# Rastafari A religious and political movement that emerged among impoverished Afro-Jamaicans in the early 1930s, reading the coronation of **[[Haile Selassie]]** on 2 November 1930 as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. Its name comes from his pre-coronation name and rank — *Ras* (roughly, duke) *Tafari* — and its core claim is that the imperial titles taken at that coronation are the messianic titles of Revelation: **King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah**. It is the most consequential thing [[Ethiopianism]] ever produced, and Ethiopia had nothing to do with making it. ## Early movement Susannah Crockford names **four preachers** as primarily responsible for the movement's first twenty years: **Leonard P. Howell (1898–1981)**, **Joseph Hibbert**, **Archibald Dunkley** and **Robert Hinds**. Howell began preaching in **January 1933** at "Redemption Ground" in Kingston and is recorded as the first to declare Selassie the returned Messiah. He was charged with **sedition in January 1934**, convicted in March, and sentenced to two years — the colonial state treating the claim as a political act, which it was. He founded the **Pinnacle** commune in St. Catherine in 1940; it was raided repeatedly and effectively destroyed in 1954. His tract ***The Promised Key***, published under the name "G. G. Maragh," is variously dated **1935 or 1938**. ## The 1966 visit — and the denial Selassie landed at Palisadoes Airport, Kingston, at **1:30 pm on 21 April 1966**. Roughly **100,000** Rastafari met the aircraft with drums, abeng horns and firecrackers; security was overrun and the crowd took the red carpet. The elder **Mortimer Planno** was asked by the authorities to calm them: *"The Emperor has instructed me to tell you to be calm. Step back and let the Emperor land."* Selassie declined to walk the carpet — the ground-contact gesture that gives **Grounation Day**, still observed annually, its name. He did not rebuke them, which the Jamaican government had hoped he would. What he told the elders instead reshaped the movement's politics: **they should not emigrate to Ethiopia until they had liberated the people of Jamaica.** Liberation before repatriation. > [!warning] The clearest denial came a year later, and it did not stop anything > In a **1967 CBC radio interview** aboard the royal train in Canada, Selassie said: *"I have heard of that idea. I also met certain Rastafarians. I told them clearly that I am a man, that I am mortal, and that I will be replaced by the oncoming generation, and that they should never make a mistake in assuming or pretending that a human being is emanated from a deity."* Rastafari interpretation generally holds that a divine figure would not proclaim his own divinity. **His death in 1975 produced a theological crisis rather than a dissolution** — some adherents denied it had occurred, others reinterpreted it non-literally. ## Shashamane The **Ethiopian World Federation** administered a land grant in **Shashamane**, Ethiopia — **five *gashas*, about 200 hectares (≈494 acres)** — made available to diaspora Black people wishing to return, in explicit recognition of Black Western support during the Italian occupation. The grant year is contested: **1948** by oral tradition and the EWF, **1950** on the archival evidence per Giulia Bonacci, whose *Exodus!* is the standard study. The first settlers, Helen and James Piper, arrived in Ethiopia in 1948 and settled at Shashamane around 1954–55. The [[Derg]]'s **March 1975 land nationalisation** took most of it back. Population figures and residency status have been disputed and unresolved for decades. ## Relationship with the Ethiopian church The **Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church** — the largest communion within [[Oriental Orthodoxy]] — was established in Jamaica on **23 May 1970** by Archimandrite Laike Mariam Mandefro (later **Abuna Yesehaq**), on Selassie's own direction and at the request of Rastafari brethren; over 600 people were baptised on the first day. Yesehaq baptised **Bob Marley on 4 November 1980**. The relationship has never been resolved, because it cannot be: **the church does not teach Selassie's divinity and Rastafari affirm it.** The church has since tightened baptismal requirements, including cutting dreadlocks, and the friction is ongoing. > [!caution] Two figures to handle carefully > The often-quoted global estimate of **700,000–1,000,000 adherents has no traceable primary source.** Rastafari is deliberately acephalous, has no membership rolls, and most adherents reject registration. The only hard number is **Jamaica's 2011 census: 29,026**, about **1.1%** of the population — and the Gleaner's analyst noted this gives little support to the anecdotal sense that Jamaica has become substantially Rastafarian. **Cultural influence vastly exceeds numerical membership**, which is the actual finding. > > Separately: the famous [[Marcus Garvey]] line **"Look to Africa, where a black king shall be crowned"** is **not authenticated** and should not be attributed to him in this vault. Garvey never named Selassie as a redeemer and publicly rejected Rastafari as religious fanaticism; his documented 1930 play *Coronation of an African King* is the likeliest real kernel of the story. ## Why it matters here Rastafari is the vault's cleanest case of a **usable past constructed at a distance and immune to correction by its own subject.** The man at the centre denied the claim on the record, in his own voice, and the movement grew. That mechanism — a symbol that draws its authority precisely from being remote enough not to disappoint — is the same one operating in the classical appropriations tracked at [[Antiquity in Right-Wing Thought Hub]], with the politics reversed. Reversal is the point: the mechanism is not owned by anybody's side. ## See also [[Ethiopian History Hub]] · [[Ethiopianism]] · [[Haile Selassie]] · [[Oriental Orthodoxy]] · [[Christianity]] · [[World Religions Timeline]]