Rites, Rights, Rastafari! Statehood and Statecraft in Jamaica, c. 1930–1961

Abstract

This article focuses on the ways Rastafari in Jamaica practiced statehood and statecraft between the 1930s and early 1960s. At times, as is well known, Rastafari rejected the authority and institutions of the colonial state in Jamaica. But archival documents also reveal the ways they came to battle against colonialism and white supremacy on their own terms. Rastas built their own versions of state institutions to recreate an alternate world beyond “Babylon.” They learned to manipulate and “work” the institutions of Babylon from law courts to the political machine in order to survive. They followed national and international news—often from Africa—and absorbed knowledge about the United Nations they could use to fight legal cases and write petitions protesting the conditions of their existence. All this suggests a novel stream of Rastafari intellectual thought and action that we must add to our understandings of the movement. Studying Rastafari in this manner—possible because of extensive research in its rich history—provides an opportunity to understand the actions of marginalized groups acting beyond the traditional nation state in the moment of decolonization.

On July 23, 2016 at Scott’s Pass, a Nyabinghi commune in Jamaica’s Clarendon Parish, Rastafari gathered from across the island nation. The evening was part of a week-long celebration of the birthday of His Imperial Majesty, the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, whose divine presence is celebrated by Rastafari the world over. As the evening progressed, I found myself engaged in a long conversation with Mr. Brooks, a 69-year-old Rastaman whose life was defined by a single day in 1966, when he viewed Selassie in his motorcade on the emperor’s state visit to Jamaica. I had asked Mr. Brooks about Rastafari participation in Jamaican politics during the 1960s, a question to which he responded by dismissing the importance of the institution. He explained how governments and their functions are irrelevant for one’s spiritual journey, then cited a U.S. newspaper in which I could view Selassie’s words in support of his point: “Read the Chicago Tribune on June 24, 1973.”¹

On that day, the Chicago Tribune carried an interview with Selassie conducted by journalist Oriana Fallaci. The controversial Italian had pressed Selassie on the anachronism of his monarchy in the contemporary world. Selassie had responded in French: “We [I] don’t even notice any difference between monarchies and republics,” and then rhetorically, “What is the difference between a republic and a monarchy?” dismissing the journalist’s stated distinction between the two institutions.² Brooks had subtly tweaked Selassie’s meaning: while Selassie’s phrasing ostensibly elided the two political systems, Brooks interpreted it as a rejection of politics writ large. Brooks was using the emperor’s words to form the foundation for his reasoning and applying Selassie’s ultimate authority in support of his point. The power of Brooks’s argument rested on two diametrically opposed pillars. The first represented the post-Enlightenment western academy: a concrete, precise citation to a printed source. The second was pure Rasta: thinking through, reasoning about, and finally interpreting Selassie’s words to discern their correct meaning.

Between the 1930s and 1960s, Rastafari would draw skillfully from these ostensibly separate realms to build new communities and battle the colonial state in Jamaica. Scholars have identified distinctive bifurcations such as these among marginalized groups across Africa and the Caribbean. Like Brooks, anthropologist Stephan Palmié melds these two worlds in his Wizards and Scientists, pulling together Afro-Cuban traditional practices and western “modernity” into the same milieu of “Atlantic modernity.”³ Novelist and poet Kei Miller—in an excerpt quoted at the opening of this article—has also complicated the links between these spheres.⁴ However, Anthony Bogues’s important Black Heretics, Black Prophets offers another perspective. Following Kamau Brathwaite, Bogues refers to Rastafari intellectual work as deriving from a more singular “inner plantation”: a physical and mental space that black radicals had forged over centuries beyond the influence and confines of western states in the Caribbean.⁵ Rastafari efforts, then, highlight the ways marginalized groups could act beyond the traditional nation state at the moment of decolonization. As such, they belong to a larger genealogy of independent black communities in the Americas, including groups as diverse as maroons, the Republic of New Afrika, and Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity.

These themes resonate through archival sources that speak to notions of statehood and statecraft among early Rastafari communities. In part due to Jamaica’s small size, Rastafari on the island were never divorced from mainstream Jamaican society. At times, they created separate communes and communities, such as the famous Pinnacle, which rejected western values and practices. But at others, they interacted closely and deeply with the Jamaican peasantry (many of whom they inspired with their visions of black liberation), and acted to challenge the colonial state on its own territory.⁶ This dual orientation meant that Rastafari both rejected the authority of the state, and at the same time, developed and deployed techniques of statecraft and statehood to further their battle against the oppression it represented. This article focuses on these efforts, showing how Rastafari built alternate versions of state institutions to recreate a new world beyond Babylon. They learned to manipulate and “work” the institutions of Babylon, from law courts to the political machine, in order to survive. They followed national and international news—often from Africa—and absorbed knowledge about the United Nations they could use to fight legal cases and write petitions protesting the conditions of their existence. These intricate and shrewd approaches reveal a novel stream of Rastafari intellectual thought and action.

