Leonard Howell Proclaims Rastafari In Jamaica

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia in 1930, Jamaican preachers read the coronation as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy naming a returning African king, and none pressed that reading further than Leonard Howell. Through the early 1930s Howell preached the doctrine among Jamaica's poor, Afro-Jamaican communities, carrying it from a single interpretation of a foreign coronation into a following of his own.

Howell set the doctrine down in writing in his 1935 pamphlet The Promised Key, fusing his reading of Haile Selassie's coronation with the Back-to-Africa pan-Africanism Marcus Garvey had already been preaching in Jamaica. That fusion, an Ethiopian crowning read through a pan-Africanist lens already circulating among the same communities, gave the new movement both its theology and its politics at once.

What Howell's preaching changed was the birth of Rastafari itself, built from among Jamaica's most economically disadvantaged subjects as a direct reaction against British colonial dominance. A coronation on another continent in 1930 became, within five years and through one preacher's pamphlet, a homegrown faith that would go on to outlast the colonial rule it first rose against.