Marcus the Prophet!

Courtesy of Axum Veggie Café...

Know Your Rights!

Universal Declaration of Human Rights!

Blaze up the Challawah!

Haile Selassie is the Esteemed World Ruler!

PRESS RELEASE: Thank You from The Rastafari Coral Gardens Committee

The Rastafari Coral Gardens Committee thanks Speakers, Sponsors, Artistes, Well-wishers and the Rastafari Community for participation in the 52nd Commemoration of the atrocity against Rastafari 1963 “Bad Friday” and the recognition of Empress Menen Earthstrong Success.

Empresses receiving the Menen Award

Over 25 Rastafari Elders, Matriarch and Patriarch were given an entire day of royal treatment on the cozy grounds of Montego Bay Cricket Club , Jarrett Park on April 3rd 2015 at the annual Coral Gardens “(Bad Friday)” Commemoration. The day commenced with the Elders, many of whom are victims of the atrocities of the Coral Gardens incident being given medical checkups by Dr. Jodine Jacto - Tafari and the medical team, doing blood sugar test, blood pressure test, nutritional and other medical advises. Later in the afternoon the seated elders were treated to a scrumptious banquet of wine, cake, sip and food by the culinary team, a running lap of honor that turned into many laps were done by Jackie Roots and her Children on the ground during the banquet.


The event then turned its attention towards the recognition of Empress Mennen 125th Birthday and awarded certificates of recognition to nine Rastafari Matriarchs for their continued struggle in the development of the Rastafari Community. Special attention given to posthumous awarded Ivorine Walsh (Mama Ita) a great warrior for the upliftment of women and mother of popular reggae Artiste Queen Ifrica.




Patrons were moved by the messages from out of the Speakers Corner of the event. Maureen Minto, Clinton Hutton, Bunny Wailer, Ras Iya-V, Michael Barnett, Maxine Stowe, inspired the audience with messages about our struggle as Rastafari and pan-Africanist in the 21st century, reaffirming that the struggle continue even as it is passed from generation to generation.



The cultural presentations were filled with energetic performances from poets, singers, drummers and the empresses Sis Isis , Sis Isha and Sis Jackie Roots marshalled the proceedings with Jah Mike Sound System to a prompt after 2:00am closure making way for the spiritual Nyahbhing Chanting till around 8:00am in the Saturday morning.

Information about the Committee’s full range of programs and services will soon be available on-line as we seek to broaden our outreach and education of the public of our missions, aims and progress in the struggle.

The Rastafari Coral Gardens Committee is a Rastafari / Pan African non-aligned organization centred around the Coral Gardens Incident, attending to the Rastafari Community, elders and survivors of the atrocity also the youths.

Faces Of Africa - Haile Selassie: The pillar of Ethiopia, part 1 & 2

Madiba: Aluta Continua

“Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.” ― Nelson Mandela

The chronicle of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, and the variety of ways in which his story crossed paths with Jamaica is important to the island's history and that of our diaspora. It must become part of the story of the emerging self-belief of people of African descent. It is also an account of a human being allowing his best and noblest self to prevail.

It is easy and very plausible to tell Mandela's story without also speaking to Jamaica's story. But as a Jamaican it would be remiss of me not to mention, how this little nation, smaller than the population of Soweto and separated by thousands of nautical miles from the shorings of South Africa, prognosticated for the isolation of South Africa in response to apartheid from as early as 1961, three years before Mandela was condemned to Robben Island.

One of Jamaica's prime ministers, Michael Manley, was in numerous ways the designer of the sporting and cultural boycott of South Africa, which, incidentally, was more cogent than economic sanctions to that degree that the psychology of being a white South African was concerned. It is little wonder that Jamaica was one of the first two countries visited by Madiba after his incarceration. He visited Jamaica and Cuba in July 1991, with our beloved Winnie Madikize Mandela at his side, and they received honour from the Jamaican people.

He was a visionary, he had a grand project. He was political. He had an avid sense of strategic timing. Yet he wasn't Machiavellian. He was loved because he was neither Mugabe nor Blair. His vision ran through his life. He was noble. And, like a virtuous father, to be kind, he sometimes could be cruel.

He was distinguished and most especially he had an vast love for his people and for the project of establishing a non-racial and non-sexist South Africa.

Mandela vigorously defended of his loyalties to Iran, Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, all of whom supported him in his battles against South Africa's apartheid regime.

Mandela was on the U.S. terrorism watch list until 2008, when then-President George W. Bush signed a bill removing Mandela from it. (Obama is yet to oblige Marcus Mosiah Garvey similar courtesies.)

South Africa’s apartheid regime designated Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) as a terrorist organization for its battle against the nation’s legalized system of racial segregation that lasted from 1948 to 1994. (Marxist legal theory at work here: Karl Marx argued that the law is the mechanism by which one social class, usually referred to as the "ruling class", keeps all the other classes in a disadvantaged position).

Former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also described Mandela’s ANC as a “typical terrorist organization” in 1987, refusing to impose sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid regime. President Ronald Reagan did as well.

