Rastafarians

Rastafarians is a term that originated in Jamaica to describe members of an indigenous messianic religious movement with social, political, and cultural extensions that have proliferated in loose form around the globe. The core belief of Rastafarianism is that former emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie is a black messiah, whose appearance and crowning in 1930 signaled the start of a mass redemption for blacks exiled around the world. Influenced by Christianity, which it re-reads, the religion centers on Selassie, whose name means “might of the Trinity.” The religion's name comes from the Amharic word Ras (king or duke) and Tafari, the family name of Emperor Selassie. For Rastafarians, wholesale exodus and repatriation to a glorified homeland (either Ethiopia or Africa) is inevitable.

Anthropological studies describe Rastafarianism as a fight-or-flight reaction among mostly young, poor, ex-Christian men to extreme poverty conditions. The Rastafari enact a purposeful nonacceptance and avoidance of Western modernity and other European-derived aspects of mainstream Jamaican culture, which stem from being conquered by the British in 1655. Rastafarians speak of Jamaica as Babylon, and [Page 1199]within this metaphor, liken themselves to the Israelites of Biblical times, who also sought exodus. By 1974, Jamaica's population of 2 million was an estimated 15% to 20% Rastafarian.

Rastafarians dance to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Haile Selassie I on July 23, 2002, in Kingston, Jamaica. Most Rastafarians recognize Selassie I as their god.

Source: AP Photo/Collin Reid.

The earliest strands of Rastafarianism begin in the 1700s rise of Ethiopianism, a religious resistance to slavery that eventually became a more generalized and global Pan-Africanist call for black racial unity. After the 1835 emancipation of slaves, nonconformist churches grew, challenging missionary readings of the Bible and providing Africanized readings that positioned traditional Christian teachings as part of the colonial oppression that characterized Jamaican history. Rastafarianism is the reaction of those Jamaicans with a more materialist consciousness, who declared irrelevant religious readings that failed to address the problematic sociopolitical climate of Jamaica.

In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey's contributions to Ethiopianism met these requirements, and he became a major influence on the development of Rastafarian ideology. Garvey wrote and spoke widely on Ethiopianism, enunciating it as a separatist religion based on the racial superiority of blacks. He developed the discourse of Ethiopianism to argue and explain this religio-racial superiority, using Psalm 68 and other Bible verses to assert the divine royalty of the black race and to prophesize that blacks would someday rule the world. Garvey instructed his followers to look to Africa for the crowning of a prince. Rastafarians were those Jamaicans, mostly Garveyites, who read the 1930 crowning of Selassie in messianic terms.

In 1916, Garvey went to the United States to form the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a worldwide black pride movement. Often described as one of the first (post-Selassie) Rastafarians, the Jamaican minister Leonard Howell was one such Garveyite, who was frequently arrested for inciting revolution with his socio-religious critiques. In the rural hills, Howell and 500 to 1,600 others began the Pinnacle commune, from which originates the Rastafari desire to burn bridges with society and to live with a wilderness aesthetic, unshaven and dreadlocked. The smoking of ganja in Rastafarianism is thought to originate in the communal bonding practices of Pinnacle, as is the ongoing practice of having no official leaders of the Rastafari movement. Until its destruction by [Page 1200]police in 1954, Pinnacle pioneered the democratic socialism that characterized the Jamaican Manley government after it gained independence in 1962.

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