This article, however, does not just participate in a broader conversation about the activities and agency of marginalized groups during decolonization, but it also contributes to two Rastafari historiographies. The first concerns Rastafari intellectual practice, and its well-known creativity. The pioneering work of Barry Chevannes provides a foundation in this regard, situating the origins of Rastafari intellectual thought in the context of religious ideas formed out of the slave experience and the historical oppression of the black Jamaican peasantry.⁷ Leonard Barrett, too, is another who has richly detailed the religious and doctrinal approaches of Rastafari practitioners over the course of the twentieth century.⁸ One might consider scholarly analyses of Rastafari textual production too, including several commentaries on The Promised Key or W. Gabriel Selassie on The Holy Piby.⁹ Second, this article contributes to scholarship on Rastafari resistance to colonialism, the Jamaican independent state, and global white supremacy. Though this literature is too extensive to explore in detail here, Horace Campbell’s work on the connections between Rastafari and other forms of black resistance is notable.¹⁰ So too is research linking Rastafari to wider black liberation struggles, particularly Pan-Africanism. In recent years, Jahlani Niaah has explored the thought of the Rastafari and Pan-Africanist intellectual Mortimer Planno in drawing Africa and the diaspora together in an “African public sphere.”¹¹ And Monique Bedasse has addressed Rastafari Pan-Africanists, linking their struggle to the global black liberation movement that stretched to Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania.¹² Thus while Rastafari came to represent an “anti-establishment impulse,” as Ennis Edmonds puts it, this certainly did not mean that Rastafari ignored the establishment.¹³ Rather, their praxis reveals a creative engagement with the state, while at the same time they developed ways to better negotiate their circumstances.

Creating a State

A hefty corpus of historical scholarship has drawn attention to the ways marginalized individuals and groups have seized upon—and carefully learned the workings of—colonial bureaucracy in order to advance their own interests.¹⁴ Such a process could be as simple as a wife learning the workings of the legal system in order to demand a divorce from a difficult husband.¹⁵ In Martin Chanock’s classic rendering, it could involve elders invoking “tradition” as a way to formulate customary law on their terms in front of an immature colonial official.¹⁶ But it could also mean simulating the mechanics of the state—its bureaucracy—to provide an alternative realm of living. Derek Peterson’s careful work on the Mau Mau war in Kenya during the 1950s provides an instructive example. Operating from bases in central Kenya’s forests and less commonly in Nairobi, Mau Mau troops carried identity cards and flew flags. Forest leaders composed instructions on heavy, cumbersome typewriters that had to be hauled up and down slippery hills in often-frigid conditions. Commanders built their own postal system, kept records, and wrote histories to memorialize their cause, all in an effort to imagine and build a sovereign state beyond the British grasp. These efforts built patriotism among their followers and demanded recognition from the British and colonial Kenyan states.¹⁷

Initial efforts to create a separate “state” in Jamaica were led by Leonard Howell, popularly given the moniker of the “First Rasta.”¹⁸ In Howell, Rastas found a replacement for the officialdom of the colonial state during the 1930s and 1940s. Howell was, as Edmonds describes him, “prophet/preacher/teacher, autocratic administrator, legislator, judge, and folk healer.”¹⁹ Perhaps this should not surprise us: Howell had become familiar with the workings of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) while living in New York during the 1920s.²⁰ By the early 1940s, Howell had formed the semi-autonomous Rastafari community of Pinnacle, in Sligoville in the hills above Spanish Town. It was run under laws created by Howell for the community, and was a safe gathering place for the dispossessed and poor, including those of East Indian descent.²¹ Extraordinarily, even the government of Jamaica seemed to recognize Pinnacle as a separate sphere: “the government should take no steps to break up the settlement of his [Howell’s] followers,” ran the attorney general’s report in 1944, “[S]o long as Howell’s followers observe the law, they are entitled to continue to live unmolested in whatever way they please.”²²

