“Rasta church is rising,” declared Alexander Munyukwi, Cherutombo Rastafari Priest, who wore a vestment stitched with the words The Black Christ. ‘’There’s nothing that can turn it back.”
The Rastafarian faith is indeed rising in Zimbabwe, where new census figures show a roughly 20 per cent increase in the number of adherents over a decade, to more than 29,000.
Norman Jesinayo, an expert in the Rastafari movement, says the number is more like 8 to 10 per cent of the population, since many Rastas disdain government initiatives and many would have refused to speak to census takers.
“Its contemporary appeal is particularly fascinating to young men, especially in the absence of alternative sources for their development,” said a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe
Growing appeal
Founded 81 years ago by descendants of African slaves, the Rasta movement’s growing appeal is attributable to its rejection of Western materialism, the scarcity of opportunities for young men in Zimbabwe and an increasing acceptance of it.
For the Cherutombo Rastafarian community, the Rastafarian faith is a transforming way of life, where Rastas strive to live a frugal existence uncomplicated by binding relationships to Babylon — the unflattering term for the Western world.
Life is highly regimented at the isolated retreat, cut off from most of the comforts of modern society. But it has a strong appeal for some, among them 27-year-old Adrian Duri, who joined the strict sect two months ago after years of questioning his Christian upbringing and struggling to find work as an upholsterer.
Passion for justice
“This place is helping me a whole heap. I’m learning every day, and things are starting to make sense,” the new recruit said in the shade of one of dozens of scrap-board buildings painted in the bright Rastafarian colours of red, green and gold.
Other Rastafari adherents follow a more secular lifestyle, marked by a passion for social justice, the natural world, reggae music and the ritualistic use of pot to bring them closer to the divine.
A melding of Old Testament teachings and Pan-Africanism, Rastafarianism emerged in colonial-era Jamaica in the 1930s out of anger over the oppression of blacks.
Its message was spread by the reggae songs created by musical icons Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear and others in the 1970s, and the movement has attracted a following among reggae-loving Americans, Europeans and Asians.
Marijuana
cademics believe at least 1 million people practice it worldwide. Besides the well-known ritual use of marijuana, Rastas endeavour to reject materialist values and practice a strict oneness with nature, eating only unprocessed foods and leaving their hair to grow, uncombed, into dreadlocks.
Most of its many sects worship the late Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, even though he was widely considered a despot in his native land and paid little heed to his adulation by faraway Caribbean people whose ancestry tended to be West African and not Ethiopian.
The worship of Selassie is rooted in Jamaican black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey’s 1920s prediction that a “black king shall be crowned” in Africa, ushering in a “day of deliverance.”
When an Ethiopian prince named Ras Tafari, who took the name Haile Selassie I, became emperor in 1930, the descendants of slaves in Jamaica took it as proof that Garvey’s prophecy was being fulfilled.
Investigations revealed that when Selassie came to Jamaica in 1966, he was mobbed by cheering crowds, and many Rastafarians insisted miracles and other mystical happenings occurred during his visit.
Reports shows that businessmen are cashing in on the faith, whose red, green and gold clothing and accessories earn millions in sales of T-shirts, crocheted caps and other items.
Marley’s music and the faith’s pot-laced mysticism has also been used to promote Jamaica as a tourist destination
Post published in: Arts