A Coronation in Addis Ababa and the Faith It Started in Jamaica

On 2 November 1930 Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, an event reported in Jamaica's newspapers and read by preachers already steeped in the island's Ethiopianist and Garveyite currents as the arrival of a promised African deliverer. Leonard Howell began preaching in the parish of St Thomas in the early 1930s that Selassie was the living God, drawing crowds large enough that the colonial government arrested him for sedition in 1934 and later committed him to an asylum, treatment that did nothing to stop the movement that took the emperor's pre coronation title as its own name, Rastafari.

The new faith grew for decades as a movement of the rural and urban poor before reggae carried it worldwide in the 1970s, Bob Marley chief among the musicians who set its language of Babylon, repatriation and Zion to a beat that reached far beyond Jamaica's shores. It took its place beside, not instead of, the island's older faiths, the Catholicism and Protestant churches of the colonial centuries and the African derived traditions slavery had already formed alongside them, one more faith the Caribbean's plantation history and its Atlantic ties to Africa had a hand in shaping.