CHAPTER 6
Although Rastafari has become a major cultural force that has often been equated with Jamaican culture internationally, resistance to the heavily influenced European rules, values, and norms of the Jamaican society were a crucial part of Rastafari’s development. The early movement countered British colonial domination, as well as the creole nationalism of local labor leaders who pursued political independence through the British parliamentary system. Thus far, this book has provided stories about, as well as voices of, several early Rastafari women on various aspects of resistance. However, Audrey Lewis is the only early Rastafari woman presented who discusses the historical development of the Rastafari movement against the British colonial government and creole nationalism. Lewis was also known by her married name, Audrey Whyte, but reverted to her maiden name and is therefore referred to by that name here (fig. 3). Lewis recognized that the attempts of the colonial government to suppress Rastafari had serious epistemic implications, namely the distortion of the movement’s history and, by extension, its development. Therefore, past experiences stood as an important tool of resistance for the Rastafari movement, and Lewis sought to preserve and publish its story through oral history, both from the perspective of the movement and also from the perspective of women. As such, she was invested in ensuring that Rastafari remained an important part of the cultural landscape of Jamaica.
Lewis was socialized in the Rastafari movement from her childhood days and provided a largely counterintuitive account of the various experiences of women and men who entered the movement in the 1940s. In an interview conducted at her home in Salt River, Clarendon, on May 5, 2013, she gave testimony of the diverse range of women’s adversities that had resulted from the suppression they faced during the colonial period. Her account of Rastafari history shows that women helped to sustain the cultural life of the first Rastafari members through their varied forms of resistance to counter the range of suppression they faced. Moreover, women’s defense of men signified, overall, their defense of the whole movement from suppression. Lewis’s account bears similarity to the narratives of enslaved people. These slave narratives documented “evidence” of the conditions of slavery and the effort of the enslaved to resist slavery in the Caribbean, the same region into which Lewis was born in 1932.1
FIGURE 3.
Audrey Lewis, Hill 60, Salt River, Clarendon, Jamaica, 1998.
Courtesy of Jake Homiak. Papers of Carole D. Yawney, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Lewis is seen standing on the tomb of her late husband, Ruppert Whyte.
Lewis’s testimony can also be referred to as what Monique Bedasse described as “Interior History,” a history that highlights the importance of “representation” through the “ways in which Rastafarians” themselves think.2 This must also include a critical analysis of their often-varied recollections of the history of the movement. These accounts can be evaluated using the documentation from sources such as the government and press, but they also give us an opportunity to perform the same critical analysis on the documentation. Thus, Lewis sheds further light on life in the Pinnacle community, one that challenges the colonial views on the original movement and its leadership. Incursions on Pinnacle that were conducted by the public health officials, an unknown police raid conducted in 1951, and women’s agency in defending the men of the movement during this raid are factors discussed by Lewis in her discussion of the relationship between government and the Rastafari movement. This discussion has indicated that the movement gained a growing following and was also able to overcome suppression because it encouraged socioeconomic improvement and divine authentication of the African heritage of the people. After surviving the colonial period, the movement was also able to attract even more followers to become a cultural staple in and beyond Jamaica.
THE CULTURAL DIVIDE: JAMAICA AND RASTAFARI
Through its history of British colonialism and slavery, Jamaican society developed as one highly susceptible to cultural resistance, and Rastafari was formed out of such resistance. The movement remained dissatisfied with the status of the African culture in the society, even though the island’s culture was viewed as plural by some scholars and creole by others. M. G. Smith’s assessment of Jamaican culture using the plural society model argued that it was mainly composed of African and European norms and values developed during colonialism and slavery. The colonial government, however, subordinated African culture through a “mythology of ‘progress’” that disseminated wealth and power unequally among the different racial groups making up the society. The African majority, “four-fifths” of the total population in 1961, occupied the least “structurally significant” position in this society.3 Edward Brathwaite, on the other hand, writing in 1971, argued that the culture of Jamaica was a combination or blending predominantly of its African and European traditions to create new cultural forms. Yet the creole society was the child of pluralism since it created new cultural forms from the heterogeneous colonial past, and the structurally significant elements of these new cultural forms perpetuated European domination.4 Pluralism was also acknowledged by creole nationalists, who used it in promoting the creation of a nation-state based on the concept of a creolized society.
