The research and discussion on early Rastafari women in this book are by no means exhaustive. Neither is the sample of women used; as Verene Shepherd pointed out, research on subaltern women in the Caribbean is an “ongoing archaeological project.”1 Nevertheless, this text has not only shown that at least some early Rastafari women challenged the status quo; it has also shown that they found various ways to resist patriarchy inside and outside of the Rastafari movement, albeit through covert means at times. It would be grossly inaccurate to suggest that early Rastafari women were low-key or docile.
This study employs an interdisciplinary framework that is critical for analyzing the primary documentation on early Rastafari women. Drawing on history, sociology, and theology, among other disciplines, this book places the recollections of women front and center in recounting aspects of the hidden past of early Rastafari women. Using data from members of the movement allows us to shed light on the views of early women that have been previously underrepresented in Rastafari studies. Discussing these data within the context of the wider society and world at the time helps illustrate challenges that women in the early movement had to counteract. A combination of epistemic and patriarchal suppression helped to create the impression that the early women were largely docile or low-key. But in reality the early women had a diverse range of connected and intersectional interpretations and experiences that aided the development of the anticolonial resistance of the Rastafari movement while also helping to shape the development of the future movement.
Women’s resistance was shaped by the environment as well as their own ideas about their civil and human rights and liberation from white rule. In addition, they were playing leading roles in the early movement. Women were involved in protecting the movement and its leaders to facilitate its early growth and development. The male image and orientation of the early Rastafari were largely a consequence of the patriarchy both inside and outside of the movement. Women, however, attended the public meetings of the Rastafari, for example, despite warnings from men that they should stay away because of the threats of violence from the police and civilian opponents of the movement, meetings where men were told “to come armed with sticks and cutlasses.”2 These warnings can be described as what Taylor calls the assurances provided by patriarchy, but women could also be seen “trumping” these assurances through various “short-term leadership” roles and longer term household and spousal “management” strategies.3 Such assurances or promises stood as prominent features of the gender dynamics of Black nationalist movements of the twentieth century.4
Patriarchy inside and outside of the early Rastafari gave the impression that women of its different organizations were more isolated from each other than connected, but the revelations of early Rastafari women, such as Lennox, Stewart, Lewis, and Fisher, also shows that early Rastafari women, even if involved in different denominations, mansions or organizations, were more connected than isolated. They were connected by their own choices to circulate Rastafari’s pro-Ethiopian doctrine and Black nationalism. Early women embraced the doctrine and political principles of their Rastafari organizations for similar reasons that ranged from the pursuit of socioeconomic improvement and Black sovereignty to challenging racism, classism, and gender inequality.
Lennox was one of the women who represented several Rastafari organizations. Early Rastafari women also remained members of the Protestant churches, namely, the Baptist church and the Church of God. As Lewis related, women were key to syncretizing rituals of the religious-folk traditions, namely Kumina, with Rastafari practices. Lewis was even a leader of her own Kumina-inspired Rastafari organization, the Beulah community, after leaving Pinnacle in the 1950s and still retained her Howellite identity. Fisher was a Garveyite and associate of the Coptic Church of Joseph Hibbert, a Rastafari founder, before creating her women’s group and, later, the African Reform Church of God in Christ, which she established with the Rev. Claudius Henry. At the same time, Fisher recognized the strengths of the Howellite organization, including the activism of women of the organization and its effort to mimic the operation of the world-famous UNIA, the Garveyite’s organization. Fisher pursued a partnership with Henry to grow her thirty-five-member women’s group into the African Reform Church, launched in 1959. Within six months, the ARC had a reported 300–400 members regularly attending its Sunday services and was recognized by the authorities as the most influential Rastafari organization at the time. Officials in Norman Manley’s government and Judge Herbert Duffus of the Half Way Tree Circuit Court had reportedly asserted that the ARC was an attempt to turn back the clock to the days of Pinnacle.
Early Rastafari women, including Fisher, also opposed creole nationalism while promoting African consciousness and Black nationalist socialism as the political ideology of independent Jamaica. In 1963, after serving three years in prison for treason-felony, Fisher, for example, rebuilt the ARC at Kemps Hill, Clarendon. It was later renamed the International Peacemakers Association, following the move to Bethel, a community built in Green Bottom, Sandy Bay, Clarendon. In the 1960s, Rodney described the Kemps Hill community and its revival at Bethel as Black Power socialist activism. Like Pinnacle, Kemps Hill and Bethel represented economic independence based on African consciousness and socialistic principles of equity. Rodney, therefore, noted that the class dynamics of the Rastafari movement aided its development into a multiracial movement by uniting the masses of the people around African consciousness and socialism.
