In August 1934, Delrosa Francis, a Rastafari woman of Seaforth district in the parish of St. Thomas, Jamaica, was charged by Robert Powers, a district constable, for assaulting a policeman and disturbing the peace of the public. The charges resulted in a trial, with Francis organizing a total of seven witnesses, including four women, Rachel Patterson, Francella McNish, Gertrude Nathan, and Amelia Gordon—all of whom vigorously supported Francis’s attempts to defend her rights to justice and fairness. Francis, they asserted, was innocent and should be treated fairly instead of being treated as an “outcast” of society because of her Rastafari identity.1 The witnesses argued that Powers infringed on Francis’s rights to freedom of speech and worship. In their account, Powers was the one who was guilty of assault and disturbing the peace. In September 1934, Francis and her seven witnesses would submit written petitions for “fair justice” to Sir Arthur Jelf, the interim governor of Jamaica.2 They maintained that Francis’s case was unfairly adjudicated, as it was presided over by justices of the peace—locals of the community who were not only known to Powers but also colluded with him to have Francis and her supporters imprisoned. Francis and her witnesses wanted the resident magistrate, a professional judge, to try the case because they believed that he would be objective. They also claimed that after the trial Powers arrested the witnesses because of their support of Francis. Essentially, the petitions implicated agents of the British colonial government in injustices against poor Black people and asserted that the petitioners expected redress and would not relinquish their rights under Jamaican law.
Francis’s case is just one of the examples of the resistance or the actions, including the assertion of human and civil rights, taken by early Rastafari women to protest injustice and oppression caused by discrimination against their Rastafari identity. However, the absence of empirical research on these women, especially those who were a part of or influenced by the Howellite understandings and who developed and promoted their own understandings of Rastafari as well, has unfortunately helped to maintain the impression that they were docile and submissive to men within and outside of the Rastafari movement. The Howellites, named after Leonard Howell, had the largest number of followers, whether men or women, of the original Rastafari movement, which originated in Jamaica in the early 1930s. As recently as 2012, an article in the Jamaica Observer, one of the island’s main newspapers, asserted that in the early years of the Rastafari movement, the 1930s through 1950s, “the profile of the Rasta woman was in general very low-keyed.”3 Such understanding of early Rastafari women not only persisted for more than a decade after the Jamaican independence in 1962; it helped to perpetuate the distortion of the history of the early women, resulting in the “obscurity” that historian Lucille Mathurin-Mair identified as affecting mostly subaltern women in Caribbean history.4
In light of this obscurity, later historians, such as Verene Shepherd, have sought to recover the agency of these subaltern women. But as Shepherd herself has noted, it is an “ongoing archaeological project.”5 This book is a contribution to this project. It is a contribution that was realized through a close examination of the available historical documentation and oral sources on early Rastafari women. While government documents and newspaper reports from the colonial period aided this study, interviews of early Rastafari women and other members of the movement form a critical part of its basis as they are essential to understanding early Rastafari women and their agency. As noted by Maureen Rowe in 1980, a dire need existed for “further research” on early women of the movement, which must entail identifying “the specific factors which brought these daughters to RastafarI” using not only archival documentation, such as government and police reports, church records, and newspaper reports, but also oral history sources featuring the voices of early women.6 Similarly, Makeda Silvera, in writing in an “An Open Letter to Rastafarian Sistren” published in 1983, also indicated the need for Rastafari women’s inclusion in scholarship: “We are rarely called upon to articulate our position and worldview.”7 These were valid points that represented longstanding views of both early and younger generations of Rastafari women who encountered marginalization and male domination. Early women, however, were unfortunately peripheral to the growing body of scholarship on women in the movement that started in the late 1970s.