It is important to recognize that Howell’s inspiration derived in significant part from Ethiopia. Rastafari were well informed about the Ethiopian state, voraciously reading any publications about the country, and demonstrating extraordinary acumen in procuring them. Colonial officials specifically drew attention to the issue in their correspondence, with one Jamaican official explaining that he was, “concerned about the number of publications and documents about Ethiopia which reach the Rastafaris here” and about the “encouragement” they were receiving from the materials.²³ Officials were especially concerned by the New Times and Ethiopia News, Sylvia Pankhurst’s newsletter on Ethiopian affairs that began publication in 1936. “[Would] it not be possible for copies [of her publication] to be intercepted and accidentally ‘lost’ in the Post Office on arrival?” wondered one reader.²⁴ Drawing inspiration from Ethiopia, Howell set his organization in contrast to the colonial state. He told his followers they should not pay tax, which had proved so crippling to the Jamaican poor in the post-depression years; instead, their contributions to the community would come via their labor. He informed his followers that their monarch was not the British king, but Ras Tafari. Howell suggested that his supporters should use the Ethiopian calendar—which runs seven or eight years behind the Gregorian version—and contributed to creating a new style of speaking in vocabulary, phonetics, and grammar, drawing from Jamaican creole, folk language, and African history.²⁵

At Pinnacle, Howell’s followers enjoyed much better living conditions than those that existed in Kingston’s shanty towns. In late 1940, the Gleaner had published a report alleging that the conditions at Pinnacle were unsanitary and dangerous. It inspired Howell to invite government inspectors to view the commune. The subsequent report revealed that 275 followers resided at the camp. They occupied 35 wattle and thatch houses, each of which had four doors. Rooms contained one to two beds, and the fly-proof latrines, drums of boiled water, and “good natural drainage” impressed the official. Around the encampment, residents grew cassava, peas, and corn, and by the 1950s, would supplement their income with ganja sales. Howell was—in short—providing all the facilities to permit the settlement to operate independently, and in provisioning clean water was doing more than the government could in some parts of Kingston.²⁶ By the 1950s—before the police razed Pinnacle—Howell even took over police duties, assigning guards to protect the compound. Regular policemen who visited alone or without sufficient backup were often beaten and unceremoniously dismissed.²⁷ Howell had also formalized a social security scheme in 1941 based on the length of membership in his newly formed Ethiopian Salvation Society. Someone who had been a member for six months would receive £1/week for the first week he or she was sick; a maximum of 15 shillings for the two weeks that followed; and a maximum of 10 shillings per week for the following six.²⁸

Creating a system of justice was central in ensuring that followers obeyed community regulations. At Pinnacle, Howell’s personal views largely determined community standards. But it is in Robert Hinds that we find the clearest articulation of legal prescription. Initially an associate of Howell, by the early 1940s, Hinds had forged his own path, establishing the successful Kings of Kings Mission. At the core of Hinds’s Rastafari organization was his “Cabinet,” comprised of seven senior elders who would aid him in the running of the mission. Chevannes describes its workings in detail:

[A] week’s notice of the trial by cabinet was given to the defendant and to the membership in general. One judge in the lot by agreement presided over the proceedings; the rest acted as appeal judges…. Punishment ranged from fines of a shilling to “hinder him from do it again,” to a period of fasting, or a period of suspension…. Sometimes it was not possible to thrash out a case conclusively. The accused was then given “a next chance”…. [One case] was finally dropped because the guard lacked sufficient evidence.²⁹

Chevannes’s description reveals several important points. First, the system’s workings and practices were highly formalized. Second, the defendant enjoyed ample opportunities to prove his or her side. Finally, the defendant would go free if the evidentiary basis was insufficient. One’s chances of receiving a fair trial were greater here than in the court at Halfway Tree where Rastafari frequently received lengthy sentences of detention for minor offences.

Despite the anti-establishment approach that Rastas came to represent, command of bureaucracy was essential for building a following and keeping it manageable. Howell had formalized his organization as the Ethiopian Salvation Society—registered in 1939—perhaps recognizing the credibility such a title conveyed. It held regular meetings on the first Monday of each month at 7 pm at 76 King Street, once the headquarters of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA. The location was no coincidence: Howell was a former member of the UNIA who had been inspired by Garvey’s “organizational techniques.”³⁰ Garvey, after all, had demonstrated great acumen in coopting the trappings of western statehood in his own struggle, from creating a UNIA national anthem to assembling a diplomatic corps.³¹ Thus Howell’s society had rules and a constitution, which outlined the responsibilities of office holders. The rules contained prescriptions for who could speak at meetings and in what order.³² A similar theme appeared in the guise of George Myers, a former Jehovah’s Witness-turned-Rasta who created his own religion with formal decrees and booklets.³³ Prince Emanuel Edwards, described below, did the same with the Ethiopia Africa Black International Congress, and Barry Chevannes expands on these sorts of groups in Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. At other times, Rasta leaders utilized identity cards. In late 1959, Reverend Claudius Henry issued his thousands of followers “blue Church membership cards.” These were their “passports” for when the ship would arrive to transport them to Ethiopia.³⁴ The move evoked a suggestion attributed to Howell two decades earlier that photographs of Haile Selassie he was selling would permit the bearer to travel “back.” (Howell denied this at his trial.³⁵) By 1963, the Rasta United Front would go so far as to reject Jamaican citizenship and demand Ethiopian passports.³⁶

