Rastafari: The Theology Behind the Iconography
Rastafari is a Jamaican-born faith built on the claim that Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia is God in the flesh, that Africa is Zion and that the Western order is Babylon. This guide covers the 1930s origins, the Jah, Zion and Babylon framework, the Nyabinghi, Bobo Ashanti and Twelve Tribes mansions, ital livity, the Nazarite locks and the sacramental herb.
What do Rastafari believe?
Rastafari believe that Haile Selassie I, emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 until 1974, is the living presence of God, whom they call Jah, and that people of African descent scattered by the slave trade are Israelites in exile whose destiny is return to Zion. Ethiopia is Zion in that reading. Babylon is the name given to the system that holds them out of it: colonial government, the police, the banks, the courts, the missionary church, and the habits of mind those institutions install. From that starting point a set of further convictions follows. God is present in every person, which is why Rastafari speak of themselves as I and I, not as a separated individual. Death does not apply to a divine life, so Rastafari call Selassie everliving. The Bible is authoritative, but Rastafari hold that it passed through Babylon's hands and has to be read with suspicion rather than swallowed whole. Right conduct counts for more than assent to a creed, and that conduct has a name, livity. No central authority exists to enforce any of it, and Rastafari differ among themselves on nearly every detail below the level of the emperor himself.
Rastafari has no synod, no clergy recognized across the whole movement, no membership roll and no agreed catechism. Doctrine gets worked out in reasoning, a session where participants argue scripture, history and current events until something like a shared position emerges, or until it plainly does not. Elders carry weight by reputation and length of walk. No office confers it. The result is a tradition that outsiders keep trying to summarize and members keep declining to standardize. Two disagreements run through all of it. The first concerns Selassie: some Rastafari hold that he was God incarnate in the plainest sense, others that he was the returned Christ in kingly rather than priestly character, and others that he was a man appointed by God whose office made him a sign. The second concerns repatriation. The 1960 University of the West Indies report on the movement in Kingston, written by M. G. Smith, Roy Augier and Rex Nettleford, took the demand for physical return seriously, and Nettleford later summed up the shift in the phrase liberation before repatriation, meaning that Zion had become something to be won where adherents already lived. How widely that reading is held has never been counted.
Do Rastafari read the Bible?
Rastafari read the Bible constantly, and many adherents quote the King James Version from memory. The reading is selective and adversarial. Rastafari hold that the text was translated and edited under Babylon's supervision, so passages get weighed against lived experience before they are accepted. The Ethiopian canon and the Kebra Nagast supply material the Protestant Bible leaves out entirely.
Is there a Rastafari creed or catechism?
No Rastafari creed exists that every house accepts. The Bobo Ashanti and the Twelve Tribes of Israel each maintain internal teaching, and Leonard Howell's tract The Promised Key circulated in the movement's first decade, but nothing carries the authority of a confession of faith. Asked what Rastafari believe, an elder is likelier to answer with scripture and biography than with doctrine.
What happens in a reasoning?
A reasoning is a seated discussion, historically dominated by men though not restricted to them, in which a text is put on the table and worked over at length. A chalice may be passed. Nobody chairs it and nobody votes. The point is to test an interpretation against the group until it holds or breaks, which is how the movement transmits teaching without a clergy to deliver it.
Why do Rastafari regard Haile Selassie I as the living God?
Rastafari regard Haile Selassie I as the living God because his coronation on 2 November 1930 matched, point for point, the titles the Bible gives to the returning Christ. The Ethiopian crown proclaimed him King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God. Revelation 19:16 names the rider on the white horse King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Revelation 5:5 names the Lion of the tribe of Judah. Genesis 49:9 gives the lion to Judah in Jacob's blessing. To the street preachers in Kingston reading newspaper coverage of the ceremony, the correspondence was fulfillment rather than coincidence. Two further supports carried the argument. The Ethiopian monarchy claimed descent from Solomon and the queen of Sheba, a claim set out in the fourteenth-century Ge'ez text Kebra Nagast and written into Ethiopia's first constitution in 1931, whose article on the imperial dignity traced the line to Menelik I, son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba. The 1955 revision restated the same clause in nearly identical words. And Ethiopia had kept its independence and its own ancient church while the rest of the continent was carved up at Berlin. No other African throne could have carried a biblical crown in 1930. His regnal name, Haile Selassie, means Power of the Trinity.
