Farrakhan to visit Jamaica later this week
BASIL WALTERS, Observer staff reporter waltersb@jamaicaobserver.com
Monday, September 17, 2007
FARRAKHAN... to meet members of the Rastafari community
HEAD of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, is expected to arrive in the island later this week, when he will join members of the Rastafari community in celebrating the African Millennium.
The year-long Millennium celebrations got off the ground on September 11 with a motorcade from the Scott's Pass' Nyahbinghi Centre in Clarendon to the Mandela Park in Kingston, followed by a cultural rally in the park. A Millennium Dinner was held at the Hilton poolside on September 12.
Another significant highlight of the celebrations involved the symbolic fire, which was lit at the Nyahbinghi House on the 10th, and which will be extinguished on Wednesday.
"The Nyahbinghi House will be having the Idren (brethren) and will be lighting the fire from the 10th, and will continue straight through to September 19," said Maxine Stowe, consultant of the recently formed Ethio-African Diaspora Union Millennium Council (a combination of different mansions in the faith of Rastafari).
"We're expecting to have the Honourable Louis Farrakhan, who will be making a special trip to Jamaica to meet with brethren of the Rastafari Community," she told journalists at the September 6 media launch of the Millennium celebrations.
Other aspects of the celebrations include a major Rastafari exhibition entitled "Discovering Rastafari" in Washington DC by the Smithsonian Institute, as well as the Nyahbinghi Order petitioning the government of Jamaica with regards to its past abuses of members of the Rastafari faith.
"The African Union (AU) has declared an African Millennium for all African countries in the African Diaspora to use this millennium to reflect on objectives and goals as African people all over the world," Stowe told the gathering.
Citing some recent developments within the AU, one of which includes the declaration of the Diaspora as the sixth region of Africa, she suggested that the issues of reparations and repatriation should form part of the Millennium celebrations agenda.
Stowe, who recently returned from Barbados where the AU and South Africa hosted a conference in collaboration with Caricom states to establish stronger relationships and ties with the African Diaspora, said the Rastafari culture was "a flagship/vanguard for the unification of Africa".
