Ezra Ben-Shalom

jewishstate.com

7 February 2005

Addis Ababa

The whole surviving Marley family, Lauren Hill, and people from all over the world came together yesterday in Addis Ababa to celebrate the biggest Bob Marley (1945-1981) birthday party yet. The gathering in Addis Ababa's huge Meskel Square, dubbed "Africa Unite", free to all comers, probably ranked as the biggest Reggae party of all time, with at least 350,000 people in the square and on the adjoining steps of a massive earth stadium carved out of a hill and leading up to ancient fortifications.

In addition to celebrating Bob Marley, the concert raised money for charities in Ethiopia in cooperation with UNESCO, the African Union, and the Ethiopian government. Marley's rastafarian religion suggests that Ethiopia's last emperor, Haile Salasie, who ruled the country through a feudal system and hid famines from the international community to preserve his own pride, possessed certain messianic qualities.

Although Ethiopian police have the reputation for occasional acts of brutality, they did not provoke any bloody stampedes or serious injuries at the birthday party. At the beginning of the event, however, around a hundred thousand people pushed over a line of barriers and sprinted up to the VIP section, thus doubling the space available to the free section.

The concert, which started only fifteen minutes after the scheduled time of noon (Ziggy Marley's last concert in Addis Ababa started four hours late), began with Burundian drummers. Burundi and Rwanda are famous for their drummers and traditional dancers, the most striking and entrancing in the world.

Then dancers from the various nations of Ethiopia, such as the Tigray, Amhara, and Groggay peoples, entertained the spectators, who included rastafarians from as far away as Japan and South America.

A couple of Jamaican DJs then did their best to distract the impatient crowd for several hours. People mingled around the beer tents, stood down in the square, or guarded their seat in the earth-stadium and tried to forget about the stones and uneven surface below their buttocks.

Some Ethiopians have the unfortunate habit of throwing stones and dirt pellets, either to resolve a dispute or to send some sort of signal. Anyone unlucky enough to block someone else's line of sight in the earth stadium suddenly underwent a standard experience: a sharp pain shot from a random part of the body, which preceded the automatic look back, revealing an array of angry and smiling faces.

Pickpockets presented an economic danger, or merely a nuisance, depending on one's preparedness. Those who had done research on Ethiopia prior to the event (a five minute check on the Internet would have suffised) knew that Ethiopia is famous for its pickpockets, even if violent crime has been rare these last few years. Andreas, a man with Swiss citizenship and an Ethiopian mother, had a plane ticket to leave the country at 3 AM this morning, which became useless once a pickpocket took his Ethiopian residency card, which gave him a legal status in the country. He took out his anger on his Ethiopian girlfriend.

(Apparently Andreas has a serious anger-management problem. Christmas night, he cursed me for being an American citizen. Later that night, an Ethiopian who pretends to be a rastafarian, whom Andreas had considered as a friend, got totally drunk and decided to try to drive a car for the first time! He helped himself to Andreas's keys and drove into a nearby store. After dealing with the Ethiopian "justice system", Andreas decided to leave the country and bought the ill-fated plane ticket.)

At the time that the concert had been scheduled to end, at 9 PM (or 3 PM according to Ethiopia's unique time system, wherin 6 AM becomes 12 AM), and following Lauren Hill's performance, Ziggy Marley, Stephen Marley, and their brothers finally came out. They pleased the audience with almost two hours of old Bob Marley songs. Up near the stage, still separate from the free section, international rastafarians heeded Rita Marley's suggestion to smoke ganja. They disguised their activity by bringing customised cigarettes to the event; that is, cigarettes emptied of tobacco and packed with cannabis. In a relaxed atmosphere, journalists danced as they stood on chairs to take pictures, and it seemed like just about anyone could meander up onto the stage if they really wanted to.

As noted above, the secondary theme of the birthday party was "Africa Unite".

Let the continent unite, but for what? To conserve an alliance of dictators? Collectively to protect democratic rights, or to consolidate the rule of the sycophant class that helps its leader falsify elections? And if democracy exists, shall we unite to protect individual liberty, or to cement the tyranny of the majority? And will we, as a continent, allow free enterprise to develop nations, or will we employ socialist ideas, invented in Europe but proven useless in Europe, America, Africa, and Asia? All 53 of Africa's states will need to respond correctly to these questions before free peoples will be persuaded to give up their sovereignty for continental unification.

And what, exactly, is the unifying force running through Africa, the world's second largest continent? Is there truly less of a differce between, for example, Rwanda and Tunisia, than Rwanda and the United States? The latter pair have the same majority religion, a friendship with the Jewish State, a solid work ethic, and a familiarity with English. Does political unification have to proceed strictly according to geography?

And in encouraging the unification of "all black people and Africans", the Marley family shows that it still believes in the idea of races, even though no genetic basis for the concept exists.

In fact, the suggestion to smoke ganja offers the only hint as to what "Africa Unite" means in concrete terms. Whether dictatorial or democratic, free or socialist, at least Africans will agree that cannabis offers a natural, cheap, and relatively safe intoxicant. And why should Africa refuse this idea? When governments do not have enough money to send every child to school, why should they waste money imprisoning productive members of society for smoking a plant in the privacy of their own homes? And why should wealthy countries like the United States pressure poor African countries to mimic their own senseless drug legislation? Are they afraid that the example of liberty in Africa would endanger their own myths and deceptions, which date back to the 1930's?