Chapter 6
Assata and Zayd Shakur, I wonder if they knew for sure,
This would be the last day that they would spend together.
They went for a drive on the Jersey Turnpike,
Shots rang out and got Zayd, much to the policeman’s pleasure.
Assata was wounded for sure, they beat her behind a prison door,
But the walls could not hold her; her friends broke in and she escaped.
Sundiata got away, he was driving with them that day,
But they caught him after three days; he’s been in prison since ’73.
So who were the real American heroes? In the seventies it wasn’t Nixon or Spiro.
Could it have been the revolutionaries working underground to keep the people free?
So who were the real American heroes? In the seventies it wasn’t Ribner or Rizzo.
Could it have been John Africa’s revolution, the Seed of Wisdom, the fight against pollution?
There’s so many people struggling,
There’s so many people hustling,
There’s a new generation coming in
And we need the light they’re bringing.
Imam Al-Amin, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, George and Jonathan Jackson,
After Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz,
Geronimo Pratt, Sekou Odinga, and Herman Bell,
Mutulu and Kuwasi Balagoon, Sha Sha, Blood, Jalil, and Nuh Washington.
Revolutionaries in the US have more in common with Rastas than just dreadlocks. They grapple with sociopolitical undercurrents, varied and even sectarian beliefs, and issues surrounding community involvement. Horace Campbell, whose pivotal work Rasta and Resistance is a prominent study in Rastafari’s relationship with revolution, profoundly points out, “Rastafari faith, or even early liberation theology, has not escaped the dilemma which each of the great religions, especially Hinduism and Christianity, has set itself—the conflict between faith and works, contemplation and action.” He continues: “The fact that this very conflict now grips the soul of Rastafari, in relation to politics, is not a sign of collapse but of maturity. So it is that there are differences of opinion among the Rasta, whether it is their work to storm the earthly kingdom and take it in order to change it; or to explain it, to enquire more deeply into the Maker and His mysteries; or to engage in both warfares.”[149]
This chapter is about some of those who engaged.
A Bloody Decade for Revolutionaries in the USA
Although 1970s America is culturally associated with the decadence of disco and the end of the idealistic sixties, it was also a time when revolutionary and reactionary forces went underground to forward their struggles outside of governmental view. It was a difficult time for revolutionaries involved in the Black Power and Civil Rights movements; the new decade began with strikingly significant flash points.
On August 7, 1970, Black Panther Jonathan Jackson was slain in the Marion County courthouse in Indianapolis, during an attempt to free his older brother, George Jackson. Behind bars, George Jackson helped form the Black Guerrilla Family and later became the subject of Bob Dylan and Steel Pulse songs. He was also the author of the best-selling book Soledad Brother. Both brothers were quite famous at the time, and the book was largely a collection of letters between them.
In the courthouse that day, Jonathan tried to free George and the other Soledad Brothers through the kidnapping of Supreme Court judge Harold Haley. Jonathan was killed on site, but his actions prompted the hunt and capture of another outspoken critic of the American judicial system: Angela Davis, a professor at the University of California, San Diego. The firearms Jonathan used in the courthouse were registered under her name; he had been one of her bodyguards. Jonathan’s courthouse incident spun out of control as multiple hostages were taken and there was a shootout between the police and the escaping van. In addition to Jonathan, three other people were killed that day—two of Jonathan’s accomplices and the judge. Several more hostages were wounded by the gunfire.
Perhaps in retaliation for his brother’s actions, a prison guard shot and killed George Jackson in the back on August 21, 1971. The prison said George was attempting to escape, but many activists viewed it as a deliberate assassination. Less than a month later, on September 13, 1971, the single bloodiest day in US prison history occurred: after a botched raid to suppress a thousand inmates who had revolted and seized sections of the Attica Correctional Facility, thirty-three prisoners were massacred and ten corrections officers and employees were killed. The inmates stood their ground against the guards for five days, seeking to negotiate an end to their inhumane conditions as well as protest George Jackson’s murder. “We are men! We are not beasts,” they are reported as chanting. Despite racial conflict, Attica prisoners fought across the color line for a common cause—the majority of the inmates were African American, but there was a substantial Puerto Rican population. The 383 correctional officers, however, were white. As reported, many of the guards were openly racist and apparently called their batons “nigger sticks.”
