Tag: african

On distant drums

On By Jah BillahIn Dub Culture DepartmentLeave a comment
The Drums of Count Ossie

We need to give proper consideration specifically to the Buru (or Burru) tradition as well.

Among the Buru drummers of the first half of the twentieth century was one outstanding and very influential musician who, like Babu Bryan, remains unknown to most Jamaicans, not to mention the rest of the world. The man I am referring to is Watta King. Not to be confused with the notorious West Kingston bad man Woppy King, nor with the Rastafarian patriarch known as Bongo Watto, who were two entirely different individuals, Watta King was a Buru master drummer of Kongo descent who migrated to West Kingston from Clarendon parish.

Although he made his living as a barber, and was not himself a Rasta, Watta gained renown as a drum-builder during the 1940s and 1950s – the very time that Rasta consciousness was beginning to gather force in West Kingston. During these formative years of the Rasta faith, Watta King was the owner of the most sought-after set of African-style drums in the area, and he and his fellow Buru players became the main drummers for the earliest grounations, or ceremonial gatherings, in the Rasta hotbeds of Salt Lane and Back-o-Wall.


It appears that Watta King represents the crucial link between the rural Buru tradition of St Catherine and Clarendon, and the nascent Nyabinghi tradition of West Kingston. His playing appears to have served as a model for many in the first generation of Rasta drummers, and his great influence can be traced through at least four important drummers of later years (and likely several others).
Baba Job (also known as Brother Job), who was to become Count Ossie‘s mentor, and Seeco Patterson, Bob Marley‘s percussionist who I mentioned earlier, both spoke to me of Watta King as their “teacher” – the man most responsible for their early development as drummers.
And Skully Simms, one of the most important session hand drummers from the 1970s on, told me in considerable detail about the influence Watta King had on him.
…

NOEL “ZOOT” SIMMS aka SCULLY(1935-2017). Here with LEE “MILO” SPENCE at Jack Ruby’s in Ocho Rios, Kingston, Jamaica, March ’76 © David Burnett

Excerpt from:

Distant Drums: The Unsung Contribution of African-Jamaican Percussion to Popular Music at Home and Abroad
Author: KENNETH BILBY
Source: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4, Pioneering Icons of Jamaican Popular Music, Part II (December 2010)

On sexism in Rasta

On By Jah BillahIn Dub Culture Department1 Comment

There are some serious ideological problems in Rasta women confronting the sexism within society and within Rasta itself. Any criticism regarding the status of Rasta women within the movement has been discarded as a white construction of reality unsuitable to Black cultures and any mention of gender liberation berated as western, feminist ideology. While a feminist ideology may not provide all the ingredients for a holistic African liberation, for too long has there been little real strategic change for women in Rastafari. In the same way Black men, in negotiating their freedom, have rejected the patronising efforts of white liberals in favour of an innate desire to chart their own liberation, so too must women design their own path to empowerment. The fundamental hurdle to the solution is that racial oppression is more readily understood and addressed than gender oppression.

Black women’s liberation is already stilted by the time they realise that their oppression is tied to their relations with their own brethren. In my experience, Black men support women’s protests as long as they are aimed at the white middle classes. However, when the subject of gender oppression is revealed and the Black man himself is implicated in this oppression, their tones become hushed.

Found in: The movement of Jah people!

from

Great Black Warrior Queens: An examination of the gender currents within Rastafari thought and the adoption of a feminist agenda in the Rasta women’s movement

by LISA-ANNE JULIEN (2003) Agenda.

Image source: Meet the Most Feared Women in History