But Madiba was more than that, he was an African man of moral sense. He was a man of virtue. Moral excellence and moral sense that made him so acclaimed globally since he led a nation at a time when virtue and morality were universally absent amongst global leaders. He slammed Bush and Blair for the war on Iraq: 'What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight and who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.' For Blair he had these words: 'He is the foreign minister of the United States. He is no longer prime minister of Britain.'

He rose above acrimony and bitterness. He was unselfish and could reach out to his enemies and cross many divides. He was eminent because he was the great unifier. In many ways he was the designer of the New South Africa.

Mandela was neither magnate nor angel. Mandela wasn't unaccompanied in the grand journey of African redemption in South Africa. One only has to read Bertolt Brecht’s great poem, Questions From a Worker Who Reads, to know: 'Who built Thebes of the 7 gates? / In the books you will read the names of kings. / Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?...'

The fight to emancipate South Africa was a collectivized crusade. Furthermore it was the force of the most oppressed, the workers in the factories, the destitute in the community, blue-collar women and youth that ultimately carried the apartheid government, if not totally to its knees, at the least to talk terms and discuss the conditions of the end of their racial scheme.

All struggle requires a vehicle, a social movement with leaders that can present political focus, tackle the arduous strategic and tactical routes. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela's ANC came to prevail. Even so, Mandela was the first to recognise the parts played by a broad array of social movements that formed the fight for national liberation and the mass democratic movement.

And while Mandela was the one to start dialogue with the apartheid government, he tied himself to the collective leadership of the ANC. He took the first steps, he led but he did so as part of a collective. He was an organisational man. He took pains to explain he was a product of the ANC. He was a man of the black, green and gold – but he could reach beyond organisational limits.

He had this quality of being able to keep people together. Even his critics – and he had them – submitted to him at the end of the day as a moral leader. Without him I can't envision how the transition would have gone.

Aye, zillions of words will be spoken and written on Madiba’s legacy, now, in the months to come, next year and thenceforth. And we will scramble to do this legacy justice. The hardest part will be to catch the essential Mandela, going beyond myth-making whilst precisely evaluating the inconsistent nature of that legacy.

Since the present can't be interpreted without understanding the past, and not everything that is haywire with current day South Africa can be put at the doorway of Zuma or Mbeki. The negotiated resolution that effected a democratic South Africa on the cornerstone of one person one vote will be reckoned as Mandela’s greatest accomplishment. It avoided the scorched earth route of bloodletting which we at present see in Syria. And even so it's those compromises that are nowadays falling apart at the seams. The unharmonious social inequality (very Marxist in nature) that has given rise to South Africa as a country of two nations: one white and relatively prosperous, the second black and poor (I believe arx would have termed these the: bourgeoisie and proletariat respectively).

Social divide the hallmark of society today!

Mandela’s legacy will likewise have to be weighed by the reality that South Africa is more disunited than ever as a result of inequality and social exclusion. The rich are richer and the poor poorer. The great unifier could undertake great emblematic acts of reconciliation to pacify the white nation but because, by definition, this involved sacrificing the redistribution of wealth, reconciliation with the whites was performed at the expense of the large majority of black people.

Mandela was great, but not so great that he could bridge the social divide built into the 21st century capitalist economy that has given us the era of the 1 percenters. It is the ill-fated timing of South Africa's transition, coming about as it did in the period in which global power got inextricably tied into the global corporation, empowered through the conventions of neoliberal globalisation. Reconciliation necessitated the forsaking of ANC policy as vocalised by Mandela on his discharge from jail, 'nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industry is the policy of the ANC and the change or modification of our views in this regard is unimaginable.'

Nevertheless it's this forsaking of nationalisation, nationalisation representing the redistribution of wealth which was determined by the needs of reconciliation not just with the white establishment but with the international capitalist economy. His encounters with the international elite at Davos, the home of the World Economic Forum, convinced him that compromises needed to be made with the financiers. In the words of Ronnie Kasrils: 'That was the time from 1991–1996 that the battle for the soul of the ANC got underway and was lost to corporate power and influence. I will call it our Faustian moment when we became entrapped.'

It's exactly this capitalistic road that's verified such a calamity and which could ultimately demolish Mandela’s life’s work. To do justice to Mandela’s lifetime of commitment and sacrifice for equality betwixt black and white, the fight must continue.

It today has got to stress on subduing inequality and attaining social justice. In this fight the entire African Diaspora will require the greatness and sapience of umpteen Mandelas. Our brethren and sistren in South Africa require an organisation committed to marshalling all South African black and white for the freeing of the wealth of that state from the hands of a bantam elite. It will necessitate a movement akin to Mandela’s ANC, a social movement based on a collective leadership with the blended qualities of Steve Biko, Neville Alexander, Walter Sisulu, Albertina Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Fatima Meer, Chris Hani, Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Robert Sobukwe, IB Tabata and the many greats that led the battle for African liberation. But most importantly the African Diaspora and South Africa will need the multitude who take their fate into their own hands and become their own liberators.

Are these the things that Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela struggled to achieve?

Jamaica, Black Leadership and the Future!

