Rastafari

The spiritual and cultural movement that grew in Jamaica from the 1930s, and the single largest reason reggae sounds and argues the way it does.

It begins with a coronation. When Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia in November 1930, preachers in Jamaica — Leonard Howell above all, with Joseph Hibbert, Archibald Dunkley and Robert Hinds — read the event as the fulfilment of prophecy and proclaimed the new emperor divine. Howell built a commune at Pinnacle in St Catherine in 1940; the colonial state raided it repeatedly and broke it up, driving Rastafari into the Kingston slums where the music was about to be made. Persecution was not incidental. Locks and drums were criminalised in practice long before they were celebrated, and at Coral Gardens in 1963 the state moved against Rastafari with a violence still remembered as Bad Friday.

The music carried it out. Count Ossie's camp at Wareika Hill taught nyabinghi drumming — bass, funde and repeater — to a generation of Kingston musicians, and that pulse is under a great deal of what followed. Haile Selassie's visit to Jamaica on 21 April 1966, when a crowd broke the airport cordon to meet him, is still observed as Groundation Day. The mansions differ in emphasis: the Nyabinghi order, the Bobo Ashanti founded by Prince Emmanuel Charles Edwards, and the Twelve Tribes of Israel founded by Vernon "Prophet Gad" Carrington in 1968, which is the house that drew in Bob Marley, Dennis Brown and Freddie McGregor and is therefore the one most audible on record.

What reggae took from it is not only imagery. It took a vocabulary — I-and-I, Babylon, livity, ital — a moral seriousness about poverty and repatriation, and a way of addressing power directly rather than obliquely. By the 1970s the faith of a scorned minority had become the argument of the island's biggest export, and it travelled everywhere the records did.