Rastafari
Speaking in New York in August 1920, Jamaican born pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey urged his Carnegie Hall audience to “Look to Africa, when a black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near.” A decade later Garvey’s prophecy appeared to come true. Haile Selassie (born Tafari Makonnen) was crowned, with Empress Menen, in Ethiopia on November 2, 1930, acquiring the title “By the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Elect of God.” In Jamaica, Haile Selassie’s ascension gave rise to a new religious movement. Combining theology with an understanding of history from the perspective of the Black underclass, Rastafari (the name taken from Haile Selassie’s pre-reign title) endeavored to promote Pan-Africanism and Black empowerment. Today, Rastafarianism has spawned a billion-dollar industry, ranging from roots reggae music to African heritage tourism, fashion, and beauty products, spreading from its rural Jamaica origins to permeate most every nook and cranny of the planet.
The first Rastas
Among those who found revelation in Garvey’s words were Rastafari’s founding fathers: Robert Hinds, Joseph and Archibald Hibbert, and Leonard Howell. They were each a product of various migration movements across the Caribbean and had personal histories which contributed to their revolutionary zealousness. Born in Jamaica in 1898, Leonard Howell is sometimes termed the First Rasta. While living in New York he became a member of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. After returning to Jamaica in 1932, Howell began preaching the second coming of Christ through Haile Selassie. One of the sources that Howell used to spread the word was an image from National Geographic depicting Haile Selassie’s coronation which he handed out in Kingston.
In 1934, Leonard Howell was placed on trial and found guilty of sedition and hate speech against the Jamaican government and the king, George V, both during his speeches and in a pamphlet that he had published, “The Promised Key.” Sentenced to two years in prison, by 1937 Howell had been certified mentally insane and was confined in Bellevue Asylum outside of Kingston. Despite these barriers, in 1940 he founded the Ethiopian Salvation Society and created the first Rasta settlement, known as Pinnacle for its elevated location in the hills of the parish of St Catherine. Situated on the site of the first village to house freed slaves in Jamaica, the community at Pinnacle first defined many of the characteristics of the early Rastafari movement: self-sufficiency through agriculture, separatism from the state, and a devotion to Ethiopia. Accused of various seditious activities, including communism, Pinnacle was subjected to several police raids during the 1950s and was destroyed in 1958. Despite its ultimate destruction, the impact of the settlement made it legendary among other settlements around the country, who were observed to have been "miniature Pinnacles.”
Following the Italian invasion in 1935, Ethiopia became something of an international cause célèbre. While Haile Selassie took refuge in Fairfield House in Bath, Sylvia Pankhurst founded a newspaper, New Times and Ethiopia News, to rally support for Ethiopia. Although she did not know it at the time, Pankhurst’s paper found an audience among the Rastafari in Jamaica, where it was banned by the British colonial government in 1955. One notable elder, Ras Bongo Watto, later revealed that New Times and Ethiopia News inspired him to establish the radical Rastafari movement House of Youth Black Faith. ‘In 1947’, he explained,
I just tek up my Bible as a youngster and start to preach the word. I meet much suffering, many police brutality. When Sylvia Pankhurst come to Jamaica with her pamphlets and papers about the emperor’s secret force, Black International, it gave me great upliftment to know that I have the inspiration to establish the House of Youth Black Faith.
The House of Youth Black Faith revolutionized the Rastafari movement. Critical of the Masonic and revivalist tendencies of early Rasta leaders, it advocated a disciplined Rastafari order which promoted the wearing of dreadlocks, use of marijuana, a new dialect (Iyaric) and chanting down Babylon.
The House of Youth Black Faith also differed from earlier Rastafari organizations in its link to a global anti-colonial movement. The wearing of dreadlocks, for example, was influenced by the Mau Mau warriors in Kenya, who were waging war against Britain’s imperialist forces. It was commonly believed that Mau Mau were angels sent by Haile Selassie to deliver Black people from captivity in Babylon, a state of unresolved exile and forced enslavement. Much of Rastafari’s growth during the 1940s and 1950s was due to the spread of the Ethiopian World Federation (EWF). The organization was established in New York by Melaku Bayen, a cousin of Haile Selassie. By January 1937 Bayen had founded a newspaper, The Voice of Ethiopia, to report on the latest developments in the country and create a platform to bring pro-Ethiopian sentiments together. During his time in the United States, Bayen realized the need for an organizational body that could harness and politicize such sentiments. In August 1937, with the approval of Haile Selassie, he founded the first Local of the Ethiopian World Federation. Its constitution was published in the first issue of The Voice of Ethiopia:
To promote the love and good will among Ethiopians at home or abroad in order to maintain the integrity and the sovereignty of Ethiopia, to disseminate the ancient Ethiopian culture among our members, to correct wrongs, to end oppression and to cut out for ourselves and our posterity a destiny worthy of our ideal of perfect humanity and the aim for which God created us; not only to save ourselves from annihilation but find our place in the sun; in this effort we are determined to seek peace and to pursue it, for this is God’s will for man.
