Haile Selassie's Death Sparks a Faith Crisis for Rastafari

In September 1974, a military committee known as the Derg deposed Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I, whom Rastafari had revered since the 1930s as the returned Messiah and the two hundred twenty fifth descendant of King David through Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Selassie was held under house arrest at his own palace in Addis Ababa, and on 27 August 1975 the Derg announced that he had died there, officially of respiratory failure following complications from a prostate operation, though evidence that later emerged pointed instead to strangulation on the military government's orders. For a movement founded on the emperor's living divinity, the announcement produced what scholars have called a crisis of faith. Many Rastafari rejected the report outright, insisting that God cannot die and that no body had been produced, and dismissed the coverage as lies of Babylon spread by a hostile international press. Others reinterpreted the reported death as a disappearance, while still others recast Selassie as a symbol of African resistance and liberation whose meaning for the faith did not depend on a literal body. The controversy hardened rather than dissolved the movement's core conviction, carried forward from Selassie's own 1966 visit to Jamaica already recorded here into the religious and political organizing recorded in Jamaica's 2015 sacramental ganja legalization also already recorded here.