Selassie himself was an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian who prayed daily and never claimed divinity. Asked about the Jamaican movement in a 1967 Canadian television interview, he answered that he was a man, mortal, and would be replaced by the oncoming generation. The answer did not break the movement. Rastafari absorbed it. The common reading is that humility is what a divine king would say, and that a God who announced himself would be an idol. His practical response to Jamaica was pastoral. He sent the Ethiopian Orthodox priest Laike Mandefro, later consecrated as Abuna Yesehaq, who set up the church's Jamaican branch in 1970, and a number of Rastafari were baptized into it while others treated the mission as an attempt to fold the movement back into ordinary Christianity. Positions still vary by house. Nyabinghi elders tend toward the literal claim. Twelve Tribes teaching keeps Christ and the emperor closer to conventional Christian categories. A minority of younger adherents read Selassie as a figure of Black sovereignty and decline the metaphysics altogether.
What did Haile Selassie's imperial titles mean in Ethiopia?
They were Ethiopian state formulas of long standing. Negusa Nagast, King of Kings, is an Ethiopian royal style much older than the Solomonic dynasty that took the throne in 1270; it appears on Aksumite inscriptions and coinage centuries earlier. Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah asserted the dynastic descent the Solomonic line claimed. Ras means roughly duke. Tafari Makonnen was his name before the coronation, which is why the movement is called Rastafari and not Selassian.
Did any Rastafari abandon the movement when Selassie died?
Some did. The emperor was deposed by the Derg in September 1974 and his death was announced on 27 August 1975, and the news caused genuine crisis, particularly among younger adherents in Kingston and London. Most Rastafari responded by denying the report, treating it as Babylon's propaganda, or reinterpreting death as inapplicable to a divine person. The movement did not collapse, though its center of gravity shifted.
What is the Kebra Nagast?
The Kebra Nagast, or Glory of Kings, is a fourteenth-century Ge'ez compilation telling how Makeda, queen of Sheba, visited Solomon and bore his son Menelik I, who brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia. Ethiopian tradition treats it as national history. Rastafari read it closer to scripture, since it supplies the dynastic argument the Protestant Bible does not contain.
How did Rastafari begin in 1930s Jamaica?
Rastafari began in Jamaica within months of the November 1930 coronation, preached independently by several men in Kingston and the rural parishes. No one founded it. Leonard Percival Howell, Joseph Nathaniel Hibbert, Archibald Dunkley and Robert Hinds are the four usually named, and each reached the same conclusion about the new emperor from a shared stock of material. That stock was Ethiopianism, the strand of Black Atlantic Christianity that had read Psalm 68:31, Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God, as a promise of African redemption since the eighteenth century. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded in Jamaica in 1914, had trained a generation to expect African deliverance and to organize for it. A prophecy about a Black king crowned in Africa circulated widely under Garvey's name. The attribution is disputed, and Garvey himself dismissed the emperor and the movement growing up around him. The audience for all this was a Jamaican peasantry and urban poor with no land, low wages and a colonial church that offered them nothing. Rastafari handed them a king, a homeland and a name for their oppressor.
Howell went furthest and paid for it first. He sold portraits of the emperor, was convicted of sedition in 1934, and around 1940 established Pinnacle, a communal settlement in St Catherine where several hundred people farmed, grew ganja and lived outside colonial supervision. Police raided it repeatedly through the 1940s and 1950s and finally dispersed it, pushing its residents into West Kingston, where the movement took its modern urban shape. Howell's tract The Promised Key, issued under the pen name G. G. Maragh, mixes biblical argument with vocabulary drawn from Jamaica's Indian indentured population. Repression continued. In April 1963 police and soldiers killed and detained Rastafari after an incident at Coral Gardens near Montego Bay, an episode Rastafari call Bad Friday and for which the Jamaican government apologized in 2017. Public standing changed on 21 April 1966, when Selassie landed at Palisadoes airport to a crowd so large it broke the security cordon. Rastafari keep the date as Grounation Day.