A core requirement of any state or community is a usable past, and a method for its constituents to learn and debate it. As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it, only an animal can live entirely “unhistorically”; a past conveys legitimacy and is an essential tool in seeking recognition from outsiders.³⁷ In this context, Howell published the foundational text of the Rastafari movement in 1935. Entitled The Promised Key, Howell’s text sought to fuse politics, belief, and history to legitimize his movement and appeal to the world’s black population. He described biblical figures Adam, Eve, and Abraham together with “Anglo-Saxon” as “all white people if you please.” They stood in contrast to King Alpha and Queen Omega, “Black Arch Sovereign[s] of most Holy Times,” who were black. Arguing that Alpha and Omega pre-dated Adam and Eve, Howell stated that Haile Selassie was their direct descendant, his focus on race and history evoking Garvey’s efforts.³⁸ But creating a usable past also requires a method for debating and learning its core material, which necessitated a separate system of thought. Howell believed that the mainstream school system (which was in any case frequently off-limits to Rastafari before the 1970s) perpetuated Babylon. Howell attacked products of this system as “college hogs” with “college filth” in their minds.³⁹ It stood in opposition to the open-minded “reasoning” of Rastafari in Kingston’s yards and at Pinnacle, a system which reflected a faith that from its inception relied on original interpretation of the Scriptures, and was built from diverse traditions including African folk religion, Jamaican peasant culture, Ethiopianism, Bedwardism, Garveyism, and more.⁴⁰ In this way, Howell was creating a new, separate intellectual universe that was Rastafari.⁴¹

In all this, Howell was building what Bogues calls a “new symbolic order.” It was not a “revolutionary world order,” Bogues notes, but an “ideological negative to the Jamaican colonial order.” Howell’s vision was formed from the ether of colonial and Ethiopian institutions of state but stopped short of a comprehensive rethinking of Jamaican society. Howell, for instance, maintained the importance of monarchical rule—just under Haile Selassie as opposed to the British sovereign.⁴² Rastafari was one pathway in the rich stream of black intellectual thought that characterized the period.

Playing the State

But what of the state—the British colonial state in Jamaica? The colonial state slowly rescinded its hold over the island during the 1940s and 1950s, culminating in full, national independence in 1962. The mechanics of state bureaucracy, however, changed little: neither Jamaica’s legal code nor its police force would until much later. Rastafari interacted with the state in a range of ways: at times, they aligned themselves with politicians to see whether they might offer some benefit. More commonly, they challenged the state’s institutions, showing a detailed understanding of how the court system and state bureaucracy operated. Much of this was built upon a deep understanding of the international world. The brutal Italian invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 was a significant moment in drawing the attention of black West Indians to Africa, and in the development of the Rastafari belief system. As a result, from the movement’s earliest days, Rastas looked beyond Jamaica to understand their circumstances, reflecting a Pan-Africanism that has defined their lives. The experience of Africans and African Americans—and even white revolutionaries—suggested solutions for their own challenges.

This international awareness was driven by a small number of highly intelligent, well-informed Rastafari who possessed the ability to communicate their knowledge to followers. Barry Chevannes has convincingly outlined the reading culture that flowed through Rastafari communities, though as he explains, the lack of extant sources makes a detailed reconstruction difficult. In the 1930s, Leonard Howell had established this trend, publishing a newspaper called The People’s Voice, which contained articles on African issues. The Ethiopian Observer and African American-run Pittsburgh Courier were commonly ordered from the United States and read in these communities (Hinds would typically order 20 or 25 copies for his followers to read).⁴³ It was the responsibility of senior members to translate and lead discussions with their juniors about these sorts of topics. Howell went so far as to inform the leading Pan-Africanist of his generation—the Trinidadian George Padmore—about his organization, telling him in 1939 that he had renamed his African Salvation Society the Ethiopian Salvation Society.⁴⁴ Padmore’s International African Service Bureau had sent Howell two “packets of literature” the previous year.⁴⁵

Mortimer Planno and Reverend Claudius Henry took up Howell’s mantle in the 1950s. Planno—the Cuban-born thinker and later confidante of Bob Marley—was an avid reader and writer. He published articles in the Pan-Africanist journal International African Opinion, edited by CLR James.⁴⁶ When future Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson—a Jamaican—visited Planno he was surprised to learn that, “There is… much discussion on current political events throughout the world,” and declared the Rastafari “unusually well informed.” He commented, tellingly, on the only furniture Planno owned: “Apart from a small cot to sleep on, the only other piece of furniture… was a large and expensive radio set.”⁴⁷ Claudius Henry traveled to Ethiopia and frequently brought the American Civil Rights struggle into his Rastafari meetings in Kingston. He would lecture on Alabama and Mississippi, doing so at one point in front of large images of lynched African Americans, in talks that ranged in content from the Archbishop of Canterbury to atomic weapons.⁴⁸

