Rastafari began in Jamaica in the early 1930s, among people formed by Marcus Garvey's movement, who read the coronation of Ras Tafari Makonnen as Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia in 1930 as the fulfilment of prophecy. Leonard Howell was among the first preachers and established the Pinnacle community in the hills, which the colonial authorities raided repeatedly and finally destroyed.
The movement developed houses rather than a church. The Nyabinghi order is the oldest, centred on the grounation drumming assemblies. Bobo Ashanti, founded by Prince Emmanuel Charles Edwards, is a disciplined communal order with its own dress and observances. The Twelve Tribes of Israel, founded in the 1960s, is the most internationally dispersed and is the house Bob Marley belonged to. Common to most is the Ital diet, the wearing of locks, the reasoning session as the form of theological discussion, and a language shaped by deliberate substitution, most famously the use of I and I in place of the first person.
Persecution was severe and official. The worst episode was at Coral Gardens near Montego Bay in April 1963, when an incident at a petrol station led to a police and military operation in which Rastafari were killed, and many more were rounded up, beaten and had their locks forcibly cut. The Jamaican government issued a formal apology for Coral Gardens in 2017 and established a trust fund for survivors.
Haile Selassie visited Jamaica in 1966 to enormous crowds, an event Rastafari still date from. He did not accept the divine identification made of him, and the movement's response to his death in 1975 varies by house, which is one of the genuine internal differences within it.