Pinnacle, a Commune That Outgrew the Colony That Tried to End It

Leonard Howell had already been in trouble with Jamaica's colonial government for years before Pinnacle existed. He had spent the early 1930s leading nonviolent protest and founding the Ethiopian Salvation Society, adding an explicit theology to Marcus Garvey's message of Pan-African independence by naming Haile Selassie I, crowned Emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, as a living divine figure, a claim colonial authorities treated as sedition rather than religion. Facing sustained police harassment for it, Howell moved his followers in 1940 to an old estate he renamed Pinnacle, in St. Catherine Parish, and what he built there over the following sixteen years was less a hideout than a working alternative society. Between five hundred and sixteen hundred people lived at Pinnacle at different points, growing their own food, and selling cash crops in Kingston that included ganja, a plant that took on lasting religious meaning for Rastafari in large part because of the role it played in Pinnacle's own economy and communal ritual. The colonial state never fully left the community alone. A first raid in January 1941 followed reports that residents had demanded tax payments from neighbors in the name of Haile Selassie, a claim of sovereign authority the government was not prepared to tolerate. The far larger raid came in 1954, when police and colonial militia burned Pinnacle's houses and its ganja fields, confiscated more than eight tons of the crop, and arrested roughly one hundred forty residents, an action that ended the settlement permanently and scattered its members across Jamaica. What survived the fire was not the physical commune but the model it had demonstrated, a self-governing, self-sufficient Rastafari community built around Howell's theology, which former Pinnacle residents and their example carried into the wider Rastafari movement that grew across Jamaica in the decades that followed, well beyond anything the raid that destroyed the original settlement was able to reach.