Among Rastafari, Jamaica’s domestic political machinations were usually things to be dismissed. Due to the levels of dishonesty they perceived among politicians, Rastas relabeled politics “politrix,” and sometimes claimed Ethiopian citizenship to dismiss Jamaica’s significance. But Jamaica was too small, and the Rastas too close to major population centers, to be entirely removed. In addition, extensive knowledge of the international situation, combined with the charisma of their leaders, meant that Rastas flirted with mainstream politics during the 1940s and early 1950s. Howell was the puppet-master in chief. Robert Hill—as well as Rastafari intellectuals—suggests that this began as far back as 1938, with Rastafari communities playing a catalyzing role in the labor unrest that broke out in Jamaica and more broadly across the British Empire.⁴⁹ But by the 1950s, the two national political parties—Norman Manley’s People’s National Party (PNP) and Alexander Bustamante’s Jamaica Labour Party—could not afford to ignore the Rastafari influence. Howell was a threat: unlike Manley and Bustamante—both of mixed race—Howell was visibly “black,” and his advocacy of an alternative to nationalist politics attractive for those of African descent.⁵⁰

At his newly established commune of Pinnacle, Howell caught the attention of the populist “Busta,” and won the ear of the intellectual Manley. Howell knew Bustamante from either New York or Panama, but by the 1950s, Bustamante had become—in Daive Dunkley’s words—the “most aggressive of the self-appointed opponents of Howell.” Bustamante, after all, had described Howell as the “greatest danger” for Jamaica back in 1939, and suggested he belonged in a mental asylum.⁵¹ Thus when Howell encouraged his followers to vote in Jamaica’s general election in 1944, the bulk of votes cast went to Manley’s PNP (this was the only time Howell allowed the placement of ballot boxes at Pinnacle and encouraged voting among his followers). Ten years later, under Bustamante’s premiership, the perceived threat represented by Pinnacle was eradicated with the commune’s destruction. Hinds, on the other hand, continued to encourage his followers to vote.⁵² Manley then made an even more naked play for Rastafari support. Aware of Haile Selassie’s visit to the United States in mid-1954, the PNP suggested that the emperor might visit Jamaica at the same time, and by the end of the decade, Manley and his party were devoting significant time to visiting Rasta communities in Kingston.⁵³

These experiences helped Rastafari learn how to negotiate the courtrooms of Jamaica, where most would find themselves during the 1940s and 1950s at one point or another. Again, it was Howell who had first recognized the powerful platform a courtroom could provide. In 1934, Howell was tried by the Crown at the St. Thomas Circuit Court in Morant Bay on two counts of sedition. In a three-day trial, covered extensively by the daily Gleaner, Howell took the unusual step of eschewing a barrister and conducting his own defense. He began by refusing to swear on the Bible, an approach later repeated by numerous other Rastas who were arrested. He used his time in the dock to expound on Rasta theology for a full day, share his own version of black history, and liberally sprinkle his words with biblical quotes. Dressed in a three-piece suit, Howell was unfailingly polite to the judge, but “caustic” in his cross-examination of the police, one of whom he subjected to a “dictation test” in front of the crowded courtroom. The jurors took fifteen minutes to deliver a “guilty” verdict, but not before Howell had brought knowledge of Rastas to Jamaican society in a new way.⁵⁴

Jamaica’s press consistently covered Rastafari court appearances, aware that its reading public was fascinated by the movement. Like Howell, Rastas used the extensive press coverage to expound on their cause: they dressed in the red, yellow, and green tricolor, held photographs of Haile Selassie, and appeared at the court house in large numbers to support their detained brethren. Many directly challenged the authority of the court to try them, refusing to engage in its mechanics. When asked whether he had any witnesses, one Rasta replied, “Jesus Christ.”⁵⁵ Another suggested in “polished English” that “the word and [his] bones” would suffice.⁵⁶ Others gave no answer when asked their names, or said only “Ras Tafari” or “Ras Rasses” when asked.⁵⁷ Some were more direct: one man told the judge “your law has no justice.”⁵⁸ In another case, three Rastafari charged with disorderly conduct stated that they were treated like “slaves” in Jamaica (an approach used broadly across the world to challenge British claims to be bringing “civilization” and benefits to colonized peoples).⁵⁹ Then, according to the Star’s summary, they “demanded… [to] be transferred to a higher Court under ‘military administration’ in accordance with the Declaration of Human Rights signed by the Emperor of Ethiopia.”⁶⁰ Framing their anger in terms of rights was common even in individual court cases: in front of the magistrate “Jahoo Rastafari” of Trench Town demanded “equal rights and justice.”⁶¹

