The Twelve Tribes of Israel Opens Its First Branch in Canada

Four years after Bob Marley's Jamaican state funeral in 1981, already recorded here, and sixteen years before the Chevannes Commission recommended ganja as a Rastafari sacrament in 2001, also recorded here, the Twelve Tribes of Israel, the Rastafari movement's largest and most internationally organized house, carried its structure outside the Caribbean and Britain for the first time. In 1985 the organization Vernon "Prophet Gad" Carrington founded in Kingston in 1968 opened its first branch in Canada, in Toronto, the same year branches opened in Barbados, the United States and Tobago, the start of a wave of international branches that would eventually number in the dozens. Giulia Bonacci's academic study of the Twelve Tribes traces the branches' spread to the organization's founding commitment to the physical return of Rastafari to Africa, read through Ethiopianism and Pan Africanism, and to a decentralized model in which a local member authorized by Prophet Gad could open a branch once forty nine executive members, a full bench, had gathered. Toronto's branch grew alongside the city's existing Jamaican community into one of the organization's established North American centers.