Black Aotearoa: Sketches of a Global Decolonial Imagination

Robbie Shilliam

Tēnei te mihi atu ki te ngākau kaha o ngā tāngata o Xamayca.

This document is a sketch of a project that I have been working on for the last couple of years. It is a sketch because I don‟t have all my sources and resources with me here, where I am writing this, at the Centre for Caribbean Thought UWI. Much of what follows is retrieved from my memory. Therefore I am not referencing in the standard way and so this document should not be cited for this reason. It is also a sketch because there is much more thinking that must be put into this project and in what follows I am collating some of my thoughts rather than presenting a finished argument. Moreover, I am taking this opportunity to relate my thoughts and sketches directly to the historical struggles of the African Diaspora in Jamaica and the Caribbean at large in order to affirm the global importance of ideas and practices that emerge not from big continents but out of “small islands”. So this is the spirit in which I am sharing this work and I hope it will provoke further thought.

The working title of my project is Black Aotearoa, Aotearoa being the Māori name for – “land of the long white cloud”. But why “Blacken” a set of islands so far away from the Caribbean? Let me try and explain, firstly by stringing together a couple of stories that run over the course of 150 years.

In 1840 Māori chiefs (rangatira) from many tribes (iwi) signed a Treaty at Waitangi with the British crown. To the Māori the treaty was supposed to govern the wayward actions of the British settlers by placing Māori under the protection of the British Queen but allowing Māori to continue to govern themselves and their land through their own spiritual, economic and political practices. To the colonial governors and settlers, the Treaty meant something quite different: Māori had ceded their sovereignty – persons, lands, practices, souls - to the British. Just a few years later it started to become clear to Māori that the spirit of the Treaty was not being honored. Having translated parts of the Old Testament of the most holy book of their new neighbors, the Pākehā (whites/Europeans), some Māori started to identify the British forces with Babylon and themselves with the Biblical Israelites.

By the 1860s a full-on civil war had erupted over land encroached upon by the British settlers. One response by Māori was to try and unite the tribes into a King movement, the Kīngitanga, which had its own propaganda mouthpiece in the form of a newspaper. Over a number of issues the writers relayed the story of the Haitian Revolution, told to them by a French Catholic priest. The Haitians, the newspaper reasoned, had formulated the correct response to European invasion. Therefore the writers suggested: “Wait a little and perhaps the Rangatiratanga [chieftainship] of this island will be like that of Haiti; possessing goods, authority, law ... Perhaps God will protect his black skinned children who are living in Aotearoa”.1

One of the most (in)famous historical personalities of the civil war in the East Cape of the North Island was Te Kooti who was (mistakenly) arrested for activities against the Crown and transported with others to a prison settlement on the Chatham Islands, at least 500 miles east into the Pacific.2 There, Te Kooti contemplated a biblical vision whereby he would lead the whakarau (prisoners) – the Israelites – out of Egypt – Wharekauri (the Chatham Islands) - back to the land of Canaan - the North Island. Te Kooti led a guerilla warfare campaign against the British forces for many years following.

In the mid 1980s in Ruatoria, a small town on the East Cape, a group of disaffected youth left their gang lives to honor the calling of Te Kooti, a calling revealed to them in part through the teachings of Rastafari and the divine image of Haile Selassie. They fought a protracted – and sometimes violent – battle with local Pākehā, local authorities, and local Māori of their own tribes in the attempt to reclaim land upon which they might live self-sufficiently and autonomously.3 Here is how Hone Heeney, the present rangatira (chief) of the Ngāti Dredd4 understands the calling:

“The Baldheads decided to plant all our whenua [land] in pine trees, plantation work. Cutting down all our native trees, making our lands desolate … They, the Baldheads, set it up so we are the „niggers‟ working their „cotton picking pine plantation‟ … We laid our hands down on the table for the War-God-Jah-Tumatauenga, colonization, western imperialism, them all be Baldhead words of slavery, standover tactics. It is our honor and glory to go on the battlefield under the banner of Jah, to fight against the dark forces invading and consuming our holy land, Aotearoa.”5

1 This story has been retrieved by Lachlan Paterson at the University of Otago. 2 The image is of Te Kooti‟s flag; it is assumed that the letters, WI, refer to the Holy Spirit (Wairua Tapu), the crescent moon to a portent of a new order (tohu) and the fighting cross of Archangel Michael. 3 The image is a sketch I found by Hone Heeney. Te Ahi a te Atua means the fire of god (2 Kings chapter 1). Fire has many connotations in both Māori and Rasta cosmologies. Compare with the image reproduced below by Tigilau Ness. 4 Ngāti is not natty in New Zealand patois. In the Māori language it indicates the name of a tribe. 5 This is from a book called Moko - Māori Tattoo. I don‟t have the full reference on me. The picture is of a Ruatoria Dredd from back in the 1980s. They were/are expert horse riders. ***************

Two sets of islands in two different oceans: one populated by indigenous peoples who then experienced encroachment and attempted genocide by European colonizers; the other experiencing a mostly successful genocide visited on the indigenous peoples by colonial forces then to be mainly populated by enslaved Africans as well as indentured Indians and Chinese. Looking on the map one would expect little to connect the two groups of islands. Nevertheless, maps can be deceptive. For example, the breadfruit that is a staple in the Caribbean was brought there by Captain Bligh from the South Pacific to be an expedient source of calorific intake for the burgeoning enslaved populations: that is the real politics of the Mutiny on the Bounty, not the mutiny itself!

Indeed, stories exist in many Pacific Island locales, including Aotearoa NZ, of enslaved Africans arriving on French and American commercial and whaling ships, jumping ship and fleeing into the hinterlands to throw themselves on the mercy of native tribes. We are not talking massive and sustained population exchanges here. Nevertheless, just like the Maroon communities in the Caribbean, the search for liberation brought indigenous and African enslaved peoples together in a social and marital weave. And just when it seemed that the struggle against slavery in the Atlantic was approaching the ascendant, so the practice started in the Pacific. From the 1860s to the end of the century, Melanesians - which to the Europeans were the blacker, more “negro” looking (hence “savage”) Pacific native as opposed to the lighter, less-savage Polynesians - were “blackbirded”, stolen and shipped away to work the sugar plantations of Fiji and Queensland Australia. Additionally, the colonial governing class was a transnational one itself. Governors of Aotearoa NZ also worked in South Africa, India, and the Caribbean. For example, Edward Eyre, the Governor who executed George William Gordon for his part in the Morant Bay Uprising, had previously served as Lieutenant-Governor in Aotearoa NZ. Incidentally, I would contend that in the British colonial circuit of the 19th century, such transnationalism allowed the word “negro” or “blacks” - and its pejorative “nigger” - to be circulated around the world to apply to all “incalcitrant” native populations… and, perhaps, landscapes.6

The point is that Euclidian maps, stripped of story and subject, do not allow us to glean the deep set of global linkages and inter-relations that were created or re-forged through - and increasingly against – colonialism; and neither, perhaps, does a geographical imagination that sights connections only in terms of material relations of cause and effect. As the above stories would have revealed, the anti-colonial / de-colonial imagination – that which spies out the possibilities and shapes of liberation – is, and has for a long time been, a global one... global enough to match the global material structures of European colonialism. This imagination - philosophical, aesthetic, affective and ideological - binds together fates in a way that makes it utterly inadequate to understand the thought and experience of (post-)colonized subjects only in terms of their relationship to the colonizer. While this relationship is, of course, a fundamentally powerful one, it also takes on a fantasy-like security for the Western Academy. In truth, the slave/master

6 Search on google maps for “Niggerhead, Canterbury, New Zealand”. Niggerhead is a slang term for a tussock grass. relationship has never constrained the imagination of (post-)colonized subjects and the practices that emerge from it, a global, imaginative, creative, searching, repairing and re- integrating imagination.