Who was Leonard Howell?
Leonard Percival Howell, born in Clarendon in 1898, is the figure most often called the first Rasta. He had traveled widely, including service in Panama and years in New York, before returning to Jamaica in late 1932 and preaching Selassie's divinity from the following year. He founded Pinnacle. He was jailed for sedition, later committed to a Kingston mental hospital by the colonial authorities, and died in 1981 largely forgotten outside the movement.
What was Pinnacle?
Pinnacle was the Rastafari commune Howell established around 1940 in the hills of St Catherine, Jamaica. It lasted roughly fifteen years. Residents farmed provisions and cannabis, ran their own affairs and kept police at a distance for years at a time, until raids through the 1950s broke the settlement up and pushed its people into West Kingston. Rastafari treat it as the movement's first attempt to live outside Babylon instead of merely denouncing it.
How did Rastafari spread beyond Jamaica?
Migration carried it first, to Britain, Canada and the United States with Caribbean labor movement after the Second World War. Reggae carried it much further from the 1970s onward. Rastafari communities also formed across the eastern Caribbean, in West and Southern Africa, and at Shashamane in Ethiopia, on land Selassie granted to diaspora settlers who had backed Ethiopia during the Italian occupation.
What do Jah, Zion and Babylon mean in Rastafari thought?
Jah is the Rastafari name for God, Zion is the promised African homeland together with the condition of living under God's rule, and Babylon is the apparatus of oppression along with the mentality it installs. Jah comes straight from the King James Bible, where Psalm 68:4 reads extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name JAH. Rastafari kept the short form and use it constantly, because a contracted name is a familiar name, and familiarity with God is the claim being made. Zion carries two senses at once. Geographically it means Africa, and Ethiopia in particular, which is why repatriation has been a Rastafari demand since the 1930s. Spiritually it means the state of a person who has stepped out from under Babylon's authority. Babylon is drawn from Psalm 137, sung by exiles who would not sing the Lord's song in a strange land, and from the Babylon of Revelation. Rastafari apply the term to the police, the courts, the banks, the mainstream church, commercial media and any person who works for those things.
The vocabulary is deliberate, and Rastafari built a whole dialect on the principle that sound carries force. Iyaric, also called Dread Talk, reworks English words whose sounds contradict their meanings. Dedicate becomes livicate, because the first syllable sounds like death. Understand becomes overstand: comprehension should raise a person, not put them underneath. Oppression is downpression, since nothing about the experience presses upward, and everlasting is everliving, because last suggests an ending. Life itself becomes livity, and vital becomes ital. The pattern is consistent enough to be learned, and it works as a running critique of the language Rastafari inherited from the colonizer. On what Zion practically requires, the movement has never agreed. Some houses, the Twelve Tribes of Israel among them, treat physical repatriation as an obligation and have organized migrations. Others, following the argument Rex Nettleford made from the 1970s, hold that Africa can be reclaimed culturally and politically in the Caribbean without anybody boarding a ship.
Is Babylon a place or a system?
Babylon is a system in Rastafari usage, not a country. It names the arrangement of power that grew out of the slave trade and continues through policing, finance, wage labor, mass media and state churches. A particular city can be called Babylon, and in Jamaican speech the word often means the police specifically, but the underlying referent stays structural rather than geographic.
Do Rastafari still seek physical repatriation to Africa?
A minority still do. The Ethiopian World Federation, founded in New York in 1937, and Selassie's land grant at Shashamane gave the demand an address, and several hundred settlers have made the move. Rastafari in Jamaica petitioned the colonial and independent governments for repatriation and reparations through the 1950s and 1960s. Many adherents today treat return as a standing claim rather than an immediate plan.
Why do Rastafari say Iyaric instead of standard English?
