Rastafari: The Theology Behind the Iconography
By DailyDestiny Editorial Team
You have seen the colors and heard the songs; here is the Jamaican-born faith underneath them: Haile Selassie I as God in the flesh, Africa as Zion, the Western order as Babylon. Covers the 1930s origins, the Nyabinghi, Bobo Ashanti and Twelve Tribes mansions, ital livity, locks and the herb.
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What do Rastafari believe?
Imagine you have a reggae song on repeat. Jah, Zion and Babylon keep coming back, and you realize you have sung along for years without knowing what they mean. Then someone shrugs and says Rasta is just about weed, and something in you says there must be more.
The short answer: Rastafari believe Haile Selassie I, emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 until 1974, is the living presence of God, called Jah. People of African descent scattered by the slave trade are Israelites in exile, destined to return to Zion, which is Ethiopia. Babylon is the system holding them out.
Babylon is concrete: colonial government, police, banks, courts, the missionary church, and the habits of mind they install. Picture a house locked from the outside. Babylon is the lock; Zion is the open air.
More follows. God is present in every person, so Rastafari say I and I, not a separated self. Death does not apply to a divine life, so Selassie is everliving. The Bible is authoritative but passed through Babylon's hands, so it is read with suspicion. Right conduct, called livity, counts for more than agreeing with a creed.
No central authority enforces any of it, and Rastafari differ on nearly every detail below the emperor himself.
If you want an official rulebook, there is none: no synod, no movement-wide clergy, no membership roll, no agreed catechism. Doctrine is worked out in reasoning, where people argue scripture, history and current events until a shared position emerges, or plainly does not. Elders carry weight by reputation and length of walk, never by office.
Two disagreements run through everything. The first is Selassie: God incarnate in the plainest sense, or the returned Christ in kingly rather than priestly character, or a man appointed by God whose office made him a sign.
The second is repatriation. The 1960 University of the West Indies report on the movement in Kingston, by M. G. Smith, Roy Augier and Rex Nettleford, took the demand for physical return seriously. Nettleford later summed up the shift as liberation before repatriation: Zion to be won where adherents already lived. How widely that is held has never been counted.
Do Rastafari read the Bible?
Constantly, and many quote the King James Version from memory. The reading is selective and adversarial: the text was translated and edited under Babylon's supervision, so passages are weighed against lived experience first. The Ethiopian canon and the Kebra Nagast supply material the Protestant Bible leaves out.
Is there a Rastafari creed or catechism?
No creed is accepted by every house. The Bobo Ashanti and the Twelve Tribes of Israel keep internal teaching, and Leonard Howell's tract The Promised Key circulated in the first decade, but nothing has the authority of a confession of faith. Ask an elder what Rastafari believe and you will likely hear scripture and biography, not doctrine.
What happens in a reasoning?
A seated discussion, historically dominated by men though not restricted to them, where a text is worked over at length. A chalice may be passed. Nobody chairs and nobody votes. An interpretation is tested against the group until it holds or breaks, which is how teaching passes on without clergy.
Why do Rastafari regard Haile Selassie I as the living God?
This is probably the question you came with. It makes more sense once you see what Kingston's street preachers saw in 1930.
At his coronation on 2 November 1930, 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. Reading the newspapers, the preachers saw fulfillment, not coincidence, like finding a key that fits a lock you have carried all your life.
Two more supports held it up. The Ethiopian monarchy claimed descent from Solomon and the queen of Sheba, set out in the fourteenth-century Ge'ez text Kebra Nagast and written into Ethiopia's first constitution in 1931, which traced the imperial line to Menelik I, their son; the 1955 revision restated it almost word for word. And Ethiopia had kept its independence and its 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.
Here is what may surprise you most. Selassie was an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian who prayed daily and never claimed divinity. In a 1967 Canadian television interview he said he was a man, mortal, and would be replaced by the oncoming generation.
Rastafari absorbed the answer. The common reading is that humility is exactly what a divine king would say, and a God who announced himself would be an idol.
His response to Jamaica was pastoral. He sent the Ethiopian Orthodox priest Laike Mandefro, later Abuna Yesehaq, who set up the church's Jamaican branch in 1970. Some Rastafari were baptized into it; others saw an attempt to fold the movement back into ordinary Christianity.
Positions still vary by house. Nyabinghi elders lean literal. 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.
What did Haile Selassie's imperial titles mean in Ethiopia?
They were long-standing state formulas. Negusa Nagast, King of Kings, is far older than the Solomonic dynasty that took the throne in 1270; it appears on Aksumite inscriptions and coins centuries earlier. Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah asserted Solomonic descent. Ras means roughly duke, and Tafari Makonnen was his name before the coronation, which is why the movement is Rastafari, not Selassian.
Did any Rastafari abandon the movement when Selassie died?