The EWF not only functioned as an unapologetically pan-African platform, but its organizational structure was also ecumenical, with offices throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. It offered Rastafari an international framework that early leaders such as Howell could not.
In September 1955 Maymie Richardson, an African America singer and international officer for the EWF, arrived in Jamaica with the intention of stirring up support for the Federation. During a speech in Kingston, Richardson explained that she had brought a message from the emperor’s lips, having met him during his American visit in 1954. As well as encouraging people to learn about the ancient land of Ethiopia and to establish an Ethiopian church, she came with information that land was available in Ethiopia for ‘Black people of the West’ and encouraged them to return home.
The impact of Richardson’s call on the growth of Rastafari in Jamaica was huge. The suggestion that British subjects should eschew the opportunity to migrate to Britain and instead move to Ethiopia was bold. But in 1948 – a year in which large numbers of West Indians ventured to Britain in an effort to help rebuild their mother country – Haile Selassie introduced an act known as The Land Grants, which set aside 500 acres of land in Shashamane, a town in central Ethiopia, for all Africans in the diaspora who supported Ethiopia.
It was through the EWF that Rastafari were able to reassert themselves as Africans and connect their spiritual and cultural visions to a broader anti-colonial project. The period following Richardson’s visit saw more aggressive demands to return to Africa. In March 1958, Prince Emmanuel, leader of the Bobo Rastafari camp, and members of the House of Youth Black Faith in the Back-O-Wall settlement launched the first Rastafari Universal Convention in Kingston. The convention, which lasted 21 days, brought together Rastafari camps from across Jamaica, as well as groups associated with Ethiopianism. Inspired by Ghana’s recent independence, the prevailing sentiment of the convention was summarized in the slogan ‘Africa yes, England no’. Following the convention, a letter was sent to Queen Elizabeth II which began: ‘We the descendants of the Rastafari community, call upon you for our Repatriation.’
The convention marked a significant shift in how Rastafari organized in relation to the Jamaican state. It brought Reverend Claudius Henry to Jamaica, who, by the end of the year, begun a Garvey-esque repatriation movement to Africa. Following the convention, Henry pronounced himself as ‘repairer of the breach’ and prophesied the return of Africans in Jamaica to their motherland. On 5 October 1959 thousands of people gathered on Rosalie Avenue in Kingston ready to sail to Africa. Although no ships ever arrived, the publicity surrounding the gathering forced members of the public to take Rastafari seriously. The following year the police found evidence supporting rumours that Henry was seeking to overthrow the government and he was imprisoned for six years. Shortly after, in April 1960, Henry’s son, Ronald, was found guilty of attempting a military coup in Red Hills and was executed for sedition.
Whether or not Claudius Henry saw himself as Rastafari remains unclear. What is true, however, is that his rise and fall attracted a significant amount of negative press for the movement and intensified the fraught relationship between the community and the police. It was common for Rastafari to be imprisoned, beaten and have their possessions demolished. Violence often targeted Rastafari communities, for example the Coral Gardens massacre in April 1963, during which as many as 150 Rastafari were tortured and killed by police and the army. Before this, in April 1960 a group of Rastafari elders had approached university professors at the University of the West Indies to ask them to conduct research exploring the movement and its demands. The findings were published in July in A Report of the Rastafari Movement in Jamaica. In addition to providing the context, history and aims of the movement, the report outlined recommendations to remedy the situation between Rastafari and the state. As recommended by the report, the government sent a mission of selected Rastafari elders and pan-African associations to Africa in 1961 to explore the possibilities of repatriation. However, by Jamaica’s independence in August 1962 these plans had been shelved.
