Shashemene’s Rastafarian community, known locally as Jamaica, straddles the main road just north of town. It’s readily distinguished by its tri-coloured buildings, dread-locked inhabitants and rounded vowels of Caribbean English. A shared bajaj from the bus station costs Birr2, or if you’re arriving from the north, just hop off when you pass it.
Various local teenagers (none of them real Rastas) serve as unofficial, and often unwelcome, guides. They’ll take you to see some churches and the defunct Black Lion Museum, which is just a family’s home with paintings of the Emperor on the walls, but their real aim is to sell you ganja (marijuana), which is held sacrosanct in Rastafarianism but is illegal in Ethiopia. You’ve been warned.
If you want to really meet and learn about the ‘Jamaicans’, the Zion Train Lodge and Banana Art Gallery are two good places to start. The latter is the home-cum-workshop-cum-museum of Haile Selassie medals and memorabilia of Ras Hailu Tefari (Bandy), originally from St Vincent in the Caribbean. His extraordinary ‘paintings’ use only material from banana plants without even additional colouring. It’s 500m down the dirt road opposite the Black Lion.