By the 1950s, newspapers record several examples of Rastafari using the court system to demand restitution from those who sought to attack them. In August 1957, Vincent Anderson, Dalbert Ferguson, and one Dulhaney found themselves in the dock on charges of resisting arrest and vagrancy, as well as participating in unauthorized public meetings. While in custody, they were subjected to a common indignity: several policemen forcibly shaved them. When released, they sued the policemen. Superintendent Lack was forced to appear in defense of his officers, who were lambasted by the judge for arresting on vagrancy charges men who possessed jobs.⁶² This transition in the mid-1950s was in part due to pro bono representation given to Rastas by Irish lawyer Peter Evans. Evans had served on Jomo Kenyatta’s legal team in 1953 in Kenya, and was deported from there, apparently for drawing attention to British indignities against Mau Mau detainees.⁶³ Evans was highly skilled at drawing government attention to his cases, and helped many Rastafari avoid jail. A fierce advocate, it was probably Evans who helped Reverend Claudius Henry unsuccessfully sue columnists and editors at the Gleaner, Public Opinion, and the Star in 1960.⁶⁴ He even defended Henry’s son Ronald, who was ultimately hanged for murder, in mid-1960.

Rastas learned a range of actions when it came to protesting in Kingston. On some occasions, they held impromptu meetings, which avoided the cumbersome process of applying for permission from the police. On others, they found out about prearranged marches—for instance, of the Afro-West Indian Welfare League—and appeared in large numbers, attempting to use the other group’s police permission to hold their own gathering.⁶⁵ Rastafari were apparently so prevalent in Kingston by the mid-1950s that the police often ignored them; in other cities like Montego Bay—a tourist destination—they took a far stricter line.⁶⁶ In Kingston, the marches included hanging tricolor banners on prominent government buildings, directly representing an undercutting of the state’s authority.⁶⁷

The more experienced Rastas developed novel techniques with each passing year. By the 1950s, Joseph Nathaniel Hibbert—one of the original formulators of the movement and a contemporary of Howell—was a high-ranking member of the Ethiopian World Federation. The neat, formal letterhead of the organization, with its address on Woodrow Street, made for smoother sailing at police review.⁶⁸ Charles Dunkley—one of the most prominent Rasta voices by the late 1950s—used a different tactic. He held meetings in downtown Kingston featuring a diverse audience including, of course, many Rastas. When the police arrived and asked for his permit he would explain to them that he was holding a religious meeting, and therefore did not need one as he was simply preaching.⁶⁹ A couple of months later on the corner of Spanish Town Road and Regent Street—with Dunkley this time in the audience—Richard Hobson used the same defense when the police arrived.⁷⁰ Though separating religion from politics made little sense in the land of Marcus Garvey, it was a dichotomy with legal significance. By the late 1950s, more and more Rasta groups would realize that formal associations with religious titles provided even more protection: Hibbert formed the Ethiopian Orthodox Coptic Church, a forerunner of the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church of the 1970s that gained notoriety for its role in the ganja trade.⁷¹

Bobo Shanti, the United Nations, and Communism

During the 1950s, all across the colonized world, the United Nations came to represent an opportunity. An appeal to the UN (or other extra-national bodies like the World Council of Churches) suggested that the authority of a nation from which little had been gained or promised might be superseded. The creation of the independent state of Israel in 1948, too, appeared to set an example for ethnic groups, kingdoms, and smaller “nations” across the colonized world desirous of their own sovereign territories. Many of these smaller groups—from the western Ugandan kingdom of Rwenzururu to Zambia’s Lumpa Church—viewed the moment as one in which independence from colonial rule—and from any potential succeeding national state—might be seized.⁷² The optimism of the 1950s would be dashed in the following decade as both the UN and the Organisation of African Unity showed themselves unwilling to support secessionist regimes.

In Jamaica, the Bobo Shanti mansion—more than any other group of Rastafari—concerned itself with the UN and the international political realm. Interestingly, however, among Rastafari communities, Bobos have maintained arguably a greater distance from Jamaican society than any other. Wearing distinctive turbans and dress, Bobos are—as one adherent puts it—visibly “separate from the world…we are not of this world.”⁷³ The group dates its origin to March 1, 1958 when Prince Emanuel Charles Edwards founded the Ethiopia Africa Black International Congress in Back O’Wall at 54B Spanish Town Road.⁷⁴ In the group’s original charter, handed down since the days of Prince Emanuel, it asserts that adherents must not vote, become engaged in politics, or accept money from any organization, political or otherwise.⁷⁵ Were one to create a rendering of the distance various Rasta groups occupy away from mainstream society, the Bobos would likely be at the extreme end, with members of their commune at Bull Bay still living very much in the rigid prescription of its founder.⁷⁶ Yet archival evidence, combined with contemporary oral interviews, hint at both a richer story and a deeper history, evoked by the light blue UN flag that still flies at the Bobo compound.