Independence forced Jamaica to confront questions about its future: who would speak for the country? How could it forge a national identity that did not see Britain as its starting point? And what values should be at the forefront of what it meant to be a Jamaican citizen? In the midst of a collapsing colonial heritage, the state crafted the motto, "Out of Many, One People." Before long, however, the slogan’s shortcomings were embraced ironically by the Black urban poor, using it to highlight their frustrations. The romantic notion of a multiracial society suggested that power would be evenly distributed. For Rastafari, however, the motto failed to reflect the true relationship between poverty and colorism that continued to define Jamaican society. The arrival of foreign enterprises in parishes such as St James, Westmoreland and Hanover sought to establish Jamaica as a tourist destination. Many Black Jamaicans were removed from their homes and forced to live in garrisons, as new all-inclusive resorts owned by the white elite were built.
Jamaica’s garrisons were the product of a political conflict between the country’s two rival parties, the Jamaican Labor Party (JLP) and the People’s National Party (PNP). The socialist PNP was founded by Norman Manley in 1938 in the aftermath of the British West Indies labor strikes, with the aim of representing the oppressed. In 1943, unhappy with the party’s direction, Manley’s cousin Alexander Bustamante founded the conservative JLP, which embraced capitalism and represented the landed gentry. Violence between the two parties would prove a persistent feature in Jamaican history.
Built as housing developments for residents who would support a local politician, garrisons became breeding grounds for political warfare. In 1963 the Back-O-Wall settlement in West Kingston, home of many Rastafari and one of the most notorious slums in the Caribbean, was demolished and replaced with Tivoli Gardens. Rastafari were dispersed across Jamaica’s garrisons, spreading their ideas among the country’s urban poor. Rastafari’s political ambivalence was encapsulated in the commonly used slur “politricks.”
Exodus
The movement of Caribbean migrants to the US and Britain shared Rastafari ideas with the world. The development of the movement in Britain is the clearest demonstration of this. The Commonwealth population in Britain increased from 2,000 in 1948 to 140,000 in 1962. In that year the Commonwealth Immigrants Act introduced stringent new entry requirements, only allowing those who had a "relevant connection" to Britain to emigrate to the country. The British Rastafari movement developed as a reaction to the racism experienced by Jamaicans in Britain. Despite misleading caricatures of the movement, which have portrayed it as a corrosive cult, Rastafari has carried the cultural, spiritual and political ideals of Black Power from Jamaica to London’s Ladbroke Grove and beyond.
Selected extracts from “The English Bible in Jamaican Rastafarianism” by Laurence A. Breiner
The Rastafarians of Jamaica constitute a religion unlike any other in the Caribbean. The most familiar indigenous religions of the West Indies and Latin America bear strong resemblances to one another. Voudon, shango, sanitaria, and candomblé are polytheistic cults with articulated theologies and acknowledged priesthoods, whose central ritual is spirit-possession. Like most possession cults around the world, these are dominated, though not necessarily ruled, by women. In all of them, traditional West African elements are preserved in a matrix of Catholicism.
Rastafarianism, too, is marked by an articulate and developing theology, but differs on every other point of comparison. In aggressive opposition to the norms of West Indian society, it is dominated by men. Though repatriation to Africa is its central tenet, it has no core of preserved African religion, and has not even adopted African elements from the surrounding culture to any considerable extent. Its matrix is Protestant rather than Catholic, and so at its center is the King James Bible, rather than any ritual mystery. Rastafarianism is, of course, monotheistic, but it rejects institutional hierarchy as much as it does possession by spirits or ancestors. What it establishes instead is in effect a religion of the Word, a community of prophets. The milieu of the cult is intensely oral/aural. Music, especially drumming, accompanies virtually every Rastafarian activity. There is an elaborate cult language, and rhetorical virtuosity is highly regarded. And as we will see, the source of Rastafarian authority and inspiration is the Bible – or more precisely, the inventive and almost endless discussion of the Bible by members of the community. The Rastafarians have created a rather different form of Protestantism, a religion in which all the Lord’s people are prophets, and in which, to paraphrase William Blake, the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God. The following will be concerned first with the use of the Bible among the Rastafarians and with the Biblical eschatology that serves as a context for prophecy, and then with the living role of prophecy within the sect, and with the probable impact of that role on Jamaican society.
A few paragraphs later…
Jamaican attitudes to the Bible are complex. It is of course the most authoritative of books and on the strength of its authority it surely served as a primary instrument of colonialism. We can assume that Black Jamaicans often heard, though they did not perhaps often repeat, Paul’s exhortation, “Servants, be subject to your masters.” Even the great myth of heavenly reward was exploited to keep the slaves manageable. But it is important to remember that, since the Bible was brought to the island by non-conformists, it was presented in the context of individual interpretation. However much that context was suppressed for political reasons, the fact remains that the slaves were being exposed to a religion devised for free Englishmen, premised on judicious individuality, and fundamentally at odds with slavery. The authority of the text was presented as an authority any reader was free to use. It was, so to speak, the neutral authority of a weapon.