Rastafari treat words as carrying power independent of dictionary meaning, a principle stated as word, sound and power. English, in that view, arrived with the plantation and encodes its assumptions, so reworking the words refuses the inheritance without giving up the language. The Jamaican linguist Velma Pollard, whose Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari appeared in 1994, described it as a layer of substitutions sitting on top of Jamaican Creole. Fluency varies by house and generation.
What do the Lion of Judah and the red, gold and green stand for?
The Lion of Judah is the biblical emblem of the Ethiopian crown, and the red, gold and green are Ethiopia's national colors adopted as the movement's own. Genesis 49:9 calls Judah a lion's whelp in Jacob's blessing, and Revelation 5:5 names the Lion of the tribe of Judah as the one able to open the sealed book. The Ethiopian imperial standard showed a crowned lion carrying a staff topped with a cross. Printed on posters and painted on shopfronts across Kingston, that image became the most reproduced object in Rastafari visual culture. The colors carry a conventional reading: red for the blood shed by Africans under slavery and colonialism, gold for the wealth taken from the continent and for the sun, green for Ethiopia's land and the promise of return. Black is frequently added as a fourth, borrowed from Marcus Garvey's red, black and green, and standing for African people themselves. The lion here is Solomonic and biblical, so readers arriving from astrology should note the distinction from the zodiacal animal covered in Leo Personality Traits: The Complete Guide to the Lion.
The tricolor predates the movement by decades. Ethiopia flew green, yellow and red pennants through the nineteenth century and settled on the three-band flag in the 1890s under Menelik II, and because Ethiopia was the African state that repelled a European invasion at Adwa in 1896, other African countries borrowed the palette at independence. The crowned lion sat at the flag's center under the monarchy and was removed after the Derg deposed Selassie in 1974, which is why Rastafari flags still carry a lion that the modern Ethiopian state does not. The crown in Rastafari art belongs to the emperor, and by extension marks any person living under Jah's authority, which is the sense in which locks are sometimes called a crown. The colors now circulate far beyond the movement, printed on merchandise with no connection to the theology behind them, and Rastafari elders have objected to it for decades.
What is the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah?
Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah formed part of the formal style of the Ethiopian emperor, asserting that the dynasty descended from Solomon of the tribe of Judah and inherited the lion emblem of Jacob's blessing. Rastafari read the title as identifying Selassie with the figure of Revelation 5:5, and that identification is the hinge on which the entire theological claim turns.
Do the red, gold and green have fixed meanings?
The readings are conventional, not doctrinal, and they vary between speakers. Red for martyrs' blood, gold for wealth or the sun, and green for the land are the versions heard most often, but some elders give gold as the sun of righteousness and green as the herb. No house has issued an official gloss, and the colors were Ethiopia's national symbols long before any Rastafari interpretation existed.
Why do Rastafari use the Star of David?
The Star of David appears in Rastafari settings because the movement identifies as Israelite and the Ethiopian Solomonic claim runs through David's line. The Twelve Tribes of Israel took it as their emblem, usually in red, gold and green. Its banners carry it still. For the hexagram as a constructed form and its use across other traditions, see Sacred Geometry Symbols: Complete Guide to 11 Essential Shapes and Their Meanings.
What are the Rastafari mansions, and how do Nyabinghi, Bobo Ashanti and the Twelve Tribes differ?
The Rastafari mansions are the movement's organized houses, and the name comes from John 14:2, in my Father's house are many mansions. Three are large enough to describe. The House of Nyabinghi is the oldest and the least centralized, run by an assembly of elders, built around multi-day drumming and chanting ceremonies, and firmest on Selassie's divinity and on repatriation. Longer formal titles for it appear in print, but they vary between assemblies and none of them is standard across the house. The Bobo Ashanti, formally the Ethiopia Africa Black International Congress, was founded by Prince Emmanuel Charles Edwards and centers on Bobo Hill at Bull Bay outside Kingston, where members live communally, wear robes and turbans, keep a Saturday Sabbath, observe strict separation from Jamaican society and support themselves partly by making and selling brooms. They recognize a trinity of Selassie as king, Garvey as prophet and Emmanuel as priest. The Twelve Tribes of Israel was founded in Kingston in 1968 by Vernon Carrington, known as Prophet Gad, and assigns every member to one of the twelve tribes by birth month. It is the most open to members of any background. Many Rastafari belong to no house at all.
