Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity

This is a portion of the introduction of Dr. Charles Price’s book, Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity, published by the New York University Press in 2022. This excerpt is publish in partnership with the New York University Press and Tenement Yaad Media

For it [is] a new name, precious name, new name, Ras Tafari. . . .

For when I call him Rastafari watch how weak heart tremble,

For it is a new name Jah got, and it [is] terrible among men;

heathen don’t like Jah name.

—Rastafari chant (hymn)

Ras Tafari Makonnen, the Ethiopian nobleman and claimant on the biblical King Solomon’s lineage, became King of Ethiopia in 1928. King Ras Tafari became the crowned Emperor of Ethiopia in November 1930, assuming the royal title Emperor Haile Selassie I (might of the Holy

Trinity). Emperor Selassie would continue to be known as Ras Tafari by the people—Rastafari—who bear his name and hold him to be the Messiah referenced in the King James Bible’s book of Revelations. By emphasizing the Ethiopian noble title of Ras, meaning “head,” the Rastafari recognize Ras Tafari and Emperor Selassie, the same personage, as the divine head of humankind.

“New Name,” like many a favored hymn, celebrates how the Rastafari imagined themselves in the face of their adversaries. Declaiming the Messiah, this chant celebrated his new name. It also disclosed the negative reactions to the Rastafari’s revelation. Again and again, the Rastafari denounced the rejection and persecution they suffered because they claimed that King Ras Tafari, Emperor of Ethiopia, was the Anointed One, successor to Jesus Christ. The new Messiah’s name roused fear in the hearts of nonbelievers, and this fear manifested in wrath unleashed on the Rastafari. Nonbelievers did not want to hear about the new Messiah, a Black and African one at that. But what was so compelling about King Ras Tafari that his identity became their identity? And why did other Jamaicans so vehemently reject the Rastafari, to the point that they sought to stamp out both them and their beliefs?

“‘Ras Tafari’ Disciple Found Guilty of Sedition,” shrieked the headline in the March 16, 1934, edition of Jamaica’s leading newspaper, the Daily Gleaner. Seven years later, another prominent newspaper, the Jamaica Times, trumpeted, “Victims Tell of Ras Tafarians’ Reign of Terror in St. Catherine.” Thirteen years after that, a Daily Gleaner story banner reported, “Police Raid [the commune] Pinnacle Again.” From 1933 onward, the number of stories published in the Daily Gleaner and other newspapers about the Rastafari grew steadily. This Jamaican obsession with the Rastafari dragged into the open fundamental beliefs and identity concerns that all segments of Jamaican society had about race, inequality, miseducation, class privilege, and colonial governance. In developing an identity and community, the Rastafari bruised the body politic and opened wounds, exposing sores of social conflict. Their pursuit of repatriation, self-knowledge, and a cooperative spirit, though fundamentally beneficent, registered with most Jamaicans as malevolent. The Rastafari were villains.

The March 16 story was the third of four stories that reported on the five-day trial of founding Rastafari evangelists Leonard Howell and Robert Hinds. Howell and Hinds appeared before the court for sedition. Charged with preaching allegiance to King Ras Tafari, Howell, Hinds, and a handful of other eccentric men and women committed themselves to birthing a community that would inaugurate a new millennium. Their trial received national news coverage through the Daily Gleaner as well as another national paper, the Jamaica Times. During their March 1934 courtroom contest, the two fledgling Rastafari evangelists explained the cardinal tenets of their new faith while critiquing and offering an alternative to Jamaica’s established institutions. The Daily Gleaner trial reports ridiculed the nascent Rastafari and, unwittingly, introduced them and their beliefs to the nation. The newspaper gave them attention that they perhaps could never have attained on their own. The trial was intended to defang the Rastafari, and given any new group’s survival chances, the Rastafari had low odds of enduring. Yet eventually they flourished, though continually embattled because of their detractors. The efforts of non-Rastafari—elites in particular—to ascribe villainous and pariah qualities to the Rastafari shaped their experience and developing communal identity, particularly as their gatherings were sometimes viciously disrupted by vigilante bands or constables. Indeed, Howell and his followers built the rural commune Pinnacle both to evade persecutors and to create a new society removed from the profane world.