My working title, Black Aotearoa, supports the legitimacy and authority of this kind of global decolonial imagination. My intention is not to provide another easy narrative of how we have always been globalized. I am far more interested in valorizing the particular situatedness of lived experience under colonial rule and at the same time exploring the global coordinates of the imagination that seeks to decolonize this experience. Neither am I interested in providing some easy descriptive combination of the local and global (i.e. glocalization – ugh!), but rather, I want to draw out the epistemic tensions, forces and empirical openings that emerge from decolonial thought and practices situated in lived experience and in a global imaginary.

I must caution, though, that this project is itself embedded in a contentious politics of knowledge production. The majority of writing on Māori history, politics and culture by Māori is not picked up in the Western Academy in order to circulate as part of knowledge production on the colonial condition. (One notable exception is Linda Tuhiwai Smith). I think that there are numerous reasons why this is the case, ranging from a focus by Māori on their own problems to the greater challenge to the Western episteme of incorporating indigenous cosmology rather than, say, the notion of Creolization or even, nowadays (“after the fact”), . In other words, in pursuing my project I am abundantly aware of the issue that by rendering Aotearoa “Black” I am at risk of “advertising” these lived experiences to the Western Academy for their consumption. But for me, emphatically, the experiences and imaginations of Māori and Pacific struggle have integrity and legitimacy foremost in terms of their own situatedness. My humble contribution to supporting their integrity and legitimacy is to consider how global (and hence sophisticated, creative and powerful) the imagination that has driven them has been.

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What I will do now is sketch out empirically some ways in which the struggles of Africans and the African Diaspora were creatively integrated into the struggles of Māori and Pacific peoples in Aotearoa NZ during the tumultuous years of the 1970s and 80s. Along the way, I shall consider some conceptual issues and challenges that arise from these sketches. I will ultimately pay a bit more attention to those imaginative – and personal - connections that were made directly with the Caribbean.

It is first necessary to place this global decolonial imagination within a particular historical conjuncture in Aotearoa NZ defined by a) the acceleration of rural to urban migration amongst Māori (begun in earnest with the 1940s war economy), b) increased immigration of Pacific Islanders into the same urban areas, and c) a set of external shocks to the economy, especially oil price hikes and the loss of a protected export market with the entry of the UK into the EEC. In this conjuncture, Māori and youth were confronted with a) bleaker urban futures b) a sense of removal (if not necessarily a categorical separation) from the everyday life of their filial cultures; and c) an increased racism amongst Pākehā, brought on by the immediate presence of “natives” in “civilized” areas and encouraged by a resurgence by government of assimilationist policies. Much of the discontent amongst urban youth was summed up in a common injunction: “we don‟t want to be brown-skinned Pākehā”.

Youth in urban areas were not categorically disconnected from the cultures and practices of their parents or grandparents, which existed in the hinterlands of rural Aotearoa NZ or back on the Pacific islands. But they were at least one generational step dislocated from these cultural hinterlands, and this was a serious problem when youth were confronted head-on with a racist society and state apparatus. This conjuncture therefore prompted a resurgent quest for cultural self-determination by youth in Māori and Pacific communities, a quest that was in many ways buoyed by the contemporaneous global surge of liberation struggles, and one that covered, as we shall see, a broad spectrum of political engagement from the immanent social justice demands of the Black Power gang to the community activism and political agitation of the Polynesian Panthers to the pre- eminent pressure group, Ngā Tamatoa.

Crucially, it was a quest that was neither an entirely conservative nor entirely modernist one: the ends of preserving or reclaiming indigenous custom/culture required innovative means, specifically a radicalization of the prevailing modality of patient reform through which elder Māori and Pacific Islanders made their presence felt in the public sphere of (post-)settler society. Inevitably, the new youthful initiatives to resist racist assimilation produced generational cleavages even though some had precursors in the 50s and 60s and even though the new activism was supported by some elders. It was in the interstices of the old and new that the youthful imagination was part fed by the struggles of the African Diaspora, especially, initially, by the literature and news on the . To put it another way, a silence had been produced in that moment where youth wished to reclaim a heritage of self-integrity but in calling to the guardians and gatekeepers of that heritage by and large were responded to in a register that was not cognate to their lived experience. In this silence the distant voices of Black Power resonated powerfully.

Ngā Tamatoa (the young warriors) were a predominantly Māori – and predominantly educated – youth pressure group that emerged to fill what they perceived to be a vacuum in Māori leadership in 1969. They were influenced first and foremost by the struggles of their tīpuna (ancestors) but also, variably, by leftist thought, and anti- imperial thought. Moreover, key figures in the movement were politicized through reading the canon of Black Power, e.g. , Muhammad Ali, , Huey Newton, , and Angela Davis.7

7 The picture shows some of Ngā Tamatoa at Waitangi and, on the next page, on the steps of Parliament. Note the wearing of Afros which probably first came into fashion through the reception of Jimi Hendrix. This politicization, I would suggest, had a practical effect in promoting the kind of public displays of radical opposition effected by the young warriors and pursued through the language of “rights”. Ngā Tamatoa are famous for re-starting direct protest at the annual Treaty of Waitangi celebrations and for part- organizing (and certainly radicalizing) the Land March of 1975. At the time, the white media made much of the comparison between the violent race relations in the US and the possibility that groups such as Ngā Tamatoa were fermenting a break down in the apparently heretofore harmonious race relations of Aotearoa NZ: “brown power” effectively became an accusation.

Black Power was more fully embraced as a political ideology by The Polynesian Panther Movement, founded in inner city in1971 and transformed into the Polynesian Panther Party in 1973. The Panthers were started by a group of young Pacific Islanders (from various Island ancestries) and a few Māori who had previously belonged to gangs such as the Nigs (“nigger” was a standard insult visited upon Māori and Pacific youth at the time). Receiving news, pamphlets and books on the Black Power movement from their relatives and friends employed in the merchant navy, the youth were politicized into forming their own chapter of the Panther movement.