Employees of the African Caribbean Institute in Kingston have carried out a number of interviews with Bobo members in recent decades. They clearly reveal the role of the UN and international dialogue in Bobo intellectual thought and reasoning, as does Ionie Angella Matthews Wallace in her recent two-volume biography of Prince Emanuel.⁷⁷ One 2002 interview with Bobo Dread, for instance, describes Prince Emanuel’s divinity in the same breath as his role as a “champion of human rights and justice.” Emanuel had taken on this role realizing that it best represented the Bobo desire for “repatriation” to Africa. For Dread, the Bobo were not a community—but a “documented nation,” and deserving of international protection as a result. Dread calls on the UN to follow through on Article 1 of its charter, a sweeping document that includes calls for peace, the guarding of human rights, and guarantees of self-determination, among other things.⁷⁸ Another group interview stresses the importance of dialogue with the UN in multiple places, and the role that international courts of justice might play in Bobo repatriation.⁷⁹ As a result, the Bobo charter includes Prince Emanuel’s title, among other honorifics, as “Black Secretary General of the Black United Nations.”⁸⁰

Little-known documents in the Jamaica National Archives in Spanish Town permit a deeper understanding of this genealogy and demonstrate how the appearance of the United Nations after the Second World War emboldened and empowered Rastafari to make demands. One letter, dating from November 1958, is written in the scratchy hand of Prince Emanuel himself. He wrote to the commissioner of police requesting a permit to hold a march on December 10, 1958, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the United Nations Human Rights Day. The day itself commemorated the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document of immense importance for people across the colonized world. Attached to the letter was a flyer that Emanuel and his compatriots were distributing around Kingston:

It is for all black men from the soldiers, to the Police, down to the People who had to find their food in the Dungle [a shanty in western Kingston, now Tivoli Gardens] to claim their nationality through the United Nations Charter, Article 15. Every man has got the right to a nationality. Africa for the Africans home and abroad.⁸¹

Emanuel was referring to Article 15 of the Declaration of Human Rights—not the UN charter itself—which lays out the following two provisions: first, that “Everyone has the right to a nationality,” and second, “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”⁸² (Other groups including the Ethiopian World Federation and Nyabinghi have used the same article to explain their own claims for repatriation.)⁸³ In the years that followed, other Rastafari houses would write directly to the Secretary General of the UN in New York requesting assistance, again directly citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.⁸⁴ In 1961, Filmore Alvarenga and Douglas Mack—representing a portion of Jamaica’s Rastafari—wrote to both Queen Elizabeth II and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan demanding repatriation based on the UN text.⁸⁵ But without doubt the most important invocation of the body came in the Minority Report of the Jamaican government’s official mission to Africa in 1961 to investigate the possibilities of relations across the Atlantic. Authored by three Rastas—Alvarenga, Mack, and Planno—it concluded by requesting that African states (and not Jamaica or Great Britain) represent their case to the UN.⁸⁶

Rastafari activism and their connections to the international arena, of course, reflected a faith forged in the diaspora that had Pan-African principles at its core.⁸⁷ This broad orientation meant that Rastafari also considered and debated global communism during the 1950s and 1960s. Like Pan-Africanism, communism represented an affiliation beyond the nation that was attractive to some Rastafari. In Jamaica, close links existed between Rasta leaders and Marxists/communists. Most important was the connection between Rastas and the People’s Freedom Movement (PFM), a “communist party by another name,” as Colin Clarke observed in 1961.⁸⁸ The PFM—led by Ferdinand Smith and Richard Hart—was responsible for bringing Guyanese socialist Janet Jagan to Jamaica, and the two men delivered lectures to Rastafari, suggesting that the PFM would defend them from the police, from whom harassment was common.⁸⁹ Hart even suggested in 1960 that if Reverend Claudius Henry was arrested, the PFM might take over his Africa Reform Church.⁹⁰ Hart was a close associate of Sam Brown, founder of the Black Man’s Political Party, who would become the first Rasta to run for election before the 1962 vote.