It's been over a year since Jamaica 50 and sometimes I wonder have we forgotten who we are as a people and has the media forgotten who we are! 

There was a time when PanAfricanism was ripe in the island, with the likes of Walter Rodney and Rastafari played a role as the memory of the people, when people remembered their Africaness. There was a time when Michael Manley was in dialogue with Kwame Nkruma and Julius Nyrere. 

Oh come on, for goodness sake! We were a people that inspired Haile Selassie to come here, a man so revered he was on the cover of Time several times and featured in the national geographic and is even spoken of highly still today in modern literature such as Robert Greene's Strategies of War and Laws of Power, as well as Wings to Freedom by and Indian Yogi named Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath. Jamaicans are a people that inspired Nelson Mandela to come here. We produced Marcus Garvey one of the greatest black icons and PanAfricanist of all times. We produced Bob Marley who not only the world loved but Africans.

So why is it then that as Africa is now being looted and plundered by Europe and America, commercially colonized by China with a renewed 21st century thrust... Why is no one speaking out about it? Europeans are streaming into northwest Africa en masse, the huge U.S. airlift capacity may soon be necessary to keep the “Crusaders” supplied and the military industrial complex oiled and firing. African militaries are being cobbled to do the Caucasian’s bidding. 

The U.S. has almost practically establish a Somalia-like operation on the near side of Africa – with Americans at the helm. A sentiment echoed by even republican politician in the states Ron Paul who said "U.S. Action in Mali is Another Undeclared War".

All this while in America itself under the Obama administration the plight of Black Americans has worsened:  A recent interview on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press,” NAACP CEO and president, Ben Jealous, told the show’s host that black Americans “are doing far worse” than when President Obama first took office. “The country’s back to pretty much where it was when this president started,” Jealous told show host David Gregory. “White people in this country are doing a bit better. Black people are doing far worse.”  Dr. Julianne Malveaux of Your Black World recently wrote that the Obama Administration needs to speak out more about existing racial disparities and persistent problems in black unemployment.

The Black Diaspora has seen the US elect thousands of African American local and state officials and re-elect the first black president. But Obama seems to have proven just a symbol, symbolic and nothing more. Nothing real, nothing substantial, nothing progressive as it pertains to the plight of blacks.

The media is slow and unwilling to note that our black leaders are dithering. Floundering. Flailing... failing and falling even. Symbolism supersedes the fact that black leadership has few or no victories to boast for the seventies, the eighties, the nineties or the new century, apart from their own illustrious careers. 

No black leader is man enough to speak to or look at the fact that the war on drugs and the prison state sprung up in north America. The symbol of Obama over rides the fact that black unemployment remains at record levels, that US wages have not risen in thirty years and that the first black president apparently forgot his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour almost as soon as he made it. And what has been done for the Caribbean? Nothing. He continues an illegal international embargo on Cuba, he continues Gitmo torture in our territory, and turned down our request to exonerate Jamaica's hero and Rastafari Icon Marcus Garvey. 

Obama seems a symbol used to nullify and quiet the analytic black mind and voice. "Nigger shut up we got a black president now!" 1 black President... and 10 million  black persons still suffering. And let us not examine his neglect of his black family in Kenya, or his brother that lives in a Shanty Town.

Who in Jamaica or the media is willing to look past the fact that he is JUST a black president and willing to examine the fact that the black role model president conducts weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings in the White House basement at which he dispatches drones to murder and special forces to kidnap and torture in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and across the African continent. It matters not at all that the First Lady is a shameless flack for Wal-Mart, that the Department of Justice prosecutes whistle blowers instead of war criminals, or that black military and diplomats like Susan Rice are up to their armpits in African blood.

The black political class at home and abroad is utterly self-interested. It cannot begin to mobilize black communities to demand higher wages, a massive jobs program to relieve unemployment, a new paradigm of urban economic development that isn't just moving poor people out of neighborhoods and richer ones in. It seems our egotistical black intelligentsia can't begin to make these things happen because foisting itself and its own advancement off as “representing” the black oppressed masses is the beginning and the end of who they are and what they do. They are not truly about the black diaspora and its plight, they do not truly care to ease the existential condition of his brothers, neighbours and friends.

For them, the election and and re-election of Barack Obama is the end of black history. The be all and end all of our history. Addressing black unemployment, pervasive economic injustice, opposing the neoliberal agenda of privatization and austerity put forth not just by the black president, but by an entire layer of black thinkers are, in their language not pragmatic or “realistic.”

So if our black leaders have anything to say about it, more years of Barack Obama means more years of black silence and irrelevance on the issues that matter most to our communities; on jobs and economic injustice. It means black leadership will wring its hands and do nothing as American federal policies drive the militarization of Africa. Our politicians will continue to philander and spinelessly acquiesce to whatever old might Uncle Sam says, we will genuflect at his very whim. We will not be the bold humans, bold leaders that stood down injustice and untruths in the past we will be the bandwagonists of a new age much to our demise!

The Marcus Garvey Awards!

Saturday, August 17, 2013

7 Pm
East Lawn, Devon House.