The Polynesian Panthers used the ‟ 10 Point Plan as the basis for their struggle against racism and for social justice. However, they integrated the Panther project into their specific Aotearoa NZ context so that a) “inter-communalism” incorporated the task of connecting back to the island cultures of their parents against the assimilationist currents prevalent in urban NZ and b) the gun was dropped as a viable or desirable tool for revolution against state forces that were violent but not automatically murderous.8 In these ways the Panthers challenged discriminatory practices in issue areas such as unequal pay, unsatisfactory working and housing conditions, education, police harassment, legal rights, immigration, and prison visits for families. At the time many Pacific Island youth were supporters of Māori political initiatives such as the Land March and the Bastion Point occupation by the ancestral people of that place, Ngāti Whātua. Indeed, the Panthers often acted as “security” for these events.

8 Miriama Rauhihi Ness, a community worker employed by the Panthers, sits under the famous poster of Huey P. Newton. Over the page, the Panthers march in Auckland against imperialism. A documentary on the Panthers is due out soon, directed by Nevak Rogers. The last official “outing” of the Panthers was during the Springbok Tour protests of 1981 (see below). Nevertheless, many Panthers and their offspring nowadays occupy influential places in law, education, politics and the arts, and as Chairperson Will Ilolahia maintains to this day: “once a Panther, always a Panther”. During their heyday there were only tentative links between the two Panther parties; recently, however, the Minister of Culture for the Black Panthers, Emory Douglass, visited Auckland and connections have been re-forged.

There was another articulation of Black Power in Aotearoa NZ in this time period, and one that in some ways is the most challenging to interrogate. It lies at the cusp of social vs political identity, amongst that group of people disparagingly called the lumpen, but who often call themselves the sufferers. It also lies at the cusp of rebellion and resistance, between rude bwoy and Rasta. I am talking of youth gangs. Māori gangs have become infamous worldwide, mainly through the film Once Were Warriors that, some might say, explores the struggles of urban indigenous lives through an LA aesthetic. Increasingly it has become acknowledged that Māori gangs are specific in that they are effectively an attempt to bridge the loss of whānau (extended family) structure suffered under the pressures of urban poverty and alienation.

In 1970 Rei Harris and others formed the Black Bulls which transmuted into the Black Power. The change in name is significant in so far is it posited an identity linked to the pursuit of social justice and reparation of past (colonial) wrongs. The gang patch has the Black Fist as a central element.9 Certainly, the Black Power were not an overtly political pressure group like Ngā Tamatoa, nor were they a social activist group like the Polynesian Panthers to the extent that the those groups were formed directly and purposefully to pursue social justice with a membership that joined for that precise reason. Much of the Black Power‟s history – like the history of all gangs in Aotearoa NZ - has involved struggles with alcoholism, block rape, criminality, violence, and now, increasingly, methamphetamine abuse. However, its purpose has always been to embrace the lost and downtrodden, not the ideologically driven. Nevertheless, the Black Power leadership has acted directly politically, supporting, for example, the first Māori political party to enter electoral politics, Mana Motuhake, and most recently filing a claim to the Waitangi Tribunal (the body that in the main partially adjudicates claims to the illegal loss of land by tribes).

Eugene Ryder, who has driven the claim, says that it is not about monetary recompense but to acknowledge that the gang problem was a direct effect of colonialism: “the object of the claim is education as to why we're in the position we're in”. Being as the vast majority of Māori now live in urban areas and not their turangawaewae (ancestral places to stand) it could be conceived that this claim is perhaps the most challenging of ALL

9 See picture. Mangu Kaha means Black Power/Strength claims to restitution for breaches to the Treaty of Waitangi. As the cartoon here shows, most of society sees it as laughable – a ticklish colonial mentality I would say! I am not aware of any study that seriously engages with the thought and experience of the Black Power (and other Māori and Pacific gangs) as legitimate resources for understanding the colonial condition rather than as pathological expressions of community ills. Numerous initiatives have been taken amongst Black Power to build the self-integrity of its members back up by re-embracing Māori customs and practices. I am not denying nor would I want to ignore the destructive activities of much (most?) gang activity – to its members, families and friends foremost and especially women (see the recent book by Pip Desmond entitled Trust). Nevertheless, to paraphrase Walter Rodney, the brothers and their sisters at least deserve some groundings.

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The spiritual-political influence of Reggae and Rastafari upon Māori and Pacific youth in this conjuncture is rarely taken seriously by New Zealanders. The mainstream view is that this influence is narrowly aesthetic/musical. Many Māori will not bat an eyelid to it, considering it simply to be “their music”, or as one friend said to me: “yeah, I guess we did kind of take that over as our own thing, didn‟t we?” I believe that, even if my friend is not directly aware of it, this latter response can be sighted as the exposed layer of a deeply profound movement of the psyche and soul driven by a global imaginary of liberation struggle.10 Additionally, those who do know something of the Reggae/Rasta influence upon Aotearoa NZ will usually assume that it started with Bob Marley‟s famous concert at Western Springs, Auckland and resulted in the establishment of the 12 Tribes house in the city. These events/occurrences are extremely significant; however, there is a broader, deeper, less “spontaneous” history in which they are situated.

10 The picture shows the ites, gold and green flying at the One Love Concert held annually on Bob Marley‟s birthday which happens to be the same date as the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. The day is a national holiday for the later reason, and celebration of Bob is folded into this remembrance. After all, why was the ground set for such a meaningful embrace of Bob in 1979? Why was he met at the airport by a Māori welcome ceremony un-sponsored by officialdom?11

My considered guess is that Reggae and Rasta really started to enter Aotearoa NZ in force between 1973 and 1975. Transmitters included Jimmy Cliff and the film, The Harder They Come; the sending of 7 inches and other paraphernalia to folks back home from folks in the UK; the musical content (of course!), especially lyrics from Culture, Burning Spear and Marley and the Wailers; and increasingly, a smattering of books including Babylon on T’in Wire and Rastafari: A Way of Life. I would venture to say that these sources came not just via the UK, but also Australia. In any case, in the historical conjuncture described above – in that silence where elders did not talk to youth in an understandable register - these African diasporic critiques of colonial oppression (400 years), social justice for the urban “sufferers” (get up, stand up), and recoveries of a non- assimilated self in a concrete jungle (the roots man) resonated directly with Māori and Pacific Island youth at a deeply affective level.

I want to focus for a moment on the Māori reception. One person related to me their encounter with Rastafari. They had been born in their ancestral land, but during childhood had to move to Porirua, an industrial urban corridor up the road from Wellington the capital city. Suddenly, there was no sustained access to Grandpa, who related to the child his heritage and sense of self-integrity. On the other hand, Mum and Dad were placed under heavy stress spending long hours working at the meat freezers, merely surviving in a situation that inevitably resulted in break ups and alcoholism. No one was providing him with the means to nurture himself in an unforgiving racist environment. In fact, it became, in his mind, a choice of either culture or survival… until he heard Bob Marley‟s lyrics. And then it became clear that survival was itself a culture, and that in order to survive one had to have a cultural sense of self-integrity. Ultimately, the Jamaican Rootsman provided this person with the means, inspiration and urgency to reconnect to his own Māori roots.

