“Rastafarian Art of Saying”; Musical Creativity and Dagga in South African Townships
The Rastafarian movement, and its expansion on a worldly scale, testifies to the success of an “art of saying” through musical expression. Body and sensorial technique, creating music is linked to the ethos of a people. In this paper I aim to comprehend the conditions of musical creativity in the everyday of Rastafarians in the townships of Cape Town in South Africa. Hence how does creating music enter at the heart of the South African Rastafarian movement and in what is this process carrier of meaning, even a part of daily survival? More particularly, what is the place of its sacred plant dagga (cannabis, marijuana) in this process that, albeit criminalized outside the movement, appears to be liberating, even therapeutic within the movement? This is the comprehensive challenge set for this article and it is a South African Rastafarian family of musicians/herbalists and an anthropology of the senses which help us meet it. In this movement explicitly arising against colonial oppression in Jamaica in the 1930s, the musical creative process appears as a better ‘way of being in the world’ in which words and sounds are clearly privileged as the medium for social change. With regards to its Herb, dagga, its place is multiple, cultural as well as biological, intermingling within musical creativity according to the actors’ particular positioning.