Liberating the Mind: Rastafari and the Theorization of Maroonage as Epistemological (Dis) engagement

Introduction

This article explores the concept of maroonage (other spellings “maronage,” “marronnage,” and “marronage”) as a process of epistemological engagement and disengagement using the way in which the Rastafari movement constructs, organizes, and legitimates knowledge and knowledge production. I use the term epistemological to focus on liberation, self-determination, and autonomy at the ideological level. (Dis)engagement serves to capture the interaction with hegemonic systems of knowledge production. It is the epistemic shift constituting the rejection of domination and the construction of alternate ways of being, knowing, and belonging. The focus on Rastafari in this article is to push beyond the existing body of Rastafari scholarship that presents the Rastafari community as a type of maroon community (Barrett, 1997, pp. 86–89; Campbell, 2007; Chevannes 1994, p. 10). If we concede that Rastafari is a type of maroon community, then how do we account for the fact that most Rastas do not live in autonomous communities in the hills or inaccessible places? Scholars of Rastafari use the definition of maroonage advanced by historians. This definition tends to focus on the phenomenon as an event situated within the history of enslavement whereby maroonage is the act of slaves running away from the plantation to form their own communities (Campbell, 1988, p. 2; Diouf, 2014; Price, 1973; Thompson, 2006). My article engages Christopher Johnson’s challenge to see the “concept of maroonage as an African cultural tradition rooted in the past, but not restricted to it” (Johnson, 2012, p. 86).

Maroonage then begins with an ideological commitment. In the historical sense of maroonage, an ideological commitment to freedom, self-determination, and autonomy propelled the process of fleeing the plantation to establish maroon communities (Diouf, 2014, pp. 2, 309–312; Thompson, 2006, p. 17). Alvin Thompson anchors the maroons’ desire for freedom, self-determination, and autonomy within an enlightenment discourse that asserts the natural affinity that human beings have for freedom (Thompson, 2006, pp. 40–52). Thompson further notes that “Marronage was for them the clearest political expression of the fact that they were persons with sensibilities similar to those of the Whites” (Thompson, 2006, pp. 36). While I agree with Thompson that there is a universal human impulse to be free from the domination of others, the maroon’s commitment to freedom was not a desire to prove that Africans had sensibilities like White people. Maroons sought freedom because the tyranny and brutality of Euro-American enslavement. The maroons’ act of securing freedom from slavery through flight necessitated a commitment to thinking outside of the ideological framework of the plantation. The articulation of maroonage as an ideological shift coheres with Neil Roberts’ assertion that “marronage is a flight from the zone of nonbeing to zones of refuge” (Roberts, 2015, p. 119). Roberts invokes Franz Fanon’s zone of being framework to demonstrate the ideological, perhaps ontological, underpinnings of maroonage. The movement into a zone of being constitutes a type of freedom. Roberts presents a useful typology of sovereign and sociogenic marronage that allows for a more useful analysis of the ideological dimensions of flight than the usual petit and grand maroonage. Within the traditional categorization of maroonage, introduced into academic discourse by Gabriel Debien, the emphasis was on permanence or duration of flight. Petit maroonage referred to temporarily absconding or leaving the plantation while grand maroonage categorized as “flight beyond the reach of the plantation with the intention to never return” (Debien, 1966, p. 3). The enslavers made the distinction between the two types of “flight” and developed a cruel system of punishment thought by these enslavers to be commensurate to the crime of fleeing the plantation. Roberts’ theorization of maroonage beyond the binary categories of petit and grand focuses on the political nature of flight where sovereign marronage is mass flight leading to sociopolitical independence as conceived by a lawgiver and sociogenic “denotes a revolutionary process of naming and attaining individual and collective agency, non-sovereignty, liberation, constitutionalism, and the cultivation of a community that aligns civil society with political society” (Roberts, 2015, p. 11). Not all cases of maroonage led to state formation, as in the case of Haiti. The formation of maroon communities represents a type of sovereignty that was mostly contingent on treaties between the plantocracy and the maroons.