Indeed, amongst many Māori, Bob Marley is known as “Uncle Bob”. This is not just a euphemism, but is meant as a genealogical connection. I have traveled to a couple of fairly remote places and have seen huge Bob pictures and posters up on walls in prime position in homes. One of Māoridom‟s seminal contemporary musicians, Ruia Aperahama even recently undertook a pilgrimage to Jamaica to thank Bob‟s family for the works of their father in effectively saving Ruia‟s people. Ruia presented to the daughter a very special gift that effectively marks Bob as a hallowed and almost mythical ancestor of Māori. The “uncle” affiliation is not casual, but very profound.

In talking about the early receptions of Reggae/Rasta I think that it is important to note the special place that Takapuwahia Pa, in the urban corridor of Porirua, holds. A Pa, traditionally, is a fortified place. However, when in the 1840s the British captured and humiliated Te Rauparaha, the rangatira of the local Ngāti Toa tribe, the settler town of Porirua effectively grew around their Takapuwahia Pa. Thus by the 1970s, the young

11 For a video of the welcome go to http://web.bobmarley.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070723&contentid=12288 Māori of the Pa lived on their ancestral ground that was now enclosed by a racist urban environment. Perhaps these were the ingredients for a far more immediate and relentless struggle against Babylon‟s colonial mentality that prompted a connection to Rasta in Aotearoa? I have been told by someone who was himself absolutely instrumental in propagating Rastafari in Aotearoa NZ that the first dreadlock he ever saw was Alma Rei from the Pa.12 The person that I mentioned in the paragraph above was himself inspired to take the Rasta message of Reggae seriously by the people at the Pa.

The Pa, and the Māori communities of Porirua more generally, were and still are host to a lively and continuous tradition of roots Reggae music including: Alma‟s band, Chaos – perhaps the first Reggae band in Aotearoa NZ circa 1977/8; in the early-mid 80s, Sticks and Shanty (named after Thai Sticks and urban shanty‟s of the time, especially Soweto), and Dread Beat and Blood (name inspired by Linton Kwesi Johnson); and more recently, Ngatoto.

Sticks & Shanty

David Grace from Dread, Beat and Blood

Ngatoto

12 The news article from which this picture of Alma is sourced is from, I think, 1980.

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At this point, I want to spend a bit of time discussing a tour of Aotearoa NZ in 1979 by a London-based Black Theatre group, Keskidee, who had with them a Rasta band, Ras Messengers. (Linton Kwesi Johnson apprenticed at the Keskidee centre as librarian in the early 1970s.) The New Zealand organizers of the tour called their collective Keskidee Aroha, aroha being the Māori word for compassion and empathy. Keskidee toured the North Island in June 1979, just a month after Bob‟s famous Auckland concert. They visited community centers and marae (traditional Māori meeting places). In this respect, the tour was the first substantive, prolonged and face-to-face encounter of Rastafari and Māori and Pacific peoples in Aotearoa NZ.

The Keskidee Aroha collective was composed of individuals who collectively represented some of the key dynamics and developments in the social history and political activism of the last 40 years. Their affiliations included, amongst others, the Polynesian Panthers, the Black Power, Community Volunteers, the Detached Youth Worker scheme, Ponsonby Labour Co-operative, Whakahou, the Manukau Arts Collective, and the Wellington Media Collective; their past involvements in notable episodes of recent history included, among many others, anti-Vietnam protests, the Dawn Raid protests, the 1975 Māori Land March, the Bastion Point occupation, He Taua (more on this presently), the Springbok protests (more on this presently), and the bringing of the 12 Tribes mansion to Aotearoa NZ. Therefore, remembering this tour brings together some of the main political currents of Māori and Pacific struggles in the 1970s and connects them to the consolidation of Rastafari and Roots-Reggae in Aotearoa NZ.

The tour was conceived by Denis O‟Reilly, an Irish Catholic member of the predominantly Māori Black Power gang. Identifying – and seeking to positively mobilize - the perceived commonalities of the young island “sufferers” of the Caribbean and South Pacific, O‟Reilly obtained a Commonwealth Youth Fellowship to travel in 1978 to the source of the redemption songs that were resonating amongst his Māori whānau (extended family). Via Jamaica O‟Reilly subsequently arrived in London, and after visiting a number of organizations, including the Ethiopian World Federation, came across the Keskidee troupe performing Scenes from Soweto.13

13 The picture captures Keskidee performing. The picture on the following page is of Ras Messengers circa late 70s. Oscar Abrams, one of the founders of the Keskidee centre, had articulated its purpose in the form of a motto: “a community discovering itself creates its own future”. While the Keskidee centre often acted as a forum for Third World liberation politics it also tackled local needs including education on tenants‟ rights and legal rights as well as providing courses in cookery, painting etc. But while it ultimately became the first professional Black theatre space in the UK, the Keskidee Centre was initially designed to help a segment of immigrant youth connect with the culture resources of their parents to which they had become at least partially alienated from in London. The Keskidee mandate therefore spoke to the situation in Aotearoa NZ wherein disaffected and alienated youth were composed primarily from the families of internal Māori and external Pacific migrants. Upon returning, O‟Reilly initiated the Keskidee Aroha collective, composed of a national and multiple local groupings, which fund-raised and organized the Keskidee tour (Black Power rank and file were active in this venture). The tour was intended to “serve as a catalyst to our own cultural development”, i.e. to translate the cultural mediums and messages of Black Liberation into Brown Liberation – mana motuhake (self-determination) - and in a way that might spur on the transformation of (post-)settler New Zealand society.

The shift, amongst activists, from a modus operandi of political confrontation with the colonial order to that of cultural self-development is important to note. Many involved in organizing Keskidee Aroha were concerned that the political struggle had not reaped the rewards intended because the spiritual and psychical tasks of this struggle had lagged behind. I find in the notes of Keskidee Aroha organizing committees consistent references to the “soul” of the struggle.14 Nevertheless, what is remarkable to me is the degree to which the organizers – situated on the other side of the world in remote Aotearoa NZ - sighted Rastafari as the contemporary epicenter of this struggle over the soul. Not only that, but they had already begun to find ways to aesthetically, philosophically and politically weave together the indigenous Pacific with the African Caribbean before Keskidee arrived. Let me provide one example of this, taken from a promotional booklet for the Keskidee tour and drawn by Tigilau Ness, a born-Aucklander of Nuiean heritage: Tigi had been the Minister of Culture for the Polynesian Panthers and we shall meet him again presently:

