Bunny wailing RasTafari and African Resistance

07 Mar, 2021 - 00:03 0 Views
Bunny wailing RasTafari and African Resistance Bunny Wailer

The Sunday News

Richard Runyararo Mahomva

On 2 March international reggae icon, Bunny Wailer was commissioned to perpetuity to meet his lifetime master RasTafari. I am confident that his departure from the flesh also fulfils the divine premise of my walk to the end as an ardent follower of the RasTafari faith and way of life. As a RasTafari, my connection to the late, Neville O’Riley Livingston also known as Bunny Wailer has its origins in my early de-westernization pilgrimage and African consciousness.

As I grew to ask myself why missionaries established White religion in Africa and our nation in particular. To this day, one stubborn question lingers; why I was being forced to speak in English at school yet I am Black? Reggae music seemed to answer some of these questions while raising many more other questions about my being.

Ras Phethezakhe Jacob Ncube –a Priest in the Nyahbhingi Order of RasTafari blatantly argues; ‘‘Reggae is the new bible’’. So reggae music broadened my horizon towards a deeper spiritual enquiry journey beyond what became the encrypted life guidelines of the proverbial good book. From a tender age; through reggae music more thought-provoking soul-searching questions have been at the centre of my navigations with being born a colonial subject:

Why were we colonised? Who colonised us? What is colonialism? What does it mean to be colonised? In heightening my self-consciousness reggae also became a philosophical pathway to understanding that I belonged to race once ontologically vanquished and battling for self-liberation.

Reggae music has equipped my conscience as a pillar of all colonial resistance. To me, reggae musicians like Bunny Wailer symbolise the redemptive and the prophetical of Africa’s future. With Bunny’s transition, the decolonial archive has been robbed of a stalwart. Nonetheless, ‘‘Nobody can stop reggae’’.

Reggae’s footprint in my life was the affinity for Afro-intellectual rebellion which it produced in me. Meanwhile, at the age of 14 reggae’s philosophical flirt with my search for a decolonial identity pivoted me towards being RasTafari.

To my family, I became the renegade child –while to neighbours and schoolmates I was that weird, but an intelligent kid who needed whipping into line. That didn’t work! In resisting the expectations of society I gained acceptance.

True to this late Bunny Wailer prophesy was fulfilled: ‘‘…that’s the strangest man I have seen –just because he is a Rasta man. Carrying the mark of the Nazarene –just because he is a Rasta man’’. Henceforth, Bunny Wailer echoes my journey as a RasTafari as clearly affirmed in song: ‘‘Jah I have got to keep on moving’’.

As I look back, I can only be grateful to the life and times of reggae greats for musically arming me to be RasTafari and pan-Africanist. The more I took doses of reggae music and loads of slices of African philosophy I regained that lost sense of identity and black spirituality arrested by the dogma of the colonial toppling in the pages of liturgical scripts of mainstream religion. Reggae music produced an alternative reclaim of the self from the snares of religion alien to Africa and anything I deemed colonial.

Reggae music continues to influence my orientation of what it means to be both spiritual and intellectual. In me, reggae music produced a disciple of African decolonisation. Based on my RasTafari peregrinations, I can safely say every RasTafari is a Pan-Africanist, but not every Pan-Africanist is RasTafari. However, the philosophical integration of the RasTafari way of life and pan-Africanism is rooted in advancing Africa’s spiritual and material repatriation from the yokes of the timeless imperialist humiliation of the Black race starting from the plundering era of slavery and colonialism –presently metamorphosing as neo-colonialism.

In terms of African spiritual renaissance, Bunny Wailer proclaimed the long silenced divinity of Africa and Africans by non-secular faiths. The selectively forgotten Afro-ecclesiastic underscores the prominence of reggae music in locating Africa and Africans in the equation of creation and divinity at large. This follows the eminent erasure of Africa/ns from the memory of contemporary dominant religions’ teachings. The colonial self-importing power of its spirituality proliferated the obliteration of our own spirituality. Our spirituality has been defined from the locus of imperialist prejudice and standpoint which for far too long has only been denigrating Africans.