Christopher Johnson makes the connection between physical flight and ideological disengagement. Johnson argues that “By physically removing themselves, these Africans were removing the very base upon which this system constituted itself. By ideologically disengaging, they were disrupting the foundational and anti-African epistemologies and methods of the plantation” (Johnson, 2012, p. 97). The connection between the physical and the psychic space of the plantation complex becomes more compelling when we consider the fact that slavery was a process of identity erasure. Maroonage then is resistance to antihuman and antifreedom practices and ideas. It involves the construction of and constant engagement with African-centered epistemologies. Constructing and engaging with Afrocentric epistemologies means that the process of maroonage entails rejecting ways of knowing that invalidate Africanness or Blackness.

The development of a Rastafari way of thinking about knowledge underscores the necessity of theorizing maroonage as the rejection of imperial epistemes. Here, I am applying a Foucauldian theorization of epistemes as the ways in which knowledge is organized, constituted, and legitimated through several discursive practices (Foucault, 1973, pp. 344–348; Mudimbe, 1988, pp. 16–28; Ward, 1996, pp. 1–3). Episteme is the “how” of knowledge production. Episteme also refers to the attitudes, categories, orientation, and goals of knowledge. In the context of the colonial Jamaican society, imperial epistemes involved the so-called rationalistic, modern, and empirical framed within a narrative of progress (a movement from the primitive to the enlightened). Within this progress narrative, Europeans defined all aspects of Caribbean life over against European understandings of rationality, modernity, and empiricism. African religious and medicinal practices, for example, had no place in a “modern” society. Several scholars have discussed extensively the way in which European colonizers defined and virtually invented notions of modernity within the colonized spaces of African and Caribbean societies. (Chidester, 1996; Mudimbe, 1988; Palmiè, 2002)

Even as I make this case for an expansion of maroonage as disengagement from imperial epistemes by my interrogation of Rastafari, it is important to underscore that the epistemological framework of Western thought foregrounds White supremacy. The very epistemes, the discursive practices that give rise to what counts as knowledge and how Western knowledge is structured, are racist. My invocation of Foucault is to highlight that knowledge, even in its most esoteric nature, is constructed and reified through repetition and our willingness to accept it as a given. Recognizing the constructedness of knowledge sharpens the focus on truth and the ability to make truth-claims as a function of power. If the recognition of knowledge as a function of power is the present “order of things,” then, as depicted by Rastafari, Black people must have an imperative to be intellectually vigilant. In sketching the theory of Afrocentricity, Molefi Kete Asante discusses this intellectual vigilance as part of the posture of ensuring that Black people reject hegemonic epistemological positions (Asante, 2003, p. 50). Moreover, a part of this intellectual vigilance is recognizing that because knowledge is a function of power, African peoples can engage with/disengage from oppressive systems of knowledge production, reproduction, and conceptualization.

Contours of Rastafari Epistemology

Before exploring fully how Rastafari epistemology extends the theorization of maroonage by a process of engaging/disengaging with hegemonic epistemologies and by formulating epistemologies of wholeness, I will briefly outline some of the contours of Rastafari epistemology. First, an Afrocentric orientation anchors the construction, organization, and content of the Rastafari epistemology. Asante defines Afrocentricity as “a mode of thought and action in which the centrality of African interests, values, and perspectives predominate” (Asante, 2003, p. 2). The concept of Afrocentricity means that Rastafari place Africa, African people, and African ideals at the center of their knowledge construction process. Michael Barnett and Adwoa Ntozake Onuora argue that all the pillars of Afrocentricity as outlined by Asante manifest in Rastafari:

With its deification of an African King (Haile Selassie I); its assertion that the Holy Land (Zion) is in Ethiopia or, by extention Africa (Williams, 2000); and its contention that Ethiopia is the birthplace of humanity and civilization, wherein Nubia and Egypt (Kemet) are considered the African daughters or inheritors of Ethiopian Civilization, we propose that Rastafari ideology and world outlook are undoubtedly Afrocentric. (Barnett & Onuora in Barnett, 2012, p. 174)

Barnett and Onuora see the manifestation of Afrocentricity in thoughts and deeds of Rastafari. Although Rastafari emerged in the late colonial period (the 1930s) and manifested differently from other Afro-Caribbean religions, the ideological gaze is on Africa. Some of the earliest practices of Rastafari like healing and drumming show a high degree of logicostructural integration of traditional African practices (Chevannes, 1998, pp. 1–19). These integrated elements make Rastafari both African-derived and Afrocentric.