Understandably, much of the documentation created about early women proved elusive for scholars as most of these records were either destroyed or suppressed by the colonial government. Many of the early women also valued oral history; a preference influenced by tradition as well as inaccessibility to formal education. Some women also believed that the history of the movement should be kept private or internal. Pearl Stanigar, for example, who lived at the Rastafari’s Pinnacle community in the 1940s through 1950s and subsequently migrated to Florida, unfortunately refused to be interviewed. Very few people who could provide firsthand information on the women who entered the movement of the 1930s and 1940s, that is, the focus group of this book, were still alive when the research for this study began in 2014. This situation was not only a reminder that historical records on any subject matter, especially those that involve controversy, are never presented on a platter. It was a reminder that there are various approaches that can help to bridge the gap in historical knowledge.
In view of this, the biographical method and an interdisciplinary approach based on critical theory were incorporated into the historical perspective used to understand the multiple dimensions of early Rastafari women’s resistance to patriarchy and colonialism. Early Rastafari women challenged colonialism, racism, and capitalism, but they also countered patriarchal issues inside and outside the Rastafari movement through both overt and covert means. The women’s acts of resistance showed a sense of the intersectionality of Black oppression with patriarchy often seen by them as the main means through which colonial domination, racism, and capitalism were used to stifle their development and independence as women and Black people. Thus, the interconnectedness of women’s resistance was not only due to their Rastafari identity but also to the fact that they were women in a male-dominated movement and society.
Ula Taylor’s concept of “community feminism” and Katie G. Cannon’s “womanist theology” are a part of the interdisciplinary approach in this book used to analyze the women’s negotiations of patriarchy, their commitments to community-building as part of pursuing Black sovereignty, and their views on the role of the Rastafari religion itself in deconstructing patriarchy as part of the Black liberation struggle.8 On the other hand, Marxist theory, which was essential to the development of critical theory in the 1920s and 1930s, informs the discussions of colonialism as the main context of domination for the development of the resistance of early Rastafari women. Marxist theory informs the framework, for instance, in which the “totalizing” tendencies of the colonial system are used in the discussions, as these “attempted to penetrate every area of life from self-constitution to interpersonal relations to education.”9 The discussions center women’s resistance to colonial “domination” or the attempts to generate “differences in power—or possibilities in a wide sense.”10 The concept of symbolic interactionism, which was developed for psychology, is also used to explore women’s resistance in an environment that shaped their activities, women who conceptualized their resistance through negotiating their contextual constraints. The women engaged in various acts of resistance that also help us to interrogate the documentation in the colonial archives and press, with resistance stimulating what is described by historians as reading “against the grain.”11 This approach to reading the colonial documentation helps to center the views of the women, views described by Monique Bedasse as part of the “Interior” or internal history of the movement, which helps to bring attention to previously ignored or silenced topics and people, such as early Rastafari women.12
Similarly, the biographical method is used in this study to illustrate some of the ways in which early Rastafari women attempted to shape the development of Rastafari’s Black liberation struggle, including challenging patriarchy inside and outside the movement, from the early 1930s to the independence of Jamaica in 1962. In addition, the foundational importance of the individual experience in history underlines the significance of the biographical method in the reconstruction of the history of early Rastafari women. Specifically, the individual’s thoughts and activities highlight some of the issues that were presented to and confronted by other members while providing context that can help us to further analyze how other persons were affected by political, economic, and cultural forces in the society. Moreover, individuals can also exert varying degrees of influence on these forces.13
The chapters are organized around themes that address early women’s thoughts and acts of resistance and are mostly arranged in chronological order. Six of the seven chapters are based on documentation and recollections about the Howellite women. Most of the women who entered the movement in the 1930s and 1940s were members of this group, which grew into the largest of the original Rastafari organizations by 1940. Throughout the seven chapters, the colonial context that was created by Crown Colony government, introduced in response to the 1865 peasant uprising known as the Morant Bay Rebellion, is used to analyze the women’s role in the rise of Rastafari mainly among the Black peasantry of the 1930s and 1940s. Also discussed are the ways in which Rastafari contested the context created by the developing creole nationalism of the local labor leaders, who dominated the pursuit of the political independence of Jamaica acquired in 1962 using the British Westminster system of government. Rastafari criticized this system as a hegemonic pretext for neocolonial capitalist exploitation of the Black majority, which they extended to include East Indians who entered the Rastafari movement. This criticism helped to stimulate women’s resistance to colonialism and creole nationalism. Women’s resistance to colonialism is discussed in the first two chapters through litigation and petitions to the government, respectively.
