of single, short musical phrases all of which are characteristics of reggae. The researchers collected songs (called Coromantee songs by the Maroons) that speak of venerable African story figures like Anansi the spider and Jesta the trickster." Then there is Jon Cano (variously spelt Junkanoo, John Canoe Juncunnu), a holiday tradition in which small bands Of Costumed musicians roam the street playing for passers-by. Some say the custom hi its roots in African fertility festivals. Its impact on mento, especially the use of the flute, fife an, side drum, is unmistakable,"'

Quadrille Bands: become Jonkanoo (music, costumes, dancing, yam festival becomes Christian becomes Christmas)

Jamaican popular music has always mixed 'the rhythm of Africa and the melody of Europe' . For all their obvious differences, African and European music have much in common certainly more than either has with say Oriental music. And the first widespread native long form was dubbed quadrille. Quadrille in Jamaica probably originated like 'bluegrass music' it America, with black country ensembles trying to reproduce the stylish European dance music of the mid-nineteenth century such as the French quadrille, the Scottish reel, the waltz and polka Four distinctive types of quadrille dances seem to have developed - the formal 'Ballroom' in urban Kingston and St Andrew, the robust 'camp style in rural St Andrew arid Portland, the intricate I virtuoso' in Clarendon, Manchester and Trelawney, and the 'Scottish reel' in the west. Jamaican popular music has always mixed 'the rhythm of Africa and the melody of Europe' . For all their obvious differences, African and European music have much in common certainly more than either has with say Oriental music. And the first widespread native long form was dubbed quadrille. Quadrille in Jamaica probably originated like 'bluegrass music' it America, with black country ensembles trying to reproduce the stylish European dance music of the mid-nineteenth century such as the French quadrille, the Scottish reel, the waltz and polka Four distinctive types of quadrille dances seem to have developed - the formal 'Ballroom' in urban Kingston and St Andrew, the robust 'camp style in rural St Andrew arid Portland, the intricate I virtuoso' in Clarendon, Manchester and Trelawney, and the 'Scottish reel' in the west.

Cuban and Hispanic influence.

Cuba is Jamaica's closest geographic neighbor, only 90 miles away, and it's not surprising that the basic mento bass-drum rhythm is similar to that of Cuban rumba (the English term for what Cubans call son). Significantly, one of the most important instruments in mento is called a 'rhumba box.' Laurel Aitken, arguably the most important Jamaican recording artist of the 1950s, was actually born in Cuba from a Cuban mother and Jamaican father. Aitken moved to Jamaica in 1938 at age 11, and at one time performed under the name 'Cubbana'. Yet there is a notable difference between the musics of the ex-English colonies and their Latin counterparts. While the former (R&B, calypso, reggae) usually focus on a heavy, central beat, the latter (samba, meringue, rumba) tend to be highly polyrhythmic, and some say, more African. This distinction may well be a result of varying colonial outlooks at the very beginning of the African Diaspora.

Calypso influence

Calypso's impact on Jamaican music is quite obvious. Geographically remote and with a considerably different racial composition, Trinidad, along with Barbados, is still the country most socially similar to Jamaica. Linked by language and cricket, they have always interacted culturally, a tradition continuing with soca and reggae. The older and more highly developed musical form of calypso must have greatly affected Jamaican popular music. Some people, not all Trinidadians, argue that mento was nothing but a Jamaican imitation of calypso. And it's worthwhile to note that two of ska's 'foundation' members were the Barbadian Jackie Opel and the Trinidadian Kenrick 'Lord Creator' Patrick.

Mento: live, banjo, drums, guitar, rhumba box (finger bass), bamboo sax, penny whistle, and steel pan. Street music.

Like calypso: up-tempo, party, drum beat steady, humor & sarcasm = social critique.

Whatever its origins, mento was the dominant music of Jamaica from its first appearance in the late 19th century up to the I 1930s, and was especially popular in rural areas. Even now mento is regarded ambivalently as 'country' music, somewhat crude and unsophisticated but hearkening back to days of lost, rustic innocence. Like most folk music, mento was a blend of music and dance, with songs mixing narrative and topical commentary. Mento has a clear, strong fourth beat in a bar of four bears and closely follows local speech patterns.

Mento songs are accompanied by various combinations of piccolo, bamboo fife, guitar, rhumba box, fiddle, banjo, shakers and scrapers. Instruments are often homemade from materials like bamboo, calabashes, seeds, metal graters and even PVC piping. One of the best-known mento stars of yesteryear was 'Sugar Belly' Walker, famous for his use of the bamboo fife and saxophone.," The Jolly Boys, who began playing in Portland over 40 years ago, were perhaps the longest lived of all mento ensembles. As recently as 1990 they recorded the 'Touch Me Tomato ' album, and even toured internationally to support it.

Mento retained its rural importance until the 1950s. However observers noted urban - Jamaica's waning affection for traditional music as early as 1920. Mento's gradually diminishing importance mirrored population shifts from village to city. Young migrants attracted to the bright lights of big city Kingston associated mento with the harsh deprivations of farm life. (A similar attitude towards the delta blues was noted in the 1950s among American blacks who had I migrated' from the rural South to northern cities like Chicago.) Mento became progressively marginalized to rural festivities and tourist hotels as the capital's cultural dominance increased, and the number of mento artists declined sharply in the I 1950s. In Kingston the musicians who congregated in bars on Princess Street found only occasional employment. By 1960 the only real demand for mento musicians was in the growing north coast tourist industry.

But mento, a most resilient traditional music, continues to exert a direct influence even today. A number of dancehall 'riddims' are based on traditional tunes like 'Sixpence' and 'Dog War a Matches Lane'. A number of authentic 'nontourist' bands still exist, like the Blue Glades, St Christopher and Lititz Mento Bands. These play at annual festival celebrations often accompanying quadrille dancers. The Jamaica Cultural Development Commission has launched a Mento Music Development Project and the Jamaican Music Awards included a mento category in 1996.

Paradoxically, mento became a national music just as it went into inexorable decline. Most performers were previously known only to live local audiences, but radio made them famous island wide. Among those who cut mento records were Count Lasher, Lord Flea, Lord Fly, Laurel Aitken, Baba Motta, Bedasse Calypso Quintet, Lord Composer, Lord La Rue, Lord Messam, Lord Tanamo, Lord Power, Hubert Porter, Reynolds Calypso Clippers, and Harold Richardson and The Ticklers. Topical humor was a favorite theme, but some songs contained veiled social commentary and others reworked old digging songs and ring-play tunes. But a large, and perhaps the most popular, part of the output consisted of bawdy, suggestive songs. 34, One of the first really big Jamaican hit records was the famous 'Healing In The Balm Yard'. Of course the raunchier material was heard only in the privacy of homes or on sound systems. (Some basic elements of Jamaican music have never changed.)

Street N=Minstrels, blues, r&b

But no longer satisfied with mento, the urban masses increasingly turned to the rhythm and blues of black America. According to music historian Robert Witmer (who differentiates between 'urban mass popular culture' and 'rural folk culture'), printed documents and oral testimony suggest that Kingston's popular music has been closely tied to that of North America since at least the late 19th century. v. The songs of Slim and Sam, the last and best remembered of the itinerant songster-troubadours active in Kingston in the 1920s and 1930s, were often called 'blues'. Witmer infers that Jamaicans came in contact with a specifically African-American vein of American music, not merely mainstream popular fare, almost from the moment it became available.

Yet Slim Beckford and Sam Black-wood are widely remembered as purveyors of primarily Jamaican music. A number of so-called 'traditional' Jamaican songs were created, or at least given a lasting arrangement, by this duo. Sir Philip Sherlock recalls that Slim, who was long and 'mawga' with a mouth that seemed slightly twisted, sang 'first voice'. Sam, shorter and chubby with one slightly cast eye, sang 'second'.

They were walking newscasts in the days before radio and captured events, rumors, love affairs, domestic scandals, and murders such as that committed by Louise Walker, reputedly the first woman in Jamaica to murder a man. Eyewitnesses of their performances remember above all the infectious laughter and two-way flow of excitement between performers and audience.

Slim and Sam first appeared in Kingston in 1929, and generally performed at Parade or near Coronation Market and Solas Market. But they did not attract media attention until Randolph 'Ranny' Williams (later to become beloved in Jamaica as the comedian 'Mas Ran') wrote an article about them in 1939: '. . . they hold to their tine with the adhesiveness of a postage stamp. Folklore is their business. All the incidents that have happened and are happening in Jamaica, they record in songs that for plain broad burnout, telling expression and true character study, cannot be beaten anywhere. The customs, whims, wiles and living conditions of the masses of the island are an open book in their hands, as "The Balm Yard Blues", "Go Tell The Chauffeur Me Naw Go Back", "Watch You Puddin", "Shephard Gone", "The Nine/Night Blues "The Labour Strike", "Madda Bulliten" and "Salt Lane Gal Mento" show.

