the more things change ...

Faith Without Works?

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” – Karl Marx, Theses on Fuerbach, 1845.

“The diversity of cultural identity in South Africa is replicated in the church, religion and theology. During the apartheid years the church was politically active in a number of ways.” – Hennie Kotze and Cindy Lee Steenkamp, Values and Democracy in South Africa: Comparing Elite and Public Values, 2009

When Has Politics Been Separated From Religion? Can we honestly say that democracy and the rule of law, independent courts and any form of institution for nation building have ever occurred without religious collusion? This has been the consistent question as I have been ‘rising’ as a political and spiritualised being.

As a Rastafarian there have been countless moments where the reasoning has turned into a heated debate and even into tedious arguments. You see, people come into a spiritual congregation from various walks of life, while others may have been committed to political struggles; others may have simply converted from a multitude of faiths, traditional practices or a blend of all the above. This obviously creates some difficulties and even barriers in inter-personal and even organisational communication.

It has been customary for Rastafari not to vote or be involved in any form of active politics, yet paradoxically this is a movement that began as a anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and even anti-church sect lead by a mystical and charismatic character known as Leonard Howell*. This eccentric yet very studious Jamaican man shocked everyone around him and even around the world when early in the 20th century he declared that a certain Black monarch was God Himself and that Black people had to refrain from paying any respects to the queen of England, the church and any representations of White Supremacy.

Howell was making an anti-oppression declaration that was not unique at that time but because of the special circumstances of the time and the peculiar Nature of his chosen Messiah made quite a huge impression on the downtrodden of Jamaica many of whom became his disciples. Even those who did not ‘leave Babylon’ and follow Howell up to the hills to pursue a life with less dependence on commercialism confessed that indeed, there was something powerful and enigmatic about him. None ever said that what he was affirming was untrue. It was not simply a religion; he was talking about a God on Earth.

We will not get too deeply into the evolution of Rastafari and the history of Emperor Haile Selassie I, the King of kings of Ethiopia here, but suffice to say that the impact of the Rastafarian way of life, cultural forms and intellectual contribution is extraordinary. Not since the rise of Marxism and socialism has there ever been a socio-spiritual movement that is as dynamic, misunderstood and even rejected as the Rastafarians. Yet if left to thrive it has to potential to solve so many of the social ills that seem to perplex the world.

Today the Rasta faithful number among the millions and those who claim to love Jah Rastafari are uncountable. Yet there is also another stream that has been rising as the 21st century begins, those who have unlearned the pro-biblical foundations of this movement and prefer a new faculty of interpretation, one that locates the core of the movement within a pan-Africanist and anti-white supremacist paradigm. Here there are no Bibles or overt religiosity; just more affirmations towards a truly Independent and empowered Afurakan self.

While I could delve into in-depth and elaborate anthropological tales about the history of human civilisations, primordial forms of societal organisations and developments, what I aim to deal with here is the way the past remains ever relevant to the present and how we more often than not fail to learn from any of this. At least one can say that there are too few people who choose to see the signs and exercise the lessons that history teaches us.

History though can be unfaithful, especially when power and powerlessness are considered as aggregating factors. Power can be a form of dictatorship and those who possess it in whatever form it takes can sometimes wield it in ways that alter or affect the course of time either positively or negatively and more often than not it is the latter. Although it is said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, not all people who have possessed power have damaged the world, indeed some have given it a more human face, or at least made a great attempt to do so.
Religion has been known to possess many levels of power, and not just for those who adhere to it, cherish it and perpetuate it; the ones who may choose to ignore it, refuse it or disregard it can also suffer its consequences. Faith is actually an unstable and uncontrollable substance.

As human beings we essentially tend to bear each other’s weight even when we least realise it. Much of what we do has consequences on the lives of others and even upon the environment. One need not be conscious or unconscious of the effects of ones thoughts, words and actions – either way they still leave an impression on the world. This is where spirituality and power find each other battling for humanity’s very existence. But what about the person who has no care for neither power nor religion? I use the words spirituality and religious interchangeably here not because I think that they are the same thing, but to elaborate how psychology, mythology and human organizational culture are intertwined and any attempt to study or use them separately is a deviation, a delusion.

“Postmodernism suggests that major ideologies such as Marxist-Leninism were products of a period of modernization, and that in increasingly fragmented and pluralistic information age societies, the focus is on the individual rather than on alternative stratification (or ‘meta-narratives’) such as class, religion and ethnicity that might have universal application. The post-modernist school of thought argues that the focus should be on changing, rather than ameliorating or attempting to work through, the worst excesses of the world. The key villain in this formulation is the power relationship of the nation-state system supported by the neo-liberal/neo-realist orthodoxy, which the school seeks to deconstruct in the search for a more equitable formula for distribution of power and wealth.” – (Greg Mills – national director of the South African Institute of International Affairs - , Back To The Future? A Review of a Decade of International Relations Thinking, page 24, South Africa’s Foreign Policy 1994 – 2004 Apartheid Past, Renaissance Future, edited by Elizabeth Sidiropoulos)

Sometimes in order to build on a firm foundation, we have to destroy what is on it. We have level the field and we have to create new tools and innovate. Yet there is nothing stopping us from re-using some of the broken pieces to fashion our new construction. If we think that nothing is truly wasted, we can recycle, reuse without reinventing the same old building. When it comes to the basics of human survival, all we have is the ground beneath our feet, the water, and the air and then we have our stories. All of these are essential to how we live within a world of finite means. Our powers are infinite yet our resources are limited to time.