Submitted by Ras Jahaziel

An excerpt from “A RASTA PLAY” based on The Tivoli Gardens Massacre, Jamaica 2010 

SCENE 1

A CONVERSATION AMONGST THE MONEY GODS as they convene to make LAWS.

SNOW WHITE THE HEAD  MONEY GOD speaks first:

This is the forum where we can be ourselves and speak our minds without worrying about political correctness. We do not have to go around corners and pretend that PROFIT is not the only thing that matters. Every-one in here knows that the advancement of our empire has often called for ruthless action against inferior peoples. 

Often times it has involved moving populations from areas that we desire. 

Sometimes the methods may be bloody and involve lost of life amongst the inferior peoples, but everyone of you know the ropes, so to speak.

So please speak your mind without worry. The press is not here. This is the place where we can discuss the dirty details that would shock the larger public outside.

Now the first thing I would like to do is to express my concerns about the stability of our modern plantation system in the Caribbean and the volatility of our Negro labor force in light of recent events.

I am sure that we all agree the image of “Paradise” must be maintained at all costs. For close to four centuries we have reaped billions of dollars in profit from the sweat of Black labor in the hot climes of these islands, and what has made our businesses so profitable is that up to this day Black labor has been for the most part free or very cheap. 

But now our old sugar plantations that required us to maintain thousands of slaves have been phased out, and Tourism has now become our new sugar plantation. 

Not only do we need fewer Negroes, but unlike in the days of sugar cane it is important to project an idyllic paradise image despite the glaring wide-spread poverty of the locals.

(The nagging truth keeps asking:Why do some people have all the luxury and some people have all the tears? Paradise and Hell all in the same place? Who keeps this system running from generation to generation? The Army, The Police, The politicians, and The Church?)

But we have a problem looming on the horizon: As a result of our recent economic adjustments the weight on the poor has been increased significantly, to the extent that they are nearing breaking-point. 

If we do not act preemptively and take drastic measures they are likely to rebel and spoil our paradise image. 

We need to crush rebellion long before it happens.

FIRST DRAGON, The Minister of Legal Terrorism and Plantation Protection: Pardon me for saying so, but I think your fears may be a little bit exaggerated because as you know, we have always used our police and army as a barrier of terror to protect our slave-holding properties. 

They have been trained to be very brutal and ruthless, and as a result of their consistent terrorism most of the slave population fears them. I don’t think we have anything to worry about, but if it would make you feel better we can increase the terror.

SCENE 2

SNOW WHITE-The Money God: Well make sure the media publishes a good excuse for doing so before giving the police the go-ahead. 

But no matter what it takes we must maintain the flow of profit from our human and material possessions on these islands. 

Even though these economic measures will affect the lives of the poor fairly harshly, such measures are necessary to maintain THE PROFIT FLOW.

But keeping the plantation from burning has always been a balancing act. 

On the one hand, too much hardship may cause spontaneous rebellion, and on the other hand the extra hardship that the Niggers feel also makes them desperate for money. 

In that state of mind it is easier to control and manipulate them, and it is never difficult to find spies and informers. 

Another very important advantage in keeping the Negroes in a desperate economic state was demonstrated just recently in Tivoli Gardens.

If you did not understand the power of our economic grip on the Negroes you would have been surprised by the zeal that was exhibited by our police and soldiers as they went about maiming and killing other Niggers that look just like themselves.

With our power to decide who eats and who starves it was easy to enlist dozens of paid killers.

So despite all of the idealistic calls for equal rights and justice, we know from long experience that we have to keep the economic lid on the Negroes. 

It is a form of control that we have always used, and in any case it has never been wise to let the Nigger get too far. 

We just need to be prepared at all times for any eventuality.

FIRST DRAGON, The Minister of Legal Terrorism and Plantation Protection:  

Well, in light of your concern about the possibility of these economic measures causing dire social consequences, let me assure you that we have already equipped our FORCES with the appropriate training and practice in the event of an uprising.

.

SNOW WHITE-The Money God: But what do our sociologists say about this, do they concur with me about the potential social fall-out?

SECOND DRAGON, The Minister of Guile and Deception and Social Manipulation: 

Yes, total agreement. When the increased stress is added to the persistent malnourishment that already exists, it is quite likely that many of the poor will be driven to desperate measures, and many of them will be forced to break The Laws of the Plantation in order to survive.

It should be expected that increasing the stress on the Negroes at a time when they are already locked down in a seemingly never-ending cycle of malnutrition-foods and low wages will be enough to bring out the very worst in their personalities. 

And this will be most evident in those places like Tivoli where they are all packed together like sardines in a can. 

The fact that they are landless means that every facet of their daily existence will be subjected to increasing pressures to get the dollar in a time when LEGAL MONEY IS SCARCE. 

For the poor and vulnerable it has therefore become a dog-eat-dog rat race that is spawning an increase in lawlessness, and the development of illegal survival systems like gangs.

(Before there were penitentiaries there were dungeons but the people in them all look the same)

SNOW WHITE-The Money God: OK, so do you have any recommendations?

SECOND DRAGON, The Minister of Guile and Deception and Social Manipulation: Yes, it is vitally necessary that we enlist the Church and influential leaders of other religious groups like the Rastas, if possible, to maintain an inordinate level of docility amongst the people at the very same time when their life conditions are drastically worsening. UnHoly Father, What do you have to share on this matter?

