A Prophecy Before There Was Anyone to Fulfill It
In 1927, Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born Pan-Africanist introduced earlier in this curriculum's coverage, reportedly told his followers to "look to Africa, for there a king shall be crowned," language his followers understood as prophecy pointing toward eventual Black political redemption on the African continent. Three years later, on November 2, 1930, Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, taking titles including King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, phrasing that closely echoed biblical descriptions of a coming messiah found in the Book of Revelation. To several Jamaican preachers, including Leonard Howell, Archibald Dunkley, Robert Hinds, and Joseph Hibbert, this seemed too precise a match to be coincidence: Garvey's prophecy, they concluded, had been fulfilled, and Haile Selassie himself was the promised Black messiah, in some interpretations the literal Second Coming of Christ.
Leonard Howell and the Founding of a Movement
Of these early preachers, Leonard Howell is most commonly credited as Rastafari's founding figure. A former member of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, Howell returned to Jamaica in the early 1930s and began preaching Selassie's divinity, work that quickly brought him into conflict with colonial authorities; he was arrested multiple times through the decade specifically for asserting Selassie's authority over Britain's King George V, a claim colonial officials treated as seditious. In 1940, following his release from prison, Howell founded Pinnacle, a self-sufficient Rastafari commune in the mountains of Saint Catherine parish that grew to include thousands of residents, cultivating crops including marijuana, which Rastas came to regard as a sacrament aiding meditation and spiritual insight. Colonial and later Jamaican authorities raided Pinnacle repeatedly over the following decade, eventually destroying the commune entirely by the mid-1950s, but its former residents scattered across Jamaica, particularly into Kingston's poorest neighborhoods, spreading Rastafari belief and practice as they went.
A Complicated Relationship With Its Own Prophet
This unit must note directly a genuine complication in Rastafari's founding story: Marcus Garvey himself never identified with the Rastafari movement his own prophecy is credited with inspiring, and in fact became an open critic of Haile Selassie, particularly after Ethiopia's 1935-36 defeat by fascist Italy and Selassie's subsequent exile, during which Garvey wrote a scathing 1937 editorial titled "The Failure of Haile Selassie as Emperor," calling him "a great coward" ruling a "country where black men are chained and flogged." Selassie himself, an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, explicitly and repeatedly denied any claim to personal divinity when directly asked about it in later interviews. Rastafari's core theological claims, in other words, rest on a foundation that both of the two men most central to the movement's origin story, Garvey and Selassie themselves, directly and publicly rejected, a fact Rastafari belief has generally addressed by treating both men's own statements as themselves further evidence of the very worldly, "Babylon" corruption the movement positions itself against.
From Persecution to Global Recognition
For decades after its founding, Rastafari faced sustained hostility from Jamaican colonial and postcolonial authorities alike, including violent clashes with law enforcement through the 1950s and 60s and, as this unit's next lesson will show, direct prosecution under Jamaica's Obeah laws, despite most Rastas' own explicit hostility toward Obeah as a practice. Haile Selassie's actual visit to Jamaica on April 21, 1966, drawing the largest crowd ever assembled at Kingston's airport to that point, marked a turning point in the movement's domestic standing, and by the 1970s, Rastafari-inspired reggae music, particularly through the global fame of Bob Marley, brought the movement international visibility and, gradually, a measure of respectability within Jamaica itself that it had been denied for its first four decades of existence. Selassie's own death in 1975 and Marley's in 1981 removed the movement's two most visible figures, yet Rastafari endures today, with adherent communities across the Caribbean, the United States, Britain, and parts of Africa, including a small but historically significant repatriate community at Shashamane, Ethiopia, established on land Selassie himself donated in 1948.