Radio Influence

Radio, as it did everywhere else, changed music in Jamaica. (Local radio broadcasting dates from 17 November 1939. The new shortwave station ZQ1 used equipment donated to the government by local businessman John Grinan when the war broke out. ZQI was on the air one hour per week in 1940. At first it was used to give out prices and information but soon it began playing classical music. Later programming was mostly BBC relays. In 1947 it was still only broadcasting four hours daily and the signal could not be heard after dark. The impact of station ZQ1 on local music culture was minimal as there were only 22,920 radio sets in 1950 and the estimated listening audience never exceeded 100,000 by much .) The first commercial broadcasting company, Radio Jamaica and Rediffusion (RJR), came on air in July 1950. In November 1956 RJR had a total average listenership of about 600,000, approximately 50 per cent of the population over 9-years-old. Programming was heavily middle class and did not reflect popular preferences. RJR's most popular musical programs for 1956 (in order of decreasing popularity) were: Calypso Corner; Treasure Isle Time; Geddes Grant Hour of Music; Reynolds Hour of Music; Les Paul and Mary Ford; Bing [Crosby] Sings; Sweet and Swing; [Nat] King Cole's Count; Hit of the Day; Music by Mantovani. And this was a time when rhythm and blues was the dominant sound in the land!

People always complained that Jamaican radio did not play what the public really wanted - though the coming of IRIE FM in 1990 changed the situation. Graham Fowler, an Australian engineer who worked with local radio in that era, tells an interesting story related to this. 'One day I was with Ken Khouri and Byron Lee at Federal Records and Ken called up his friend, Bob Lightbourne. Lightbourne got on to Wills 0. Isaacs, and Isaacs told the radio stations that if they didn't play at least 'pro-rata' of foreign Music to local music according to sales, they would lose their license.

Robbie Shakespeare gives a first-hand listener's account of early radio: 'When I was young I listened to country and western and blues a lot; at first all you could get in Jamaica was one radio station, and that's what they played . . . Jamaicans love sad music, music that makes us want to cry. So the singers with feeling were the ones we liked when we were growing up, everybody from Marty Robbins to Frankie Lane and Bobby "Blue" Bland.'

Since the local radio stations in the 1950s were not playing the rhythm and blues they wanted to hear, Jamaicans naturally looked for other sources. They could pick up Southern U.S. R&B radio stations like WINZ in Miami, but only at nights, and clear reception was not always possible. So most turned to the sound systems.

THE 1950'S

USA rhythm and blues songs on the radio, on sale. Black culture. Nat King Cole.

Jazz, big bands. Popular in the 40's and 50's.

Sound system: taking music to the people. Get R&B tunes from the USA.

Shift from R&B to rock N roll. Less "cool," less of a groove.

So, sound system operators had to make some of their own music.

Shift to the backbeat. Prince Buster. Blue beat. Shuffle in the riddim, plus use of new riddim elements (guitar, voice).

Demo back beat vs. Euro beat

Recording: Prince Buster, Duke Reid, Clement Dodd.

Proto roots: Rasta communities developing, Owen Grey, Count Ossie. Ossie.rm

THE 1960'S- SKA EMERGES

Uses it all from before: R&B, mento, African, party at the sound system, upbeat like Jonkanoo, back beat, shuffle, new riddim elements. Riddim is almost polka like.

Skatalites, Byron Lee & Dragonaires, Derrick Morgan, many others.

Ska beat.

SKA BECOMES ROCK STEADY

Hot summers of 1965-66.

Slower not faster, cool not hot, bass lines broken up and moves around the main riddim, horns & guitar support for bass and drums, electric bass vs. standup bass, although solos, not as optimistic as ska, more social commentary.

Shift from sound system to recording studios. Alton Ellis.

RUDE BOY MUSIC: rock steady meets reality

Electric bass emphasized more.

Address the issues of ghetto youth.

Invanoe "Rhygin" Martin. Is Harder they Come character.

Increase in crime as influx from the countryside.

Protest lyrics very common in the late 60's in other nations.

Search for a ground to stand on: reject the system, but what else is there? Rasta. Selassie visits in 1966.

ROCK STEADY PLUS RASTA BECOMES REGGAE

Jimmy Cliff. First Selassie song: I am the Lion, and in this Kingdom I reign.

Rebel/Rasta music: Lee Perry, Niney the Observer.

Rasta chants: nyahbinghi drum circle, plus other influences. Religious. Herb.

EARLY RECORDING HOUSES:

Brentford Road: Clement Coxsone Dodd: Horace Andy, Burning Spear, Alton Ellis, Heptones, John Holt, Jackie Mittoo, Wailing Souls.

Bond Street: Duke Reid: Treasure Isle: Joya Landis, Hopeton Lewis, U-Roy, Justin Hinds & Dominos.

Orange Street: Prince Buster: Islam. Stayed the same.

Others: Joe Gibbs, Derrick Herriot, Bunny Lee, Sonia Pottinger.

Leslie Kong: Wailers, Maytals

Harry Mudie: Count Ossie & R&B.

DJ GALORE

Sound systems, sing over the dub, then sing/talk, then chant over the dub.

King Stitt, U-Roy.

SO:

1. Musical evolution from multiple sources.

2. Movement from party to social commentary and back.

3. Developments take place when there is no outside control. Left to their own, reggae is the result.

NOTE: Insets are from Kevin Chang & Wayne Chen, REGGAE ROUTES, 1997

Reggae - African Rhetorical Traditions

2011-02-02T19:06:00.000-08:00

Reggae - African Rhetorical Traditions from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

From my lecture notes:

INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN RHETORICAL THEORY

Investigating concepts from Karenga, Alkebulan and Woodyard (and others)

Western rhetoric has been dominated by:

Consumerist approach to rhetoric pressed into the service of vulgar persuasion, advertisement, seduction and sales.

It has abandoned the classical Aristotelian rhetoric of deliberation and action in the interest of the polis, but has also ignored and denied contributions from other cultural traditions.

In this African conception of rhetoric it is a practice of communal deliberation, discourse and action oriented towards what is good for the community and for the world. This essence of community is both expressed in the goal of the rhetoric but also in the practice of the rhetoric. It is designed to help bring good into the world.

The Odu Ifa of Yoruba land claims: “Humans are divinely chosen to bring good into the world,” that is their mission and communication is the way that they do that. They are uniquely situated among living creatures to do this.

This is not to replace but to contrast and add to classical European and Greek approaches to rhetoric. Often this enterprise uses Kawaida philosophy, the consolidation of enduring African theory and practice in rhetoric.

Kawaida invites us to ask what Africa has to offer to the understanding of human communication in the interest of benefiting all humanity. We should engage in ancient and modern traditions, written and practiced, oral and other forms. It has traditionally been concerned with building community, affirming human dignity and enhancing the life of the people. More recently, it has been a rhetoric that concerns itself with struggles for liberation in the political, economic and cultural senses as well as a rhetoric of resistance.

It is not just about “tradition” in the way we usually mean it, but also in terms of Location, the continual reference to context and centeredness. It is about history as well as tradition.

It emphasizes communal discourse, deliberation and action. It is a rhetoric of resistance, formed in the crucible of struggle. It is not just about African people, but also about all of humanity. It is the rhetoric of reaffirmation, for African peoples as well as all of those who are not considered fully human. It is also a rhetoric of possibility, about what we can do that is new as well as what is traditional.

NOMMO

The historical cultural triumphs of ancient Egypt (Kemet) stands as one of the main modal periods for Africa. It was the first and one of the most developed societies in the world. It has been clouded over by European jealousy and attempts at outright theft.

§ It was African, not European.

§ It was not a huge slave society, free people who volunteered their work built the pyramids. Europeans needed it to be “slave” because of what they had done with slavery.

§ It was the basis for much of so-called “western” civilization. The great works of law, medicine, and rhetoric began there, not in Greece thousands of years later. Hippocrates admits in his text that he is a servant to the great Kemetic healer Imhotep.

While the historic tragedy that was slavery and its results tried to erase these traditions, it could not be erased. African rhetorical traditions reappeared during the resistance of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and especially in the rhetoric of the 1960’s, both “civil disobedience” and “by any means necessary.”

Nommo is the creative power of the word. While conceptually rooted in the rhetorical teachings of classical Kemet, the word itself comes from the traditions of the Dogon people of central Africa. The creator spirit sends Nommo to the world in the form of speech to assist humans in the forward movement of history and the reorganization of the world. It is through the word that weaving, forging, cultivating, building family and community and making the world better, bringing good into the world. Nommo is the unity of water, earth and fire, and the unity between male and female.