Against this prevalence of dismemberment, reggae music as advanced by its forerunners like brother Bunny provided and continues to embody recuperations of the decimated African soul. Reggae, thus represents the ageless spiritual yearning of Africans home and abroad for freedom. At the same time, reggae declares death to all oppression –whether Black or White!

In material terms, reggae is political; and anti-colonial to be more precise! Reggae champions Africa’s awakening from colonial trampling. As such, reggae amplifies the message of resistance and that message is made unequivocally clear by the lyrical: ‘‘Get up, Stand up. Stand Up for your Right’’. Bob Marley’s clarion call, ‘‘Africa Unite’’ speaks to the philosophically cradle of pan-Africanism.

The Negro-America roots and Caribbean nexus to reggae music provide a comprehensive mapping of the decapitating effects of slavery to the humanity of Africans. Through reggae, marshalled by Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, Bob Marley colonial injustices are questioned. The rise of other reggae outfits such as Misty In Roots, Israel Vibration, Abyssinians and other contemporary RasTafari discursive swingers like Morgan Heritage, Luciano, Chizediek, Capleton and Chronix among others emphasise the continuity of Africa’s endless liberation project. As a genre, reggae carries the ethics of Africa’s liberation and lambasts residues of colonialism in our political-economy.

Reggae can be viewed as a discursive signifier Africans’ determination to collapse the global imperialist asymmetrical order of power, being and knowledge. Through reggae music, the RasTafari serve as advocates of equal rights and justice with a pronounced bias towards the downtrodden African race across the world. More than any other institution of political and socio-economic decolonisation, the Rastafari creed is prepared to give up peace in the fight for unity, justice and equality of all mankind.

This is even emphasised by Bob Marley: ‘‘How good and how pleasant it be; before God and men; to see the unification of all Africans…’’

In seeking a balance between spirituality and materialism, the RasTafari is guided by the wisdom of the movement’s patriarch, Emperor Haile Selassie who once said: ‘‘Knowing that spiritual and material are essential, man should work for the equal attainment of both’’. In as much as reggae is the embodiment of the RasTafari philosophical, it is also founded on the pragmatic which demands a balance with the spiritual. The RasTafari affirmative of the spiritual and material entail the totality of the decolonisation project and the fundamentals of African resistance. Bunny Wailer is a musical epitome of that African resistance to imperialism.

Bunny Livingstone Wailer’s legacy remains intertwined with his fraternal link to Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. As such, Bunny, Tosh and Bob represent the theological trinity of the RasTafari movement as a philosophical point of departure for African liberation. Bunny’s music struck the balance between spiritual and political consciousness. Tosh was a radical anti-establishment bandit defying the colonial status-quo.

Being of mixed race, Bob was the symbol of racial integration. Unlike Bunny and Tosh, he deradicalised RasTafari theology through his all-embracing sing-alongs. Each one them (Bunny, Tosh and Bob) had a substantive leaning to the thematic pillars of the RasTafari creed. In that respect, they monumentalise the philosophical –if not the theological trinity of the RasTafari movement. The late reggae star’s relationship with Bob Marley predated the establishment of the legendary roots skanking trio, The Wailers.

Bunny was around nine years old when his father, Thaddeus Livingston, began a relationship with Marley’s mother, Cedella Booker. This means that Bunny and Bob were raised as brothers in the same house in the west Kingston community of Trench Town in Jamaica.

Of note, Trench Town is the home of countless reggae music. It was in Trench Town where Bunny and Bob met Winston Hubert McIntosh, who later came to be known as Peter Tosh.

To the Rastafari and Pan-Africanists like myself, Bunny Wailer is just more than a reggae idol, he is a spiritual and ideological Godfather. He will be forever missed. However, my comfort is girded on the Nyahbhingi Chant verse: ‘‘One bright morning when my work is over I will fly away home to Zion’’. Again, I am confident that when ‘’Jah gather the lamp of his children –all the pure one and the bright gems of his crowd’’ I shall meet Bunny! The reggae icon was born on April 10, 1947.

Richard Runyararo Mahomva (BSc-MSU, MSc-AU, MSc-UZ) is a Political-Scientist with an avid interest in political theory, liberation memory and architecture of governance in Africa. He is also a creative literature aficionado. Feedback: Twitter: @VaMahomva & Email [email protected]

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