By Dakika Esrael
Far far across the valley comes the sound of an almighty procession Zion bound. Chanting chanting Iyabinghi drums yunder and yant the call to redemption, Babylon doomed to fall, Iyudgmant to come through Ivine intervention. Funde dance, Kette skip, Bass yunder, riddims praise Rastafari, the prophesied Anointed One, Jah the Redeemer in his biblical and kingly character. The year is 1930, and revelation of the newly crowned Black King of Ithiopia is proclaimed by the Brethren of Rastafari unto the world as the fulfillmant of biblical prophecies relating to the second coming of Christ on earth in his Ivine lineage.
Realizations of Afrika, specifically Ithiopia, the ancient Kingdom of Afrikanity being the Hola citadel of Jerusalem: Mount Zion to the tribes of Rastafari. Spiritual allegiance was given to the newly crowned King of Ithiopia by the Brethren as the rightful creator and ruler of the physical universe, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. The King of Kings and Lord of Lords manifest in the physical appearance of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I: light and inspiration to the dispossessed mass of suffera Jamaicans of Afrikan ascent reaching for salvation from the depths of slavery and degradation. A glorious king whose coming is to conquer, Negus Tafari Makonnen, godhead to the Movemant of Rastafari, domiciled on the island of Jamaica.
Just prior to and during the 1930s, there were various “witnesses” professing and expounding the belief that H.I.M. was indeed the prophesied King of Israel alluded to in several passages of the Hola Bible.
A cornerstone influence at the foundation of the doctrine was Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the first acknowledged international spokesman of Black Consciousness who foretold the event of the crowning of a Black King in Afrika who would herald the impending redemption of the Black race scattered throughout the world. Garvey is considered a supreme Black Zionist who articulated a philosophy of righteousness for the Black race which was to become a source of deep inspiration and guidance to the emerging Rastafarian consciousness and doctrine of the formative groundations; a John the Baptist prophet of the culture of Rastafari.
At the same time, there were others in agreement with Garvey’s prophecies, and around these first orators was gathered a growing number of followers in the poverty-stricken ghettos of western Kingston and the rural areas of the island. H. Archibald Dunkley (King of Kings Missionary Movement), Joseph Nathaniel Hibbert (Ethiopian Coptic Faith), Leonard Howell of Pinnacle (Ethiopian World Federation) and his deputy Robert Hinds, were all part of eclectic missions that preached the initial doctrines of Rastafari at what is considered the inception of the movemant. Leonard Howell established the communal Ethiopian World Federation in the Sligoville area of St. Catherine, known as Pinnacle, and it is partly through these portals that the growing awareness of Rastafari and Selassie began to spread into the colonial society of the ’30s and ’40s.
Communities sprung up in the poorest tin and board ghettos of western Kingston; the notorious Dungle, Back 0′ Wall, Shanty Town, Moonlight City and up in the Wareika Hills overlooking the city of Kingston. From these humble beginnings the Rastafari Movemant has risen and spread its cultural consciousness through other West Indian Islands, into parts of the United States of America and Canada, into the United Kingdom and certain areas of Europe; to Afrika itself and other regions of the world just becoming acquainted with the vision of Rastafari, Jamaica, Selassie I and Afrika as a redemptive reality in the world today. Ongoing manifestations of the Spirit of I & I, the evolution of a practical “living way of life” based on the essentially revolutionary Christian doctrine of peace and love and the brotherhood of man existing in the “here and now” and not in some future or in an unseen “afterlife”; the reality of Zion upon this our one earth.
Picture colonial Jamaica of the 1930s, an axis of 400 years of exploitation of the masses in the name of the “motherland” England, a Crown colony maintained by the then British ruling class. Social rituals founded upon Anglo-Saxon ethics of church, state, morality, education and finance (social or otherwise) there on the island as in other colonies were nothing more than Britain removed to the Caribbean, “chips off the old block.”
Colonial society by then was socially and financially ordered according to “class and station” of White, Chinese, Syrian, Black, Jewish, Indian and Creole, down to the rock-bottom dispossession of the Black suffera masses. Thus it was upon the poor Black psyche that the initial outpourings of the spirit of Rastafari was accepted and taken to heart; it offered salvation to those whose lot was little better than nothing—poverty in the extreme with little or no hope of change for the better.
Theirs is to be the apocalyptical Exodus and Movemant of Jah people from all Babylonian Empires and the return to each man’s vine and fig from where the ancestors were taken and cast in the West into slavery. Micah 4:4: “But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.”
Rastafari transcends life in the spirit of a Jah-inspired life, setting aside all limitations. I & I walk in the knowledge of the temple as witness to the love that the “I am that I am” bears unto his children.
Rasta is not concerned with the insanities perpetuated in the name of Christ and the fallen sinful nature of man. He lives within the tribulation of these times yet his “cloth” is washed pure in the rivers of salvation.
Rev. 7:13-14: “And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?
“And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
Rastafari is love of one and all; do unto others as I & I would have others do unto I & I. The more immediate, open and conscious I & I live, the more I & I experience the life-giving spirit of Christ dwelling within. Rasta knows through the 5×5 God-given faculties that life is a supreme gift to the universal earth functioning as a sacred bond with I Faada, the almighty and living Jah.
Rastafari defends the belief of the Black Christ of the ancient Solomonic house of Ethiopia, the supreme Adonai and creator of Heaven and Earth as the sole and true spiritual ruler of the creation manifested as the Hola One of Israel. Knowledge of the origins through the Black Christ of Rastafari stretching from antiquity and the union of King Solomon and Queen Makeda of Sheba whose son, Menelik I, established the first divine Solomonic throne in Ethiopia centuries ago. Black historical facts, hidden, denied and desecrated throughout time, now to be established through the awareness of historical fact and reality.
This I-sense (essence/inner sense) for Rastafari is an I-sense of natural intuitive intelligence, it involves full use of the 5×5 I-senses of the physical temple being attuned to the spirit to receive ongoing cycles of creative energy. A living sea of awareness, both inner I of the Irit, and outer I of the material world.
Let all hearts, open and receptive to the uprising of Rastafari, come and take rest in the gardens of truth; the rebirth of those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Perhaps then truth shall once again prosper as Jah knoweth and liveth.
This article was originally published in the April 1983 issue of High Times Magazine.