While it is apparent that there was some degree of cultural fusion of African, European, and East Indian traditions in the Rastafari, Lewis indicated that the early Rastafari was not only a symbol of resistance to European cultural dominance; it explicitly challenged this dominance through the Pinnacle community established in 1940. Lee estimates that Pinnacle was established on a sizeable property of about 153 acres, but even this may be a conservative estimate.5 As stated in chapter 3, different estimates have been provided for the size of the property. In 1946, a Gleaner report stated the property was composed of 1,300 acres, while a subsequent estimate provided by the island’s Office of Titles at the Registrar General’s Department stated that the property was about 485 acres.6 In addition to promoting the economic welfare of its members, the community was developed to promote the African consciousness of Rastafari but met fierce resistance from Jamaica’s colonial government. In her account of her experience at Pinnacle, Lewis stated that she, among other women, embraced and engaged in various African cultural activities, including singing, dancing, and celebrating Emperor Selassie and Empress Menen, the sovereigns of Ethiopia. Rastafari women made one of their most visible marks on the culture of the early movement by preserving the African folk traditions. Through the preservation of Jamaica’s folk traditions, women diversified Rastafari culture by fashioning it to accommodate their own notions of their African heritage. Following her departure from Pinnacle in 1951, Lewis herself was known as the Kumina Mother or “Kumina Queen,” a title attributed to other Rastafari women at Pinnacle. They ensured the preservation of Kumina. The “Kumina Queen” was essentially a spiritual and cultural “female-leader” of “the Howellites,” who promoted the blending of Rastafari culture with the African-derived, religious-folk tradition known as Kumina.7
The role of the Kumina Queen in Rastafari signaled continuity rather than change. Women occupying the same role in Kumina were usually the persons responsible for the transmission of its religious, spiritual, and medicinal culture from the older to the younger generation. The continuity over which the Kumina Queen presided included the preservation and promotion of African religious, spiritual, medicinal culture and consciousness. Included in this Kumina cosmological and therapeutic consciousness was the practice of using the powers of ancestors to bolster the struggles of the living. This is why, as Dianne Stewart has observed, the “cross” was important in Kumina. In addition to being a “fundamental symbol of religiosity in classical BaKongo civilization, from which Kumina religious culture is derived,” the cross symbolized the triumph over persecution through the resurrection or revival of the slain, vanquished, downtrodden, oppressed.8 The integration of Kumina’s culture with Rastafari culture grew the reception of Rastafari’s African consciousness by helping to further legitimize this consciousness among the African-descended peasantry, who composed most of the population of Jamaica. This integration was not creolization, as it did not lead to a new practice that was a blend of Rastafari culture and Kumina. Rather, selected elements of Kumina were integrated into Rastafari to fortify its claims to being authentically African or to develop its African consciousness. This integration can be described as the “syncretizing” of Rastafari with the African-derived, religious-folk traditions already on the island, traditions that also included “Pukumina, Revival or Revival Zion.”9
The parish of St. Thomas, where most of the Pinnacle residents came from, has been described by Olive Lewin as “the centre of Kumina,” which also had “striking” similarities to the Rastafari movement, aiding the syncretizing of the two. Kumina was “one of the purest traditional African non-Christian retentions in Jamaica,” which developed in the island between 1841 and 1865 with the arrival of indentured African laborers who came from mainly Central Africa.10 Stewart, who was also at Pinnacle in the 1940s, stated she “grew to see and dance Kumina” in Pinnacle, where the “most spiritual life was when we were working with Kumina.” A Kumina Queen named Sister Ina, she recounted, “used to wash feet and be filled with the spirit.”11 Clinton Hutton has asserted that “Kumina cosmology, rituals and other cultural expressions would play a significant role in the shaping of the identity of Rastafari,” a role embraced and practiced by both men and women at Pinnacle, who saw no conflict between their practice of Kumina and their Rastafari beliefs and rituals.12 Kumina, like Rastafari, was rooted in “African traditional thought,” including its emphasis on “cooperation and communal camaraderie rather than the glory of the individual victor.”13 Kumina’s communal spirit mirrored Rastafari’s socialistic conception of the community as a family.