The metatheory of Afrocentricity makes it permissible to speak about Rastafari epistemology in a universalizing way. Universalizing discourses tend to overlook the nuances of a given phenomenon. However, this critique does not apply to the formulation of Rastafari epistemology because Afro-consciousness holds together the social, religious, and political ethos of Rastafari. Rastafari, regardless of the mansion (an organizational division within Rastafari) to which they belong, will attest to the centrality of Africa and Black people in the formulation of what Rastas believe. The practical outcomes of a Rastafari epistemological system vary on the individual level. An example of this variation is the matter of repatriation. Rastafari historically conceptualize Ethiopia as the Promised Land to which Black people must return, but not all Rastas believe in a physical return to Ethiopia. Some Rastas believe in a spiritual repatriation and others have expanded repatriation to Africa more generally (Barnett, 2018, pp. 78–79; Bedasse, 2017, pp. 1–7). Although the enactment of knowledge differs among Rastafari, the frameworks of knowledge construction (the epistemes) remain essentially the same. As one Rasta brethren expressed it, “Only those with insight enough to see the light of Africa will accept the truth of Ras Tafari” (Cashmore, 1983, p. 169). Rastafari ceases to exist without this Afrocentric orientation.

In addition to the Afrocentric orientation, Rastafari construct their process of knowledge production by differentiating between knowing and believing. The distinction is part of a sapiential tradition that developed within Rastafari. Within the wisdom tradition, knowing comes as a result of an active spiritual awakening while believing is the passive acceptance of things (Owens, 1976, p. 33, pp. 170–171). During his fieldwork among Rastas in the early 1970s, Joseph Owens observed that

The brethren use the term knowledge’ in an unconventional way: knowing is always characterised by a high degree of certainty, by a close relation to the practical, and by an innate presence within man. . . Knowledge for them is an active, inward process, which does not merely reduplicate an “external” world, but creates and re-creates a world in which internal and external are welded in unity. (Owens, 1976, pp. 170–171)

The dualism that frames most of Western epistemology does not hold in Rastafari. Jah (the divine) is within the Rasta, and this creates a situation wherein knowledge already resides within the Rasta (Cashmore, 1983, p. 135). Knowledge emerges from the dialectical encounters with Jah (during meditation) as well as with each other (when holding a reason). Reasoning in Rastafari is a communal ritual involving dialectic engagement with each member about life, truth, and the ways of Rastafari (cf. Afari, 2007, p. 89; Onuora in Barnett, 2012, pp. 156–157; Christensen, 2014, pp. 61–63). Reasoning often involves sitting and smoking marijuana as Rastafari build community with one another and with Jah Rastafari. The I-and-I concept (I-n-I or I-and-I)—the oneness of Jah and human beings—typifies the way in which Rastafari frames knowledge as dialectically constituted between Jah and the individual. The oneness of Jah and human beings means that each Rastafari has authority and access to knowledge.

Scholars have characterized the Rastafari concept of the I-and-I in several ways. Cashmore sees I-and-I (“oneness”) as an outgrowth of epistemological individualism (Cashmore, 1983, p. 140). Other scholars see it as a circumlocution for the first person plural (Owens, 1976, p. 65); an intertextual continuity with the messianic pronominal I of the New Testament (Palmer, 2010); and as an adaptation of Monophysitism (Coltri, 2015, pp. 54–56). The I-and-I concept is multidimensional. The various scholarly characterizations are all probable. But Rastafari constantly echo the interpretation that I-and-I mean the divine oneness; the indwelling of Jah within the Rasta. The “oneness” claim rests in the realm of both epistemology and ontology. It is important to note that Rastas see an inseparable link between knowing (epistemology) and being (ontology). Adrian McFarlane provides a useful explication of this concept:

The I-and-I expression does not function simply as a protocol for all I-words; it is the means by which Rastas make all informed utterances related to their principles, cultic practices, and self-affirmation. That is, the expression is a means by which Rastas communicate their basic philosophy or concept of themselves, their community, and the world. (McFarlene in Murrell et al., 1998, p. 107)

McFarlane argues for the I-and-I as a linguistic construction but also as a part of Rastafari epistemology. He further argues that this I-and-I is a lionhearted response to Quashie mentality (fear, timidity, and compliance; McFarlene in Murrell et al., 1998, pp. 114–117). The lionheartedness propels Rastas to think and act differently. I-and-I is part of what we could call epistemological defiance, nonconformity to Eurocentric constructions of knowledge.