Chapter 3, however, focuses on Tenet Bent, a middle-class woman who married Leonard Howell and made herself critical to the origin of their Pinnacle community while aiming to build Rastafari’s reputation as a movement for the empowerment and improvement of poor Black people within and beyond Jamaica. I go on to discuss women’s development of the movement’s religion through the promotion of the notion of the divinity of Empress Menen, the empress of Ethiopia and wife of Emperor Selassie I, whom Rastafari men mainly promoted as the promised return of the Messiah. Women, such as Merriam Lennox, empowered the movement’s women and sought to strengthen the Rastafari’s religious and political consciousness with their focus on the divinity of Empress Menen. Chapter 5 discusses cannabis and Pinnacle and focuses on the historical context of slavery to analyze women’s role in the developing use of cannabis as a medicinal treatment in Rastafari. Rastafari men stood as strong and consistent advocates for the recognition of the medicinal and sacramental benefits of cannabis and its decriminalization; however, women were also a crucial and pivotal part of this advocacy. Both women and men supported cannabis as a sacrament and therapeutic plant. From the perspective of Audrey Lewis, women’s involvement in the sustenance of Pinnacle, the first self-sustaining Rastafari community that aggressively pursued a Black nationalist agenda against creole nationalism, is discussed in chapter 6. Rastafari’s Black nationalism pursued Jamaica’s sovereignty through attachments to Africa, especially Ethiopia, while creole nationalism pursued this sovereignty through attachments to Britain and the West.
The closing chapter is based on the history of Edna Fisher, one of the two founders of another Rastafari organization known as the African Reform Church of God in Christ. This church was cofounded by Fisher and was largely influenced by the Howellites’ Pinnacle community in several ways. It created an outward facing sacred and sovereign compound, one that was expected to exemplify and spread Rastafari’s Black nationalism across Jamaica. Within a year, its leaders also claimed the most members of any Rastafari organization formed after the disbandment of Pinnacle by the colonial government in 1958. Similar to Pinnacle, Fisher’s organization generated a large amount of the controversial government surveillance and press coverage on the early Rastafari movement. It also generated significant anxiety among the leadership of the mainstream churches and members of the public while reinvigorating academic interest in the Rastafari’s Black nationalist politics and Ethiopic culture and religion. Fisher, other leaders, and members of the organization were tried on treason-felony charges in 1960, but her actions would eventually contribute to the Rastafari as a political and cultural force in Jamaica.
Overall, the oral history from and about early Rastafari women is discussed at varying lengths in the seven chapters alongside an analysis of the sources from the colonial archives and press. The women’s testimonies and other acts of resistance contested their most prominent depictions in the colonial archives and press, which often suggested that they were naïve and submissive to early Rastafari men. Nevertheless, as each chapter illustrates, parts of what has been referred to as the different or diverse orientations that marked the genesis of the movement, including its “doctrinal differences” and “doctrinal individualism,” were introduced by women, mainly in activities that highlighted their struggles against discrimination based on race, class, and gender.14 Early Rastafari women’s history is thus essential to understanding the resistance ethos of the early Rastafari movement. Women challenged inequality based on race, class, and gender in discussions of the doctrine and principles promoted by men, and some women integrated these concerns into the anticolonial political activities of the early movement.
I have used Black with a capital B throughout this book out of respect for what I perceive to be the historical conceptualization of Blackness as synonymous with Africa by early Rastafari women and men. I have also used it out of respect for the nondiscriminatory transnational African consciousness of Rastafari, enunciated by the conception that Africa or Blackness is the cradle of humanity, to which the early women of the movement made significant contributions through their oppositions to racism, classism, and gender inequality.