Women and men of the Howellites rejected the criticisms of their Kumina cosmology by other Rastafari organizations, particularly the Nyahbinghi mansion of Rastafari. Both men and women in the Howellite movement saw no conflict between Rastafari beliefs and their Kumina beliefs, including spirit possession. Such views were maintained by Howellites during the early years of the Rastafari movement when other emergent Rastafari organizations, such as the Youth Black Faith, progenitor of the Nyahbinghi, strongly rebuked Howellites for Kumina practices that incorporated Revivalist practices into its culture. Kenneth Bilby and Elliott Leib, for example, mentioned the “ambivalence” of some Rastafari toward “certain fundamental aspects of the Kumina religious experience, such as ancestral spirit possession and the emphasis placed on the continuing participation of the dead in the affairs of the living.”14 Howellites were also criticized for being “flesh eaters” because they did not adhere to the strict vegetarianism and veganism of other Rastafari mansions. In addition, some Howellite women rejected the wearing of locks. As observed by Homiak, the “combsome/dread divide” affected not only men but also women who decided whether they would wear locks.15 As observed in chapter 4, the decision to wear or not to wear locks indicated women’s sense of independence in the movement.
After Lewis departed Pinnacle in 1951, she became a Kumina Queen, a prominent cultural and spiritual leader of the Hill 60 community in Salt River.16 In 1962, the same year as the Jamaican independence from Britain, the community was renamed “Beulah,” a name derived from the Book of Isaiah 62:4–7, which partly states, “You shall no longer be termed Forsaken, Nor shall your land any more be termed Desolate.”17 The members of the newly renamed community interpreted independence as also granting them more freedom to steer Jamaican culture toward the recognition and acceptance of Rastafari’s African religious culture. No longer, they reasoned, would Rastafari be forsaken or their community considered desolate or isolated from the wider society. Lewis became known as “Guyo,” the cultural and religious matriarch of the Beulah community.18
While African folk traditions occupied a significant role in the culture of the early Rastafari, the religion was the overarching aspect of this culture. In fact, it was one of the most condemned aspects of Rastafari culture by the colonial government and wider Jamaican society during colonial rule. Christianity, Rastafari members opined, had its origin in Africa, but was appropriated by Europeans, who used it for the oppression of Black people. The Rastafari movement had its own interpretations of the Bible, and members met regularly for fellowship to pledge allegiance to Emperor Selassie and Empress Menen, whom they believed were the divine rulers of Black people and the world and would guide them to “Zion” or “the Promised Land.”19 Zion or the Promised Land indeed signified Ethiopia but were also used as religious metaphors for freedom from colonial and racial oppression in addition to social and economic prosperity in Africa or the African diaspora. As Lewis herself, among other women such as Lennox, indicated, Rastafari was responsible for enlightening the people about the return of the promised Messiah, the emperor and empress of Ethiopia, even “through the white world.”20 Further, Rastafari’s livity, or “way of life,” established Zion or the Promised Land wherever Rastafari people might be situated.21
Such understandings challenged European Christian notions of white dominance that Lewis and other women in the early movement also denounced. European churches, Lewis asserted, were disingenuous and suppressed Black people: the “church have nothing special for us,” and “if we to follow the parson, plenty of the parsons come out of the way.” The parson “tell we don’t eat bread, but him a eat bread.”22 Many women joined the early Rastafari because they believed that the movement championed the rights of poor people and facilitated a better future. They felt that the leadership of the churches, namely the Anglican church, had failed to demonstrate enough regard for them as poor people and were misguided.23 As such, Rastafari was superior to the churches because it aimed to redeem the poor, most of whom were people of African descent, from social, economic, and political repression. Rastafari also promoted among its members the “consciousness of their divine, African selves and the lifestyle that emerges from that awareness.” A part of their “doctrinal individualism,” this awareness was critical to their self-reliance and was used to pursue their social and economic improvement, which they also believed could be achieved through education.24 Contrary to the perception that early Rastafari members were uninterested in education, Lewis argued that the government tried to inhibit the schooling and acquisition of knowledge by Rastafari members.