The differences are substantive and the houses know it. Nyabinghi takes its name from an East African resistance tradition associated with the medium Muhumusa, who led opposition to colonial rule in the Kigezi region in the early twentieth century, and the word reached Jamaica through press reports in the 1930s. Its ceremonies use three drums, the bass, the funde and the akete or repeater, and can run for a week around dates such as 2 November, 21 April and 23 July. Bobo Ashanti observance is the most regulated of the three, with rules governing dress, seclusion during menstruation and the daily order of prayer, and its members are the most visibly separate from the surrounding society. The Twelve Tribes assigns a color and a letter to each tribe and keeps a more scriptural, less ceremonial style; Bob Marley belonged to it, in the tribe of Joseph. Smaller bodies exist as well, among them the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church and the School of Vision. Whether the houses amount to denominations is itself disputed.
What happens at a Nyabinghi ceremony?
A Nyabinghi, or binghi, is a gathering held on Rastafari holy days: drumming, chanting of psalms and hymns, reasoning and shared ital food. Three drum parts lock together. The bass marks a heartbeat, the funde holds a steady two-count and the repeater improvises above them. Sessions can run for several days and nights, and elders set the order of chants.
Who was Prince Emmanuel Charles Edwards?
Prince Emmanuel Charles Edwards, who died in 1994, founded the Bobo Ashanti house and convened the Nyabinghi convention of 1958 in Kingston that drew Rastafari from across Jamaica. His followers regard him as the priestly figure in a trinity with Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey, a position other mansions reject outright. The community he established at Bobo Hill continues under an internal priesthood.
How does the Twelve Tribes of Israel assign a tribe?
The Twelve Tribes of Israel assigns each member to a tribe by birth month, beginning with Reuben in April and running through the year to Benjamin in March. Every tribe carries a color and an associated letter. The system gives members a fixed place within the house and is one reason the Twelve Tribes has kept a more formal structure than the older Nyabinghi assembly of elders.
What is ital livity, and what do Rastafari eat?
Ital livity is the Rastafari discipline of eating and living so that the life force stays intact, and in practice it means food that is fresh, unprocessed, mostly or entirely plant-based, and cooked without salt in the stricter houses. Ital comes from vital, with the I of Iyaric replacing the first syllable. Pork is excluded absolutely, on the authority of Leviticus 11. Shellfish and scaleless fish go with it, and many Rastafari extend the exclusion to all flesh. Those who do eat fish generally keep to small fish, with a rule of thumb that nothing longer than about twelve inches belongs on the plate, since a predator carries whatever it consumed. Canned goods, chemical preservatives, refined sugar, coffee and alcohol are avoided. Clay and earthenware pots are preferred to aluminum. What appears instead is what Jamaica grows: callaloo, ackee, breadfruit, yam, plantain, gungo peas, coconut milk, scotch bonnet, thyme and pimento in a long-simmered ital stew. No authority enforces any of this, and observance runs from absolute to occasional.
Salt is the most argued point. The usual explanation is that salt marks processed food and the plantation ration, and therefore belongs to Babylon rather than to creation. An older Caribbean and African American folk motif runs underneath it, in which Africans who ate salt lost the power of flight and could no longer cross the water home, and Rastafari cooks have drawn on that story without treating it as doctrine. Bobo Ashanti observance is the strictest, with food prepared separately and rules about who may cook it. Nyabinghi practice sits in the middle. Many Twelve Tribes members eat conventionally. Livity is the wider word, covering sleep, speech, work, dress and the refusal to take part in what the movement counts as corrupting. Purity disciplines built on diet appear across traditions and rest on different reasoning in each; Vedic astrology, for one, prescribes dietary restriction as a planetary remedy, which is covered in Rahu and Ketu: The Shadow Planets and Karmic Axis in Vedic Astrology. Ital makes no clinical claim and has not been tested to a clinical standard as a treatment for anything. As with any restrictive diet, a strict version can leave gaps, vitamin B12 being the usual one in fully plant-based eating, and that is a question for a doctor or a dietitian rather than for an account of theology.
