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Drum: COVER FEATURE
to survive and be reworked to suit the needs of slave
communities across the Caribbean. Think of Voodoo
in Haiti or Obeah in Jamaica to beg a sense of the
desire to maintain the African past. But the gap also
meant that Jesus when accepted by slaves was
always going to be remade in light of African
traditions. Jesus became a slave amongst the slaves,
his life story was reworked to mirror those in
“ My mama bore me in
a ghetto, there was no
mattress for my head.
But, no, she couldn’t
call me Jesus, I wasn’t
white enough she said.”
- Curtis Mayfield, Kung Fu
bondage. His death and resurrection gave hope for
the present and the future. Furthermore the
revolutionary message that good would win over evil
became the ideological raw material for slave
insurrection. For African Caribbean people the
association between Jesus and black life was most
clearly made within Garveyism and Rastafari.