Leonard Howell Founds the Pinnacle Commune

Ten years after Leonard Howell proclaimed Rastafari in Jamaica in 1930, already recorded here, and eight years before reggae carried Rastafari to Britain in 1948, also recorded here, Howell gave the young movement its first physical home. After his early preaching that Haile Selassie I, crowned Emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, was divine drew the attention of British colonial authorities, Howell established a commune on an old estate near Sligoville in St. Catherine Parish, around 1940 on Jamaica's own account of the site. Known as Pinnacle, the settlement grew to between roughly five hundred and sixteen hundred residents at its height, who built a largely self-sufficient economy growing their own food and cultivating cash crops including ganja for sale in Kingston, a practice that took on lasting religious significance for Rastafari through Pinnacle's example. The Jamaica National Heritage Trust, which now protects the site as a national heritage location, records Howell's founding of the commune around 1940. D.A. Dunkley's peer reviewed history of Howell's suppression under Jamaica's colonial government situates the 1940 founding within the wider campaign of surveillance and arrest that had targeted him since 1932.