In the surge of nationalism that accompanied nation independence (in 1962) there was some suggestion that the English Bible, like the English language, should be spurned as the abandoned materiel of imperialism. But cultural commentators have since pursued the metaphor by declaring that these are among the spoils of war, captured weapons that can be put to use in the continuing struggle for equal status among nations. This is essentially the Rastafarians’ attitude toward the English Bible, though they conceive it more as a recovered rather than as a captured weapon. The Rastas believe that the true Bible was originally written in Amharic by and about Ethiopians, the “Israelites.” But as part of the punishment by which God led his people into exile, the Bible was allowed to fall into the hands of the slavemasters, who distorted it to serve their own oppressive purposes. As a result, it now exists only in corrupt form, the aptly named King James “Version.” But the time of deliverance is at hand, and so the Rastafarians have been singled out and inspired with the ability to see through the distortions in order to restore the true sense of the original Bible. By recognizing the covert motives of the oppressors’ Bible they grow familiar with its characteristic deceptions, and so perceive what the original Bible must have said
The Rasta dream of returning to Ethiopia
Since repatriation will not come through any effort but in the fulness of time, the task of the Rastafarian is to survive in Babylon without becoming part of it. Prosaically, this make a virtue of the chronic unemployment of the urban poor, but it also elevates the attendant alienation of the poor into a moral stance. Especially in the early days this rejection of oppressive circumstances as “Babylon,” and the turn to the solace of a dream of Africa, made the cult appear otherworldly to outsiders – another downtrodden cargo cult. But Rastafarianism has in fact no other world, and in this it differs fundamentally from Revivalism and Black Protestantism throughout the Americas. It rejects every conception of heaven as “pie in the sky.” The doctrine of life after death is treated as another lie perpetrated by Christians in the service of slavery. As the Rastafarians’ God is a living God, their Zion as Ethiopia, the entirely physical place, no more transcendent than the Jerusalem of the Exilic Jews, where Rastafarians desire and deserve to be in their own lifetimes.
So “this worldly” is the movement that many Rastafarians do not believe in natural death at all. For them, death comes only as the wages of sin. One dies only because of one’s own sin, or when one is victimized by the sin of another. Barrett cites one such explanation.
“Life is like a game of cricket. As long as the player makes the appropriate stroke that merits each ball, he can play on and on for centuries. The only way a good player can be bowled out is when he makes an inappropriate stroke. The Rastafarian is the man who has acquired the appropriate spiritual way of dealing with life, he therefore is immortal.”
Many Rastas suggest that it is only the loss of a characteristic self-possession or “calmness of spirit” that can cause death. But since grief over the death of others might threaten this calm, it is reported that these Rastafarians assiduously avoid funerals and other contact with the dead. When one is a true Rastafarian, one simply cannot die.
The English Bible does not take precedence over personal revelation in Rastafarianism
The role of the Rastafarians as a prophetical remnant in effect supersedes the Bible. What guides them is not the text of the Bible itself, so much as the inspiration it authorizes. “We get our spiritual communication from our Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Haile Selassie… We read our Bible carefully, but by true inspiration we know that he is God.” While the Bible, and particularly its language, is the wellspring of the movement, its highest authority is vested not in any institutionalized interpretation by a priestly hierarchy, but in the ongoing, inspired conversation for which the Bible is only a kind of catalyst. [Joseph] Owens, perhaps the most experienced outside observer of the Rastafarians, notes that “basic conviction that living faith and experience are far more important than any written words…. Infinitely more vital than the books themselves are the God to whom they point and the men who try to live in fidelity to that God.”
Rastafarian doctrine is a work in progress
Doctrine or potential doctrine spreads as it is formulated. In Jamaica today, information often moves by word of mouth. Rastafarian doctrine circulates, is modified, and becomes established, in the same way. Ideas are spread, with impressive speed, just as news and gossip are spread. Here too the role of popular music is tremendously important. Reggae tunes ae being produced daily, to be pumped out through radios and sound systems on every street. Everyone hears them, and whether the subject is amorous, political, or religious, the language and orientation are nearly always Rastafarian, and have been so now for over twenty years [over forty years by 2024, since this article was copyrighted in 2001]. The impact of this entrenched alliance between religion and music on Jamaican society, especially in the city, can hardly be exaggerated.