The relationship between epistemology and ontology in Rastafari manifests fully in Rastafari conduct or principle of behavior known as livity. Like other Rastafari concepts, livity is broad and dynamic, denoting Rastafari lifestyle. The elements of Rastafari livity varies among Rastas. Livity usually entails a strict diet of no meat, no salt, no alcohol, and no unnatural foods (Barrett, 1997, pp. 140–142; Owens, 1976, pp. 166–169). This strict diet is called i-tyal. Not all Rastafari adhere to this strict dietary code. In fact, many Rastas eat fish and quite a few eat chicken. However, the general reason for accepting a “natural,” plant-based diet is the belief that certain foods corrupt and weaken the individual both physically and spiritually. A healthy body and mind project the lionheartedness of the Rastafari but, more importantly, allows for a strong connection to Jah. This connection to the divine is the source of Rastafari power and ability to resist Babylonian ways of knowing and ways of being.

The sporting of dreadlocks is another example of Rastafari livity in which the relationship between knowledge and being intersect. The growth of locks is the most important component of attire for Rastafari. Barry Chevannes shows that the acceptance of locks as a symbol of Rastafari occurred over a period of time. Chevannes argues that it was the Youth Black Faith that institutionalized the sporting of locks as a symbol of Rastafari (Chevannes, 1994, p. 157). Rastafari used biblical justifications, such as the Nazarite vow (Numbers 6:5), to justify the growing of the hair. In the Bible, Nazarites vowed not to cut their hair, drink alcohol, nor have sexual intercourse. Samson was the prototypical Nazarite who got his strength from his locks. Rastafari appropriate the Samson image, particularly, his locks wearing to bolster the symbol of their strength and power. Over time, Rastafari have come to see the hair as a symbol of strength. Commenting on hair symbolism, Barnett and Onuora assert that “locks are symbolic of the lion’s mane. As a result, Rastas view the lion as a consummate African symbol of the freedom, power, and sovereignty that they, as Africans inherently hold” (Barnett & Onuora in Barnett, 2012, p. 165). Some Rastas believe that having locks brings them closer to Jah. As one of William Lewis’ informant told him, “The barber shop is the mark of the beast. Comb and razor conquer. The wealth of Jah is with locks, in fullness of his company” (Lewis, 1993, p. 45). The cutting of the hair is generally considered to be Babylonian conduct. Yasus Afari in his book Overstanding Rastafari writes that “They [locks] are the Roots that anchor us in the Cosmic Mind, Intelligence and Consciousness of the Most High, as well as, the Antennae that connects us to the spiritual existence” (Afari, 2007, p. 103). As an extension of the Most High, dreadlocks are embodied symbols of a deep-rooted connection to the wisdom of Jah and to the source of knowledge.

A final element of Rastafari epistemology is the liberatory nature of knowledge. The fundamental consideration for Rastafari is how knowing can make Black people free from White oppression. Rastas have always understood freedom to be more than a physical condition but also a mental state of being. When Bob Marley punctuated the airwaves challenging Black people “to emancipate themselves from mental slavery,” he asserted a fundamental element of the Rastafari dialectic of freedom. Noel Erskine has argued that there is a synergistic relationship between knowledge and “salvation” in Rastafari thought (Erskine, 2004, p. 145). Erskine is generally right about this observation except that Christian theology limits his idea of salvation. Rastas would rather talk about freedom from Babylonian bondage rather than salvation from sin (Perkins in Barnett, 2012, p. 241). Of course, Rastas take their cue from Marcus Garvey who emphasized the power of knowledge. Many of the early followers of Rastafari give credit to Garvey for their coming to a deeper level of consciousness (Chevannes, 1998, pp. 91–110). Garvey’s teaching has had the greatest influence on the development of Rastafari (Erskine, 2004, pp. 30–38). Like the earlier Garvey movement, Rastafari believed that access to the history of Africa and Black people would not only bring enlightenment but psychological freedom. The ethical and practical implications of a liberation-oriented epistemology manifest in the anticolonial, anticapitalist, and antiracists agenda of the Rastafari movement. (Bedasse, 2017, pp. 22–47)