Race, religion, and a history steeped in almost unceasing contention fashioned the Rastafari’s collective identity. The Rastafari worshiped an African Emperor, inspiring their fellow Jamaicans to treat them and their beliefs as absurdities. Yet despite their negative reputation, they grew from a few persecuted adherents into a self-perpetuating people who by the 1980s numbered in the tens of thousands. They grew from a handful of people into a diverse community, developing an identity that altered Jamaican’s understandings of race, nationality, and Christianity. The Rastafari created a new vision of the Christian God—an African Emperor who is Christ returned or some variation thereof—and they set out to preach and live this new vision. Their effort met resistance at nearly every turn. Yet they found interested people willing to sacrifice their well-being to affirm and live the new vision. The outcome? The ethnogenesis—origin and development—of a new people, faith, and identity, part of an unfolding saga. Three factors knit together this decades-long story of Rastafari ethnogenesis and collective identity formation: (1) Rastafari persistence in the face of relentless punishment, (2) varied vectors disseminating information—positive and negative—about them, and (3) the interventions of outsiders (nonmembers).

Stirring the Historical Imagination: The Making of a People and Collective Identity

This book chronicles the development of the first through fourth generations of Rastafari, the period between the 1930s and early 2000s, focusing on their collective identity formation in Jamaica, along with limited attention to their global presence. The Rastafari emerged out of a specific cultural and political context, and the forces that were marshaled against them and the forces that increased their popularity must be examined in order to better understand their development. As members jointly resisted those hostile forces and developed cultural practices

that resonated with Jamaicans, they developed their collective identity in particular ways. The relentless effort to delegitimize Rastafari beliefs constituted a dialectical identity dialogue that nourished Rastafari ethnogenesis: the Rastafari created narratives to counter the detractors while the detractors continue to disparage. 

It is worth making explicit how British colonialism itself facilitated the international influences and the conflict that fed into Rastafari ethnogenesis. At varying times, Britain claimed colonies or territories in South and Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Elites and nonelites moved between the colonies, sometimes with consequential effects. Happenings in Central America or Africa could induce repercussions in Jamaica. Lessons that the British learned about Ethiopianism and native revolts in Central Africa, for example, informed colonial thinking in Jamaica. Many of the colonized resented the British colonizers. Therefore, the British were keen to demolish uprisings or other native challenges to their authority. Two proven British strategies for managing the colonies were to pit native elites against other natives and to use naked oppression, suppression, and repression. The move toward decolonization raised new issues for Jamaica and the Rastafari, in particular the impact manifest in anticolonial and independence movements at home and abroad and the spread of communist, Marxist, socialist, and Black consciousness ideas into the colony.

Our narrative journey begins in the 1890s, when Jamaica’s roiling waters gave birth to disparate groups and movements, though few that endured long enough to spawn a second generation. The Rastafari, however, have persisted for several generations, through to the present. While scholarly depictions of their origins and development have tended to fix on a single dimension—Revival religion, achieving accommodation with mainstream Jamaica, social movement resistance, or cultural revitalization—this book shows how Rastafari collective identity developed over decades through contention and exchanges between Jamaican Rastafari and non-Rastafari. It illuminates how collective identifications are molded through the activities and experiences of members, through dialogue with nonmembers, through self and other recognition, and through contentious encounters.

In an earlier publication, Becoming Rasta, I focused on why and how individuals became Rastafari. The book focused on the early converts to the Rastafari tradition, asking why Jamaicans became Rastafari despite rampant discrimination and situating their identity transformation within a social and historical framework. The current volume develops in historical detail the nonlinear processes, interactions, and events that explain the Rastafari’s evolution into a durable identity and collectivity, a people who conceive of themselves as a living and coherent entity. Becoming Rasta explained how individuals identified themselves as Rastafari, while this book shifts from the individual to the collective level to describe and explain how Rastafari identity evolved.

This book conjures the “historical imagination” by integrating the “small acts” of history with the bigger ideas they signify. For instance, it is in the details of Howell’s and Hinds’s March 1934 trial that the clashing and competing views of history, politics, and scripture assumed meaning. In the courtroom exchanges between Howell and Hinds, who deemed King Ras Tafari divine, and the chief justice, who saw him as the leader of an insignificant African polity, we learn about the symbolic import of race and the power of international hierarchies. 

As we will see, Rastafari ethnogenesis occurs within a context in which they are cast as villains. The historical treatment will show why this is the case (e.g., promotion of a new and Black God, threat to the established order, Black consciousness). This theme is persistent until the later years of Rastafari ethnogenesis, and the book reflects this. During the later years, new challenges arise.

My voice shifts over the course of the book as I move from distant to recent aspects of Rastafari ethnogenesis. The later chapters raise normative issues specific to Jamaica’s postcolonial period and to neoliberal capitalism, such as cultural appropriation. As the Rastafari star rose steadily (if unpredictably) from the 1950s into the 1980s, it acquired recognition and value that outsiders spun to their advantage. Thus, we can ask, for example, how has growth and popularity shaped Rastafari ethnogenesis?