Do all Rastafari avoid salt?
No. Salt avoidance is standard in Bobo Ashanti households and common among Nyabinghi elders, but plenty of Rastafari cook with it and would not consider the question closed. Where salt is refused, sea salt is sometimes permitted while refined table salt is not. The variation follows the movement's general pattern of strong convention with no enforcement, and households differ within a single family.
Are all Rastafari vegetarian?
Most are vegetarian or vegan, a strict minority eat only raw food, and the movement has no universal rule. Pork is the one exclusion held almost everywhere. Beyond that, some Rastafari eat small fish, a smaller number eat chicken or goat, and observance often tightens with age and with attachment to a particular house. Guests at a Rastafari table are usually fed ital regardless.
What does livity mean beyond food?
Livity is the whole conduct of a life lived in Jah, and diet is one department of it. The word covers how a person speaks, what work they will accept, how they treat family and strangers, what they wear, how they keep their body and what they refuse to participate in. Rastafari judge one another on livity far more readily than on stated belief.
Why do Rastafari grow dreadlocks and treat ganja as a sacrament?
Rastafari grow locks on the authority of the Nazarite vow at Numbers 6:5, that no razor shall come upon his head, reinforced by Leviticus 21:5, which forbids making baldness upon the head or marring the corners of the beard, and by the lion's mane belonging to the Lion of Judah. In the movement's own account, uncut hair marks a person as consecrated to Jah rather than groomed for Babylon's approval. Ganja is treated as a sacrament on scriptural grounds as well. Genesis 1:29 gives every herb bearing seed for use, Psalm 104:14 has God causing the herb to grow for the service of man, and Revelation 22:2 describes leaves for the healing of the nations. Herb is smoked from a chalice, a water pipe passed around a reasoning or a Nyabinghi, and is used to open discussion and steady meditation, not for entertainment. Rastafari commonly call it the wisdom weed and separate it sharply from alcohol, which the movement rejects as Babylon's drug. Neither practice is universal. Locks are not required by every house, and a substantial number of Rastafari do not smoke at all.
Locks were not there at the start. Through the 1930s most adherents wore beards and ordinary hair. Locking spread from about 1949 through the Youth Black Faith, a younger and more confrontational group that broke with the older preachers over ritual and respectability, and it became general across the movement during the 1950s. The look frightened colonial Jamaica by design, and the word dread came out of that reaction before Rastafari accepted it as a name for themselves. Persecution followed the hair directly. Police shaved detainees, employers refused work, and forced cutting in custody was recorded in Jamaica for decades, including after the Coral Gardens arrests of 1963. Legal recognition has arrived unevenly. Jamaica's Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act of 2015 decriminalized small quantities of cannabis and made specific provision for sacramental use by Rastafari at registered places of worship. South Africa's Constitutional Court decriminalized private adult use in 2018 in a case brought with the Rastafari lawyer Gareth Prince, who had lost an earlier challenge before the same court in 2002. In most jurisdictions no religious exemption exists. None of this is medical or legal advice. Cannabis carries documented risks, among them dependence and a raised chance of psychotic symptoms in people already prone to them, and anyone weighing its use alongside medication or a mental health condition should take the question to a clinician.
Is cutting a Rastafari's locks a religious offense?
Yes, in the movement's own terms. Locks are held to be consecrated under the Nazarite vow, so forced cutting is treated as a violation of the person rather than a haircut. The practice has been a recurring grievance in prisons, schools and armed forces across the Caribbean, Britain and the United States, and several legal challenges have been brought over it.
Do all Rastafari smoke ganja?