The liberatory framework of Rastafari epistemology is not without criticism, even from members of the Rastafari community. Despite the anticolonial, anticapitalist, and antiracist agenda of the Rastafari movement, scholars have noted a significant contradiction concerning the status of women within the movement (Christensen, 2014; Coltri, 2015; Kitzinger, 1969; Lake, 1998; Rowe, 1980; Tafari-Ama in Murrell et al., 1998, pp. 89–106; Werden-Greenfield, 2016). Sheila Kitzinger, one of the earliest scholars to document the status of women in the Rastafari movement, documents that women are peripheral to the movement and their status (queen or virgin) defined in relation to Rastamen (Kitzinger, 1969, pp. 252–253). Maureen Rowe, a Rastafari woman and scholar, agrees with most of Kitzinger’s points but notes that patriarchy seen in Rastafari is a result of the Bible-based origins of the movement (Rowe 1980, p. 14–17). The gender restrictions, according to Rowe, are not necessarily oppressive because Rastawomen “understand, accept, and practice them” (Rowe 1980, p. 16). Rowe’s point is that oppression is a matter of ideological positioning; if the Rastawomen do not see the rules as oppressive then outsiders have no right to foist such categories on the movement. Of course, it is very possible that woman can internalize oppression and can unconsciously be complicit in their oppression. Yet Barnett’s insight is instructive that the glass is half full where matters of gender are concerned (Barnett, 2018, p. 75). The Rasta brethren that I have reasoned with do admit that the movement in its infancy held to a rigid patriarchy such that women could not speak during services, but the dynamics have changed as Rastawomen now occupy prominent leadership roles in the various Rastafari organizations. Furthermore, recent movements within Rastafari, particularly in the United States, to raise consciousness about Empress Menen Asfaw not only as the wife of His Majesty but as Mother of Creation, are shifting the gender dynamics. The inaugural publication of the Empress Menen Chronicles: An African Woman’s Journal of History and Culture, edited by Asantewaa Oppong Waddie, represents an important step in “balancing Rastafari.” Rastafari talks about “balance” as a way of achieving gender complementarity. Rasess Jahzani Kush’s Blue Fyah movement seeks to bring attention to “the feminine divine as represented through the energy of Empress Menen Asfaw” (Kush, 2019, p. 65). Gender dynamics might be a sticking point, but the overall epistemological grounding of the movement is all about liberation.

The Sociopolitical Context of Epistemological (Dis)engagement

Rastafari epistemology manifested within and against the colonial milieu of the Jamaican society. The history of colonization in Jamaica was about the policing of knowledge, sites of knowledge production, and access to knowledge as much as it was about economic exploitation and European conceit. For most of the period of enslavement in the Americas, slaveholders made it a crime for African people to learn how to read. Enslaved Africans would often be severely whipped for reading, especially the Bible, because the White enslavers feared that by reading slaves would attempt to secure their freedom. Not all Africans were illiterate neither was literacy the only means to knowledge. Africans had their own ways of knowing. Proverbs, communication with the ancestors, esoteric information passed down through the generations, memory of home, and common sense (folk wisdom) constituted the epistemological system of enslaved African people. But the slaveholders also patrolled indigenous knowledge and knowledge production sites using the whip, the noose, and the coercive force of colonial law. The criminalization of African spiritualties such as myal and obeah throughout the British West Indies speaks to the White man’s fear and suppression of African people accessing and having knowledge.