THIRD DRAGON , The UnHoly Father with the Forked Tongue: Well gentlemen my throat is sore from preaching last night, so pardon me if I am a little brief with my comments today. Speaking from a position of long practice and experience I would say that the best way to do this is to revive the old “God is soon coming for his world” sermon. Another one that I would highly recommend is the “Patience and Long suffering sermon” that teaches the people to be patient with bondage, and imprints in their minds an attitude that SUFFERING LONG IS A VIRTUE. 

Also another trump card that we have always played is to teach them to love their enemies. With this combination of doctrines we can do anything to them and get away with it.

The desired objectve here is that through the influence of properly cooked religion, the people’s natural instinct to act in pursuit of freedom will be totally erased. You may think that it would be difficult to immobilize the human’s natural instinct to be free, but it is not. 

All we the religious leaders need to do is to continue feeding the Nigs with doctrines that condition them to look beyond themselves for a miracle-working God or a super-man Selassie to bring betterment to their lives… if they are prepared to patiently wait and be long-suffering.

We must continually hammer home the importance of blind faith and belief so that their minds are sufficiently spooked out. 

When crippled by this mental condition they will see two thousand years of waiting as no big deal.

But for this thing to be truly effective these doctrines and our ministers that are chosen to spread them must be made to look very holy. We and our rituals must be elaborately clothed with the utmost sanctity, so that if anyone dares to think critically about these spooky myths they would feel like they are committing sacrilege and sinning against God, and their conscious minds will be therefore afraid to THINK. 

After a few short generations of these teachings the natural instinct to act in pursuit of freedom can be effectively erased for thousands of years.

SNOW WHITE-The Money God: I totally agree with you. Properly cooked religion can definitely work wonders on the mind of a slave. 

The evidence is all around us. We have successfully tricked them with the idea about emancipation, and control their labor and their time, and their very lives the same way as we did before we told them that they are free. We have cloned for ourselves a true slave people, and programmed them with slave doctrines that taught them to love their enemies more than they love themselves. Most of them live from day to day in a permanent hustle for scraps, and have no prospects of handing down anything to their children but more slavery. Every generation passes it on to the next, and yet they still can be heard talking about slavery in the past tense. They are a very stupid people.

They have stupidly fallen for our emancipation trick and believe that the absence of chains means the absence of bondage and that the absence of a white face in charge means the end of white power. We will always be able to trick them and rule them, because although they can play sports and make music, thinking is something that they always have a problem with. Go ahead and tell us some more!

THIRD DRAGON , The UnHoly Father with the Forked Tongue: Well, as you all know, we have never failed to collaborate with the schools and universities in making the historical robbery of African people and the historical enrichment of our people look like remote events that left no lasting social and economic legacy.

We have always held that any discussions that throw light on the connection between past robberies and present poverty must be made taboo, and all the focus and the blame must be placed instead on the sins of the slave whose morality was bound to crack from the constant stress of the long historical weight of oppression.

If the truth were to gain recognition that the soul-destroying nature of slavery and the stress of present-day oppression are the main contributors to the moral decay of the people, then unhealthy attention and the glance of condemnation may become focused on us. 

God forbid that such a thing should happen, because the issue of reparations would be unavoidable, and it would be difficult to extricate the Church from responsibility for its long years of collaboration with the slave owners.

To counter such an eventuality I would suggest using the News Media to create a despicable image of those slave-descendants at the bottom of the economic ladder so that their poverty and social confusion will be seen as a direct result of their own laziness and their own innate immorality and inferiority.

SECOND DRAGON, The Minister of Guile and Deception and Social Manipulation: Thank you for your input UnHoly Father. Your suggestions are always very practical. As you know, we have been trained to study society from a long-term perspective, and that is why we say with full confidence that if we continue to keep the people’s heads locked down in a bottle with the type of religious dope that we have cooked up, our wealth-generating colonies will continue to yield just as much wealth as we have gotten over the past four hundred years.

While we the Money Gods are getting away with the loot, the stupid Negroes will blame each other for ” increasing and causing problems.” Deep down in the psyche of the Nigger we have stamped a compelling self-condemnatory feeling that they are guilty of an unwritten crime called being Black in the wrong time and the wrong place. As you know, we strongly recommend abortion and prison as a remedy for this crime, and with the help of The Church and the news media, public opinion will favor more birth-control pills and the building of MORE PRISONS. Birth-control pills for the Niggers, fertility pills for us.

As long as The Church, the universities, and The News Media continue to keep silent on the issues that we have cautioned them not to discuss, the dominant view in the society will be that more forces, more police, more soldiers, and more prisons are the best way to keep paradise afloat.

So my humble counsel to Your Majesty is that in light of our present economic measures we must divert the people’s attention from the fact that we are responsible for the macro-economic earthquake that was designed to shake off the vulnerable worthless eaters in society and lessen useless mouths on the plantation.

“ACCEPT JEEZUS,” “BUILD MORE PRISONS,” “STRENGTHEN THE DEFENCE FORCE,” “BRING BACK CORPORAL PUNISHMENT,” “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY”, “GET ANOTHER PARTY”. “WE HAVE TO TIGHTEN OUR BELTS AND BREED LESS”

These are the diversionary band-wagons that we will need to send out on the airwaves and in the pulpits so that uncomfortable issues of historical cause and effect are not discussed. These diversions will allow our profit-making mechanisms to continue increasing profits while belt-tightening strategies are preached to the ignorant, the un-educated, and the miss-informed.