Some did. He was deposed by the Derg in September 1974 and his death announced on 27 August 1975, causing genuine crisis, especially among younger adherents in Kingston and London. Most denied the report as Babylon's propaganda or read death as inapplicable to a divine person. The movement did not collapse, though its center of gravity shifted.
What is the Kebra Nagast?
The Glory of Kings, a fourteenth-century Ge'ez compilation telling how Makeda, queen of Sheba, visited Solomon and bore 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 lacks.
How did Rastafari begin in 1930s Jamaica?
To feel why this caught fire, picture yourself as a poor Jamaican in 1930: no land, low wages, and a colonial church offering you nothing.
Within months of the coronation, several men in Kingston and the rural parishes were preaching it independently. No one founded it. Leonard Percival Howell, Joseph Nathaniel Hibbert, Archibald Dunkley and Robert Hinds are the four usually named, each reaching the same conclusion from shared material.
That material was Ethiopianism, the strand of Black Atlantic Christianity that since the eighteenth century had read Psalm 68:31, Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God, as a promise of African redemption. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded in Jamaica in 1914, had trained a generation to expect deliverance and organize for it. A prophecy about a Black king crowned in Africa circulated under Garvey's name; the attribution is disputed, and Garvey himself dismissed the emperor and the movement.
To the peasantry and urban poor, Rastafari gave a king, a homeland and a name for their oppressor.
Howell went furthest and paid first. He sold portraits of the emperor, was convicted of sedition in 1934, and around 1940 founded Pinnacle, a settlement in St Catherine where several hundred people farmed, grew ganja and lived outside colonial supervision. Police raided it through the 1940s and 1950s and finally dispersed it, pushing residents into West Kingston, where the movement took its modern urban shape. His tract The Promised Key, under the pen name G. G. Maragh, mixes biblical argument with vocabulary from Jamaica's Indian indentured population.
In April 1963 police and soldiers killed and detained Rastafari after an incident at Coral Gardens near Montego Bay, which Rastafari call Bad Friday. The Jamaican government apologized in 2017.
Then, on 21 April 1966, 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 most often called the first Rasta. He had traveled widely, including service in Panama and years in New York, returned to Jamaica in late 1932 and preached Selassie's divinity from the next year. He founded Pinnacle, 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?
Howell's commune, founded around 1940 in the hills of St Catherine, lasting roughly fifteen years. Residents farmed provisions and cannabis, ran their own affairs and kept police away for years at a time, until 1950s raids broke it up and pushed its people into West Kingston. Rastafari see it as the first attempt to live outside Babylon, not just denounce it.
How did Rastafari spread beyond Jamaica?
Migration first, to Britain, Canada and the United States with Caribbean labor after the Second World War. Reggae carried it much further from the 1970s. 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?
These are the three words in almost every roots reggae song, so here is what you have been singing.
Jah is God. It comes from the King James Bible, Psalm 68:4: extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name JAH. A short name is a familiar name, and familiarity with God is the point, like calling someone you love by a nickname.
Zion is the promised African homeland together with the condition of living under God's rule, so it has two senses. Geographically it is Africa, especially Ethiopia, which is why repatriation has been a demand since the 1930s. Spiritually it is the state of someone who has stepped out from under Babylon's authority.
Babylon comes from Psalm 137, sung by exiles who would not sing the Lord's song in a strange land, and from the Babylon of Revelation. It means the police, courts, banks, mainstream church, commercial media and anyone who works for them.
Have you ever felt a system was built to keep you small? Rastafari have a name for that feeling.
Rastafari built a whole dialect on the principle that sound carries force. Iyaric, or Dread Talk, reworks English words whose sounds contradict their meanings, and once you hear it you notice your own words differently.
Dedicate becomes livicate, because the first syllable sounds like death. Understand becomes overstand: comprehension should raise you. Oppression is downpression, since nothing about it presses upward. Everlasting is everliving, because last suggests an ending. Life becomes livity, vital becomes ital. It works as a running critique of the colonizer's language.
On what Zion 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 Rex Nettleford's argument from the 1970s, hold that Africa can be reclaimed culturally and politically in the Caribbean without boarding a ship.
Is Babylon a place or a system?
A system. 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 city can be called Babylon, and in Jamaican speech the word often means the police, but the meaning stays structural, not geographic.
Do Rastafari still seek physical repatriation to Africa?
A minority 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 moved. Jamaican Rastafari petitioned the colonial and independent governments for repatriation and reparations through the 1950s and 1960s. Many today treat return as a standing claim, not an immediate plan.
Why do Rastafari say Iyaric instead of standard English?
Words are held to carry power beyond their dictionary meaning, a principle stated as word, sound and power. English arrived with the plantation and encodes its assumptions, so reworking it refuses the inheritance without giving up the language. The Jamaican linguist Velma Pollard, in Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari (1994), described it as a layer of substitutions 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?