Brian Moore and Michele Johnson argue that the postemancipation period (1865 and onwards) in Jamaica was about rooting out Afro-creole thoughts and behaviors by implanting a Victorian system of belief (Moore & Johnson, 2004). In this system of British cultural imperialism, schools, churches, the judiciary and other gatekeeping institutions became tools in the process of civilizing the masses. The importation of the cultus Britannica, with all its ritualism and pageantry, served to correct the backwardness of Afro-Jamaican culture by making them more British (Moore & Johnson, 2004, pp. 271–310). The program of British cultural indoctrination in Jamaica after 1865 attempted to regulate the thinking of the people and shape their consciousness. Afro-Jamaicans pledged allegiance to the British monarchy, considered Britain to be the motherland, and modeled an ethos that suppressed Blackness and Africanness. Only few Jamaicans challenged the British cultural imposition that dictated how Black people should think and what Black people should believe. The colonial elites labeled the Afro-Jamaicans who embraced traditional systems of knowledge such as obeah, revival, Kumina, and bush medicine as devilish, uncivilized, and seditious. The Rastafari process of reconceptualizing life and positing alternate ways of knowing was a process of epistemological self-determination. This epistemological self-determination is part of the process of maroongae, a movement away from the hegemonic control of ideas. Rastafari demonstrates this epistemological self-determination in several ways including the formulation of their own language that scholars refer to as dread talk (cf. Pollard, 2000, pp. 69–85). Dread talk differs from Jamaican or English language by the proliferation of “I” words. My article, however, focuses on a narrower epistemic shift related to reclamation of religion and spirituality. The focus here on Rastafari proclamation of a Black God and the Black Zion as a type of epistemological disengagement is important in the context of the Afro-Caribbean because Eurocentric religious ideas remain one of the strongest ideological entrapments for African people.

Epistemic Shift: A Black God, A Black King, A Zion

In a setting where to be modern, rational, and civilized meant situating oneself in an epistemological system structured on White supremacy, the architects of Rastafari disrupted the status quo by presenting an alternative worldview. The message of Rastafari constituted a disengagement from a system of knowledge (re)production that stemmed from the very plantation complex that most Afro-Jamaicans had come to revile. Rastas rejected every aspect of the cultus Britannica: monarchy, church, school system, politics. Rastafari saw these institutions as part of a Babylonian system. In the Rastafari overstanding (Rastas do not understand because “under” represents a position of being below), Babylon represents evil and oppression. Ennis B. Edmonds rightly argues that Babylon can be summarized as the metaphorization of historical atrocity, economic rapacity, mental slavery, and political trickery (Edmonds, 2003, pp. 46–50). Instead of bowing to the imperial political and religious order of the Jamaican society, Rastas channeled an African-centered consciousness. Rastafari embraced Haile Selassie I as the legitimate king. The Rastafari reference to Haile Selassie I instead of Haile Selassie is important in Rastafari legitimation of Selassie’s divinity. The name represents a shift from a chronological to the pronominal designation (Palmer, 2010, pp. 6–8). The throne name of His Imperial Majesty does not simply designate him as the first (Roman Numeral one—I) but as the I-ternal (eternal) One with whom the Rasta is now united. The emphasis on the “I” in Haile Selassie’s name underscores the epistemological and ontological value of the I-and-I concept. As King Ras Tafari, he was also declared divine and as the legitimate deity. Ethiopia became the ancestral home and sovereign kingdom for Black people. The Gleaner, the most prominent of the colonial newspapers, printed the first article about the emerging Rastafari movement which captured the main components of the Rasta theological orientation in 1933:

It is stated that during the last few months largely attended meetings have been convened at which seditious language and blasphemous language is employed to boost the sale of pictures of “King Ras Tafari of Abyssinia, son of King Solomon by Queen of Sheeba.” From the tale told to a reporter by one who attended one of the meetings, one would almost conclude that the sleek young Jamaican dressed in full black—vest and all—has lost his reason; but the fact remains, our informants assures us that the photographs are sold at 1 [. . .] . . .. Devilish attacks are made at these meetings, it is said on Government both local and Imperial, and the whole conduct of the proceedings would tend to provoke an insurrection, if taken seriously. (Blatant Swindle Being Carried on in the Parish of St. Thomas, 1933, p. 2)

Despite the procolonial stance and the anti-Rastafari claims, the newspaper article provides a good depiction of the ideological framework from which these early Rastafari adherents worked. The kingship of Haile Selassie I became a focal point for thinking about colonialism, imperialism, and domination.

Leonard Howell, one of the founders of Rastafari, published The Promised Key, in 1935 which outlined the ideology driving the movement and the epistemic framework which structured early Rastafari thought. Maragh and Howell (2001) preached that “Black Supremacy has taken white supremacy by King Alpha and Queen Omega the King of Kings” (p. 13). Black supremacy emerged as an alternative way of thinking about authority, knowledge, and value of the Afro-Jamaican population. For Howell, this represented the entire system of governance and social order. Whereas, the political and social elites reified the cultus Britannica as the frame of reference for most of the Jamaica society, Howell and other Rastafari adherents rejected the system altogether in favor of an Ethiopianist position. In this system of belief, Selassie was undoubtedly King and God. The logic at work in the Rastafari declaration of Selassie as royal and divine is that if a White man can be called king, then a Black man can be king too; if there can be a White god, why not a Black god? Barry Chevannes argues that Rastafari rejected the hegemonic system of values that uplifted Whites and degraded Blacks (Chevannes, 1998, p. 28). Echoing Howell’s rejection of the fetishization of Whiteness, reggae musician and Rasta Sizzla, declares,

I have no white god

Don’t teach me anything wrong

Can yuh white god save me from white man oppression?

