This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Jamaican Rastafarian Development Community traces its roots to informal home schooling begun in 1975 by Brother Donald Leach for the English-speaking Rastafari repatriate community in Shashamane, Ethiopia, work that was formally registered as the Jamaican Rastafarian Development Community School only in 2002, twenty seven years later.
Shashamane itself carries particular significance for Rastafari: it is land Emperor Haile Selassie I granted for the repatriation of people of African descent, so a school built there serves a community whose presence on that land is itself an act tied directly to Rastafari belief and history, not simply a diaspora community that happened to settle nearby by circumstance.
The school serves both the English-speaking Rastafari repatriate community and local Ethiopian children in a non-English-speaking environment, a dual audience that reflects the wider Rastafari movement's history of building formal community and educational institutions in Jamaica since the mid twentieth century, now extended to the specific land its members repatriated to, and supported by the US-based Shashamane Foundation.