14 The picture is of Tigilau Ness 25 years after Keskidee Aroha! 15

The repertoire that the Keskidee troupe brought to Aotearoa NZ expressed the interconnected issues of racism and sexism prevalent in the work, family and religious lives of the African Diaspora. There were many such plays in the repertoire, but I shall name a select few here. Steve Carter‟s Eden was the most popularly received play in the tour; the play focuses upon the internalized racism of two families living in 1920s New York, one Jamaican and run by an old Garveyite patriarch, the other African-American and composed of an aunt and nephew from the South. Steve Wilmer‟s Scenes from Soweto often raised the tension of the performance to its peak; the play follows an apolitical academic‟s return from Oxford to his native Soweto where, during the student riots, he is finally forced to take a stand before being murdered by a white policeman. Derek Walcott‟s Malcochon dwelled on the internalization of racism and sexism amongst ex-slaves in the absence of the old master but in the presence of white rum. Finally, the troupe performed excerpts from Edgar White‟s Lament for Rastafari (the main reason why they brought the Ras Messengers on tour) included the final callings of Jujuman for liberation from Babylon, but also the provocative scene wherein a clergyman is questioned about his inability to believe in a Black spirit, as well as Hilda‟s Soliloquy on

15 The word kowhaiwhai in the description pertains to Māori patternings that adorn meeting house rafters. They are key aesthetic patternings that embody various symbolisms and meanings. the thankless labor relation between Black help and white families. The later sketch was especially remembered by audiences.16

The tour was explosive on many different levels: inter-personal relations, inter-cultural relations, but especially in terms of the impact on audiences. Many Māori audiences were conscientised by the plays, and many Pākehā audiences were fundamentally disturbed by them. This is an excerpt from O‟Reilly‟s report of the tour: “The effect of a predominantly Black group willing to confront this tension met either resistance with people employing all manner of devious plays to avoid issues that applied to them, or it triggered an immediate venting of frustration, fear and despair from people affected by it … Unlike violence, the medium does not cloud the message”. At this point, I want to reproduce in full a letter to the Ministry of Internal Affairs – of Internal Affairs – that I found in the archive. It examples the challenge to the colonial mindset that emanates from projects inspired by a global decolonial imagination that are nevertheless firmly situated in the ground out of which their necessity grows. You will find it on the following page:

16 The picture is a review in a London newspaper of the Keskidee performance of Lament for Rastafari.

However, as I have intimated, contentions also grew within and between the tour members. Visiting poor communities and encountering gangs with names such as the Stormtroopers and Headhunters, Rufus Collins, the director of the Keskidee troupe, would often point out that they were not social workers but there in their professional capacity as performers.17 It should be acknowledged that while Rufus Collins refused to see his own theatre as social work he had a highly developed sense of the politics of theatre and education. And in fact, during a prison visit, Rufus Collins gave a first hand account of his involvement in the US civil rights struggles in 1960s and how important the education of Blacks in prison had been for the cause. Nevertheless, Rufus‟s principled professionalism was also a cause of contention; this agitated dissonances between the visitors and hosts that were due to a simple unawareness on the part of the former of the social and political currents that the later had thrown them into.

In this charged environment I would like to focus for a moment on the experience of the Rasta. The members of Ras Messengers have reminisced to me that they found many resemblances between their Afrocentric cosmologies and mythologies and those of Māori. In fact, in acknowledgement of them, Māori elders would sometimes trace their whakapapa (ancestral genealogy) back to Africa. Finding connections in whakapapa is one of the main modes of connecting and binding groups together in Māori culture. The Idren remember being welcomed onto marae (traditional meeting places) in a way that made you “feel like someone”. At the time, one Ras Messenger, Chauncey Huntley, described the experience in the following way: “When you just go and shake a man‟s hand, it‟s over. But when you bring him to a place where all your fathers rest and sing him a song for get on the same vibrations as him, and him sing you back a song, you know? Yes! That‟s what I call a greeting!”18

17 The picture captures the Otara based Headhunters gang greeting Rufus Collins (with hat and glasses). I am not sure that Rufus is charmed by the situation.. 18 The following picture is a recent one taken of Chauncy in London, who still has the traditional rākau (sticks) he was given 30 odd years ago. Above all, it was the Rasta who seemed to connect most easily with their Māori hosts, especially the youth.19 One of the Keskidee actors that I spoke to this year reminisced to me that many of his fellow actors (but not all of them) tended to bring with them a “hybrid” sensibility, “not quite European yet nothing to do with our African heritage”. So I want to pursue this special resonance of the Rasta with their hosts by way of their stay in Otara, a predominantly Māori and Pacific suburb of South Auckland. The local organizing collective at Otara were made up in the main of an existing youth activist group called Whakahou (to renew, rebuild) who already had connections with the Polynesian Panthers. The members of Whakahou were trying to find a way to navigate the urban corridor of the recently built Otara suburb and, in this context, to assess what of their inherited culture they wanted to hold onto and what they needed to change. The question they pursued - “what is our culture, and how is it expressed?” – was in a sense the South Auckland articulation of Oscar Abram‟s Keskidee motto: a community discovering itself creates its own future. So in the pursuit of these aims Whakahou organized a week long workshop at Ngati Otara Marae that would examine the themes of racism and sexism and develop skills to express feelings about the local community. And in the middle of the week they hosted Keskidee for a number of days.

Whakahou members complained of being intimidated by Rufus Collins, and of feeling little solidarity with most of the actors whom they deemed to be professional, aloof and disinterested in their struggles. But not so with the Rasta. I would suggest that this connection was made possible due to the reverence for African “roots” within Rastafari worldviews, a reverence that acted as the common thread affectively tying together Black, Māori and Pacific yearnings for self-determination. This weaving had empirical effects. The use of “roots” instruments and song forms heavily influenced by Rastafari, but practiced in a public setting, inspired a resolve in Whakahou to henceforth publicly promote art forms indigenous to Aotearoa NZ and the South Pacific through the grassroots-led Manakau Arts Collective.

It has continually puzzled me, this affective resonance between Rastafari and Māori (and Pacific Island peoples, but less so). But now, after sojourning in Jamaica for a short while, I am much clearer about it. I had previously approached Rasta and African- Caribbean spirituality through the rubric of “creolization”, hence, my problem was always this: “why is it that a peoples (Māori) whose spiritual integrity is firmly rooted in their living, directly transmitted and certifiable ancestors could find such resonance with a peoples (Rasta) whose spiritual quest have required them to try and reconstruct their ancestry after a violent rupture from it.” Now I realize that if there are few – if any - in the Caribbean who could recount their ancestry back to very particular African family

19 The picture captures the Ras Messengers in action on the Keskidee Aroha tour. trees, there are directly transmitted and certifiable roots and routes of African ancestry that become living and present to Caribbean peoples through their relating to the spirits of the ancestors. This relating is practiced through African rituals that were personally carried to the New World in the one thing that the enslaved were allowed to keep wearing in the Middle Passage out of necessity: their minds. This is the crossroads of the Atlantic, as Clinton Hutton suggests in his wonderful work on African-Caribbean spirituality.