I have no white god

Is just a blackness iyah

If yuh white god a bless you him no bless Sizzla.

For Sizzla, like many Rastas today, the Christian church (particularly the Catholic Church), Whiteness, and White supremacy are part of Babylon, this system of oppression. For Rastas, embracing Christianity and its “White” deity, is an overt embrace of Eurocentrism and an act of total complicity in Babylonian oppression of Black people. The embrace and practice of Christianity by a number of Rastafari complicate the rejection of Christianity as an element of the epistemological shift. Some members of the Rastafari community embrace traditional Christian denominations such as the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and even Seventh-Day Adventism while others are part of Afro-centered churches like Spiritual Baptists. Abuna Foxe’s The Church of Haile Selassie I, Inc. represents a Rastafari organization that incorporates Christian liturgical and sacramental forms. Rastafari often to qualify any embrace of Christianity by demarcating between Christianity “proper” and White Christianity. It is also true that several people who identity as both Rastafari and Christian allow the two to stand in tension without rationalizing what many other Rastas consider to be a contradiction of existence. Even though I make room for Rastafari members who also identify as Christians, we should bear in mind the fact that an overwhelming number of Rastafari consider Christianity to be a “White man’s” religion that should be rejected.

Rastas justified their proclamation of Selassie as God and King using the Bible, a traditional site of knowledge construction. The use of the Bible in Rastafari knowledge formation brings into question the degree to which Rastafari actually disengage from the colonial hegemonic systems of knowledge construction, organization, and legitimation. However, the Rastafari approach to traditional sources of knowledge, like the Bible, produces significantly different outcomes than those of the dominant society. Rastafari show a dialectical engagement with scripture. They embrace the Bible as an important source of knowledge for Jah’s people but, at the same time, they take a skeptical approach to the scripture. Rastas generally hold that White people corrupted the Bible when they translated it from the original Amharic language (Owens, 1976, pp. 30–38). Because White people perverted the Bible, Rastafari must apply what Samuel Murrell and Lewis Williams call the hermeneutics of Black superiority (Murrell et al., 1998, pp. 329–330). In this approach to scripture, Rastas correct the corruption created by White people by reading God, the bible characters, and biblical setting as all African. Rastafari challenge the caricature of a Caucasian Jesus by deploying texts like Jeremiah 8:21, Psalm 119:83, Daniel 10:6, and Revelation 1:14-15 to justify the Blackness of Christ.

Furthermore, Rastas have drawn an undeniable continuity between the biblical world and Ethiopia. One upshot of this continuity is the transformation of Emperor Haile Selassie I as the biblically promised messiah. An important piece of supporting evidence for the Bible validating Selassie as God is the Christological appellations ascribed to Emperor Haile Selassie I at his coronation on November 1, 1930. Barnett explains,

“The November 2, 1930 edition of The New York Times, reporting on the coronation of HIM Haile Selassie I on its front page, noted that he was crowned King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. The article indicates that the titles were bestowed upon him rather than being the result of self-proclamation. In fact, the title Haile Selassie I is argued to be prophetic in and of itself as it means, in Amharic, the power of the Trinity. (Barnett, 2018, p. 21)

Howell seemed to have been aware of this news report. In The Promised Key, he emphasized the divine titles, also adding “Elect of God and Light of the World.” Maragh and Howell (2001) also cited Psalm 72:9-11, Genesis 49:10, and Psalm 21 as texts that prophesied the coronation of Selassie and the homage that would be paid to him by world dignities (pp. 4–5). Again, Rastas make it a point to read against the grain. Their reading of the Bible unlocks the mysteries and exposes the textual corruptions created by White people. Coming to a knowledge of a Black king, a Black god, and a Black spiritual consciousness is part of systematic agenda of opting out of epistemological suppression.