Women such as Francis, who was a landlord, and Bent, who was employed as a secretary and came from a middle-class family, became members of the early Rastafari movement while being economically independent. Both mixed-race and middle-class women entered the early Rastafari movement. Mixed ancestry was common in the peasantry. Though the peasantry outnumbered all other groups, the upwardly mobile members used their education and business interests to aid the movement’s growth while maintaining its African consciousness and Black nationalist socialism through various activities. These activities included granting members free access to land and capital to build homes and farms to make themselves self-sufficient as well as promoting the community as a family and providing education based on African consciousness to challenge racist ideas about nonwhites and their culture emanating from colonial knowledge. Essentially, these women used their social and economic status to build the anticolonial resistance of the early Rastafari movement.
Early Rastafari women who entered the Howellite movement exhibited their agency by defending their Rastafari identity as well as the movement. In 1934, Francis defended herself from an assault by a district constable in her Seaforth village. He later tried to arrest her and called on other men to assist him. But Francis’s self-defense was not the most important aspect of her resistance. Her use of other Rastafari women and non-Rastafari members of the community to support her counteractions of the police and judges in the parish demonstrated the “community feminism” of early Rastafari women.5 These women’s resistance to patriarchy and colonial suppression challenged the suppression inside and outside the Rastafari movement while highlighting that women and men should be equal partners in order to protect themselves from the colonial system. Francis’s community of supporters included other Rastafari women who had previously challenged the colonial authorities at the first trial of Rastafari members for crimes against the government. Only two such trials involving Rastafari members took place during the colonial period, the second of which involved Fisher’s ARC. The women who testified at the first trial in 1934 were supported by other members, but they were no doubt discouraged by some members. Nonetheless, they testified against the better judgement of these members. They mainly testified against the police and members of the middle class and upper class, who had been writing to the government and newspapers to complain about the Rastafari movement. This opposition helped to encourage the women to argue against the middle-class and upper-class members of society as conspiring with the police and judiciary to malign their movement and undermine it. Though the colonial government opposed the Rastafari movement, much of this opposition was stimulated by members of the society who were outside of the government. These members of the society had vested interests in maintaining the social order from which they obtained their status and wealth.
Early Rastafari women also helped to develop the divinity attached to the cannabis plant through their use of it for ritualistic smoking, culinary purposes, and as a treatment for various illnesses. The government, nonetheless, focused on men as the chief purveyors of the movement, and, by extension, the main sources of cannabis use by the movement, and suggested that men mainly forced the women into cannabis use. The first dispersal of Pinnacle attempted through the police raid in 1941 failed largely because the police arrested only men. Pinnacle women openly defied a court-ordered eviction in 1945 by refusing to leave but were escorted from the community by armed police personnel.6 The eviction was challenged in court and the people returned to the community before the end of the year. By the mid-1950s, however, it was clear that women were being targeted for arrests, even on cannabis charges. Women, along with children, were dispersed from Pinnacle during the police raids in 1951, 1954, and 1958 as part of the disbandment of the community, an attempt to end the Rastafari movement in general.
Despite the government’s attempts to suppress the movement, women continued to spread Rastafari. Lennox, for example, assumed the role of preaching her womanist views of the doctrine within the movement and on the streets of Jamaica, and noted that she was not the only woman who was preaching “on the by-walks.”7 They also developed relationships with other such women that continued into the postindependence period. Lennox’s main arguments included asserting the divinity of Empress Menen, part of highlighting the equality of women and men. She argued that this equality existed from creation with the connectedness of women and men, whose only difference that was ordained by the creator was biological, in order to facilitate, as Lennox put it, the multiplication of God’s people. She also saw elder women of the early movement as having a vital role to play in the future of the movement in terms of empowering and educating younger women. The younger women had mainly themselves, each other, and elder women to rely on for protection from the patriarchy in the movement. As Lennox became an elder Rastafari woman, she asserted herself as a protector of the dignity and divinity of all women, whom she regarded as empresses. This name was used by women from the colonial period of the movement. Women of the early Rastafari embraced and promoted the concept of empress, a title that has become synonymous with Rastafari women.