It was not until the 20^th century that western rhetorical theory began to fully understand the generative power of symbols, that they create a reality, that they shape our experience, as opposed to the more traditional view that they are just tools that we use to “get our way.” The rhetorical basis of Nommo puts African rhetorical theory ahead of Greece, Rome and Renaissance Europe in this way.

As Karenga puts it (p.8):

It is this sacred, indispensible, and creative character of the word, as an inherent and instrumental power to call into being, to mold, to bear infinite meanings, and to forge a world we all want and deserve to live in, that seizes the hearts and minds of the African American creative community and becomes a fundamental framework for developing, doing, and understanding rhetorical practice – both its oral and literary forms.

ASANTE

African American rhetorical scholar Molefi Kete Asante is largely responsible for this rebirth of traditional African rhetorical theories. His major early themes included:

§ Africans brought a sophisticated oral style to the western hemisphere

§ Africans brought with them a different rhetoric, not just a concern with influence and ends

§ African rhetorical tradition retained and further developed the concept of nommo, Africans understand the transforming power of vocal expression.

§ Because Africans were denied reading and writing they learned to rely on the spoken word.

§ The enslavement experience stands astride all discourse like colossus, whereas the discourse might be about discrimination or voting rights, but the slave experience is at its basis.

ANCIENT KEMETIC (EGYPT)

Kemetic rhetorical studies pre-date similar Greek activities. The Book of Ptahhotep offers guidelines and principles for good speech. For Kemetics, eloquence and good speech is a unity not just of techniques that are successful but also that lead to what is good for the community. The three standard Greek modes (logos, ethos, pathos) are brought together, so that if techniques are successful but lead to bad for the community, then it is not real eloquence.

Speech is conceived as an ethical activity, because it is a tremendous power that can be used for good or evil. For them, a “good” speech is not just effective, but is also ethically and morally good.

Maat is the Kemetic standard for what is “morally good.” In application to speech, Maat means that it is truthful speech. Truthful speech creates its own ethos and is in and of itself persuasive. This stands in contract to the artifice and dissimulation that is so important in modern western rhetoric that has been put to the service of seduction and sales.

The Book of Ptahhotep is also the major source for the understanding of Maat as an overall moral concept. The central focus of the book is a narrative about the calls petitions for justice from a normal peasant named Khaunanup. He makes a number of appeals to figures in power and these demonstrate the speech that is both “moral” and “effective.” The point here is that rhetorical eloquence is not necessarily that used by leaders and important people, but by all people – peasants, servants (and men and women) can be rhetorically eloquent, and are expected to be so. It is no surprise that the model orator in this Kemetic text is a farmer.

Humanity is seen as a spiritual force. In African rhetoric and Reggae rhetoric there is no line of demarcation between the spiritual and the secular. The speaker calls all of us to go to a higher place and improve ourselves not just as physical but as spiritual beings. Communication is the way that moral and spiritual ideas are transmitted.

If the greatest spiritual law is the law of love, then great communication events are examples of this. Asante has said that there are no speeches by hatemongers that have gone down in history as great speeches. There will never be any, because the overwhelming judgment of history is a moral one and the speaker who imperils the forward march of human dignity will not live in the minds of the future. It is the champion of righteousness who is the true victor in rhetorical traditions.

The African culture tends to be a very oral one, and thus rhetoric is paramount in its importance for the human spirit, for the benefit of human conditions and in the achievement of personal and social harmony.

African and African American rhetoric does not compartmentalize rhetoric, poetry, literature, prose and drama. All these forms are interwoven into a discourse designed to achieve important goals and ends.

ARISTOTLE RECONSIDERED

Aristotle might be a bit unfamiliar with modern rhetoric. He was clear that rhetoric had to have an ethical dimension, that truthful arguments were always stronger, and that rhetoric needs to serve the ethical dimensions of politics.

Today we see the dominance of technique in discourse, of the use of rhetoric to control, manipulate in a way that can be mapped out in advance. The fault may not lie with the extended vision of Aristotle, but with the basic definition of rhetoric, “the faculty for observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” This focus on persuasion through any available means has become the central tenet of current rhetorical practice.

Kemetic texts called “sebyt” are instruction manuals for how officials and others in important positions should conduct themselves, but it also contains advice on how communication should take place in family life and community life. The Kemetics viewed the unity of private and public lifer as important.

Fox has identified five important canons of ancient Kemetic rhetoric:

§ Silence (self control)

§ Good timing

§ Restraint

§ Fluency

§ Truthfulness

The sebyt of Ptahhotep is the oldest complete text in the world. It is a set of instructions to his son about how to engage in public service.

Karenga indicates four ethical concerns of classical African rhetoric:

ONE: DIGNITY AND RIGHTS OF THE HUMAN PERSON

The ethical concern for the dignity of every human person is a fundamental aspect of rhetorical practice.

Be not arrogant because of your knowledge. Rather converse with the unlearned as well as the wise. For the limit of an art has not been reached and no artist has acquired full mastery of an art. Good speech is more hidden then emeralds and yet it is found among the women who gather at the grindstone.

In an example, Pharaoh is cautioned not to use people as experiments or for unnecessary reasons, in this case with a convicted prisoner. Each person is part of the “flock of God” and must be respected.

The petitions presented by Khunanup are all for common people, who should be respected just as much as the most famous. His appeals for justice are based on Maat, the equal dignity and rights that all should have. Maat needs to be in its rightful place, as a foundation for political, judicial and social practice.

Leadership is seshemet, as in “working out” or “proving” a problem in mathematics. This must be done through consultation and communication. The speaker is called on to not just speak to but also to speak with those concerned so that a proper conclusion can be reached. Thus, Kemetic rhetoric tends to be consultation as opposed to unidirectional.

TWO: WELL BEING AND FLOURISHING OF THE COMMUNITY

In the text Count Harkhuf explains why he feels he is worthy of respect. He locates himself in his community and his family, and then speaks about the way he did good for the people, especially the vulnerable. “I gave bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked and brought the boatless to land.” Iti, the treasurer, says, “I am a worthy citizen who acts with his arm. I am a great pillar of the Theban district, a man of standing in the Southland.” Lady Tahabet defines herself as not just a worthy daughter, but as a worthy citizen, when she says, “I was just and did not show partiality. I gave bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty and clothes to the naked. I was open-handed to everyone. I was honored by my father, praised by my mother, kind to my brothers and sisters and one who is united in heart with the people of her city.”

This is different from many of our western conceptions. In the west, “I think, therefore I am.” In a Kemetic sense, “I am related and relate to others, therefore I am.” I discover myself through being with, being of and being for others. Others listening are not merely audience, but co-agents and co-participants in creating and sustaining the just society and the good world.

THREE: THE INTEGRITY AND VALUE OF THE ENVIRONMENT

Moral obligation is related to all parts of life. As one has obligations to other people, one also has obligations to all of life – to nature. Maat requires worthiness before the Creator, nature and the people. If there is damage and degradation, there is an obligation to restore and repair. This obligation implies:

§ To raise up and rebuild that which is in ruins

§ To repair that which is damaged

§ Te rejoin that which is severed

§ To replenish that which is lacking

§ To strengthen that which is weakened

§ To set right that which is wrong

§ To make flourish that which is insecure and underdeveloped

FOUR: RECIPROCAL SOLIDARITY AND COOPERATION OF HUMANITY

We have obligations to each other and we must cooperate through our communication. This is in conflict with the artificial eloquence, deceptive discourse and instrumental reasoning that may serve some but not all of humanity. Likewise, this questions the nature of the closed public square, saying that human communicative exchange should include all of humanity.

The Book of Ptathhotep, there are examples:

“He who does justice for all the people, he is truly the prime minister.”

Leaders and speakers must stand for and speak for all marginalized and oppressed people as well as those in the mainstream who are privileged.

Doing good leads to solidarity. “A good deed is remembered,” and also, “do to the doer that he may also do.” When Maat is a part of rhetoric, it leads to two kinds of solidarity:

§ Solidarity of action

§ Solidarity of understanding

These are both achieved through communication.

Lady Ta-Aset says: “Doing good is not difficult; just speaking good is a monument for one who does it. For those who do good for others are actually doing it for themselves.”

In the Dogon text, it is written that, “Doing good worldwide is the best example of character.”

AESTHETICS

For African people, language is art. Art is not for the purpose of artistic expression and creativity, but is always functional. In the west we separate art from life, but this is not the African conception. It is not the product of the artistic activity, but the process that is important. That process is always a part of living.

Art has the same ethical obligations as rhetoric. Rhetoric is an art.

Call and response is one example of aesthetics in rhetoric. One does not just listen to, but responds to and participates in discourse. The discourse is a living presence and the audience responds and becomes a part of it.

In African rhetorical tradition and specifically in Afro-Jamaican rhetoric the audience engages in this way. In church, at concerts, in the dancehall, in meetings, in political speeches. The rhetorical event becomes a communal one.