In interviews in 2016, I spent considerable time discussing communism with older Rastafari who were alive and active during the 1950s and 1960s. For many, communism represented revolutionary potential.⁹¹ In their yards, Rastas studied the Communist Manifesto, searching for how its ideas might contribute to social consciousness. They were “warrior versions of Rastas,” remember one man.⁹² For some Rastas, communism’s apparent historical successes via revolution provided a prescription for action, and the “mindset” required to be a part of either movement was similar.⁹³ Perhaps for Rastas there was a middle road between the two poles outlined by George Padmore in Pan-Africanism or Communism?⁹⁴ But for every supporter of Brown who believed mainstream politics offered a solution for Rasta woes, there was another who believed Jamaica offered nothing and that repatriation was the only solution.

Towards the University College of the West Indies (UCWI) Study

In popular perception, the 1961 Mission to Africa—which included Alvarenga, Mack, and Planno, the three Rastas mentioned above—signaled the beginning of the process in which Rastas were brought in from the cold. But it was preceded by a range of smaller scale events. From the 1950s onwards, Rastas had begun playing a more direct role in Jamaican life. Some Rastas had even applied to join the police several years earlier, and at least one member of the police was a Rastaman and was attempting to recruit from within.⁹⁵ In 1959, the Moral Rearmament Movement—popularly imagined as a colonial antidote to movements like the Rastas and Mau Mau—invited several brethren to Canada in mid-1959. They apparently conducted themselves well and received a high-profile welcome on their return from the mayor of Montego Bay and custos of St. James.⁹⁶ In 1960, government officials contacted Rasta leaders to see whether they would be interested in playing a role in the census. They had anticipated that without assistance, their efforts would meet with strong “resistance” in areas where many Rastafari lived. Rasta leaders acquiesced and assisted in the counting.⁹⁷ Soon, as noted above, Sam Brown would become the first Rasta to run for political office.

This is the context in which the crucial UCWI study on Rastafari in Jamaica—published in July 1960—should be read. It was derived from this background as well as significant links built between the campus and Rastas in the decade before the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney arrived at the university’s Jamaican campus. To read the university’s fortnightly student newsletter, The Pelican, is to realize the degree to which Rastas had entered student consciousness, and even the students’ physical space. Throughout the 1950s, student leaders appeared with “Ras” before their names or nicknames. One humorous poem “Nonsensical Hashey” by Omega read thus:

Scholars at UCWI including Arthur Lewis—the Vice Principal—as well as Rex Nettleford and Roy Augier were in close touch with Rastafari leaders. Augier remembered being “frequently invited” by Rastafari leaders to meet and reason with them. According to Augier, Mortimer Planno contacted Lewis asking for the assistance of the university in serving as an intermediary between the Rastas and the government and middle-class Jamaica.⁹⁹ Scholar Robert Hill, however, has cast doubt on this, claiming that the investigation was more likely an effort by premier Norman Manley to gather intelligence on the Rastafari, perceived as highly dangerous by the government. (It was a “classic counter-insurgency operation masquerading as a University-sponsored investigation,” according to Hill.)¹⁰⁰ In any case, the result was that Augier, Nettleford, and M.G. Smith undertook a two-week study in Trench Town in western Kingston from July 4 to July 17, 1960. The study played an important role in legitimating the Rastafari cause, and enabled the government to link itself more closely with Jamaica’s black poor.¹⁰¹

The UCWI study—and the participation of Rastas in the 1961 Mission to Africa—were moments that demonstrated the degree to which Rastafari had garnered formal recognition from the government. This recognition was the product of the efforts of men and women over the course of the several preceding decades. This article has considered the ways that those members of the Rastafari faith perpetually resisted simple categorization in their dealings with the state. Rasta leaders and adherents pivoted toward and away from the state in an effort to negotiate better circumstances. While Edmonds is clearly correct in noting how Rastas “delegitimize[d]” colonial institutions, when necessary, they demonstrated a deep knowledge of functional bureaucracy, often fighting the indignities of colonialism on its own terms.¹⁰² In deploying a variety of allegiances and orientations in this manner, Rastas blurred traditional efforts to classify them. That Rastafari activism proved itself so flexible should come as little surprise. The origins of the movement—explored so effectively by Chevannes—reflected a heady mix of inspiration drawn from Ethiopianism, Bedwardism, Revivalism (and Myalism), and more.¹⁰³ This diversity of intellectual approach was then laid over Jamaica’s vibrant black peasantry, engaged in the historic search for tools to resist or survive the slave and plantation systems over the previous three centuries.¹⁰⁴ This approach was a distinct stream of intellectual activism that featured in the otherwise relatively well-known Rastafari activities of the period, and reflected the ability of marginalized peoples to battle against oppression.

Notes

I am grateful to the following people for their thoughts and comments on earlier drafts of this paper: Monique Bedasse, Daive Dunkley, Anta Merritt, Lee Mottard, Charles Price, and Jenny Sharpe, as well as the journal’s two anonymous reviewers.

Endnotes