Written by Lee Perry and recorded for The Heptones 1977 album, Party Time, Sufferer’s Time is nothing less than one of the greatest, most humane songs I have ever heard. It breaks out of the dogma, which can attach itself to some reggae music and addresses the experiences of Rastafarians, as well as the poor and needy, by looking at how life is lived alongside the material aspirations that people may have. The Second Coming and a return to The Promised Land will be great, but it’s been a long wait, with no imminent sign of happening, so in the meantime, can’t the lowly suffera get a slice of the action by driving a fancy car or partying? Especially given that four hundred years of colonialism was supposed to promise better things for the indigenous peoples.
It’s a deft trick to be able to write a political song which blends capitalism with apathy, but that’s exactly what we get here. Small goals and targets, a means of measuring progress by consumerism. And why not, given the hardships the target audience may have endured. I’m assuming that A so we say, a so we go is the Rasta version of Keep calm and carry on, though I suspect it probably isn’t.
Projecting the theme of the song more widely, more of us are sufferers than we would care to admit. And many of us have been seduced into striving for the consolation of a better car, against real, positive, long lasting change. And in large part, that has been because the sufferers have enthusiastically lapped up the ism and schism which has been used to get them to blame other sufferers for not reaching their consumerist dreams.
The current tragedy of our age is that, in an Election year, the Sufferer’s Time seems as far away from being realised as it has ever been.
Video courtesy of Cheikh Tidiane NDAO
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