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Published: December 29th 2022
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The Rastafari Community Development Office of Mombasa began with an idea from elder Ras Simba for a Rastafari library…. He told me this idea of his back in 2007. I had no idea how to do it then, but now I have some clue. And here we are.
In those days, I was a mostly-clueless 25-year-old backpacker. I'd spent basically a decade of my life as a skinhead, in a maligned fashion cult, messing around with street gangs and punk bands while vibing to a soundtrack of Jamaican ska & reggae mixed with UK Oi! and US hardcore. Spiritually, I thought of myself as a Rasta, but I had no idea what that meant really. Politically, I was pretty much a softened Anarchist. I'd been to college and got a business degree. I'd started building a career in film & video, but I was pretty much lost. Before backpacking, I'd been going through a phase of excessive partying and looking like a stoned metal dude.
Now, in Kenya for the second time, I was completely fixated on my new fiance, her home of Africa, and learning more about Rastafari. I spent a lot of time at a place called
"Kwa Rasta" in the neighborhood of Mafisini (the place of the hyenas). The hyenas weren't there anymore, but they weren't long gone. The neighborhood was still mostly bush, with plenty of stick-and-mud huts and a few stone buildings scattered here and there. One of these was the Rasta Pub (Solid Rock) owned by Ras Franklin. This was the gathering place for a couple dozen Rasta bredren, amongst others, who would gather to watch live concert videos of Burning Spear, Lucky Dube, Culture, or Bob Marley projected onto the wall with the sound system blasting. We would smoke herbs out in the open there and when the right song came on, we'd all chant, "Jah Rastafari preserve our people!"
This is the place where I learned many things about Rastafari, about Jamaica and Ethiopia, about the Mau Mau struggles of Kenya, and words from the Rasta vocabulary like “Ital” and “Nyahbinghi”. This is where Ras Simba told me about his idea for a Rastafari Community Library. It is appropriate that this is the same location where we’ve put our office.
I had lost touch entirely with Simba over the years, and never figured out a way to help him
with his library idea. Then, on last year’s trip to Kenya, I had the idea to rent a small shop on the Haile Selassie Road in Mombasa--like a little phone kiosk that sells SIM cards and prepaid calling credit--but I wanted to take a little stall like that and sponsor a Rastafari Connections Center. There would be pamphlets and leaflets from various Rastafari organizations of the world, literature to inspire and educate the Rastaman and Rastawoman. There would also be a registry of contact information for various Rastafari organizations, mansions, and governments so that Rastas from Mombasa could reach out and make enduring connections.
The location on Haile Selassie Road would be nice, but I didn’t have the connections nor the budget to rent that space. What I was able to do was to rent a larger office at Kwa Rasta, and this offered the opportunity to house Simba’s library along with my Connections Center within the same location. In the past 15 years, Kwa Rasta has grown into a densely-populated urban neighborhood. Gone are the mud huts, baobab trees, and fields of grass. The name 'Mafisini" has been forgotten and even the ghosts of the hyenas have vanished.
Now Ras Franklin's little pub has grown into a small block of rental shops. I was able to rent one of those shops. We brought carpenters in to build a wall and some bookshelves, and hired painters to emblazon the interior with bright red, green, and gold. A beautiful mural of Haile Selassie I and Empress Menen was commissioned for the front doors.
And then the miraculous thing happened. Ras Simba, whom we'd both lost contact with for many, many years, resurfaced. Somehow Franklin was able to track him down. he visited him at his home in Mariakani and told him about the office and the library we had opened. Simba came to check the place out, they called me on the phone, and I offered Simba the job of running the place. Since then, the project has completely taken off.
The vision for the future is broad, but it starts small, here at this place now, with what we have at hand from our meagre resources. Since opening one year ago, we've registered with the government of Kenya as a Community Based Organization and been registered with the Kenya Libraries Association, who gifted us with many books
of general knowledge and esoteric subject matter. I've also shipped over or hand-delivered a large collection of books directly related to Rastafari: books on Marcus Garvey, African liberation, pan-Africanism, Haile Selassie I, and the Rastafari movement. Simba's Library is going strong. My Connections Center is there too, with a variety of literature from the Nyabinghi house, Ethiopian African Black International Congress, and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and links built to the Association of Rastafari Creatives and the ETHIOPIAN WORLD FEDERATION, INC. We’ve also added a community shop to the place, envisioned as somewhere that Rastafari creatives can bring their arts, crafts and other goods to be sold. Ras Franklin is now building his contribution: a medicinal bar for African herbal medicines and fresh fruit juices.
The children of the neighborhood love it. They come to read, color, and play the drums. Rastas from all around the Mombasa area make the journey to read and study for hours at a time. This thing is growing.
Enjoy the photos. Feel free to contact me if you're interested in supporting this effort. I'll write more blogs about it here and on my other websites. We have an Instagram page @rastafaricommunitydevelopment
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