Not all of them. Sacramental use is widespread and openly defended, but abstainers exist in every house, and some Rastafari argue that herb is meant for reasoning and healing, not habitual smoking. Bobo Ashanti regulate its use tightly. The stereotype that Rastafari identity rests on cannabis reverses the actual order, in which the theology came first, and age and health often change the practice.
Why is ganja called the wisdom weed?
Rastafari describe herb as an aid to insight, a thing that clears the mind of Babylon's distraction and opens the reasoning in which teaching passes between people. That is the movement's account of its own sacrament rather than a finding about what the plant does, and the two should not be run together. A folk tradition holds that the plant grew on Solomon's grave, which ties the herb to the wisdom literature and gives the name its point. Elders police the line between that use and recreation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Rastafari a religion or a way of life?
Rastafari is both, and most adherents prefer the second description. The movement has theology, scripture, holy days and ceremonies, which makes it a religion by any standard definition, and national censuses count it as one. Rastafari themselves usually say livity, or way of life, because the word religion suggests an institution with buildings, salaried clergy and membership rolls, and the movement has resisted all three from the beginning. Scholars generally classify it as a new religious movement of Abrahamic descent. Both descriptions are accurate; the disagreement is about connotation rather than content.
Why do Rastafari object to the word "Rastafarianism"?
Rastafari object to Rastafarianism because the suffix ism names exactly the kind of packaged doctrine the movement rejects as Babylon's manufacture. Isms are systems built by men and then imposed on people: capitalism, communism, colonialism, and the denominational Christianity that arrived with the plantation. The preferred form is Rastafari, noun and adjective alike. Rastafarian is tolerated more often, though many adherents dislike that too. Scholars writing on the movement have largely dropped Rastafarianism since the 1990s.
Do Rastafari still consider Haile Selassie alive after his death in 1975?
Many do, in one sense or another. Haile Selassie was deposed in September 1974 and his death was announced on 27 August 1975, and Rastafari responses split. Some rejected the report as Babylon's fabrication, a position easier to hold because the Derg concealed the burial and the remains were identified and reinterred at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa only in 2000. Others accept the physical death and hold that a divine person cannot cease, which is why Rastafari say everliving. A minority read the whole claim symbolically.
What does "I and I" mean when Rastafari speak?
I and I means roughly we, with a theological argument built into the grammar. The construction asserts that Jah is present in the speaker and in the person addressed, so no conversation happens between two separated individuals. Rastafari also use I in place of me, my and other pronouns whose sound they hear as submissive, so I and I can stand for I, we, us or our depending on context. The same I echoes the numeral in Haile Selassie I. Fluency with the form varies by house and generation.
Can anyone become a Rastafari, or do you have to be born into it?
Anyone can become Rastafari, and nobody is born into it in the sense of automatic membership. There is no conversion ceremony, no baptism required across the movement and no register of names. A person becomes Rastafari by taking up the livity, sitting in reasonings and being recognized over time by people already in it. Houses differ on race. The Twelve Tribes of Israel has accepted white members since its early years, while some Nyabinghi and Bobo Ashanti elders hold that the movement belongs to African people and that others should support it from outside.
Is ganja use legal for Rastafari in Jamaica and elsewhere?
In Jamaica, largely yes. The Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act of 2015 made possession of small amounts a ticketable offense rather than a crime, permitted households to cultivate a few plants, and made specific provision for sacramental use by Rastafari at registered places of worship. Elsewhere the picture is uneven. South Africa decriminalized private adult use by a 2018 Constitutional Court ruling. Most other countries grant no religious exemption at all, and Rastafari travelers have been prosecuted for carrying herb across borders.
How many Rastafari are there in the world today?
Nobody knows precisely, and the figure of roughly one million worldwide that circulates in reference works is an estimate rather than a count. Jamaica's 2011 census recorded about 29,000 Rastafari out of a population near 2.7 million, a number most writers on the movement treat as low, since many adherents decline to answer state questionnaires on principle. Communities exist across the Caribbean, in Britain, the United States, Canada, Brazil, West Africa, Southern Africa and Ethiopia. Counting a movement that rejects membership rolls is unreliable by design.
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