Strong case made for Rastafari reparations

The call for reparations for the Rastafarian community is getting louder as individuals from the region call for systems to be put in place to repair the damage done to their community over the years.

This comes as President of the African Heritage Foundation (AHF) Paul Ras Simba Rock painted a picture of how Rastafarians have been treated in Bridgetown over the years.

During the Marcia Weekes Show on Wednesday, under the theme Ganja Reparations, officials insisted that members of the Rastafarian community should be compensated for the inhumane treatment meted out to them over the years, and for the stigma and discrimination they suffered.

In his submission, Rock indicated that the Rastafarian community in Barbados was yet to come together and discuss what reparations here should look like, but he said first, there is a need for a national education and sensitisation programme.

“In Barbados, there are a lot of unutilized buildings that the Government could make available to rastafari to develop schools and help with the funding to develop these spaces,” he recommended.

“Within their big cannabis industry I think Rastafari is due a percentage into that industry, going into a National Rastafari Development Fund that would assist in developing the services and entities within the Rastafari community. Within there, is the consideration of reparation going along with repatriation and what that would look like – a part of the repair has to be reasonable travel to and from the continent [of Africa] and repairing the trade between our brothers and sisters on the continent,” he added.

Recently, Rock, who is the Public Relations Officer of the Rastafari Progressive Movement (RPM), made a call for Government to consider allocating at least 25 per cent of the earnings from the burgeoning medicinal cannabis industry to the Rastafari community as part of reparations.

Pointing out that Rastafarians were yet to get a formal apology from the Barbados Government, Rock said “We’ve had acknowledgements by actions, even though the actions taken to repair are kind of skewed”, as he singled out the new Sacramental Cannabis Bill.

Stating that for him reparation was simply repairing damage done, Rock said it “goes way farther than money”.

He said rastas were rejected at one point in Barbados, which led to the creation of the Temple Yard location in The City, where several members of the Rastafarian community currently ply their trade.

However, Rock said: “It is hard for a business community to develop when you have constant raids by the police, constant mashing up of shops. This has a number of effects on the psyche of the people doing business there and the public they don’t want to come into that space because they see it as a bad space because of the whole demonizing of the plant.”

He said members of the minority group have been “targets” for searches and humiliation over the years because they were “the only openly identifiable proponents of cannabis and cannabis use”, which resulted in them also being “ostracized” and living in fear of their doors being “kicked off”.

Rock, who gave a personal account of how he was treated in this manner early one morning as police did a search of his property, said there are some who go through this time and time again.

“There needs to be a repair, and I am not even going into the hindrance of being able to create social structures like schools for ourselves because we don’t know when we are going to be on our way to jail,” said Rock.

“So when we are speaking about repair, people have to understand the damage done before they understand the need for repair. All of the damage done cannot be quantified in a sum of money. I don’t know how you quantify people’s suffering and the retardation of a community. So I am saying, starting from 1974 for Barbados, this would be close to 50 years of oppression. How do you start to repair that,” said Rock.

Marcia Weekes, host of the programme, acknowledged that the Jamaica Government has issued an official apology to the Rastafarian community for the action of the state against rastafari in the 1963 Coral Gardens Incident, and the subsequent establishment of a JA$10 million trust fund for survivors as reparation.

“The question is, is this enough?” said Weekes.

The Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda has also issued an apology to the Rastafarian community in that country for their decades of “brutalisation” and “discrimination”, while proposing reparation through giving them a stake in the medicinal cannabis industry there.

Weekes said too many governments continued to “pretend” they don’t understand the oppression the Rastafarian community faced over the years because of their use of marijuana on which many countries were now seeking to capitalize.

“Some of us pretend we don’t understand, but we need to understand what has occurred and that is why today we are calling for justice. We are saying if our CARICOM governments are going to benefit financially from ganja, marijuana, cannabis, we need to look at what was done to the Rastafari community,” insisted Weekes.

Meanwhile, African Reparations Minister in Trinidad and Tobago Reverend Kwame Kamau who shared the Trinidad and Tobago experience, told the online gathering that a lot of human and financial resources have been invested in the prohibition of marijuana use over the years that could have been directed elsewhere.

He said based on statistics, black individuals also seemed to be more likely to be incarcerated for a marijuana-related offence than Hispanic and people of mixed descent in Trinidad and Tobago.

“We need to repair the trauma that has been inflicted and clearly there are statistics that are available . . . Is there need for reparations? The answer is clear – yes,” he said.
(marlonmadden@barbadostoday.bb)