To my mind, this opens up doors of inquiry into the philosophical, spiritual and political salience of roots in the decolonial project. After all, the fundamental purpose of colonial mentality is, as a requisite for worshipping an idealized European episteme, to cleave all non-European roots from their living sources whether this be by robbing land (the “native”) or forcefully relocating labor (the “negro”). It is my suspicion that we need to do more work on how the struggle to redeem roots necessitates a drawing together for mutual destruction of those two master objectifying/thingifying categories of colonialism: the “native” and the “negro” to reveal, for example, Māori and African. With these considerations as a backdrop, I want to describe the image below, taken at a recent coming together of many of the members of Keskidee Aroha. The location is the beautiful wharenui (meeting house) of my university‟s marae, Te Herenga Waka (the place to moor canoes). Zena Tamanui, the lady in the blue patterned dress, is one of the leaders of Whakahou. She is singing a song that was composed by members of the Māori and Pacific women‟s movement. Spontaneously, Tigi Ness (from longtime a 12 Tribes member) accompanies her on the guitar with a reggae riddim. The chorus is then morphed into the chorus of Get Up Stand Up, and Miriama Rauhihi-Ness, another longtime 12 Tribes member (the lady in Black), and Wanjiku Kiarie, a Kenyan actress in the Keskidee troupe (the lady in yellow) join in as support. A global redemption song.

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Keskidee Aroha and the attempt to feed the “soul” of liberation took place at a watershed moment in recent New Zealand history where assimilation policies and racism had combined with an economic recession to reach a peak. On the eve of the tour, an incident happened wherein a number of Māori and Pacific activists left their Otara base to confront the demeaning tradition of the Auckland University engineering students who every year would perform a comic and insulting haka (the cultural performance that you might have seen, for example, at the start of an All Blacks rugby game). The confrontation led to some minor physical actions much of which was in self defense and those who confronted the students retroactively dubbed themselves He Taua (the raiding party). They were charged by the police while the political salience of their action was ignored by the media who portrayed them as a bunch of dark gang thugs oppressing reputable white students. The two pictures below are of a newspaper cartoon accurately representing the racism of the media, and of Hilda Halkyard-Harawira facing down the engineering students on another occasion.

More was to come. New Zealand erupted into a de facto civil war barely two years after the Keskidee tour when in 1981 the government of the day, for the purposes purely of shoring up their conservative electorate, broke the Gleneagles agreement regarding sporting links with Apartheid South Africa and allowed the Springboks to tour Aotearoa NZ. Anti-apartheid protest had already been an established tradition going back to the late 1950s. For Māori, the issue had been that for their people to tour South Africa as part of the All Blacks they would have had to have been labeled as “honorary whites”, a categorization antithetical to their sense of genealogical self and a bare insult to their ancestors. I am making this point because although the Pākehā led opposition to Apartheid is usually remembered as the prime source of opposition – and we should not belittle the principled activities of these people, sustained over decades - the issue was always far more personal to Māori. Overleaf I reproduce a graphic from the Māori Organization on Human Rights circa 1972.

There are two levels of contention to the 1981 protests. One of them takes up the bulk of space in the popular and, I would suggest nowadays increasingly antiquarian, national memory of the protests. This is a memory of how half of the population – split within families of all types and across the country at large – saw South African rugby as simply a non-political game, and how the other half considered the rugby team to be an extension of the Apartheid system and hence immanently political.

The repressed memory – repressed at the national level, but not amongst most of the Māori and Pacific peoples involved along with their enlightened Pākehā comrades – was of a fight against Apartheid as both a South African but also global system of racial segregation that was being developed in Aotearoa NZ too. While many whites shed blood in the clashes with police, at those moments where the showdown was most serious it was notably Māori and Pacific peoples who were willing to step up to the frontline (often via their own military wing, called the Patu squad (Patu means “to strike”)). While the leaders of the frontline were longtime activists involved with, for example, the Polynesian Panthers and Ngā Tamatoa, the rank and file also consisted of various gang members, who actually worked together on these occasions.20 Not only that, but out of those protestors who were charged with criminal actions the vast majority were Māori and Pacific, with the police using the occasion to “pay back” some of the activists of the 1970s. This level of contention brings out the issue of white paternalism that you might have caught in the letter to the Ministry of Internal Affairs above. Those who conceived of the struggle in this light charged the white mainstream of the anti-apartheid movement with at home to the extent that they refused to examine their own complicity in white supremacy at home when they claimed that solidarity for the sufferers of Apartheid could only be directed overseas. This memory is repressed, I believe, because it reveals the narrowness of the strategic accommodations that state and society have since “gifted” to Māori and Pacific peoples.

A final word on the Springbok Protests. In one of the first matches of the tour, in Hamilton, about 200 protestors managed to break out onto the pitch and to force a cancellation of the game. Leading the charge was Wally Te Ua, a renegade Māori Anglican minister who had become a radicalized spiritual person through his time as a soldier in Vietnam. As far as I understand it, this very match was the first rugby match to be televised LIVE in South Africa. Watching the events unfold in real time, whites who assumed beyond a shadow of a doubt that their settler bredren in New Zealand had their back were severely shaken in this belief, and some had to thenceforth take seriously the weight of world opinion against Apartheid. Blacks who watched the game (and Nelson Mandela came to hear about it) were invigorated by the sight of protest; this, at a point in time when within South Africa the struggle had been severely and savagely set back.21

From here on, Māori and Pacific activists went in two directions. Firstly, there were those who saw the Springbok episode as proof that state and society were in no way going to help then and that they had to therefore “do for self”. Against this stark backdrop, the purposes of Keskidee Aroha seemed to be either premature or simply an unnecessary diversion. What occurred then was a further radicalization of the movement through groups such as the Waitangi Action Committee, and Māori Peoples Liberation Movement. Interestingly, among the feminist wing of the radicalized activists, the use of Black as a positive identifier (while already somewhat in use in the 1970s) intensified at this point, a process led by groups such as Black Dykes, Black Womins Group, etc. The

20 This photo captures it nicely. 21 The story has been captured in this documentary: http://www.spacific.co.nz/documentaries/try- revolution/ strategic use of Black was similar to that used by Garvey, and especially by Dessalines in the Haitian Constitution 1805. That is, one could not be “Brown” and sit on the fence: one had to identify and cast one‟s lot in with either the oppressor (White) or oppressed (Black). One of my masters students, Erina Okeroa, is currently researching this underappreciated but important tendency amongst the 1980s feminist activists.

In ways that have yet to be fully recounted the Black women‟s movement seems to have had a divisive effect on Māori vs Pacific vs heterosexual women. Not only that, but some key figures in the more general movement of the 70s had either been locked up or had fled abroad for fear of police reprisal. There was a way out, however. And that was to follow through wholeheartedly in pursuit of the “soul” of liberation. In this climate, a number of the previous Polynesian Panthers decided to take their interest in Rastafari up a level and journeyed to Jamaica in the early 1980s to seek out Prophet Gad and the 12 Tribes. At the same time, Reggae music ramped up a gear, not only with the consolidation of the Porirua musical roopu (group) but also, now, with the Auckland bredren and sistren. Tigilau Ness had formed a group, Unity Pacific as a response to Alma Rei‟s Chaos (out of chaos comes unity);22 but by far the most influential was the group Herbs who effectively anointed the genre of Pacific Reggae. Herbs was managed by the old Polynesian Panther‟s chair, Will Ilolahia; and one of its members was instrumental in journeying to Jamaica and officially bringing the 12 Tribes to Aotearoa NZ.

