Rastafari took its name from an Ethiopian emperor's title before his coronation
Before he was crowned Haile Selassie in 1930, the future emperor of Ethiopia was Ras Tafari Makonnen, ras being a noble rank like duke. Jamaican preachers such as Leonard Howell hailed that coronation as fulfilled prophecy, and a faith was born. Nobody knows why its founders chose the pre-regnal name.
Rastafari emerged in 1930s Jamaica among poor Afro-Jamaicans pushing back against British colonial culture. It drew on Ethiopianism and on the Back-to-Africa ideas championed by Marcus Garvey. Its beliefs rest on a reading of the Christian Bible and centre on one God, Jah, who dwells partly within every person. Many Rastas regard Selassie, emperor from 1930 to 1974, as Jah incarnate and the returned Christ, while others see him as a human prophet.
The outlook is Afrocentric. Western capitalist society is Babylon, a place of oppression for the African diaspora, and Africa is Zion, the promised land where many hope to resettle. Daily practice, called livity, includes the Ital diet, dreadlocked hair and traditional gender roles. Gatherings known as groundations mix music, chanting and discussion with cannabis, treated as a sacrament.
There is no central authority or creed. Rastas stress personal experience and intuition, so no one can declare orthodoxy, and the scholar Darren Middleton prefers to speak of many Rasta spiritualities. Groups called Mansions include the Nyabinghi, the Bobo Ashanti and the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Many adherents dislike the word Rastafarianism, since an -ism suggests doctrine and institutions they reject, and some prefer to call it a way of life. In 1989 a British tribunal ruled that Rastafarians count as an ethnic group under the Race Relations Act 1976.
The path was bumpy. By the 1950s the counterculture clashed, sometimes violently, with Jamaican authorities, and early black supremacist strands, framed as resistance to white supremacy, have faded since the 1970s. Reggae, above all Bob Marley, lent the faith respectability and global visibility in the 1960s and 1970s. Interest dipped in the 1980s after Selassie and Marley died, yet an estimated 700,000 to 1 million followers remain, most in Jamaica.
Source: Rastafari