Aristotle posed the concept of the enthymeme, an incomplete argument completed by the audience. This is effective because it allows audience participation that increased acceptance. The entirety of African American rhetoric already knows this. Knowles-Borishade puts it this way:

Responders (audience) are the community who come to participate in the speech event. They are secondary creators in the event, containing among them a vital part of the message. It is they who either sanction of reject the message – the word – based on the perceived morality and vision of the Caller (rhetor) and the relevance of the message. The notion of community or group sanction is the basis of the African call and response tradition.

We will examine many other aesthetic elements of African American rhetoric in the weeks to come.

STRIPPED OF AFRICANNESS

What signals a real African presence in a discourse? Some might be African American in appearance but not in substance. Danny Glover in Switchback or Morgan freeman in Shawshank Redemption. They are African American when they express a sensitivity to themes relevant to African Americans. There is no African American way to order a grilled cheese sandwich, but there is an African American way to discuss racial discrimination or white privilege, because it carries with it an energy and a perspective. A single phone call may offer multiple indicators of an African American presence: tone, rhythm, enunciation and metaphorical use.

ORALITY

The Harlem Renaissance writers were able to take elements of traditional African culture and apply them to modern African American culture through the legitimation of folklore and oral histories to written literature. An oral tradition achieves not only contact with the past but also is flexible in dealing with changing present and future.

Orality tends to be:

§ Immediate and direct.

§ Speaker and audience are one

§ It is common and everyday, not isolated and elevated

§ It is spontaneous and not rehearsed.

§ It is improvised for the purpose and situation.

§ It allows individuality to flourish in a group context.

Traditional rhetoric positions rationality and logic at the center.

African rhetoric positions ethics, critical thinking and personal logic at its core.

Traditional rhetoric tends to be direct and explicit.

African rhetoric sees this as crude and unimaginative. The African tradition talks around something in an exploratory way, and allows the audience to make its own decision instead of following orders that are justified logically. When discourse in daily life is too direct it creates problems in relationships. The more indirect methods allow people to structure the ideas in ways they wish and allow for consideration without an open confrontation.

Afro-Jamaicans are more likely to use language as a form of play. Of course, there is always a relationship between what is “play” and what is “real,” and that relationship allows the exploration of issues in a more indirect way as mentioned before. Play is entertainment, but it is also a symbolic exchange of each other.

Signifying is an example. There is an element of indirection, but the apparent significance of the statement may be different from the real significance. Shared knowledge helps the listener interpret the message properly. We call it “reading between the lines,” bur in African rhetoric it is all important and almost ever-present. We do this through shared knowledge, and shared knowledge is cultural knowledge. Shared knowledge in the African American culture consists of those patterns of communication, behaviors, worldviews and philosophy as understood by the members of that community.

We often say that meaning is in people not in words. Yet, in an oral culture the meaning is often found in the cultural setting than in strictly an individual. Meanings may be ultimately in people, but in the oral tradition meanings are tempered by the text, the context and the pretext.

Magara Principle:

Comes from the Bantu tradition. Magara is a system of operations where spirit force and material force are united in the production of life and meaning. It can be life strengthening or life weakening.

It helps us understand persuasion from an African perspective that is completely in tune with modern European understanding of persuasive processes. We do not “change” opinions, we “move” them through persuasion and its depiction of spirit and reality.

Ntu is the universal life force that represents itself in patterns and rhythms. It is fundamental to living. Let us illustrate ion civil rights rhetoric.

1. Nomo operates within the context of ntu to engender magara within and across rhetorical communities. The generative power of speeches from the civil rights movement had a rhythm that catches people’s attention and strengthens their acceptance of full participation.

2. Nommodic rhetorical behaviors are evident in strategies and behaviors of particular communicators and other participants in rhetorical communities. Civil rights leaders actively used words to change the world. “Language is the last weapon left to the powerless.” Zora Neale Hurston.

3. Magara effects are observable in a rhetorical community’s responsiveness to rhetorical strategies and behaviors over time. People are strengthened or weakened towards ideas over time. Begin to accept full African American participation.

4. Rhetoric, as proscribed by ntu, is the evidence of rhythmic patterns urging shared meanings within and across rhetorical communities. “I have a dream.”

BASIS OF AFROCENTRICITY

Assumptions underlying it:

1. Consciousness determines being

2. Ontology is communal

3. Epistemology validates reality by combining historical knowledge with intuitions

Afrocentric worldview:

1. Interconnectedness of all things – circularity, rejects the bi-polar of Marcuse: something is because of what it is not.

2. Collective identity. Reject the I-other distinction, because responsible to the same community, pairs that travel together.

3. Consequential morality. Speakers are judged by how they moved the audience, responsible for the impact of the communication, not so much the intent.

4. Oneness of body, mind, spirit. Western medicine is a contrast. Rhetoric can effect all three.

5. Spirituality. Spiritual focus to rhetoric, whether in a church spiritual, a civil rights speech, a ceremony for ancestors, or prayer for future generations.

6. Time. Timing and rhythm is important. Context is important. History is important.

NOMMODIC RHETORICAL BEHAVIORS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN DISCOURSE, OFTEN IGNORED IN EUROCENTRIC RHETORICAL APPROACHES

1. Rhythm as a frame of mentality. Language and the flow of speech. Pauses, modulation of pitch, rate, loudness and other paralinguistic attributes reflect the important of rhythm. Much more of a focus in African American rhetoric.

2. Stylin’ out as a quality of oration. Mannerisms are used to influence the audience: gestures, posture, bodily movement, facial expressiveness, and other extra verbal behaviors. They communicate visual messages.

3. Soundin’ as verbal artifact. Vocal mannerisms that focus similarly to stylin’ out. The way you say certain words. Johnnie Cochran.

4. Lyrical approach to language. Used poetic language, insert poetic elements, rhyming is an example. Up with hope, down the dope.

5. Preference for improvisational delivery. Roll with the crowd. No totally set text. Take advantage of the situation as it evolves. Like jazz.

6. Call and response participation. Give the audience space to participate, to express themselves. Speaker gives a call, and the audience responds. Much more likely to be influenced by something they participate in.

7. Reliance on mythoforms. There are standard stories we use to understand our lives and our reality, as well as the past and the future. They should be shared and accepted forms.

8. Use of indirection. Circuitous approach to an issue. In a European style we state a claim and then follow it with logic and reasoning that demands acceptance of that claim. In African tradition, you view a thing from various angles before landing at a point to be made. This is the “stalking” of an issue. Malcolm X.

9. Repetition for intensification. Repeat essential ideas until saturation is reached. I have a dream. I am somebody. The clarity of a point is enhanced each time.

IS THERE AN AFRICAN WORLDVIEW?

Worldview vs. view of the world. Many European thinkers seem to embrace a worldview that would be consistent, such as Carl Jung. Chief Fela Sowande. As well, European theorists like Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have produced important work on the relationship of language to thinking, knowledge, power, discipline and the reproduction of systems of domination. Ivan Illich has spoken about the power of formal language to restrict modes of thought to ways preferred by those in power.

While theorizing about African rhetorical approaches should not be privileged to Europeans using European tools, thus we should not necessarily privilege Africans analyzing rhetoric using African tools. Sowande suggests that we need a global worldview that embraces and empowers all, and that integration of an Afrocentric approach will be essential to this, just as European approaches must not be universally rejected. Work by McPhail and Greeson on these issues has been largely invisible in the conflict of Afro vs. Euro.

The power of the Afrocentric perspective might be that it is integrative and inclusive as opposed to hegemonic. McPhail argues that we need to seek “dialogic coherence” as a capacity to integrate diverse conceptions of reality, culture and identity.

THE REALIST/SCIENTIFIC WORLDVIEW AND HOW IT FAILS US (Wright)

1. Objectivist ontology. Reality consists of objects or entities with fixed properties and relations, which re amenable to observation and description. NOT: We impose on what we observe what we know. Anthropologists impose their social order on those observed, we see what we know. Snow.

2. Essentialism. All entities have essential properties which make the thing what it is, and without which it would not be the thing that it is. Other properties are purely accidental. NOT: This creates a bi-polar structure, male or female, white or black. Things may lack essential characteristics of a category and still be within that category. Our identification of essential categories is in many ways arbitrary. Bamboozled Wayans character.

3. Objectivist categorization. All the entities that share a given property form a necessary category. The set of essential properties constitute the conditions that define the category. NOT: Same. Our needs determine which categories we deem essential.

4. Objectivist knowledge. Knowledge consists in correctly conceptualizing, categorizing and articulating the identified objects and relations that constitute the real world. NOT: Knowledge is different for all. What are the standards for “correctly” categorizing? Again, we impose our own ideas on what we observe.

