On November 2, 1930 Ras Tafari, said to be the descendant in a line of 323 kings that followed the union of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, was crowned His Imperial Majesty and Emperor of Ethiopia.
    Ras Tafari took the Biblical name Haile Selassie I, meaning "the power of the Holy Trinity." Other titles he recieved that day were Lord of Lords, King of Kings, and Conquering Lion of Judah,- all taken from the Book of Revelations. The lavish ceremony was held in St. George's Cathedral in the Ethiopian capital. Addis Ababa, and was attended by representatives of all the great powers of the world.
By the time the news of the newly crowned Emperor reached Jamaica, that country was already swept up in a feverish wave of Ethiopianism thanks to the teachings of the Jamaican-born freedom fighter and black supremacist Marcus Garvey, who had traveled to America in 1916 and a year later formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Throughout the '20s, Garvey's "back to Africa" movement, and his belief that blacks had the power to be the voice of sanity in a white world gone mad, made him revered as a prophet by Jamaica's downpressed.
Haile Selassie
    Garvey cut such a messianic figure that a large number of Jamaicans felt repatriation to Africa was imminent. "Africa for Africans at home and abroad" was his rallying cry. He also preached that black people should see their God through Ethiopian eyes the same way the white man saw his God through white eyes-namely, that black people should believe in a black God. He quoted Psalm 68 in his speeches: Princes shall come out of Egypt and Ethiopia shall stretch forth his hands unto God," and finally one Sunday in 1927, legend has it, he announced to his congregation, "Look to Africa, where a black man shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is here."
    With this history in mind, it was a short jump for Garveyites from Ethiopianism to the devout belief that Haile Selassie was the prophecied messiah. The coronation was splashed all over the newspapers. For a country used to being the subject of the English monarchs-white rulers of supposedly "divine right"-the concept of a divine black king was intoxocating.
    Consulting their Bibles, Jamaicans found even more evidence, particularly the Book of Revelations where it is stated. I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, 'Who is worthy to open the scroll, and loose the seals thereof?...and one of the elders saith unto me, 'Weep not; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has prevailed to open the scroll, and to loose its seven seals." For Rastifari, Haile Selassie is the Lion of Judah. The irony is that Garvey, undoubtedly the man who set the movement in motion, later denounced Selassie, after Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, as the inept leader who was critical of the new Rastafari movement.
    The first leaders of the movement are legendary in their own right. Between 1930 and 1933 Rastifari began to spread through Kingston's ghettos. One of its first missionaries was a man named Leonard Howell, who sold pictures of the Emperor on the streets of Kingston, supposedly good as a passports back to Ethiopia. He had been to Africa and had fought in the Ashanti Wars of 1896 and later spent time in the United States, where he witnessed the poor living conditions of America's blacks. It was through him that the Rastafari movement first came to the attention of the Jamaican people at large. In January 1934, Howell was arrested after a meeting at which he proclaimed the superiority of the black race, the urgent need for repatriation back to Africa and that Haile Selassie was God and the only ruler of the black people.
    Howell got two years hard labor. Once released, he retreated to the countryside. Howell was a descendant of the Maroons, a fierce tribe of escaped slaves that lived in the mountains and continually eluded British soldiers throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, finally winning independence in 1739. There he started Pinnacle, a Rasta commune that could be reached by foot through a secret and quite dangerous path. Its membership is said to have numbered between 500 and 1600. Howell served as chief and is said to have had 13 wives. The community was financed by money recieved from growing and selling ganja, the magical herb that had become the focal point of all their rituals.
    Finally, in 1941, police raided Pinnacle after neighbors complained that the Rastas were insisting all taxes be paid to them, in the name of Haile Selassie, and not the Jamaican government. Under the jurisdiction of the Dangerous Drugs Law, amended that very year to include a mandatory prison sentence for the possession, smoking, cultivating or selling ganja, the police made 70 arrests. While 28 Rastas went to prison, Howell escaped the authorities and his legend grew.
    Pinnacle regrouped, this time with a greater emphasis on security. The Rastas began wearing their hair in locks, fashioned after Masai and Somali soldiers they'd seen in pictures. They were also encouraged by Leviticus 21:5, which states. "They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh." In 1954, police again raided Pinnacle, arresting 163 members. The commune was destroyed and its members were turned loose in the ghettos of Kingston. Howell himself started to unravel, proclaiming that he, not Selassie, was the living God, and was finally committed to a mental asylum in 1960, where he died.

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