Pinnacle, Sligoville, St Catherine

Founded in 1940 by Leonard Howell under the banner of his Ethiopian Salvation Society, on an abandoned sugar plantation, Pinnacle was consciously modelled on eighteenth-century Maroon settlements and the post-emancipation free village at Sligoville. It grew to roughly 1,600 residents living communally and self-sufficiently, and survived fourteen years of escalating police raids under Jamaica's ganja laws before a 1954 raid destroyed sixty dwellings, saw Howell recommitted to Bellevue mental hospital, and scattered the community into Kingston's ghettos, directly seeding the West Kingston Rasta enclaves that fed into the sound-system-era music scene.