You have seen these colors on a flag, a wristband or a shop sign. Here is what they carry for the people who chose them.
The Lion of Judah is the biblical emblem of the Ethiopian crown. Genesis 49:9 calls Judah a lion's whelp, and Revelation 5:5 names the Lion of the tribe of Judah as the one able to open the sealed book. The imperial standard showed a crowned lion carrying a staff topped with a cross. On posters and shopfronts across Kingston, it became the most reproduced image in Rastafari visual culture.
The red, gold and green are Ethiopia's national colors. The usual reading: red for the blood of 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 often added, borrowed from Marcus Garvey's red, black and green, for African people themselves.
If you came here from astrology, this lion is Solomonic and biblical, not the zodiac animal in Leo Personality Traits: The Complete Guide to the Lion.
The tricolor is older than the movement. Ethiopia flew green, yellow and red pennants through the nineteenth century and settled on the three-band flag in the 1890s under Menelik II. Because Ethiopia 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 carry a lion the modern Ethiopian state does not. The crown belongs to the emperor and, by extension, anyone living under Jah's authority; that is why locks are sometimes called a crown.
The colors now appear on merchandise with no link to the theology, and elders have objected for decades. Next time you see them on a souvenir T-shirt, you will know what is being borrowed.
What is the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah?
Part of the Ethiopian emperor's formal style, asserting descent from Solomon of the tribe of Judah and the lion emblem of Jacob's blessing. Rastafari read it as identifying Selassie with the figure of Revelation 5:5, the hinge the entire theological claim turns on.
Do the red, gold and green have fixed meanings?
No, the readings are conventional and vary. Red for martyrs' blood, gold for wealth or the sun and green for the land are most common, 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 long before any Rastafari reading.
Why do Rastafari use the Star of David?
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, and its banners still carry it. For the hexagram as a form 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?
If you have met two Rastafari who practiced very differently, this is why. The houses are called mansions, from John 14:2: in my Father's house are many mansions. Think of different rooms in one home. Three are large enough to describe.
The House of Nyabinghi is the oldest and least centralized, run by an assembly of elders and built around multi-day drumming and chanting ceremonies. It is firmest on Selassie's divinity and repatriation. Longer formal titles appear in print, but none is standard. If you ever hear its drums, you will feel this house in your chest.
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. Members live communally, wear robes and turbans, keep a Saturday Sabbath, stay strictly separate from Jamaican society and partly support themselves making and selling brooms. They recognize a trinity: Selassie as king, Garvey as prophet, 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 a tribe by birth month. It is the most open to people of any background, so it is often the house outsiders meet first.
Many Rastafari belong to no house at all.
The differences are real. 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; the word reached Jamaica through 1930s press reports. Its ceremonies use three drums, the bass, the funde and the akete or repeater, and can run a week around dates such as 2 November, 21 April and 23 July.
Bobo Ashanti observance is the most regulated, with rules on dress, seclusion during menstruation and the daily order of prayer, and its members are the most visibly separate.
The Twelve Tribes gives each tribe a color and a letter and keeps a more scriptural, less ceremonial style. Bob Marley belonged to it, in the tribe of Joseph.
Smaller bodies include 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 holy-day gathering: drumming, chanting of psalms and hymns, reasoning and shared ital food. The bass drum marks a heartbeat, the funde holds a steady two-count and the repeater improvises above. Sessions can run several days and nights, with elders setting the order of chants.
Who was Prince Emmanuel Charles Edwards?
He founded the Bobo Ashanti, convened the 1958 Nyabinghi convention in Kingston that drew Rastafari from across Jamaica, and died in 1994. His followers see him as the priest in a trinity with Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey, a position other mansions reject outright. His Bobo Hill community continues under an internal priesthood.
How does the Twelve Tribes of Israel assign a tribe?
By birth month, from Reuben in April through to Benjamin in March. Each tribe carries a color and a letter. This gives every member a fixed place and is one reason the Twelve Tribes is more formally structured than the older Nyabinghi assembly of elders.
What is ital livity, and what do Rastafari eat?
If you have ever eaten at a Rastafari table, you may remember how fresh and alive the food tasted. That is the point.
Ital livity is eating and living so that the life force stays intact: fresh, unprocessed, mostly or entirely plant-based food, cooked without salt in stricter houses. Ital comes from vital, with the Iyaric I replacing the first syllable.
Pork is excluded absolutely, on the authority of Leviticus 11. Shellfish and scaleless fish go too, and many extend the rule to all flesh. Fish eaters generally keep to small fish, with a rule of thumb of nothing longer than about twelve inches, since a predator carries whatever it consumed.
Canned goods, chemical preservatives, refined sugar, coffee and alcohol are avoided, and clay or earthenware pots preferred to aluminum. Instead comes what Jamaica grows: callaloo, ackee, breadfruit, yam, plantain, gungo peas, coconut milk, scotch bonnet, thyme and pimento in a long-simmered ital stew.