The government feared George Jackson because of his incredible leadership potential and formidable determination. Due the success of Soledad Brother, Jackson’s voice invigorated many people with a sense of urgency. In the text, after discussing the brutal killings behind prison walls, he proclaims, “Our mortality rate is almost what you expect to find in a history of Dachau.”
At the age of eighteen, Jackson had been sentenced one year to life for a seventy-dollar armed robbery. In prison, he became politicized and an outspoken critic of the American government. His activism essentially guaranteed a lifetime sentence. In 1966 inside San Quentin Prison, Jackson and other prisoners started the aforementioned Black Guerrilla Family. It was an organization set up to defend the rights of black inmates. Danny Haiphong, a writer for the Black Agenda Report, explains, “George Jackson was a giant that the US State could not contain—so it killed him. It was Jackson who developed a foundational theory of the prison state in relationship to the design of the imperialist system. Jackson said revolutionary movements require three elements: ‘an above-ground organization that carries out political work, an independent media, and an underground organization committed to creating crises for the establishment.’”[150]
Jackson’s political positions were shaped by his firsthand experience. He advocated for worldwide revolution and was not rebellious with a criminal’s intent. As Eric Mann argues, “George doesn’t use fascism as an angry curse at the rulers. He presents it as an analytical model to explain the nature of US society that can help us better understand the nature of our enemy and work out the most effective strategies for resistance.”[151]
More than thirty years have passed since George Jackson’s murder, but law enforcement officials still operate with animosity toward revolutionaries. A prominent example of this came in 2005, when Tookie Williams’s stay of execution was denied by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in part because Tookie cited George Jackson as one of his heroes. Tookie was a prominent Los Angeles gang member who evolved into a positive role model for young inmates in prison; he taught others to serve their sentences without inciting or encouraging violent incidents. Despite Tookie’s exemplary conduct in prison for more than a decade, the state still executed him. He was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize after he worked on a peace accord between rival LA gangs and publicly lamented his role in forming the Cripps. Despite such deeds, Schwarzenegger denied Williams clemency. In his statement, the governnor said: “The dedication of Williams’s book Life in Prison cast significant doubt on his personal redemption. . . The mix of individuals on [the dedication] list is curious . . . But the inclusion of George Jackson on the list defies reason and is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed . . .”[152]
In 1970, activist H. Rap Brown was charged with inciting to riot in Cambridge, Maryland, and was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. At only twenty-three years of age, he was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a strong member of the Civil Rights Movement; Brown worked tirelessly registering black voters in the South and later became minister of justice for the Black Panther Party.
In 1971, the FBI captured Brown in New York City and sent him to Attica prison on a robbery conviction. After five years of incarceration, he emerged from prison as Jamil Al-Amin, a devout Muslim. He made a pilgrimage to Mecca and then settled in a neighborhood in Atlanta’s West End, where he became active in the Muslim community. In 2002, journalist Mara Shalhoup wrote:
Today, West End Park is lined by manicured yards and white-trimmed bungalows painted lemon yellow, teal and taupe. Boys shoot hoops on a covered basketball court, and women in bright headscarves gather on the lawn across the street. All signs point toward prosperity.
It was a different scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those gathered in the park were not there for play but to sell services and wares: sex, and later, crack rock.
Within a decade the drugs and prostitutes began to disappear. Al-Amin’s followers like to credit him with the street sweeping, but no one can say for sure that he was creating the resurgence of West End. He did join the local mosque and become its prayer leader. Muslim families from Boston, Philadelphia and New York relocated to West End to be closer to the mosque and its charismatic leader.
“We developed West End at the height of the crack epidemic, enforced the park’s curfew to keep out the bad elements,” says Ali, now heading the West End mosque in Al-Amin’s absence. “We cleaned it up by having a visible presence of [Muslim] men in this neighborhood.”[153]
After Jamil Al-Amin was released from prison, the police tracked him incessantly. In 1993, he was interrogated as a suspect in the first World Trade Center bombing. A year later, he was charged with shooting a man in the leg outside of the store he owned. Later, the victim accused the police of provoking Al-Amin into shooting him. The charges were dropped, and the victim joined Al-Amin’s mosque in the West End. But immediately after they arrested Al-Amin for the bogus shooting, FBI agents invaded his store. (This incident occurred only one month after NYPD officers were acquitted for the brutal slaying of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed twenty-three-year-old immigrant from Guinea. Diallo was a devout Muslim and a law-abiding citizen. Police fired over forty shots into him as he stood in the foyer of his apartment building.)