The Pinnacle community provided an elementary education with an African focus for the children in their early childhood years, and women, namely Bent, taught many of these children. As the early childhood years were a critical stage in a child’s socialization, and education is an organ of culture, it was expected that they would be equipped with knowledge from the African perspective that would make them conscious of the ills of the dominant culture, that is, the British culture, by the time they were ready to attend colonial schools. In addition, it was anticipated that this knowledge would also facilitate the development of their self-awareness or self-consciousness, a critical factor of self-reliance. However, Lewis pointed out that many Rastafari children, including herself, were banned from the schools in the society. While living in the Pinnacle community, she attempted to gain access to a colonial school when she was eleven years old but was denied enrollment because of her Rastafari identity. Recounting the incident, Lewis asserted, “they would represent us in no school,” so “I just remain for is there [at Pinnacle] me grow, and to leave there now, where would I go?”25 Though it is not certain how long Lewis would have remained at Pinnacle and perhaps in the movement had she been granted access to an education in the colonial schools, it is apparent that she, as well as other children and their parents, valued education and did not see formal schooling and their membership in the Rastafari movement as mutually exclusive.
SETTING PINNACLE’S RECORD STRAIGHT
By 1940, about eight years after its inception, the early Rastafari movement, mainly the Howellites, established Pinnacle. This was, as previously stated, the first Rastafari community that sought to operate autonomously, but it experienced several government interventions throughout its existence. The government painted a stark picture of the community, indicating that it was infested with criminals, malnourished women and children, and impoverished fanatics of religion. However, the Howellites rejected the government’s claims. Lewis, who lived at Pinnacle between 1940 and 1951, and after this visited the community until 1958, pointed out that the community was unstable because the government was intent on undermining the Rastafari movement and used both public health officials and the police force to stifle its social and economic development. As a woman, she believed that Pinnacle was an equitable and just community, one built on socialist principles, and one in which women would often protect the movement from even the police personnel.
Describing her time at Pinnacle, Lewis recalled that life there was “very nice,” but this pleasure was marred by interventions of the health department and horrific periods of raids conducted by the colonial police, which interrupted the stability of the community. Howell’s leadership of Pinnacle, Lewis asserted, also made the suppression of the community a priority of the government. He was the most prominent founder of the Rastafari. Officials in the government perceived him as a despotic man who was abusing his followers in the community. Reports in the Gleaner newspaper also published the government’s stance that defiant residents were tried and sometimes beaten by “special whipping men,” or expelled by Howell, who acted as judge and jury. One of these reports disclosed its source for the information, a government public health official named “Mr. A. DaCosta, Inspector of Poor for St. Catherine.”26 News of the trials raised concerns among officials, who also concluded that Howell was a tyrant.
However, Lewis insisted that the rules instituted by Howell were basically the same as the ones stipulated for the wider Jamaican society. Such rules, she recounted, included “don’t steal people goods” and “do not go out by the road and give people problems,” and because “all those things” came from “Mr. Howell,” who had an “understanding” of their importance to building their community, his followers abided by them.27 They felt that these rules were not only beneficial to them, but such were also important to the stability and development of their community. Gertrude Campbell, a contemporary of Lewis, who was one of Howell’s secretaries in the late 1940s and 1950s, also insisted that “a lie them a tell, a them come in destroy we,” when asked about the assertion that “there was a lot of violence in Pinnacle.”28 Some of the persons to whom Campbell referred were not members of the community but intruders who came there to steal their produce, especially cannabis. These were the people tried, punished, and expelled. Campbell further asserted that the population of Pinnacle, an initial 700 people, whose occupation of the community started in November 1940, climbed to over 1,000 people prior to any of the incursions by the police.29 These people, she insisted, chose to join the community after hearing about the prospects of peaceful coexistence and expectations of economic prosperity based on a socialistic lifestyle.
