Rastafari

A small community, about one per cent at the 2010 census; a 2019 law permitted sacramental cannabis use in registered Rastafari places of worship.

This source names Rastafari directly: "on Ganja, his doctoral research on Rastafari at Columbia University, and his standing as the author of Rastafari: Roots and Ideology, the standard scholarly study of the movement, published in 1994."

This source names Rastafari directly: "Twelve Tribes of Israel, the largest Rastafari organization by membership and reach, arguing that the return to Africa determined both its genesis and the development of branches abroad, and records..."

This source names Rastafari directly: "and the United States, traces the Rastafari movement's return to Africa from the Caribbean, the United States and Britain, situating the Twelve Tribes of Israel's international growth within the..."

Rastafari arose in British Jamaica in the 1930s around the coronation of Haile Selassie, a religion the empire produced without intending to.

This source names Rastafari directly: "to his establishment of the first Rastafari community in the hills of St."

This source names Rastafari directly: "with Grenada's government or its Rastafari community, reporting Grenada's Parliament passing the Drug Abuse (Prevention and Control) (Amendment) Bill, 2026, including its Rastafari sacramental..."

This source names Rastafari directly: "of Grenada's government and its Rastafari community though oriented toward the cannabis industry, reporting Governor General Dame Cecile La Grenade's 13 February 2026 assent to the Drug Abuse..."

Rastafari emerged in Jamaica in the early 1930s, reading the coronation of Haile Selassie I as prophetic fulfilment, and was persecuted for decades, most severely at Coral Gardens in 1963.

This source names Rastafari directly: "first Caribbean nation to recognize Rastafari in law, citing Jamaica's own 2011 Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms and its 2015 sacramental ganja provisions while acknowledging Saint Kitts..."

This source names Rastafari directly: "Nairobi's Milimani Law Courts of the Rastafari Society of Kenya's petition for a religious cannabis exemption, with Justice Bahati Mwamuye's reasoning, the petitioners' planned appeal and the..."

This source names Rastafari directly: "that Leonard Howell founded the first Rastafari community of roughly 4,500 members at Pinnacle in the hills of St."

This source names Rastafari directly: "apologising for the violence against Rastafari at Coral Gardens between 11 and 12 April 1963, which the statement itself calls "a grave injustice" marked by "brutality, injustice and repression."

This source names Rastafari directly: "of 29,026 Jamaicans identifying as Rastafari, the strongest parish followings in St Andrew (7,630) and St Catherine (4,557)."

This source names Rastafari directly: "extending legal recognition to the Rastafarian faith, quoting Drew on the constitutional basis for the change and the new registration process for Rastafari places of worship."

A visible minority community rooted here since the 1970s, part of the faith's spread through the eastern Caribbean.

This source names Rastafari directly: "death produced a crisis of faith among Rastafari in Jamaica, documenting the movement's belief in Selassie's divinity as the two hundred twenty fifth descendant of King David through Solomon and the..."

This source names Rastafari directly: "affiliated with Kenya's courts or the Rastafari Society of Kenya, reporting the 15 July 2026 dismissal of the petition, the community's constitutional argument for cannabis as a sacred sacrament..."

JRDC was founded by and serves the Jamaican Rastafari repatriate community of Shashamane, Ethiopia, so linked to Rastafari at the religion level.

The Kebra Nagast, the Ethiopian account of Solomonic descent, underwrites Rastafari's reading of Haile Selassie as standing in the line of Solomon and Sheba.

Rastafari does not codify a fixed scripture, but the King James Bible, read through an Afrocentric reinterpretation, is the text in central devotional use.

A biographical documentary whose extended, sourced subject includes its subject's own conversion to Rastafari and the doctrine's direct influence on his music, not a film that touches the tradition only in passing.

Shashamane is Rastafari's central African repatriation site, built on the 1948 Haile Selassie land grant to the Ethiopian World Federation.

Held across the movement, but not in one form; the houses differ over whether the divinity is incarnation in the full sense.

Taken up in Rastafari as the song of Babylon and dispersion.

Adds a specific, dated milestone in Rastafari's history between Bob Marley uniting rival leaders at the 1978 One Love Peace Concert and Jamaica legalizing Rastafari sacramental ganja use in 2015, both already recorded here: the Jamaican government's 21 May 1981 state funeral for Bob Marley at Kingston's National Arena, where Prime Minister Edward Seaga's eulogy closed by naming Jah Rastafari explicitly.

Adds a specific, dated milestone in Rastafari's public history in Jamaica between Haile Selassie's death sparking a faith crisis in 1975 and Jamaica legalizing Rastafari's sacramental ganja use in 2015, both already recorded here: Bob Marley uniting Jamaica's rival political leaders on stage at the 22 April 1978 One Love Peace Concert.

Adds a fact not yet on the map: a second and separate Caribbean nation, Grenada, writing Rastafari sacramental cannabis protections into national drug law within weeks of this timeline's already cited Saint Kitts and Nevis recognition, through a different legal mechanism, a decriminalization statute rather than a declaration of religious status.

Adds a specific, dated doctrinal crisis between Haile Selassie's 1966 visit that sparked Grounation Day and Jamaica's 2015 legalization of Rastafari sacramental ganja use, both already recorded here: the Derg's September 1974 coup against Selassie, his house arrest in Addis Ababa, and the movement's collective refusal, on his reported death on 27 August 1975, to accept what many called lies of Babylon.

The government's reversal of the 1963 Coral Gardens suppression came fifty four years after it, and stands as the most recent event recorded here, two years after the 2015 ganja legalisation.

Rastafari's most recent event on this atlas's map by thirty five years; the tradition's map otherwise ends at 1980 with reggae's spread to Britain.

Adds a fact not yet on the map: a second and separate cannabis rights case lost in a different country's courts the same year as this timeline's existing citation of the United States Supreme Court's dreadlocks ruling, showing the legal fight over sacred cannabis use continuing in East Africa as well as North America.

Adds a milestone in Rastafari history between Leonard Howell proclaiming Rastafari in Jamaica in 1930 and reggae carrying Rastafari to Britain in 1948, both already recorded here: Howell founding the Pinnacle commune near Sligoville in St. Catherine Parish around 1940, Rastafari's first organized settlement.

Adds an eighth event between 2017's citation of Jamaica's Coral Gardens apology and this map's own 2026 citation of the Landor Supreme Court decision, recording a different Caribbean government's own affirmative legal recognition of the faith in the same year as that ruling.

Adds a specific, dated milestone in Rastafari history between Bob Marley receiving a Jamaican state funeral in 1981 and Jamaica legalizing Rastafari sacramental ganja use in 2015, both already recorded here: the National Commission on Ganja's 2001 report, the first official government body to recognize the ganja sacrament as a legitimate religious practice.

Closes a 9-year gap since 2017's Jamaica Apologises For The Coral Gardens Suppression, the most recent event already on Rastafari's map, with the United States' highest court ruling on a Rastafari prisoner's own case.

Adds a milestone in Rastafari history between Bob Marley's 1981 state funeral and the 2001 Chevannes Commission, both already recorded here: the Twelve Tribes of Israel, the movement's largest international house, opening its first Canadian branch in Toronto in 1985, part of its first wave of branches outside the Caribbean and Britain.