5. Language isomorphism. Language is an adequate instrument for the formulation and communication of knowledge. Properly used, language is isomorphic in expression with the world that exists external to language (it shares the same characteristics). Language reflects reality. NOT: Loosely true, but only in intention. Many important things have no acceptable language equivalent. Many important things cannot be expressed in words.

Touchstones to understanding different perspectives:

Who are you?

Eurocentric: I think, therefore I am.

Afrocentric: I am relating and related to, therefore I am.

What do you want?

Eurocentric: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Afrocentric: Do what is right so that others may also do.

What does rhetoric do?

Eurocentric: It represents thoughts and ideas

Afrocentric: It generates and creates reality

CRITICISMS OF AFROCENTRIC THEORY

Criticisms of afrocentric rhetorical theory:

1. Anti-white

2. Hostile takeover

3. Debased through its use – KFC, etc.

4. All good things come from Africa

5. Ignores cultural hybridization

6. Does not discover issues of class

7. Retrograde views of women and homosexuals

8. Mystical essence of blackness

9. Essentialist criticism. Singular perspective

STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS AS A METATHEORY (Jackson)

Strengths:

1. Historically grounded and conditional

2. Culturally particular, contextual

3. Demarginalizes African descendants and recenters them as agents in human interaction

Weaknesses:

1. Does not deal with the element of economics as a liberation metatheory

2. It is not a full theory: understand, predict and control

3. Can be misunderstood as being essentialist and hegemonic due to over enthusiastic proponents.

CONCLUSION

These concepts have been expressed through African American rhetoric, where the elements of African rhetorical theory can be seen. Frederick Douglass, said:

Great is the miracle of human speech – by it nations are enlightened and reformed; by it the cause of justice and liberty is defended; by it evils are exposed, ignorance dispelled, the path to duty made plain, and by it those who live today, are put into the possession of wisdom of ages gone by.

Videos - Background for Reggae Music

2011-02-01T16:28:00.000-08:00

Reggae - Background Part One from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

Reggae - Background Part Two from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

Reggae - Background Part Three from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

Reggae - Background Part Four from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

This is a lecture about the historical background for Reggae music.

The lecturer is Alfred Snider, professor at the University of Vermont. He teaches the class "Rhetoric of Reggae Music" every few semesters.

This video is old, grainy and strange. It was translated from a RealPlayer file and there was some damage, but the sound track is good and the visuals are acceptable. This was done in 2000 when a version of the class was offered online, thus it might be a bit dated.

To get more information about the current status of the course, go to the blog for the class, at
rhetoricofreggaer.blogspot.com/

For information, contact Dr. Snider at
alfred.snider@uvm.edu

Lecture: History and Background of Jamaica

2011-01-26T08:49:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

HISTORY AND BACKGROUND OF JAMAICA

While reggae is an international music, to understand it we need to understand Jamaica, because that is where it comes from. It has roots in Africa and impacts everywhere, but it clearly comes from Jamaica.

CONTINUOUS THEMES IN UNDERSTANDING JAMAICA AND REGGAE

While these themes are applied to Jamaica, they might be applied to all that we experience in the past and modern worlds.

1. EXPLOITATION:

Substance is taken from Jamaica, and not returned to it. Jamaica is a victim and force for generating wealth. Those who produce are not those who benefit.

2. RACISM:

The lines of privilege, cultural sophistication, human rights, wealth, are all drawn on racial lines. The darker the skin, the more difficult the life.

3. PROMISES, EXPECTATIONS, AND DISAPPOINTMENT:

The people of Jamaica are often hopeful and optimistic. They know injustice and oppression when they see it, but often they succumb to the promises and predictions of previous masters and fall victim to age old traps. Idealism and hope are thus used against them. Once expectations are raised, however, there is a cost to pay for not fulfilling them in the form of...

4. RESISTANCE:

Jamaica has found ways to resist which range from the subtle to the overt. Rebellion, non-cooperation, sarcasm, and the powerful message of reggae music are all manifestations of this resistance.

BACKGROUND:

The stone that the builder refused. Is soon to be the new cornerstone.

Population: about 2.5 million. Size: 4411 sq miles.

Drive across it in no time. Almost walkable.

HISTORY:

Inhabited by the Arawaks. 60,000 of them when discovered. Exterminated.

1494 Columbus discovers the island.

1509 Settled by Spain under command of Diego Columbus.

1510-1660 Spanish rule the island. Plantations, slaves from Africa, but little real development.

1660 English conquer the island without much of a fight. They begin the large-scale development of plantation cropping. The slave trade accelerates.

Many slaves flee to the hills.

EXPLOITATION - RACISM

The English plantation system involved:

-Export focus

-Absentee landlords

-Dependence on slave labor

-Money generating machine - 70% profit.

Slavery:

-80 million souls died in the African Diaspora. Jamaica was one destination.

-West Africans preferred, Ashanti. Coromantee.

-Captured or purchased, packed in ships like wood being stacked, trail of sharks, "middle passage", separation and mutilation.

-Sold or pre-bought by plantation owners.

-Total violence, not psychological manipulation as in North America.

-Not treated as humans -- denied Christianity.

-By 1793, 6 x 1 black.

-Provision grounds.

-Required orchestras for the few holidays.

-Sexual victimization and emergence of sub-groups.

-Racial classes: negro 100%, sambo 75%, mulatto 50%, quadroon 25%, octaroon 1/8th, musteefino 1/16th. White plus musteefino = white.

-But, by 1808 slavery wasn't making sense to England. Wealth going the wrong way, markets jammed full, resistance made things costlier.

MELODIANS:

By the rivers of Babylon

Where we set down

And there we wept, when we remembered Zion

For the wicked carried us away, captivity

required of us a song

How can we sing King Alpha's song

In a strange land?

RESISTANCE, PROMISES, EXPECTATIONS, DISAPPOINTMENT:

1660-1738: THE MAROONS: Spanish slaves who fled to the hills, and others joined them as time went on.

Coromantees increased their numbers. Name of castle where they were held, mostly warriors, they made bad slaves. Formed the body of the new, aggressive Maroon people.

-Cudjoe & Nanny fought successfully.

-Guerilla fighters vs. Redcoats.

-1738 Peace Treaty: promises and benefits but turned them into a British police force to bring back runaway slaves.

-Became part of the problem.

-Symbolic independence.

1831-32: SAM SHARPE

Sam Sharpe. Great speaker, Baptist, created expectations. Freedom papers.

Planned a non-violent revolution -- to stop cooperating -- but it got out of hand. Rage had built up too long.

It began with celebration, and soon the Plantations were burning.

White regiments and black regiments. Only the black regiments fought at Montpelier, but superior weapons drive the slaves back.

A real English army arrives, and immediately promises to pardon all of the slaves if they would return to their masters, and to protect them, saying that they will be set free soon.

-When returned, killed or flogged or mutilated.

-Maroons hunted them down.

-They couldn't hang them fast enough. 30 minutes from trial to death.

But, in 1834 slavery was abolished.

STILL SLAVES

Abolition was not much relief.

Emancipation increased the importance of race, because free/slave distinction no longer existed, so color became all-important.

Heavy taxation drove former slaves back to the plantations.

But, there weren't many jobs available there because of cuts in demand and competition from other colonies.

Provision grounds were lost.

Dependent on food imports for staples.

People went back to hunting and gathering otherwise.

30K lived on estates, and 370K were set adrift with nothing.

1841 started importing free Africans and indentured Indians.

RESISTANCE: MORANT BAY REBELLION 1865

Edward Eyre - Governor

Geo William Gordon - brown intellectual. Self educated, businessperson, advocate for the oppressed. He was the thinker.

Paul Bogle - he was the man of action.

-Built an army for a show of force.

-Marched to Morant Bay, scared the English, then left.

-Warrant for his arrest, he was not arrested.

-English attacked, fight and crushed by superior weapons -- guns.

-Surrendered, but Maroons tracked them down, many were killed.

-Gordon and Bogle were hung illegally by Eyre.

96 degrees in the shade.

1865 THIRD WORLD

Taking I & I to see the big fat bwoy

Sent from overseas, the Queen employ.

Excellency I come before you with my representations,

You know where I’m coming from.

You caught me on the loose, trying to be free, now you show me the noose on the cotton tree

Entertainment for you, martyrdom for me.

Some may suffer, some may burn

But someday soon, my people will learn

Today I stand here a victim; truth is I'll never die

-Eyre was returned to England, tried, and found guilty. Humiliated.

Jamaica then became a Crown Colony, with self-governing opportunities.

EXPLOITATION IN THE 20TH CENTURY

1900s Export focus on new crops, bananas, coffee, more rum.

1930's Depression hit hard

-Only 18% had any income at all.

-Wave of strikes in 1938.

-Alexander Bustamante, egomaniacal union leader. Founded JLP.

-Norman Washington Manley, founded PNP.

-1944 Universal suffrage instead of property control.