Deputies Aldranon English and Ricky Kinchen, who ironically also served the warrant to Al-Amin, had both been on the force for less than a year. Heavily armed and inexperienced, their first approach to his store was fruitless; the second time it was lethal.
Al-Amin was thought to have killed Kinchen and wounded English. When he was finally apprehended, though, the case against him was very thin. Nonetheless, at the time of this writing, Al-Amin remains in prison enduring inhumane conditions, including solitary confinement and restricted access to his Quran.
Walter Rodney was a noted historian and political figure in the 1960s and ’70s; he released his best-known book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, in 1972. In 1966, when Rodney was just twenty-four, he was awarded a PhD with honors in African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His dissertation, “A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800,” was published in 1970. A devoted student of C.L.R. James, Rodney became a professor of African history at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, where he was introduced to the burgeoning culture of Rastafari. He instructed his classes in both a formal university setting and in remote regions of Jamaica’s countryside via “groundings” with Rastafari sistren and brethren. The reasoning sessions he facilitated are recorded in Groundings with My Brothers—his mission was to debunk any uneducated glorification of the African past by teaching a true history of the African continent. Originally born in Guyana, Rodney was assassinated in his home country after returning from an independence celebration in Zimbabwe. Authorities deplored Rodney’s revolutionary zeal; he expertly voiced the people’s dire need for change.
The revolutionary vigor in America in the 1960s and ’70s was part of a global phenomenon, and our close Caribbean neighbors were no exception. In Grenada, Rastas mobilized to take part in the revolution. According to Horace Campbell, “More than 400 Rastas were involved in the People’s Liberation Army, which overthrew the Eric Gairy dictatorship on 13 March, 1979.”[154] The New Jewel Movement championed the Rastas against ganja charges, placing them in “key governmental positions in the security forces” and proclaiming, “Rastafari must take their proper place in the Third World Revolution struggle against dictatorship and oppression. Rastas cannot and must not become the pawns of reactionary capitalists in their attempt to maintain imperialism.”[155] There was clearly an interchange going on throughout the region, and the successful revolution in Cuba was a beacon.
In 2016, I traveled to Cuba with the National Cooperative Business Association. Our delegation engaged Cuba’s cooperative sector in as many ways as we could. Since the US embargo was still effectively in place, we hoped to pave the way for future co-op collaborations. I was working with the NCBA CLUSA’s US-Cuba Cooperative Working Group, along with others from True Value Hardware, Organic Valley, the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, and more. I was excited to do some work with the co-ops in Cuba, but what would have made the trip even more special would have been to link up with an idol of mine, Assata Shakur.
Assata Shakur and the Black Liberation Army
At the end of the 1960s, the Black Panther Party began to split. After merciless persecution, different perspectives clashed: some members wanted guerrilla warfare, others wanted a nonviolent political movement. Geronimo Pratt had gone underground to work on an independent “New African” Southern state. Apparently, this caused his removal from the BPP. After the Panther 21 made a statement supporting the Weather Underground, they too were removed.
The Panther 21 was a group of New York Black Panthers arrested and charged in April 1969 for conspiracy to blow up the New York Botanical Gardens; the jury acquitted them after just forty-five minutes of deliberation. Afeni Shakur (Tupac’s mother), Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Jamal Joseph, Kwando Kinshasa, Shaba Om, Ali Bey Hassan, Curtis Powell, Richard Harris, and Kuwasi Balagoon were all involved.
The FBI’s ruthless persecution of the Black Panther Party forced many members into hiding. This gave rise to the Black Liberation Army, a self-proclaimed “New African guerrilla organization.” The song lyrics that preface this chapter refer to a 1973 incident involving BLA members Sundiata Acoli, Assata Shakur, and Zayd Malik Shakur. State troopers ambushed them while they were driving on the New Jersey Turnpike and ultimately Zayd was killed and Assata was shot twice. Assata later stated:
I was kept on the floor, kicked, pulled, dragged along by my hair. Finally I was put into an ambulance, but the police would not let the ambulance leave. They kept asking the ambulance attendant: “Is she dead yet? Is she dead yet?” Finally when it was clear I wasn’t going to die in the next five or ten minutes, they took me to the hospital. The police were jumping on me, beating me, choking me, doing everything they could possibly do as soon as the doctors or the nurses would go outside.[156]
On November 2, 1979, the Revolutionary Armed Task Force liberated Assata Shakur from prison and whisked her away to safety in Cuba. Assata apparently still resides there today, safe and sound, albeit with million-dollar bounty on her head, courtesy of the George W. Bush administration.