Even though the movement promised a better future, Lewis indicated that poverty existed at Pinnacle because many of its residents had been the poorest people of Jamaica, especially its single women, who came there by themselves or with children. These individuals sought refuge in the community and anticipated reprieve, which was not immediately possible. Some women also came to escape from physically abusive relationships with men. Stewart herself had also confirmed Lewis’s point that the women at Pinnacle were safe from abuse by men, partly because this was against the rules of the community and partly because the women banded together to protect themselves.30
The public health officials were dispatched to Pinnacle after cases of malnutrition were reported. However, in the report on his first visit on behalf of the Medical Board of St. Catherine, F. W. Aris observed that a “state of starvation” existed in the entire community.31 A total of four such visits took place, three of which happened within less than a month of each other. These visits were made on November 29, 1940, December 31, 1940, January 11, 1941, and February 5, 1941, and the reports on each visit maintained that the entire community was hopeless and destitute, circumstances deemed particularly harsh for children and for women, seen as the primary caregivers of the children. Writing of the living conditions, Aris reported that the houses were “shacks” built from “plain wattle,” which were “not weather-proof,” and contained “rough beds” that were “made of sticks with no mattresses and scanty filthy bedding,” and sanitation was the worst that he had seen. He also stated that “the latrine accommodation” serving the community “was entirely inadequate,” and that “water had to be brought from some distance away.”32 After the second visit on December 31, 1940, Aris also reported that “undernourishment prevails,” which was “especially marked amongst the children.”33 In the absence of a field officer from the Agricultural Department of Jamaica, the public health officer also pointed out that there was “yield from the land” which he did not think would “be adequate to the demands of the future.”34 Following the next visit, on January 11, 1941, eleven days after the previous visit, Aris stated that “a state of acute starvation now exists,” and that the “symptoms are especially marked amongst the children and young adults who are weak and emaciated.”35
Lewis contested the severity and hopelessness of Aris’s accounts, as well as similar depictions by J. Hall, the assistant director of the island’s medical services.36 Her description highlighted struggle, creativity, and self-reliance. This description corresponded with a rare photograph taken of some of the children and women at Pinnacle. Taken by a reporter for the Jamaica Times and published in the newspaper on July 19, 1941, the photograph shows the children almost uniformly dressed in clean, light-colored clothing, possibly their school uniform, with four of the women, their guardians or teachers, proudly standing adjacent to and behind the children. Two men wearing dress shirts can also be seen in the photograph, as men were usually placed at the school as guards (fig. 4). The headline provided by the newspaper for the photograph, “The Raid Didn’t Seem to Bother These Juvenile Ras Tafarians,” bears testimony to Lewis’s account of the resilience and pride of the Pinnacle residents, including the children.37 In addition, Lewis noted that despite the absence of piped water, a situation that also affected most of the people in Jamaica, Pinnacle residents had regular access to clean water from the Rio Cobre River in St. Catherine, where they went to bathe daily and brought back some of this water for purification and household use. Bathing daily, Lewis explained, was a necessity. Later, a well was dug at Pinnacle, which also gave them regular access to water. Where food was concerned, women of Pinnacle practiced mostly small farming since most of them were members of the Jamaican peasantry. They planted a range of food crops, including red peas, gungo (pigeon) peas, callaloo, potatoes, yams, bananas, and plantains. They also reared poultry and goats, along with burning charcoal and making household and personal items, such as sandals, activities they shared with the men. They sold some of their food crops, as well as many of the items they made, at markets in Spanish Town, Sligoville, and Kingston. Lewis even expressed delight about the quality of the sandals, adding that they sold quickly.
FIGURE 4.
A rare photograph of women and children at Pinnacle, Jamaica, July 19, 1941.
Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.
