RAISED TO THE POWER OF JAH

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KNYSNA

PART II

RAISED TO THE POWER OF JAH

It is hot, yet the young man is dressed in burlap. Head to toe in sackcloth. His dreads are wrapped in a rough conical turban of the same brown material. He wears a long tunic that ends below his knees, secured around the waist with a sash of the same material. It is an impressive sight. Almost stylish, some might say, a soft monochromatic blend of fabric and skin. I am thinking he might be an ascetic, a penitent member of some off shoot monastic wing of the Rastafri community.
“Don’t read too much into it,” Brother Paul says to me, a wise smile on his lips.
Brother Paul, who has arranged my home stay, has taken me to the “taxi rank,” but first he is checking with some Rastas who are sitting behind a table of traditional medicinal herbs and roots. There is a handsome dreadlocked man with glazed eyes and the burlap man. Paul first wants to see if anyone is going up to Judah Square, the Rastafari community, before he puts me in a mini-bus taxi by myself. No one is.
The ”taxi rank” is the official transportation hub of the black and coloured communities in South Africa. There is essentially no public transportation here and the black and coloured people have to travel significant distances from the townships to get to work. White people drive. Everyone else walks or takes minibus taxis, VW or Toyota vans loaded to the gills with passengers. In these ranks there might be fifty or more vans lined up and waiting to depart when full.
It’s evening, crowded, and everyone is heading home. Brother Paul finds the appropriate taxi and speaks to the driver to make sure I get out at the correct spot. He has explained to me the landmarks - the concrete wall with the painting of the two joined hands, “double sevens,” the little shop, the hill, then “just ask anyone for Sister Kerri’s house.”
But there is a young sister who is also going to Judah Square, and she becomes my escort.
“Sister, can you take him to Sister Kerri’s house?”
“Sure. Irie. Rastafari.”
“Hey Dennis, have a great time. I know you will.”
I sit in the front seat, next to the driver, and as we roll away I soon discover that I have a job. Apparently the person in this seat has the responsibility of collecting the money that’s passed up from the rear. Over my right and left shoulders hands appear holding coins, or bills wrapped around coins. I gather them in.
“Driver, three,” I hear someone say behind me as I accept a little crumpled bundle.
“One,” some one else says, handing me six Rand in coins.
The driver signals that I should just place the money in the depression on the dash. The man next to me helps. I suppose it all works out. Mostly it is Xhosa that is spoken, so I can’t be sure.
When we pull out of the taxi rank the driver maintains a loud, theatrical conversation with people on the street. Then we are on the main highway, then turning off into the township of Concordia, the wooden shacks and houses perched and terraced on the steep brown hills. We climb and climb, and I recognize the Dorothy Broster Home when we pass it. Then we stop and my escort taps me on the shoulder.
“Here,” she says.
She guides me down a steep hill, on a hard packed path. I slide in my flip-flops
“Careful, don’t fall.” she says, and I manage not to embarrass myself.
We pass the shop and then I jump down onto on a small paved street lined with block and wood homes. Again we veer off and descend a path, past a circular block building with windows in the shape of six pointed stars, then past a wooden building that my escort tells me is a crèche, a preschool. She then unwraps a chain from around a gate and we enter Sister Kerri’s yard. I hear the very loud bass-beat from a stereo.
“Shakasi,” she yells. “Shakasi!”
Eventually Shakasi emerges, light skinned and dreadlocked, handsome, about twenty years old. He has a slight Australian twang, because, in fact, his mother is Australian and he lived there before moving to South Africa with her some ten years ago.
He shows me my digs, a concrete block outbuilding with two bunk beds, a toilet, and a sink. Perfect. We go for a short walk to see the neighborhood, a small one-block stretch where about twenty Rasta families live communally. The house on the highest point has a magnificent view of the estuary below, although reaching it is a slightly hair-raising experience. The ersatz wooden stairs tremble. They are barely held together. One tread is missing altogether. The polite command, “Mind your step,” should be taken very seriously here, although the view at the summit is breathtaking.
Down in the street about 15 kids are whacking a ball around, throwing it against a concrete wall and chasing it down the road. They pay absolutely no attention to this white man. I am invisible to them. Visitors are apparently commonplace here. They immediately make me comfortable. Kids can do that.
And now I realize what I have been missing here in South Africa. This neighborhood experience, kids in the street, noise, banter. My experience, and I don’t think it is unusual for a white person living here, has been one lived behind walls and gates, races separated, almost Jim Crow-like, in this democratic, post apartheid society.
After Shakasi takes me back home I grab my camera and head back into the street. Immediately I run into Brother Zebulon and another Brother from Kenya. They are busy lighting up a fat one. Brother Zeb engages me as if I have been living there for years. I think he’s telling me that he has mixed the ganja with garlic. I think that’s intriguing enough, until I realize that he’s rolled the spleef with garlic skin.
“This way I don’t have to smoke all that paper. Rastafari.” he says.
Clouds rise into the evening sky.