1940s Bauxite discoveries. Aluminum. 67% of exports, but money not returned to the Jamaican economy. Bauxite prices later crashed in the 1970s devastating the economy.

1940s-50s Migration to the UK. They wanted workers, but then changed their mind.

Racism growing in UK as a result.

DON'T CALL ME NO ENGLISH GIRL - Sister Audrey

They said come on over here, there's lots to share

But now 30 years later, they give a piece of paper,

UB40 = unemployment form = the dole

1960s-70s Screwdriver industries.

1963 independence meant very little, the power brokers who remain in power to this day arranged it.

CURRENT SITUATION -- EXPLOITATION

WEALTH

Skilled workers make 30x more than unskilled workers.

50% of the population lives on less than $25 a week. If they have a job at all.

10% of the people have 50% of the income.

Class breakdown:

-1% in the upper class.

-20% in the middle, lower middle class

-79% in the lower class.

RACISM IN JAMAICA TODAY

Blacks are 77% of population, browns 20%, whites 1 %, Asians 2%.

Whites make 2x money of browns, and 13x money of blacks.

Whites are 1/3 of the "60 most important people" in JA.

Jamaican stock exchange lists 42 corporations, all chaired by whites or Asians.

Chinese, for example, own 95% of grocery stores in Jamaica in 1963.

Elevation & race & wealth:

As you rise in elevation in Kingston, every 100 feet means you are cooler, richer, and whiter. At the top, it is very cool, very rich, and very white.

Whites have traditionally used browns as a buffer against the blacks.

1. EXPLOITATION

2. RACISM

3. PROMISES, EXPECTATIONS, AND DISAPPOINTMENT

4. RESISTANCE

==========================

TRY THE VIDEO: Grainy, jumpy, from an old format, but still they work!

Part One
http://vimeo.com/19236713
Part Two
http://vimeo.com/19237898
Part Three
http://vimeo.com/19250466
Part Four
http://vimeo.com/19250907

Last Chance to Sign Up for Discussion Groups

2011-01-26T08:40:00.000-08:00

I will hand out a list today in class. Ask for changes then or forever keep your peace.

TAs will sign up for their sections today. I still have 3 empty spots.

See you in class at 4 PM!

Discussion Groups - Choose Your Times

2011-01-20T06:50:00.000-08:00

You need to pick your first, second and third choices from these options.

MONDAYS

2 PM

4 PM

TUESDAYS

1 PM

3:15 PM

4 PM

WEDNESDAYS

1 PM

3 PM

THURSDAYS

NOON

4 PM

5:30 PM

FRIDAY

3 PM

Email your choices to me if you did not hand them in at the first class.

Reggae Music Structure

2011-01-20T06:44:00.000-08:00

INSTRUMENTS:

Drums: hi hat, rim shot, bass drum

BIM SHERMAN, SLUMMY GHETTO

MAD PROF, COOL RUNNING MANDELA CD #8

Bass: establish a riddim, then move around it.

JOHNNY OSBORNE, JAH PROMISE

Riddim Guitar: percussion element

THE CABLES, BABY WHY

Lead Guitar: picking, few leads

HEPTONES, PARTY TIME

Percussion: bongo, block, bells

BURNING SPEAR, FURTHER EAST OF JACK, CD #3

Riddim organ: bubble

BIM SHERMAN, SLUMMY GHETTO

Lead organ: melody, soaring

BLACK UHURU, SOLIDARITY, IPOD BROWSE ARTISTS

Horns for melody and interlude

HEPTONES, PARTY TIME

JOHNNIE OSBORNE, JAH PROMISE

Melodica: sed at times

JACOB MILLER, CD #6

Vocal lead: in and out of the mix.

BLAC UHURU, SENSEMILLA (END)

Vocal lead harmonies: trio singing

THE HEPTONES, PARTY TIME

CULTURE, COMBOLO CD #4

Vocal accompaniment: repeat, fill in, backing.

STRUCTURE:

Emphasis on 3^rd of 4.

Drum beat to begin.

BIM SHERMAN, SLUMMY GHETTO

Repetition of critical lyric.

HOW IT COMES TOGETHER IN THE MIX:

SEE EHRLICH DIAGRAM

THE LOWEST PARTS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT.

Reggae - Structure Part One from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

Reggae - Structure Part Two from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

Here is the old lecture on this subject.

The lecturer is Alfred Snider, professor at the University of Vermont. He teaches the class "Rhetoric of Reggae Music" every few semesters.

This video is old, grainy and strange. It was translated from a RealPlayer file and there was some damage, but the sound track is good and the visuals are acceptable. This was done in 2000 when a version of the class was offered online, thus it might be a bit dated.

To get more information about the current status of the course, go to the blog for the class, at
rhetoricofreggaer.blogspot.com/

For information, contact Dr. Snider at
alfred.snider@uvm.edu

Rhetoric of Reggae Music for Spring 2011

2010-11-30T13:59:00.000-08:00

THE RHETORIC OF REGGAE MUSIC

Alfred C. Snider, Professor

Office: 475 Main Street Room 103, 656-0097, 238-8345, Alfred.snider@uvm.edu

Spring 2011

Class: Wednesdays, 4:05-7:05 PM Angell B112

The purpose of this course is to examine the origins, characteristics, social phenomena, and messages to be found in an African-Caribbean musical form known as reggae music. Reggae music will be examined as a rhetorical movement and as a social movement. The province of rhetoric is to evaluate, criticize, and advocate. Reggae music does all of these.

Because the cultural setting of reggae may be different from our own, it will be necessary for us to study the history and background of the African Diaspora, the history and background of Jamaica, and the forms of expression used in reggae music. While we may not be capable of a full understanding of this music and culture, we will try to learn and appreciate it as best we can.

This course represents a very serious and scholarly examination of this material. Students who are interested in an easy three credits would best look elsewhere. Any stereotype that “reggae = slack” must be abandoned in order for this class to work for all of us.

READINGS & RESOURCES:

Class blogsite updated weekly http://rhetoricofreggaer.blogspot.com/

Roger Steffens & Peter Simons, REGGAE SCRAPBOOK

Available at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Reggae-Scrapbook-Roger-Steffens/dp/1933784237/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249827188&sr=1-1

The instructor will be providing access to an additional set of readings via a password protected website of text and multimedia materials. The web address is http://www.uvm.edu/~asnider/reggaereadings and you will use your netID and password to gain access.

You will be encouraged to buy, download or acquire reggae music for listening and study during the semester. Your choices should reflect your interests and/or the content of your paper.

REQUIREMENTS:

YOU MUST DO ALL THREE OF THESE ASSIGNMENTS TO PASS THIS COURSE:

PARTICIPATE: This implies that you come to class, are familiar with the material being discussed, and volunteer opinions and perceptions actively. This participation must involve a discussion group. You will attend a 50-minute discussion group each week led by a TA. Students must also join the email list by going to

http://list.uvm.edu/archives/rasta.html. The email list will supply information and announcements during the course as well as readings.

(one third of grade)

WRITE A RESEARCH PAPER: You will write a 15-20 page paper on a topic which you and the instructor agree on. A paper proposal will be due during the semester and handed in as a final paper at the end of the semester. You must submit your paper electronically as an email attachment. You must use Word or else submit it as an .rtf document. This electronic word processing document assumes basic literacy. A paper that fails to meet basic standards for college level work will be rejected. NO LATE PAPERS CAN BE ACCEPTED. THEY MUST BE TURNED IN ON TIME AS I WILL BE LEAVING THE COUNTRY (one third of grade)

JOURNAL: You will keep a weekly journal of your activities related to this course. In it you will keep track of your progress through the readings, your reactions to the videos we will see, reports on your music appreciation activities, your reaction to your discussion group, and other related events. This journal will be examined every few weeks by the TA of your discussion group. (one third of grade)

EVALUATION

Students will be evaluated on the basis of earned points only. There will be no extra credit work available. Each assignment has a basic point value (adding up to 100) of which students will be awarded a portion based on the quality of their work. Point values are: paper 33, journal 33, class participation 33, registering 1.

Students should be aware of the University policies on academic honesty.

OUTSIDE OF CLASS

Students should feel free to meet with the instructor during office hours or at times that can be mutually agreed on. The Teaching Assistants will also be available to meet with you. Feel free to ask for explanations of assignments, class material, grading, or anything else that might be of interest. The goal is to develop a friendly working relationship with each student in this class.

CONCLUSION

This is a tentative syllabus and may be revised. A day-to-day schedule of events and assignments will be provided.

The Cool Ruler is Gone

2010-11-10T10:39:00.001-08:00

Cover of Gregory Isaacs
From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/arts/music/26isaacs.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

Gregory Isaacs, Reggae Singer and Songwriter, Dies at 60

By ROB KENNER

Published: October 25, 2010

Gregory Isaacs, reggae’s “Cool Ruler,” whose aching vocals and poignant lyrics about love and loss and ghetto life endeared him to fans of Caribbean music, died on Monday at his home in London. He was 60.