LEWIS AND THE 1951 POLICE RAID
While the government indicated that Pinnacle was raided for the illegal growing of cannabis, Lewis, among other Howellites and other early Rastafari members, suggested that raids were used in an effort to disband Pinnacle and ultimately end the Rastafari movement and that the government hid some of these raids from the public to protect itself. Prior to the 1948 amendment to the Dangerous Drugs Act, which made the punishments for cannabis possession even more severe, Eustace McNeill, the representative for St. Catherine on the Legislative Council of Jamaica, had telegraphed Alexander Grantham, the colonial secretary, on December 23, 1940, and reported, “I visited Poor House Spanish Town and was shown over twenty inmates of both sex,” allegedly from Pinnacle, where they became malnourished, emaciated, and contracted diseases. McNeill added, “I would advise that government take immediate steps to have proper investigation as certainly this state of affairs should not be allowed to continue.”38 Grantham decided to explore McNeill’s suggestion, and in January 1941, stated that “steps should be taken to dispense the misguided people of this strange cult.”39 However, subsequent admonitions from Arthur Lewey, the attorney general, on April 15, 1941, stated that no evidence of “criminal negligence” had been substantiated in any “Medical Report,” and “Malnutrition” itself “might result from ignorance and not neglect.”40 Within two months of the warning from Lewey, the police in Spanish Town reported they had received a letter proving that Howell had broken the law by sheltering a wanted man named James Nelson.41 Historian James Robertson states, “He may be the James Nelson of Duckenfield in St. Thomas, fined £50 for ganja possession in 1938.”42
Lewis was unable to talk at length about the Nelson allegation and the resulting police raid on Pinnacle on July 14, 1941, as she was nine years old at the time. Nonetheless, she related her experience of an undocumented 1951 police raid that had devastating effects on Pinnacle. This raid, Lewis explained, occurred the same year that she had left Pinnacle. It was also the year of Hurricane Charlie, popularly known as the ’51 Storm, that had hit Jamaica and killed about 110 people and caused damages amounting to roughly £16 million sterling.43 Additionally, this raid resulted in Lewis’s father leaving Pinnacle for Salt River when she was nineteen years old. Lewis also stated that shortly before the 1951 police raid, she had decided to remain at Pinnacle and would have stayed at Pinnacle at least until the police returned to clear the community of its remaining residents in 1958, had her father not left the community to avoid arrest in 1951.
Shortly after Lewis’s father left for the bushy flatlands of Salt River in Clarendon, the police went to his house at Pinnacle to enquire about him. But Lewis told them nothing and ensured that her younger brother, Alfred, who was five years old at the time, did the same. “They did not want to put my father in jail,” but he fled knowing that he had knowledge about the cannabis that was cultivated in the community. It was a terrifying encounter, but Lewis remained nonchalant, keeping her fears hidden. As she explained, there was more than one police officer, and before leaving, they spat “in the copper of food” and taking “the ashes from underneath the copper” and throwing “it in the food” meant “nothing for us to eat.” Despite this and similar experiences, Lewis stated, “plenty of us [women] never leave” and helped the men to escape arrest.44
Women also knew that the police arrested men in hopes that the women would be unable to fend for themselves and their children, thereby leading to the disbandment of the community. However, these women persisted without men and showed that the destruction of Pinnacle would continue to fail if the effort of the police remained gender specific. Referring to this gender-specific approach, Lewis pointed out that “most of the man that did leave that they never catch to carry to prison got to put on all like that lady dress, tie him head like a woman, just so that the police don’t ill-treat him.”45 In other words, women helped men to avoid arrest by disguising them as women and, apparently, the women were successful, as the police thought these men were indeed women. To say that these women were under the domination of the men is therefore problematic. These were men who were desperately seeking to avoid arrest, men who at those harrowing and desperate moments had rested their fate in the hands of women, whom they were confident could help to shield them from arrest. Women, therefore, played an active role in defending not only Rastafari men but also the movement against colonial suppression.