Brother Zeb is the one who will take me on a walk into the nearby forest nearby in the morning. The Rastafari community apparently has an arrangement with South African National Parks to host and maintain the trail. I ask questions about the Judah Square Community in general, and I mention Brother Maxi, a name that was listed on the Knysna Tourism website as a contact person along with Brother Paul. I learn that Brother Maxi is the Chairman of the community. In a minute we are all sitting in the kitchen of Brother Maxi’s house, and I am getting one hell of an education - Rastafari 101, eventually proceeding to some serious graduate level discussion. Thick cumulous clouds gather at the ceiling. I am thinking it might storm. But then I realize it’s probably the garlic talking.
“Praise Jah, Rastafari. On the very first page of the Bible…” says Brother Maxi, as he opens the well worn bible that Brother Winston has magically (at least it seemed that way to me) retrieved from outside the front door.
The dreadlocked brothers quote passages from the Bible as loquaciously as Billy Graham, all backing up their very serious religious beliefs. And they are serious. For a white guy whose last sacramental experience left him confused and with unleavened bread sticking to the roof of his mouth, this Biblical moment is both wildly exhilarating and incongruous.
“Look here, in Psalms,” hack, hack, “It says…” hack, hack.
But who can argue with them. They just want to be left alone. And, according to the police, their neighborhood in Knysna is the only one with virtually no crime. It’s peace, love, dove raised to the power of Jah.
“The only law you need to obey,” says Brother Maxi, “is love.”
I also learn about their phenomenal reworking of word structure to avoid using negative sounding syllables. For example, they have removed the “hate” from appreciate, and now it’s “appreci-love.” They do not “con-tribute,” they “i-tribute.” They don’t read the bible with “under-standing” but with “over-standing.” And I learn that ganja is the key, the way to unlock the mind in meditation.
Brother Winston’s son, Reuben, shows up and joins us. He’s the burlap man from the taxi rank. Perhaps he has also taken a vow of silence, for he’s a very quiet soul.
Just as we are about to elevate the discussion to a post-doctoral level, Sister Kerri, the host for my home stay, shows up looking for me.
“I thought I might find you here,” she says, “I knocked on your door thinking you might be resting, then…”
“We’re going deep here,” I say.
“Rastafari.” Zebulon interjects.
The Rasta from Kenya is smiling a 400-watt smile.
Sister Kerri laughs, and then says, “I’m making some dinner. Just vegetables, nothing fancy. Join us when you want to.” Then she heads home.
Brother Maxi is standing professorially, elbows on the counter, and Winston and Reuben are still pillared next to the front door. Maxi’s wife is pulling two beautiful loaves of bread from the oven. The smells are heavenly. It seems their dinner is ready as well, so although Brother Maxi has invited us to retire for further discussion into his living room, I feel it is time for me to leave.
At Sister Kerri’s house she is preparing a vegetarian dinner in her simple kitchen. Shakasi is upstairs playing computer games with a friend. Sister Kerri entertains me with amazing stories about her life - about thirty years of traveling around the globe, hitchhiking, sailing across the Atlantic, her introduction to the Rasta way of life while in Barbados and Jamaica, She has chosen this way for spiritual reasons, although she no longer smokes the dagga. Then the power goes out.
We eat by candlelight, and outside the windows in all the other shacks and houses in the neighborhood glow softly.
I return to my little block home and fall into a deep unmoving sleep. When I awake in the morning the street below me is full of uniformed children on their way to school.
Brother Zeb is waiting for me when I walk up to the road. He is putting the final touches on his morning sacramental spleef, readying it for our walking meditation.
We set off down the road followed by his dog Tsunami, a black muscular mix of Pit Bull and Jack Russell. Two women are opening up their hairdressing shop that is housed in a shipping container. Soon we have stepped off the pavement and are walking through wet grass, onto a trail, then through a turnstile, and underneath an archway that welcomes us into the forest. It’s a wonderful “Nature Trail,” perhaps only a few kilometers in length that wanders through the tall pine trees. Some old clear cutting is still in evidence, as well as a poignant reminder of the once natural beauty of this place before development scarred the landscape. It lies hard up against the rough township, providing a wild contrast between what was and is.
The trail is hardscrabble in places, especially where wood has been used to cross lower wet spots or to provide footing in steeper sections. It reminds me a bit of the stairs leading up to that beautiful view in Judah Square. Rickety is the word. Brother Zeb steps lightly in front of me, testing out the wobbly and deteriorating logs, while occasionally pointing out medicinal plants.
We stop at a “picnic spot” at about the halfway point and Brother Zeb fires up his key to meditation. He talks about the beauty of the place, about how peace and love and Jah could supplant all the violence and hate.
“It’s not that complicated, you know what I’m saying man, the beauty is all around us. Praise Jah. Rastafari.’
We climb out of the forest and back into the township past a construction site where new houses are being built by the municipality. They are identical block matchbox affairs to replace the old wildly angled wooden shacks.
Back in Judah Square Brother Zeb tells me about the Rasta gathering that takes place here on the first Saturday of each month, in the round building that I saw when I first arrived. The Rastas get together weekly in different communities for “church,” to drum and chant and sing and pray, from about two in the afternoon until midnight.
“You must come and join us someday man,” he says.
Can you imagine?
This might be the region I’m looking for, because I can really overstand the message apprecilove the people.
After all, the only law you need to obey is love.
Irie mahn!

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Comments

[Christine]

Irie
What an awesome & peaceful community. If only everyone could adopt the law of love!