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To finish, let me draw some of these stories together by presenting a kind of topography of Rasta in Aotearoa.

First, there always were and still are swathes of individuals who cleave to no mansion or house but identify as Rasta. It is important to recognize this fact because it confirms the agency, imagination and intuition deployed by individuals in their search for redemption from Babylonian New Zealand. I have, for example, been told the story of a duo – one Pākehā one Māori – who in the very early 1980s decided to leave behind Babylon and live rough as Rasta in the hills (their own little Pinnacle!), coming down regularly to steal food from the farms of the downpressors. Further, it should be noted that key figures who

22 It was only in the last few years that Unity Pacific finally released their album, a soundtrack of many of the struggles documented in this paper. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0xb-nXUAyY and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBi6zX14MNo later on joined the 12 Tribes initially came to feel Rasta by other diverse routes (even if Bob was a big influence). Furthermore, I would place the only Rasta MP (now ex-MP) in the world, who just so happens to live in Aotearoa NZ, in this category.

In this respect, there is also another sort of “individualism” to appreciate that locks into histories that I suspect are on the verge of being lost. I am talking about the self-directed action of the youth of extended Māori families (whānau, hapu) who collectively escaped gang life by realizing Rastafari.23 The most (in)famous example of this tendency is the Ruatoria Dredd (see below). But they were not, however, the only ones. For many – perhaps most - this transition was temporary, to be derailed by the pressures of Babylon or to be transformed again through the gateway Rasta provided into their own ancestral spiritual/cultural self. Nevertheless, it is, once more, proof of the deep – often subterranean – impact of Rastafari upon a peoples seeking to free themselves from mental slavery under the pressure of a South Pacific Babylon manifested in the form of Settler Colonialism.

Second, is the 12 Tribes house, undoubtedly the most coherent and largest grouping of Rasta in Aotearoa NZ. The rolling membership, over its lifetime, has by some estimates approached 2000 souls, and approximately 25 members of the house have visited Ethiopia. Incorporated, if I remember correctly, around 1985, the house was, for a while, extremely productive and organized, holding dances, making records with its band, and selling clothes and craftwork.24 Around the early 1990s the house fell into disorder, largely to do with the errant activities of its head, the Jamaican Hensley Dyer. I will not detail these activities here because if they do come out in the open that process will have to be guided by the house itself. I will, though, relay a couple of observations from someone who is not a Rasta but has known the house since its inception. Dyer was already sojourning in Auckland, and helped to make the

23 The picture is rare. It is of a group of young Rasta in Hastings, who, in the mid 1980s, turned away from their gang lives. Note both the traditional Rasta trinity signs and the man in the middle who has his tongue displayed in a traditional Māori posture of strength/intimidation. (See the Bob Marley welcome video that you can access in the link above). 24 The picture shows the 12 Tribes band, circa 1990. Hensley Dyer is in the white patterned clothing. Jamaican links. In many ways, Dyer held a significant influence over the 12 Tribe members in Auckland simply because of his authenticity as a Jamaican Rasta. My friend puts it this way: Dyer needed another Jamaican around him in Auckland to keep him in check. He also relayed to me a story that Gadman was not overly-enthused on sending Dyer back as the guiding light for the Aotearoa house, in fact, he believed that a better person could be found. In any case, by the early 1990s many of the original members were leaving the house, some even disowning Rastafari (apparently Dyer is now a born again Christian).

Nevertheless, there seems to be somewhat of a resurgence of the house underway, or at least, it is some of the children of the original members who are now seeking to place the house on a firmer footing sometimes even despite the actions or non-actions of their parents. I visited the monthly meeting earlier this year. The crowd was not large, but the HQ was well fitted out and of a decent size, and the 12 seats as well as the present Sister Dinah 1, were not only filled but occupied mainly by articulate, zestful and deep thinkers. It was communicated at this meeting that the house had finally manage to purchase, in its own right, land at Shashamane. I have been told that a marae is in construction on the land.

The 12 Tribes members are multi-ethnic, although the origin of the house was and is still firmly rooted in the struggles of Māori and Pacific peoples. Even amongst the Māori members there is the steadfast belief that repatriation to Ethiopia must and will occur, even if this is an inter-generational mission. This I find to be a very interesting and challenging belief to the extent that Māori self-integrity is so rooted in ancestral land. Hardly any of the Māori 12 Tribes that I know disown their own culture and ancestry in any way. Yet they look forward to repatriation to Ethiopia. It is no surprise that they have, each in their own way, intricately woven together Rasta, Selassie, the Bible and their own ancestry – material and spiritual – into a theology of the deliverance of the House of Shem.25 For these people, one can be Māori and Rasta, or Pacific and Rasta, no problem. There is much work to be done here in appreciating and understanding further this rich tapestry.

(As far as I am aware there is no official Nyabinghi or BoboDredd presence in Aotearoa NZ. However, it should be noted that nowadays Rastafari is evolving just as much through new immigrants as well as refugees. Key to this is that there are nowadays many more Africans in Aotearoa NZ than in the 70s or 80s. These new developments need investigation, too. But this is not part of my present project.)

The third group I would call the Garveyites. As I have noted above, these are people who through Rastafari found a way to connect back to their ancestral heritage, spiritually and culturally, but with the effect of making them incredibly “staunch” in their political views. They are almost entirely Māori, and many still wear dreadlocks but would probably identify themselves as Māori instead of Rasta. They take from Rastafari the political teachings of Garvey over the spiritual significance of Selassie. Garvey tells them

25 In fact, one of the Rasta who conveyed such a theology to me is Carl Perkins, an old/ex 12 Tribes member. Catch his awesome band at www.houseofshem.com. not just to stand proud against the white onslaught, but also to fight for the reclamation of their land: Africa for the Africans, America for the Americans, Aotearoa for the Māori. This, for instance, is how I conceive of David Grace (see above, Dread Beat and Blood).26 It should be noted that the placing of either Garvey or Selassie over each other was a source of contention, especially in the late 80s early 90s, amongst those Māori and Pacific peoples inspired by Rastafari.

By way of moving onto the fourth group I want to remember the Māori prophetic traditions of the 19th century that I introduced right at the start. In many ways the integration of Rastafari into Māori spirituality can be understood as one more iteration of this tradition albeit prompted by the particular conjuncture of the 1970s. Let me give an example.

Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana was a prophet contemporaneous to Garvey. I have heard a number of people make direct comparisons between the two, including Ruia Aperahama whom I mentioned above. As far as I understand it, Ratana never meant his movement to be a Christian denomination, although that is what it is considered nowadays. Rather, it was due to a Suppression of Tohunga Act that Ratana was forced to register his flock as such. The Caribbean equivalent of Tohunga would be, approximately, Myal. In other words, the Act was a colonial tool designed to suppress and eradicate Māori spirituality as a subversive and disorderly force. If one ventures into the Ratana Pa near Whanganui, walks around its magnificent temple and sights the iconography, one is immediately struck at how non-Christian it is. There is much Muslim symbolism - for example, the star and crescent moon - and the women often wear veils. (Awareness of this caused Louis Farrakhan to drop in for a reasoning session with the Ratana elders in the early 1990s). And not only that, but there are directly political expressions of the belief that the bible is the book that tells of the struggle of Māori not of Europeans: the central icon of Ratana is of the bible in one hand and the Treaty of Waitangi in the other.27 To what extent, then, is such a prophetic tradition as Ratana the rough equivalent of, say, Revivalism, especially in relation to Rastafari? There are many tantalizing issues to explore here, not least because one extremely prominent Māori 12 Tribes member told me that she had been prepared to recognize Selassie as divinity because she grew up with images of a brown God: her family household followed Ratana.

With these thoughts we can arrive at the fourth group, the Ruatoria Dredds. I have already mentioned them at the start. In actual fact, they are probably the most studied Rasta grouping in Aotearoa NZ – and one seminal study was done back in 1994 by UWI‟s own Ian Boxhill! They are (in)famous because they fought a civil war with local authorities, farmers, their own elders and families, and ultimately the state. Additionally,

26 Hear the militant lyrics in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktwWuJf1WWI&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9cg7bEUXJ4&feature=related. 27 Pictured is the Ratana Star: A and O = Alpha and Omega. many other Rasta in Aotearoa NZ believe them to be false dredds due to their use of violence. It should be acknowledged that much of the early years were bloody: one dredd cut off the head of another; and many violence prone youth affiliated loosely with the Dredds. I do not want to idealize the Idren in this respect. But I do want to remember that key in this violent war was a guerilla occupation/disruption of white farm land and the burning down of buildings associated with Babylon: the police station, court house, and even, eventually, a wharenui. In other words, the violence was youthful and on occasion excessive to the extreme, but it was rarely mindless neither was it unprovoked. The leader, Chris Campbell, was effectively assassinated in 1990: after being shot by a Māori farmer Chris was taken to hospital in poor but stable condition where a white South African doctor did not treat him for shock so that he eventually died on the operating table. The farmer received a not-guilty verdict for manslaughter.

I want to focus here on the cosmology of the Ruatoria Dredd, a cosmology that armed them to resist Babylon so directly and so staunchly. Initially, it was an encounter in prison between Tigilau Ness and Chris Campbell that introduced the Ruatoria roopu to Rastafari. Tigi was in prison for his part in the Springbok protests, and, as the present leader Hone Heeney put it to me, Chris “brought back the face of God”, i.e. Selassie. Through Rastafari the Ruatoria Dredds connected back to the struggles of their ancestors (and, it must be said, to the struggles between their ancestors families) and made a principled stand against the appropriation of their holy land around Ruatoria that positioned them as much against many of their own family and tribe members as white land owners and authorities. The land was deemed holy because it traditionally incorporated Mount Hikurangi, a mountain “in the East” and of “many peaks”, the first to see the sun of the new day (given that Aotearoa NZ is positioned just left of the international date line and that Hikurangi is on the extreme East cape of the north island). In other words, the Dredd were fighting to clear holy Mount Zion of Babylonian forces.

In this task they were radicalized again by prominent local members of the Ringatu faith, principle amongst them being the noted elder, Tom Te Maro. The Ringatu church, founded by the guerilla fighter Te Kooti, is based on an indigenized biblical hermeneutic that relies upon memory retention and oral renditions for its rituals, rituals that are performed by and large in the wharenui (meeting houses) of marae rather than in church buildings. Indeed, key members of the Ruatoria Dredd were already primed to empathize with the Black biblical hermeneutic of Rastafari through their childhood memories of Ringatu rituals.28 Hence, an indigenized biblical tradition inter-connected with Rastafari to produce an astoundingly complex, creative and powerful indigenized Rastafari cosmology. In reading and listening to articulations of this cosmology I am consistently taken aback by these qualities. Yet, to my knowledge, there has only been one treatise on the Ruatoria Dredds written by a professional theologian (Harold Turner). To the rest of New Zealand, the Ruatoria Dredds will always be thugs, crazies, and arsonists.

28 The picture is of Hone Heeney, from the book Moko – Māori Tattoo. Returning to the issue of “roots” that I mooted earlier, I would just like to finish here by relating part of a conversation I had with Hone Heeney earlier this year. Hone interpolated himself, the Ruatoria Dredd, as the cherub who, with a flaming sword, guards the Garden of Eden. Hone purposefully re-engineered the genesis story: for him, the taslk of the cherub was not to guard Eden from entrance by the sons of men; rather, it was to protect the people of the land of Eden from the incursion of external Babylonian forces. This might seem to be a small re-arrangement, but in fact, it entirely reorients the standard flow of the Biblical narrative i.e. from a set of exoduses into Babylon to a series of “coming ins from the cold”. Hone‟s indigenous Rasta has never left Zion, but has trod in it from creation, and stays resolute to protect this holy land of the ancestors from the external encroachment of Babylonian forces.

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The above thoughts are somewhat chaotic and the order of presentation is intuitive rather than fully thought out. In other words, I can provide no conclusion! I do, however, want to return to my stated purpose of valorizing the particular situatedness of lived experience under colonial rule while at the same time exploring the global coordinates of the imagination that seeks to decolonize this experience. Thinking these words while situated in the Centre for Caribbean Thought, I immediately relate them to Kamau Brathwaite‟s Pan-African sighting of the unity that is submarine. Considering the increasingly global resonance of the African-Caribbean struggle amongst those human populations who also struggle against colonial oppression in all its continuing guises, I wonder if “non- African” shores must by now be necessarily integrated into the study of the tidalectics that nourish Pan-African unity. This is in no way a call to (heinously) democratize Pan- Africanism so that it becomes re-colonized by liberal whiteness; Pan-Africanism is itself at the heart of a set of situated experiences, coming out of slavery, which must be honored in their specificity. I guess that at the most basic level I am simply positing an empirical fact that has philosophical, spiritual and political ramifications for the redemption of the African family: Bob is also the uncle of other suffering peoples. So in my research I am now faced with two paths. I can treat the resonance of Africa in Aotearoa NZ as a curiosity, an aesthetic delight, a mimicry, mockery or simply a mistake, and in so doing (to paraphrase Walcott) break each rock into its own nation; or, I can approach it as evidence of the submarine existence of a global decolonial imagination. I will defend the latter as the more humanistic orientation.