THE POLITICAL AWARENESS OF WOMEN
Almost the entire first half of the twentieth century was characterized by neglect of the political consciousness of women in the Jamaican society. For the Rastafari woman, this neglect was coupled with the perception that they were unaware of the politics inside and outside of their movement and unable to make informed political decisions. Nevertheless, Lewis used her account of the history of the movement in the preindependence period to show that she and other early Rastafari women understood the political dynamics of Jamaica and Rastafari and disapproved of the colonial government’s strategic efforts to mar Rastafari’s social and economic successes. The growing influence of Rastafari, Lewis also indicated, led significant elements within the creole nationalists to also suppress the movement for political leverage. In 1962, Jamaica gained independence from Britain through the creole nationalist agenda of unifying the nation based on a national cultural identity developed through the creolization of its plural society. Nonetheless, Lewis and other Rastafari members continued to emphasize the development of the African consciousness of Jamaicans instead of the maintenance of the nation’s ties to Britain. Rastafari thought the independence obtained by creole nationalists would lead to a new form of colonialism, one that would continue the social and economic inequalities of the colonial period. Rastafari’s African consciousness was based on the possibility of creating an equitable society through the fair distribution of land to the people so that they could produce for themselves and family members. This project had started at the Pinnacle community but was crushed by the police raids in 1951, 1954, and 1958.
While dissecting the Howellites’ encounters with creole nationalism, Lewis condemned Alexander Bustamante and the Jamaica Labor Party’s (JLP) preoccupation with suppressing the Rastafari movement and Howell in particular. Bustamante had formed the JLP to contest the first national elections in 1944. The JLP won these elections and held onto power until it lost the elections of 1955. Bustamante was thus the first chief minister, or government leader, following Jamaica’s acquisition of universal adult suffrage in 1944. The JLP government shared power with the colonial authorities until the 1955 elections. Lewis deemed Bustamante “a killer [of] black,” who “never like” Black people. In this description, she used the term “killer” both in its literal and metaphorical sense.46 Not only were the police armed whenever they executed the raids on Pinnacle, Lewis also argued that imprisonment had the potential of leading to the deaths of Rastafari people. If incarcerated, they were cut off from their community while having to endure the inhumane conditions in the prisons, including the infamous St. Catherine District Prison, where the Pinnacle residents were usually sent. In addition, Lewis’s condemnation went beyond the impression that Bustamante feared Howell simply because of the latter’s disapproval of the trade union movement as deceiving the people with a solidarity that would not elevate their African identity or liberate them from persistent poverty. Before Bustamante was the chief minister of Jamaica, he wrote to the colonial secretary in 1939, advising that Howell was a “danger to the peace of the Community,” was “the greatest danger that exists in this country today,” and recommended his immediate confinement in prison or the mental hospital.47 Lewis, in her own recollections of Bustamante, asserted that he not only condemned Howell, but he also “send in his government to us so the school never get to go on.”48
Several such incursions occurred after Bustamante’s 1944 election victory while Lewis was also in school at Pinnacle. The incursion that she remembered the most, however, occurred in 1951, as this was the one that stimulated her departure from Pinnacle. Like other Rastafari members, Lewis argued that the JLP’s approach was one of aggression toward the Rastafari movement. She also argued that the aggression was inspired by the successes of the movement, such as its acquisition of land at Pinnacle and its schooling of the children at Pinnacle, rather than only the movement’s criticisms of the trade unions. The main point Lewis made was that Rastafari had made itself into a viable alternative to creole nationalism, one that was gradually improving the social and economic condition of the people, one invested in their ownership of land and their education, and had even attempted to use the colonial schools. In Lewis’s view, Rastafari promoted an African consciousness that counteracted the colonial education that threatened their strong sense of self-worth, resourcefulness, and independence as African descendants. These were the successes that Lewis indicated Bustamante saw and considered as the Rastafari movement’s main threats to creole nationalism in continuing its influence over the masses of the people.
