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Negus, Ras Tafari, the Emperor Haile Selassie, the King of Kings and the Lion of Judah, the Elect of
God. We want King Alpha and Queen Omega!'
'Who are they?'
'They are the same thing.' I began to understand that Rastafari, like all primitive religions, as Dr. Max-
imilian remarks of Voodoo, is impatient of explanation. I said that they ought to have a soft spot for the
English, as we had driven the Italians out of their country and helped the Negus back to his throne. Paul
was ready for that too. 'That's another lie the white folks say, to win us over.' But they were not to be
fooled. They were going to make war on the whole white race
'Not the Russians, Paul,' one of the others said.
'That's right. Not the Russians. They're good folk and they love Haile Selassie. But on all the rest.'
They were all members of the P.N.P., he said: 'All for Manley and Communism.'
'But,' I remonstrated, 'it's not the same thing at all.'
'It's the same. Manley loves the Russians. And he loves Haile Selassie.'
Thereupon they sang, to the tune of a hymn, a political song beginning 'Jamaicans, Jamaicans, one
and all, Listen to the clarion call …' which ended with a chorus: 'It's the remedy for all the ills we see,
So rally to the P.N.P.!'
I wondered how pleased Mr. Manley would be.
The air in the hut was beginning to smell very strange—a sweetish, vegetable reek that awoke memor-
ies of Piræus and Beirout. I noticed that the boy on the end of the bed was smoking a home-made cigarette
as blunt and as unwieldy as an ice-cream cone. He smiled as my eyes fell on it, and waved it in the air.
'It's the wisdom weed, boss,' he said. 'This is what makes us see everything so clear …' He hospitably
rolled me one, and handed it down the bed. I asked him how he got the stuff—didn't the police put a stop
to it? They all laughed and pointed to a clump of weeds outside the door that turned out to be, on closer
inspection, hemp. 'They can't take that away from us,' Paul said. 'The police don't come here. We smoke
it all day.' The Dungle, apparently, is a fanatics' lair, like the refuge of the Old Man of the Mountains and
his Hashasheens, in more senses than one.
They had a Dungle King—a sort of stand-in for the Negus—in the past, they said, but he had been
hanged for murder some years ago, since when the office had remained dormant. The hill, too, from
which the Dungle had taken its name, had been levelled when the railroad was laid—'The whites pull
down the old Dungle,' the smoker tearfully observed, 'so now we got no view of the sea….'
There was something pitiful about my hosts. They had all three been in jail—two for theft and the third
for using a razor in a fight. None of them had known homes since they were ten years old, and not one
of them could read or write. The only controlling influence they had ever encountered were the wise men
they kept referring to. They pointed one out as we crossed the waste land towards the railway—a shrewd
middle-aged man in spectacles, reading the evening paper in one of the half-buried motor-cars. His eyes
followed me out of sight with a look of detestation. It occurred to me that his presence there was for quite
different purposes than for the organization of a return to Ethiopia. There is a strong streak of madness in
the Dungle, induced, perhaps, by continual marijuana-smoking and propaganda as well as by the aid of
crime and disaffection; and the rallying-call of an organization for a return to the Abyssinian Canaan is
as good a means of keeping these poor wretches together as another. Not one Rastafari, since the birth of
the cult twenty-odd years ago, has ever undertaken the journey to Addis Ababa. I could not help specu-
lating what the reactions in Ethiopia would be if all the denizens of the Dungle suddenly appeared there,
and whether the Negus had ever heard of his distant worshippers. Nothing else—except Communism and
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