The MOVE organization emerged in Philadelphia in the seventies. Like the movement of Rastafari, their focus on stopping pollution and animal cruelty was dramatically ahead of its time. In their self-published booklet 20 Years on the MOVE, they defiantly stated in capital letters: “MOVE’S WORK IS TO STOP INDUSTRY FROM POISONING THE AIR, THE WATER, THE SOIL, AND TO PUT AN END TO THE ENSLAVEMENT OF LIFE—PEOPLE, ANIMALS, ANY FORM OF LIFE.”
MOVE had a very innovative approach to resisting the criminal justice system. When members started getting locked up on a regular basis, they used “strategic profanity,” as they called it. Their logic was that words were not profane, only the system that oppressed others was profane. They also strategically decided who would get arrested at each protest. Then at the hearings they would have ten or so members disrupt the trial. This meant that the case would get suspended and ten more people would be charged with contempt. MOVE members did this over and over until city officials were forced to drop the cases against them; the system could not manage the workload.
MOVE members ate a plant-based diet and embraced hard physical work. Living as a family, they adopted homeschooling as their primary means for educating their youth. They chopped their own firewood, ran dogs, shoveled snow, and swept the street. They helped homeless people find shelter and assisted the elderly with home repairs. Well-known political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal was a local journalist at the time of MOVE’s emergence, and he describes his relationship with them this way:
I met MOVE while covering them in Philadelphia. No one who was in Philadelphia from the seventies to the mid-eighties can claim not to know about MOVE. MOVE members have been active and aboveground in Philadelphia since 1973. I’ve been reading in magazines a lot about the animal liberation movement. In 1973 they were in the Philadelphia Zoo protesting caged exploitation of animals, and they were beaten for it, they were jailed for it, and they got ridiculously high bails for it. When I first heard about MOVE people eating garlic, the women having babies with no midwife, no drugs, no medication, no husband, just themselves and their God-given instinct for motherhood . . . about MOVE people being beaten for protesting Frank Rizzo or protesting at the zoo against the encagement of animals, I thought they were crazy . . . What MOVE represents is an idea that people can move away from the system and use the principle of life to survive . . . There’s nothing more powerful than an idea.[157]
MOVE’s striking radicalism ramped up when a police officer trampled one of their newborn babies to death. The circumstance of the baby’s murder prompted MOVE to host a press conference. Needless to say, the police department, run by the notorious Frank Rizzo, was not congenial. In 1978, two years after this tragic incident, the police carried out a full-on siege of a MOVE house following a housing code violation, going as far as using water cannons and firepower. Consuewella and Janet Africa carried children out of the flooded basement and Delbert Africa was savagely beaten on international television.
Nine MOVE members were eventually convicted for the killing of a police officer. He was shot at a downward trajectory in the back of the neck while the MOVE members were confined to the basement of their house. The angle of the shot points conclusively to “friendly fire,” but this is very rarely, if ever, reported in the media. The judge in the case made the startling admission “that he ‘hadn’t the faintest idea’ who really fired the fatal shot. ‘They call themselves a family,’ the judge said. ‘I’ll sentence them as a family.”[158] Those nine MOVE members are still incarcerated at the time of this writing—almost four decades later!
MOVE was reborn in the eighties at a row house in West Philly, where they broadcasted their strategic profanity from a loudspeaker; they set it up one Christmas Eve and screamed about how much of a “motherfucker” Santa Claus was. The mayor and the police commissioner classified them as a terrorist organization, although the revamped MOVE house had yet to commit a violent act. Their weapons were words, and they faced a foe that was ready to use explosives. On May 13, 1985, MOVE’s row house was bombed, resulting in the death of five children and six adults. Ramona Africa and thirteen-year-old Birdy Africa were the only ones to survive the attack. As the only adult survivor, Ramona was later incarcerated for rioting and conspiracy.
