Fri Feb 4,12:11 PM ET
SHASHAMANE, Ethiopia (AFP) - Twenty-five years after reggae superstar
Bob Marley visited fellow Rastafarians here, residents of this dusty
Ethiopian town are hoping the late music legend will put them back on
the map.
AFP/HO/File Photo
Having lived through decades of hardship and neglect, Shashamane's
aging and often wary rasta community sees opportunity in the
commemoration this month in Ethiopia of what would have been Marley's
60th birthday.
"Maybe it will shine some light on (those) of us who have been living
here for 20-odd or 30-odd years," says Ronald "Arms" Simmons, a 56-
year-old Jamaican Rastafarian who has lived here through thick and
thin since 1974.
"We do feel it, we do feel forgotten," he says with a sigh, running
his hands through a scraggly white beard to reveal a mouth nearly
empty of teeth.
Little-known and largely overlooked outside the tight-knit,
dreadlocked Rastafarian diaspora, Shashamane, about 250 kilometers
(150 miles) south of Addis Ababa, has been the movement's "Jerusalem"
for more than half a century.
Yet the community -- founded on land deeded by former Ethiopian
emperor Haile Selassie, whom Rastafarians adore as a living god or
nearly divine spiritual leader -- has never quite taken off.
Regarded with a mixture of curiosity and contempt by many Ethiopians
and stung by the country's chronic poverty, instability and frequent
natural disasters, Shashamane's Rastafarian population has never
risen above 1,000, residents say.
The euphoria that greeted the farming settlement among Rastafarians
and proponents of Pan-Africanism in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, was
tempered by the repression and isolation that Ethiopia's Marxist
revolution brought in 1974.
"As young rastas coming up the '70s, our dream was to return to
Africa, repatriation was on our minds," Simmons said. "Even to come
back to Africa and live in a tree was better than the West."
But, he admits, that the life did not appeal to everyone, including
his own family in Jamaica, none of whom in the nearly 31 years he has
lived in Shashamane has ever visited his four-room cement house.
Even Marley's much-heralded visit in 1979 at the height of his
career, and the fall of the communist regime just over a decade
later, failed to spark a significant influx of rastas, whose numbers
now hover at about 500.
And just as social and political conditions appear to be improving,
there are fears the community's location along Ethiopia's main north-
south highway will make it a prime target for government-backed
commercial development.
"They plan to make Shashamane the second city of Ethiopia," says 80-
year-old Elda Solomon, an official with the Ethiopian World
Federation who arrived in Shashamane from Jamaica in 1969.
Perched behind a desk in his small home under a photograph of Haile
Selassie, the diminutive Solomon says his group is attempting to
strike a deal with the authorities the Rastafarians believe want to
push them out.
"It's a problem we really resent now," he said. "It is the first
priority for us."
But any arrangement must be approved by the community, which is split
into at least four factions, each with its own interpretation of
Haile Selassie's land grant, his religious stature and Biblical
prophecy.
Shashamane's Rastafarians speak in hushed tones, if at all, of
friction amongst themselves and are loathe to speak to outsiders
about anything suggesting differences although it is clear there are
differences of opinion.
Even would-be immigrants to the town, which will host a number of
small Bob Marley-related events next week, seem to have an opinion.
"His Majesty (Haile Selassie) gave it to us," said 65-year-old Sanga
Davis shortly after he arrived at the airport Addis Ababa from
Jamaica.
"We want to fulfill his majesty's words and go to Shashamane and
develop Shashamane and make it in to a beautiful city, a modern city
where all of us can live and love, black, white and pink," he said.
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