Lewis and other members were confident that the movement would overcome the effort to suppress it. Rastafari’s triumph in this regard, she believed, was a revelation. As she explained, the politicians “know what they doing is not a part of right, but they take it for right, so don’t fight them, leave them.”49 In other words, she believed that in time, Rastafari’s suppressors would self-destruct, and the movement would gradually transform the society politically and economically toward African consciousness and the Rastafari’s socialistic conception of the nation as a family. Like the crisis of capitalism that Marxism predicted, Lewis prophesied that Jamaica’s political and economic system would continue to squeeze its marginalized majority into a fundamental state of antagonism. After all, this same situation had led to the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865. Many members of the peasantry, acting “individually or co-operatively,” opted to invest “their savings in land purchase” after emancipation from slavery in 1838, and many diversified their food crop production by shifting into cash crops, namely coffee and banana in Jamaica.50 By 1890, they were producing these cash crops for export. Jamaica’s peasant cash crop exports increased from 11 percent of the island’s exports in 1850 to 23 percent in 1890.51 However, many of the peasant landholders were ultimately deemed as “squatters” because they lacked the documentation to prove their ownership and were removed from their land by the colonial government, a process started in the 1870s.52 Economic policy changes by the government in the 1890s, due to the rise of banana as a principal plantation crop, also led to the government’s promotion of the plantation system and, consequently, the displacement of many of the peasant landholdings.53 With this historical background, Rastafari sought to activate the process of transforming the nation into an African nationalist political condition, one that emphasized the restructuring of the nation around the building of a community through equal opportunity.
Creole nationalism remained the dominant aspect of political ideology in Jamaica, but Rastafari, as Lewis believed, indeed became a major cultural force in the country, as seen in its influence on the Jamaican language, education, food, religion, politics, music, aesthetics, herbal traditions, among other aspects that have helped to reinforce the African consciousness of the Black majority. At the same time, creole nationalists promoted independence through a national identity that represented the blending of the racial and ethnic components of the society rather than through the Rastafari’s understanding that African consciousness should be the basis of unifying the nation or the foundation of its national identity. As early as 1937, Rastafari leaders had asserted that “the black or colored man as the white man, has no apology to make if he preaches racial solidarity.”54 As the colonial government and elements of the creole nationalist movement deemed Rastafari’s African consciousness as alienating to other races and ethnicities that made up Jamaica and denounced the movement’s religious beliefs as cultism and escapism, they were able to legitimize the attempts to suppress the Rastafari movement.
SUBALTERN VOICES
Though Lewis was not appointed a formal leader of the Howellites, she believed that it was her duty to protect Rastafari’s history. She recognized the importance of transmitting this history to future generations. Indeed, her narrative is provided from her views as a Rastafari member; however, a history of Rastafari’s development without the voices of both major and subaltern actors would be insufficient. Lewis is not just subaltern in the sense that she was a member of the movement, she was marginalized because of her gender status. It should also be noted that records on the early movement were created within a colonialist framework and based on the ostracism of the movement and patriarchal underpinnings of the society. Such context also accounted for Lewis’s intent to provide her side of the story. Yvonne McClean, a practicing Rastafari also known as Sister Hodesh, spoke of Lewis’s commitment to promoting her views of Rastafari’s history and culture even in her final days: “I remember my last talk with Mama Audrey. She told me don’t beat up on yourself, we are doing a lot. I used to meet with her once a week . . . talk with her on what needs to be done, and updating her on what’s happening.”55 In her later years, Lewis was part of the Rastafari’s struggle to wrest control of Pinnacle from private developers. She used her recollections of Pinnacle to support this struggle and was always willing to speak publicly about the colonial effort to disband Pinnacle and strip the Rastafari of any claims they could make to the land on which they built the community. She argued that the deficiencies of the early movement that the government officials had highlighted were exaggerations aimed at undermining especially the diverse and complex accomplishments of the Pinnacle community. Good sanitation, hygiene, nutrition based on organic farming methods, and independent production of a range of household and personal products formed crucial parts of their lived experiences at Pinnacle. The principal problem that these practices and accomplishments posed for the government, Lewis argued, was that they were established for the purpose of enabling the people to physically, psychologically, and materially sustain their freedom from colonial domination and resist control by the less radical creole nationalist movement. Lewis was eighty-four years old when she died at the Lionel Town Public Hospital, Clarendon, in 2016, three years after the Jamaican government finally declared one of the six central plots at Pinnacle as a protected National Heritage site.56