In 1996, after regularly traveling to Philadelphia with the Beehive and taking part in Mumia demonstrations, I visited the Philadelphia courthouse holding MOVE’s civil suit against the city. We watched as the judge ordered the city to pay $1.5 million to Ramona and various relatives of others killed in the incident. The MOVE members defied expectations. These are passionate people who want to be heard, but are also willing to listen. The MOVE organization taught its members to be leaders and prepared them for legal persecution and a lifetime of struggle. When pressed by the authorities, they practiced courtroom techniques which were very effective.
“We didn’t start out confronting the court system and going into court,” Ramona Africa said in a 1996 interview. “We were having peaceful demonstrations at the Philadelphia Zoo, at unsafe boarding homes for the elderly, the board of education, and the police started coming at us and attacking us, to stop our demonstrations.”[159] That’s when they developed the tactic of clogging the courts with their cases.
MOVE’s tactics might seem intense and occasionally brash, but in light of today’s worldwide consciousness of climate change and police brutality, John Africa’s teachings might have made positive strides toward correcting these atrocities. Here’s more of the pivotal perspective MOVE offered:
OUR RELIGION—LIFE
JOHN AFRICA taught us that Life is the priority. Nothing is more important or as important as Life, the force that keeps us alive. All life comes from one source, from God, Mom Nature, Mama. Each individual life is dependent on every other life, and all life has a purpose, so all living beings, things that move, are equally important, whether they are human beings, dogs, birds, fish, trees, ants, weeds, rivers, wind, or rain. To stay healthy and strong, life must have clean air, clear water, and pure food. If deprived of these things, life will cycle to the next level, or as the system says, “die.”
NATURAL LAW
We believe in natural law, the government of self. Man-made laws are not really laws, because they don’t apply equally to everyone and they contain exceptions and loopholes. Man-made laws are constantly being amended or repealed. Natural law stays the same and always has. Man’s laws require police, sheriffs, armies, and courts to enforce them, and lawyers to explain them. True law is self-explanatory and self-enforcing. In the undisturbed jungles, oceans, deserts of the world, there are no courtrooms or jails. The animals and plants don’t need them. No living being has to consult a law book to be able to know if they have to cough, sneeze, or urinate. Natural law says that when you see something getting too close to your eye, you will blink, whether you are a German shepherd or a Supreme Court Justice.
SELF-DEFENSE
All living things instinctively defend themselves. This is a God-given right of all life. If a man goes into a bear’s cave, he violates and threatens the bear’s place of security. The bear will defend his home by instinctively fighting off the man and eliminating him. The bear is not wrong, because self-defense is right.
BEING A REVOLUTIONARY
Revolution starts with the individual. It starts with a person making a personal commitment to do what’s right. You can’t turn someone into a revolutionary by making them chant slogans or wave guns. To understand revolution, you must be sound. Revolution is not imposed upon another, it is kindled within them. A person can talk about revolution, but if they are still worshipping money, or putting drugs into their body, or beating their mate, they obviously haven’t committed themselves to doing what’s right. Revolution is not a philosophy, it is an activity.[160]
1974—The Overthrow of Selassie I
America and the Caribbean weren’t the only places bursting with revolutionary fervor. In the seventies, Ethiopian citizens were frustrated with the emperor; they wanted further progress. What many didn’t see was that Haile Selassie I was making the strides they were looking for, and due to Rastas, history remains on his side. “If the revolution is good for the people, then I am for the revolution,” Selassie I said.[161]
In prior decades, when European powers found themselves too weak to maintain imperial rule, some African countries began making significant headway toward independence. While Ethiopia was the only African country never to be fully colonized, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Sudan, Morocco, Ghana, and Guinea all threw off the yoke of their oppressors and became independent in the 1950s. In the 1960s, almost the entire continent followed suit. Unfortunately, all those countries kept the borders established by European powers. This led to a certain amount of instability for many ethnic groups who ended up on multiple sides of the borders. The ethnic conflicts created and perpetrated by colonialists have continued into this period, leading to military rule in many of these countries.
During the early period of Modern Africa from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, Africa was characterized by more than seventy coups and thirteen presidential assassinations. Border and territorial disputes were also common, with the European-imposed borders of many nations being widely contested through armed conflicts.[162]
In the late 1970s the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank forced governments to enact policies that favored rich elites and starved the poor. Their stated policies supposedly enhanced development, but as we’ve seen all over the world, what actually happened was that these struggling countries continued to be dependent on Western economies. That is why this deplorable dynamic is called neocolonialism.