Enlarge This Image

David Corio

Gregory Isaacs in 1982.

The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, June Isaacs, who lives in Kingston, Jamaica.
Cat Coore, the guitarist and cellist for the seminal reggae band Third World, has called Mr. Isaacs “the Frank Sinatra of Jamaica” for his elegant vocal phrasing. But as the singer’s friend and former manager Don Hewitt observed, “It goes further than that, because Sinatra was not a songwriter.”
Mr. Isaacs’s nuanced compositions eschewed sentimental cliché and boastful machismo in favor of a sensitive, even vulnerable point of view. But on songs like “Slave Master” and “Hand Cuff,” he revealed a more militant side.
“Gregory used to sit and go through his lyrics with a dictionary,” his wife, a secondary-school teacher, said in a telephone interview. “He was very clean with his lyrical content and his grammar.”
Born on July 15, 1950, in the rough Kingston neighborhood Denham Town, Mr. Isaacs picked up the nickname Jah Tooth after a policeman broke one of his teeth. Inspired by the American soul singer Sam Cooke, he got his start on a local radio talent show, “The Vere Johns Opportunity Hour.” He was briefly a member of the vocal trio the Concordes before making his name with the solo single “All I Have Is Love” in 1973. Although he established his own Jamaican label and record shop, African Museum, with his fellow reggae singer Errol Dunkley, Mr. Isaacs was later signed to the British labels Virgin and Island.
While true mainstream success eluded him, few recording artists in any genre could rival his prolific output. He recorded hundreds of albums’ worth of original material, starting in the ’70s and concluding in 2008 with his final CD, “Brand New Me.”
Mr. Hewitt said of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones that when he was introduced to Mr. Isaacs, “he carried on like he’d met Jesus.”
Mr. Isaacs was best known for his 1982 release “Night Nurse,” on which he was backed by the renowned band Roots Radics, which he organized in the 1970s. His 1988 album “Red Rose for Gregory” proved that he was equally at home singing over the hard-edged digital rhythms of reggae’s dancehall era.
He was also renowned for his fashion sense; he performed in the 1978 film “Rockers” wearing a powder-blue tuxedo and black fedora. “He was always dapper,” Mrs. Isaacs said. “Very proud, very tidy, very laconic, a man of few words.”
But he could be an aggressive businessman, she added. “He always stood up for what he deserved in whichever way he could,” she said. “When it came to what was due to him, he had to get that. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”
When he and his wife were arrested for illegal possession of a firearm in 1983, she said, “he took the rap so I could go free” and served time in Kingston’s General Penitentiary. He was also arrested repeatedly for possession of cocaine and struggled with addiction for many years.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his mother, Enid Murray; a brother, Sylvester; 12 children; and a grandson.
In a 2001 interview, Mr. Isaacs reflected on his legacy. “Look at me as a man who performed works musically,” he said. “Who uplift people who need upliftment, mentally, physically, economically — all forms. Who told the people to live with love ’cause only love can conquer war, and to understand themselves so that they can understand others.”

Martin Luther King Memorial Project

2010-04-13T10:48:00.001-07:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The month of April marks the 42nd anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We are commemorating the life and work of Dr. King by creating a memorial in our nation's capital. The Washington, DC, Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial will honor his life and contributions to the world through non violent social change. I'm reaching out to ask if you and your readers would help spread the word by posting about this wonderful project on The Reggae Lunch.

I've put together this blogger-friendly micro-site to help get the message out - there are videos, photos, banners, and even a web toolbar that, when used, donates money to the creation of the memorial:

http://mlkmemorialnews.org

After years of fund raising, the memorial is now $14 million away from its $120 million goal. This will be more than a monument to a great humanitarian, the National Memorial will be a place for visitors from around the world to share the spirit of love, freedom, and peace. If you are able to post or tweet about this please let me know so I can share it with the team. If you have any questions please pop me an email. And if you are able to help, thank you so much.

Lowell

--
Lowell Dempsey,
BuildTheDream.org
Twitter @mlkmemorial
Facebook.com/MLKNationalMemorial

"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity"
--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

New Essays in Dread Library

2010-01-28T04:57:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

http://debate.uvm.edu/dreadlibrary/dreadlibrary.html

I have posted a lot of new essays from last semester.

Congratulations to these students for their excellent work:

A. Laird

A. Brennan

Alleger

Belcher-Timme

Bell

Casey

Cihocki

Clark

Critsimilios

Elisa

E. Nelson

Havel

Madden

Noordewier

Ozay

Radke

Robell

Salzberg

Sangara

Seger

Seids

Sharma

Skeris

Sperry

Swank

Wiesner

Thanks for a Great Semester of the Study of Reggae Music

2009-12-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

Image by germeister via Flickr

I want to thank all the students in the Rhetoric of Reggae Music course at the University of Vermont during the Fall 2009 semester.

I read 106 term papers, and I was humbled by their quality, diversity and depth of research.

You all did a great job and I thoroughly enjoyed working with you. I also learned a lot from you.

Best wishes, and hope to see you again in another classroom!

Rastafari Inmates Segregated for Ten Years Over Dreadlocks Issues

2009-12-09T07:35:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

From http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local/crime/article/HAIR07_20091206-223208/310004/

Rastafarian inmates in segregation for nearly 10 years

PDF: Read the rules
According to Rastafari.org, “Rastafari is a movement of black people who know Africa as the birthplace of mankind and the throne of Emperor Haile Selassie I—a 20th century manifestation of God who has lighted our pathway towards righteousness, and is therefore worthy of reverence.“

Rastafarians smoke marijuana as a religious rite and oppose the combing or cutting of hair. “Their nappy tresses were allowed to mat and twine themselves into ropy dreadlocks,“ says Web site Bobmarley.com. Bob Marley, a reggae musician from Jamaica who died in 1981, was a famous Rastafarian.

By Frank Green
Published: December 7, 2009 Buzz up!

RICHMOND, Va. -- Bill Clinton was president when a handful of Virginia prisoners entered segregation cells rather than cut their hair. The inmates, Rastafarians, complain the Department of Corrections' grooming policy of Dec. 15, 1999, violates their religion. Followers of the Rastafari movement let their hair grow in dreadlocks and let their beards grow.

Among other things, the policy requires that male inmates' hair be cut above the shirt collar and around the ears for security and health reasons.

Next week marks a decade that at least eight of them have been confined alone in small cells for refusing to comply -- allowed out for three showers and five hourlong recreation periods a week.

Eric Balaban, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project, has never heard of anything like it in any other state. "That really is remarkable -- based solely upon the continued violation of grooming policy -- to put somebody in the hole for 10 years," he said.

"Why would you use up your valuable space in segregation for these guys?" Balaban asked.

Because they are in segregation, the inmates cannot be interviewed. Six, however, recently wrote to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. They said many were originally in segregation at the same prison but were later scattered to other prisons across the state.

"I can't speak for all the others' experience, but for me, being in seg. for as long as I have been . . . has created a deep rooted bitterness, frustration, and depression," wrote inmate Allen McRae, also known as Ras-Solomon Tafari.

McRae, 32, serving a 20-year sentence for cocaine possession, said, "my normal day . . . is a repetitive cycle of stress and frustration."

Elton L. Williams, 30, a Greensville Correctional Center inmate, forwarded a list of nine current inmates, including McRae and himself, who he says have been in segregation for 10 years.

Larry Traylor, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Corrections, confirmed that eight of the nine have been in segregation for nearly 10 years. The total number of inmates in segregation for refusing to comply was not available.

Among other things, the policy is intended to help identify prisoners who could otherwise change their appearances from the mug shots taken when they first entered the system.

Female inmates' hair must be no longer than shoulder length. One or two braids or ponytails are allowed, but hair must be kept out of the face and eyes. As of four years ago, no female inmates were in segregation for failing to comply.

The ACLU of Virginia challenged the grooming policy, alleging it violates the religious rights of Rastafarian and Muslim inmates under a federal law, but lost. The court ruled the state had a compelling interest in imposing the grooming policy.

Those in segregation say they are allowed one non-contact visit per week and two phone calls a month.

The department says they cannot participate in recreational, educational or treatment programs and are not earning any so-called "good-time" parole credits. But they are able to speak with inmates in adjacent cells and with staff.

A 10th inmate on Williams' list is Ivan Sparks, once the "elder" of the Rastafarian community at the Buckingham Correctional Center.

Unknown to Williams when he wrote the new list was that Sparks, 59 -- after spending nearly the last 10 years of his life in segregation -- died Oct. 21 at VCU Medical Center from renal failure because of prostate cancer.

Sparks wrote to The Times-Dispatch in 2005 and identified 11 Rastafarians, including himself, who had been in segregation at that time for nearly six years.

