Rastafarians

A millenarian movement of Afrocentric Black Jamaicans deriving their tag, “Rastafari,” directly from their deity, Emperor Haile Selassie I (Ras meaning duke or head combined with the emperor's precoronation name Tafari Makonnen), Rastas emerged from the Jamaican working classes in the 1930s. The group mirrors a number of African diasporic separatists in the western hemisphere, the most notable being Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association, the Afro-Athlican Constructive Church, the Moorish Science Temple, and the Nation of Islam of the United States, which were organized at roughly the same time. Rastafarians were by far the most successful in terms of longevity and influence on their home turf.

Representing approximately one of every nine Jamaicans today, they are a considerable political force on their home island and have had a cultural impact on the arts and cuisine of the Caribbean and West African regions. Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia was the living God for Rastafarians, an earthly deity tracing his ancestry to Solomon of Israel and Queen Sheba, supported by the Old Testament sources and the Book of Revelations in the New Testament. Most prominent among the range of decentralized belief systems held by “righteous” Rastas are the adherence to an ideal world (Zion); disdain for the forces of oppression (Babylon), most often a euphemism for Anglo-American nations and White people in general; and beliefs about cleanliness, mysticism-magic, dreadlocks, and the racial solidarity of Africans. The Rastas have dietary laws similar to kosher guidelines, which provide for “ital” food (ital is a variation on “vital”).

A milestone in Rastafarianism was the visit to Jamaica of Emperor Haile Selassie I in April 1966, which eased the political repression brought by conservatives in the island government and served to mainstream the Rasta faith in the West. In a wider sense, the Rasta look and sound—dreadlocks, knitted caps, colors (i.e., red, gold and green), and use of marijuana (ganja), along with reggae music—have become popular cultural symbols that have far outdistanced fundamental Rastafarianism itself, being embraced by both Black and White youth since the late 1960s in what can be called “reggae culture.” Rastafarian religious proliferation was also no doubt aided by the burgeoning popularity of reggae music and the prominence of its most accomplished and widely known performers, Bob Marley, Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, and Peter Tosh, who electrified American audiences in the 1970s. Reggae's driving “earth beat” caught on in the United States, England, and Canada in large part because of the presence of Afro-Caribbean peoples in those nations and their high-profile dreadlocks that were adopted as cultural symbols of ethnic purity, revolutionary consciousness, and the ritual (or other) use of ganja. More importantly, ideological links within revolutionary movements in the United States, West Africa, and the Caribbean were cemented by Guyanese author and activist Walter Rodney. It was Rodney who, before his assassination, published the influential pamphlet Groundings With My Brothers (1968), detailing his associations with Rastafarians and the need for solidarity among peoples of color. Rodney's recognition of the Rastafari as a restorative force for Black peoples and his call to arms in many ways echoed the sentiments of other famous insurrectionist icons, Frantz Fanon, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Eldridge Cleaver, in their characterizations of the United States as “Babylon,” an evil power, similar to the Ayatollah Khomeni's branding of America as the “Great Satan.”

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