Furthermore, the declaration of Haile Selassie I as the king and God of all Black people provides the ideological basis for the reconfiguration of space. Ethiopia (I-tiopia) becomes Zion, the land of redemption for Black people. All other places outside of Africa, including Jamaica, becomes Babylon. Ethiopia becomes the land of liberation for Rastas because the Bible prophesized it: “Princes shall come out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hand” (Psalm 68:31). For the Rastas, the long biblical genealogy of Ethiopia justifies its status as Zion. Here, we see significant ideological continuity among Rastafari, Ethiopianism, and Garveyism. Beyond the scriptural support, Rastas conclude that Ethiopia must be Zion because up to 1930 when the Rastafari movement emerged, Ethiopia had never been colonized. Some people in the Rasta community also believe that Garvey prophesized the crowing of a king by declaring “Look to Africa for when a black man shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near.” Outside of Rastafari oral tradition, there is no evidence that Garvey spoke those words, but correct attribution is less significant than what the idea instantiates (cf. Chevannes, 1998, pp. 103–104). By their experience of alienation and marginalization in the Jamaican society, Rastas came to the realization of Jamaica as Babylon. The reconfiguration of Ethiopia as Zion allowed Rastas to disengage from the dominant theological world of Jamaica where Heaven in the sky (the apocalyptic New Jerusalem) is purported to be the place of freedom.

The reconfiguration, however, does not remain on the ideological level of spatial logic. Some Rastas believed in a literal exodus (physical disengagement) from Babylon to Zion. The belief in repatriation to Africa was at the core of the Rastafari movement for the first 50 years of the movement. In fact, hundreds of Rastas repatriated to Shashamane in Ethiopia since the 1960s (Campbell, 2007, pp. 220–226; MacLeod, 2014, pp. 1–5). The financial cost of repatriation and the difficulties of acquiring citizenship and its associated benefits have challenged the prospects of physically disengaging from Babylon. Since the 1980s, the idea of repatriation has become more of an ideal rather than an ideological imperative. This is not to suggest that many Rastas have given up on the possibility. Some Rastas continue to see physical repatriation as fundamental to complete liberation. But others have accepted the spatial logic of reconfiguration and are building community around the idea of Zion in the present moment even as they aspire for the homeland. Perhaps we can take a cue from Chronixx’s “Capture Land” lyrics to understand the creative tension routinized in the Rastafari reconfiguration of space

Carry we go home, carry we go home

And bring we gone a east

Cause man a rasta man

And rasta nuh live pon no capture land

Carry we go home

An mek we settle and seize

Man a rasta man

And rasta nuh live pon no capture land

Cherry garden a capture land

Me tell you Shortwood seh dat a capture land

Los Angeles dat a capture land

And New York City dat a capture land

East some a di place weh you wah go live sweet

A teifing land there’s no title fi it

And some a these place weh you wah go live nice

A tief dem tief it in the name of Christ

Spanish Town dat a capture land

The whole a Kingston dat a capture land

Remember Portland dat a capture land

And all down a Trinidad dat a capture land

Barbados dat a capture land

Tell dem Bermuda dat a capture land

And tell Colombia dat a capture land

All round a Cuba dat a capture land. (Chronixx, 2014)

The idea of captured land (stolen and colonized spaces) highlights the oppression that created the Americas. The deployment of the language allows for Rastas like Chronixx to sustain resistance against the Babylonian state by constantly calling out the historical violence caused by colonialization. The discourse on repatriation and the reconfiguration of space are part of the process of epistemological self-determination.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, I attempted to demonstrate that maroonage can be conceptualized as a process of engagement with and disengagement from hegemonic epistemologies. I supported this theoretical conceptualization by exploring how Rastafari constructed an epistemological rooted in Afrocentricity, a sapiential tradition of knowing as opposed to believing, and liberation from White oppression. The articulation of a Black God, a Black king, and a Black Zion typify the extent to which Rastafari epistemology expands the theory of maroonage as a process of epistemological self-determination. My suggestion that maroonage is a process of epistemological self-determination or epistemological (dis)engagement is only a small intervention in the growing effort to move beyond maroonage as just a historical occurrence. The process of epistemological self-determination is maroonage in process.