"He was a great person," said inmate Devon Sutherland, 50, who has also been in segregation for 10 years. "I knew he had two daughter he love, he had love his religious conviction."

Evans Hopkins, a former prison inmate, award-winning writer and author of "Life After Life," knew Sparks well when the two served a total of 16 years together in two different prisons. Hopkins mentioned him in his book and says Sparks was a sincere Rastafarian.

"I'm not a Rastafarian and don't necessarily ascribe to all their beliefs . . . but I know Ivan Sparks believed with all his heart," Hopkins said. Sparks, from New York, was convicted of murder in Danville in 1981 and sentenced to 51 years.

Hopkins plans to ask Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to provide some sort of help for the inmates. He said 10 years of segregation "should rule out anyone who only wants to wear dreadlocks simply to make a fashion statement."

Hopkins and Sutherland question the adequacy of medical attention given those in segregation.

Another inmate in segregation, Kendall Gibson, 37, also known as Ras-Talawa Tafari, wrote that, "today I came out of the cell twice -- I went for my twelfth parole hearing and took a shower. I don't go out to the [recreation] cages when the weather is cold."

Convicted of robbery, abduction and firearms charges and sentenced to 47 years, Gibson was first eligible for discretionary parole in 1998. He said that if not for the grooming policy, he might have already been released on parole.

Because he has been in segregation and cannot earn the good-time reductions, Gibson said, he is unlikely to be released until 2023.

But, he said, "I'm not going to bow."

"I personally do not dwell upon all the down depression -- I just try to make the best of my situation by keeping focus on the 'good' things I need to know and learn," he said, adding, "I haven't seen a TV since 1999."

Williams, serving 14 years for robbery, says the Rastafarians are being punished more severely than serial killers or prisoners who attack officers or other inmates. Those inmates can re-enter the general population, "not us, though," he said.

"Solitary confinement has become our doom," he complained.

"The best way to describe it would be in comparison to a faucet drip . . . after 10 years I would think it's now time for a plumber," Williams wrote.

Jacob Edgar of Cumbancha Visits the Class

2009-12-08T19:36:00.000-08:00

From http://www.cumbancha.com/welcome.php

Cumbancha is a new record label founded by Jacob Edgar, an Ethnomusicologist and music producer who for the past eight years has been the head of music research and product development at famed independent record label Putumayo World Music. It has been Edgar's job to travel the world in search of exceptional artists and songs for Putumayo's critically acclaimed and commercially successful compilations of music from all over the globe. Over the years, Edgar kept coming across artists he felt deserved wider recognition and assistance in bringing their music to the world stage, and he decided to form Cumbancha to address that need.

"I believe exposure to music from different parts of the world can help open a doorway to other cultures," insists Edgar. "Listening to music is an excellent way to make a connection with people who are very different from yourself, and it can create a common ground that overcomes some of the barriers that separate people of different walks of life."

"My experience at Putumayo has taught me that world music is much more popular than is generally recognized. People from all generations and backgrounds are looking for music with roots in cultural traditions, even if that music isn't as visible as it should be in the mainstream media."

Edgar is a global explorer with an insatiable curiosity for the diverse ways in which people express themselves through music. His research trips in search of music for Putumayo's compilations have taken him to Cuba, Brazil, Turkey, India and dozens of other countries, not to mention hundreds of the world's greatest international music festivals, showcases and performance venues in search of exceptional musical talents.

Edgar has helped produce compilation CDs that have sold a total of over ten million units worldwide. Always scouring the planet for new sounds, he possibly listens to more world music CDs than anyone else in the USA and, possibly, the world. "My basic role at Putumayo has been to travel the world and dig up as much music as I could, then review it to uncover those truly great artists and songs that rise above, and that would appeal to both fans of world music and neophytes who are just interested in hearing something they like. I often tell people, I suffer so you don't have to!' What I mean is I have to listen to a lot of pretty banal stuff to find those musical diamonds, but as a result I've gotten to know some pretty special artists and musical movements."

The main motivation for Cumbancha sprung from Edgar's desire to work more closely with some of the most extraordinary artists he has gotten to know over the years. "We used to say at Putumayo that doing compilations was like dating, and signing artists was like getting married," says Edgar. "After years of flirting with some of my favorite artists, it's nice to finally make some commitments and settle down!"

Shortly after notifying Putumayo last fall of his intentions to leave the label strike out on his own, Edgar's former employer offered to become an investor in his new project and service his releases through Putumayo's network of worldwide distribution. The relationship allows Edgar to continue to assist Putumayo in the development of their popular compilations, while giving Cumbancha releases a powerful presence in over 60 countries around the world. Edgar also continues to assist Putumayo in the development of their popular compilations.

"Many of the artists who will appear on Cumbancha have been on a Putumayo compilation over the years," notes Edgar, "so in some ways this new label offers an opportunity for people who have become intrigued by artists on Putumayo's collections to explore their work further." At the same time, Cumbancha will present many artists whose work falls outside of the aesthetic boundaries of a Putumayo compilation, but whose work is particularly compelling or innovative.

Cumbancha's first release in the United States, Canada and Latin America was the album ¡Ay Caramba! by the UK-based band Ska Cubano, whose appealing fusion of Jamaican ska with Cuban mambo, salsa and son has earned them wide praise and accolades across Europe.

Yet, even though the group has played at some of Europe's most prestigious festivals and concert halls, won numerous "Best of" awards from dozens of magazines, and even caused a stodgy audience of tuxedo-clad diplomats to bounce in their seats at last year's Nobel Peace Prize Award ceremony, Ska Cubano remained largely unknown among the broader public outside of Europe. Since their album was released in the United States they embarked on a hugely successful US and Canada tour, playing in hi-profile venues such as Central Park SummerStage, Montreal International Jazz Festival, San Francisco's Stern Grove and Grand Performances in Los Angeles among others. Praised by both the media and the public, Ska Cubano's album hit number 5 on the Billboard World Music Charts and number 1 on the College Music Journal's World Music radio chart, marking an auspicious beginning for the new Cumbancha label.

The first worldwide release by Cumbancha is the Israeli cross-cultural collaborative, The Idan Raichel Project, whose appealing fusion of Ethiopian folk music with Middle Eastern flavors have made them one of the most unexpected success stories in Israeli music today. While recent headlines are dominated by news of conflict and war in the Middle East, this Israeli musical collaborative has achieved success by looking beyond intercultural differences and celebrating the value of diversity. With its blend of traditional Ethiopian folk music, Arabic poetry, Yemenite chants, Biblical psalms and Caribbean rhythms, The Idan Raichel Project has already taken Israel by storm with multiple number one hits and triple platinum sales.

While the ensemble regularly fills large concert halls at home, the upcoming international release of the recordings of The Idan Raichel Project on the Cumbancha record label promises to introduce the work of this inspirational collective to a wide global audience. "The Idan Raichel Project are already superstars in Israel and Israeli and Ethiopian communities worldwide," says Edgar, "They have performed in some of the most prestigious venues in Europe, the United States and Latin America, yet almost exclusively to Israeli audiences. Cumbancha's goal is to expose them to a wider public who will also enjoy this unique artist." The Idan Raichel Project will be embarking on an ambitious worldwide touring schedule in an effort to introduce their music to a new public.

The headquarters for Cumbancha is an 1830's farmhouse in the small town of Charlotte, Vermont. Also home to one of New England's most prestigious recording studios, Charles Eller Studios (www.charlesellerstudios.com), the complex in Vermont will allow for a unique artist retreat where musicians from around the world can come together to record in a picturesque and tranquil setting free from outside distractions. While many of the records released on Cumbancha will be recorded on location in the countries where the music is from, others will be recorded in this special setting. Most of the post-production work will be completed in Vermont, in the shadows of the verdant Green Mountains. "I spend so much time traveling around the world," says Edgar, "it's nice to work in a place where I can focus and be surrounded by the region's tremendous natural beauty."

"One of the things I enjoy most about the work I do at Putumayo," says Edgar, "was knowing that thousands of people are exposed to music from cultures they might not otherwise get to learn about, and in a small but not inconsequential way that helps pave the way towards greater appreciation and respect for diversity." Cumbancha gives Edgar a chance to take that experience one step further.

"Cumbancha" is a Cuban word of West African derivation that refers to an impromptu party or musical jam session. Many classic Latin songs refer to the "cumbanchero," a person who knows how to party and have a good time. For those who are familiar with the word, "cumbancha" implies an opportunity to get together with family and friends to dance, sing and celebrate life. "I like the creole nature of the word," says Edgar, "that it is a blend of African and Spanish. Much of the greatest music in the world reflects this interaction between cultures and the ways in which people can gain inspiration for new expressions from people of different backgrounds."

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The Cool Ruler is Gone

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Published: October 25, 2010

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