For decades, Ethiopia kept foreign vultures from gaining too much power within their economy by aligning with opposing powers. After World War II, the Cold War between the US and Russia impacted Africa as the superpowers perpetuated internal conflicts and supported inhumane military dictatorships. These tendencies eventually moved to the Ethiopian political landscape, culminating in a “revolution” and Haile Selassie I’s ouster. What the people got, however, did not embody democracy. In Campbell’s words, “The vast masses were reduced to the limited role of a frightened audience in their own revolution.”[163] And in the process, they empowered Mengistu Haile Mariam, who later became known as “the butcher of Addis Ababa.”
Even in the 1960s, His Imperial Majesty had been a driver of progressive change. He can be credited with transforming the country from feudalism into the modern age—abolishing slavery and introducing a constitution. Focused on education, he sent many students to the West. Unfortunately, they came back to overthrow him. Biographer Ryszard Kapuściński writes:
The monarch, in spite of his advanced age, maintained a perspicacity amazing to those around him, and he understood better than his closest followers that a new era was coming and it was time to pull together, to bring things up to date, to speed up, to catch up. To catch up, and even to overtake. Yes, he insists, even overtake. He confesses (today one can talk about it) that a part of the Palace was reluctant to embrace these ambitions, muttering privately that instead of giving in to the temptation of certain novelties and reforms, it would be better to curb the Western inclinations of youth and root out the unreasonable idea that the country should look different, that it should be changed.
The Emperor, however, listened to neither the aristocratic grumbling nor the university whispers, believing as he did that all extremes are harmful and unnatural.[164]
People around Haile Selassie I at the time of his undoing offer a different story than what Kapuscinski tries to convey—that Selassie I was some kind of despot. On the contrary, he chose not to call the troops against his own people when they tried to overthrow him. In the end, the so-called revolutionaries wreaked havoc on the people they supposedly wanted to liberate.
The strategic conversion to the Dergue—the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1987—began when their agents started to fill Haile Selassie I’s own ranks:
Their cunning consisted in this: they carried out all their destruction of the system with the Emperor’s name on their lips, as if executing his will and humbly realizing his thoughts. Now—claiming to do so in the name of the Emperor—they created a commission to investigate corruption among dignitaries, checking their accounts, landholdings, and all other riches.[165]
Haile Selassie’s arrest was somewhat anticlimactic, although the significance of the act didn’t seem lost on the official who read the new government’s statement to him. As a line of armed soldiers faced the emperor, the man reading the order was shaking, while Selassie I was poised and regal. The Dergue charged him with abuse of power, a lack of competence, and the embezzlement of state funds. Through the media, these charges were spread across the globe, and Selassie I’s reputation was tarnished.
After an awkward silence, Selassie I’s response to the charges was profound. In the tone of a father speaking to his children, he informed the soldiers that the role of the King of Kings of Ethiopia “is not just a title,” it is about “organizing work during peace and defense when under attack,” something he had done throughout his life. He reiterated that an individual’s desires should never come before the needs of the nation; if it was determined that their actions were for the greater good of Ethiopia, he would comply.[166]
What followed was one of the most horrendous eras in Ethiopia’s long history, and the country has still not recovered. Four years after Selassie I was deposed, the “Red Terror” unfolded, leading to “tens of thousands of young people [being] killed, and the government addicted to the use of terror as a weapon of war,” according to a report by Africa Watch.[167] The movie Man of the Millennium: Emperor Haile Selassie I demonstrates the carnage after the Dergue took power in 1975. “Around 1,500,000 Ethiopians were victims of Dergue genocide,” says the filmmaker, “the seventh-worst genocide in world history.” Even though Haile Selassie I had been vilified for the famine in the seventies, the “great famine” came in the eighties under the Dergue’s watch, and was largely attributed to counterinsurgency efforts.
News of Haile Selassie’s death prompted Bob Marley to pen the song “Jah Live,” singing, “The truth is an offense but not a sin. Is he who laughs last, children, is he who win.” The movement of Rastafari focuses on more than just Haile Selassie I’s holiness, serving its energies toward individual empowerment and defending inalienable rights.