Nothing is enforced, and observance runs from absolute to occasional.
Salt is the most argued point. The usual explanation is that it marks processed food and the plantation ration, so it belongs to Babylon, not creation. Underneath runs an older Caribbean and African American folk motif: Africans who ate salt lost the power of flight and could no longer cross the water home. Rastafari cooks draw on the story without treating it as doctrine. It is an aching image, and you can see why it stayed.
Bobo Ashanti observance is strictest, with food prepared separately and rules on 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 refusing what the movement counts as corrupting. Diet-based purity disciplines appear across traditions on different reasoning; Vedic astrology, for one, prescribes dietary restriction as a planetary remedy, 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. It is standard in Bobo Ashanti households and common among Nyabinghi elders, but plenty of Rastafari cook with salt. Where it is refused, sea salt is sometimes allowed and refined table salt is not. Strong convention, no enforcement: households differ even within one family.
Are all Rastafari vegetarian?
Most are vegetarian or vegan, a strict minority eat only raw food, and there is no universal rule. Pork is the one exclusion held almost everywhere. Some eat small fish, fewer eat chicken or goat, and observance often tightens with age and attachment to a house. As a guest, you will usually be fed ital regardless.
What does livity mean beyond food?
The whole conduct of a life lived in Jah, with diet as one part. It covers how you speak, what work you accept, how you treat family and strangers, what you wear, how you keep your body and what you refuse. Rastafari judge one another on livity far more than on stated belief.
Why do Rastafari grow dreadlocks and treat ganja as a sacrament?
These are the two things you notice first and the two most misunderstood. Both rest on scripture.
Locks follow 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 mane of the Lion of Judah. In the movement's account, uncut hair marks a person consecrated to Jah, not groomed for Babylon's approval. It is a vow you wear where everyone can see it.
Ganja rests on Genesis 1:29, every herb bearing seed; Psalm 104:14, the herb for the service of man; and Revelation 22:2, leaves for the healing of the nations. It is smoked from a chalice, a water pipe passed around a reasoning or a Nyabinghi, to open discussion and steady meditation, not for entertainment. Rastafari call it the wisdom weed and reject alcohol as Babylon's drug.
Neither is universal. Not every house requires locks, and many Rastafari do not smoke at all.
Locks were not there at the start; in the 1930s most adherents wore beards and ordinary hair. Locking spread from about 1949 through the Youth Black Faith, a younger, more confrontational group that broke with the older preachers over ritual and respectability, and became general during the 1950s. The look frightened colonial Jamaica by design, and the word dread came from that reaction before Rastafari took it as their own.
Persecution followed the hair. 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. Imagine the most sacred thing about you being treated as something to punish.
Legal recognition is uneven. Jamaica's Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act of 2015 decriminalized small quantities 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. Most jurisdictions have no religious exemption.
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 terms. Locks are consecrated under the Nazarite vow, so forced cutting is a violation of the person, not a haircut. It has been a recurring grievance in prisons, schools and armed forces across the Caribbean, Britain and the United States, and has prompted several legal challenges.
Do all Rastafari smoke ganja?
No. Sacramental use is widespread and openly defended, but every house has abstainers, and some argue herb is for reasoning and healing, not habit. Bobo Ashanti regulate it tightly. The stereotype gets the order backwards: the theology came first. Age and health often change the practice.
Why is ganja called the wisdom weed?
Rastafari describe herb as an aid to insight that clears the mind of Babylon's distraction and opens the reasoning where teaching passes on. That is the movement's account of its sacrament, not a finding about what the plant does, and the two should not be confused. A folk tradition says the plant grew on Solomon's grave, tying it to the wisdom literature. Elders police the line between that use and recreation.
Questions people ask
Is Rastafari a religion or a way of life?
Both, and most adherents prefer the second. It has theology, scripture, holy days and ceremonies, and national censuses count it as a religion. Rastafari usually say livity, or way of life, because religion suggests buildings, salaried clergy and membership rolls, which the movement has resisted from the start. Scholars generally classify it as a new religious movement of Abrahamic descent. The disagreement is about connotation, not content.
Why do Rastafari object to the word "Rastafarianism"?
The suffix ism names the kind of packaged doctrine the movement rejects as Babylon's manufacture: systems built by men and imposed on people, like capitalism, communism, colonialism and the denominational Christianity that arrived with the plantation. The preferred form is Rastafari, as noun and adjective. Rastafarian is tolerated more often, though many dislike it too. Scholars 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. He was deposed in September 1974 and his death was announced on 27 August 1975. Some rejected the report as Babylon's fabrication, easier because the Derg concealed the burial; the remains were identified and reinterred at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa only in 2000. Others accept the physical death but hold that a divine person cannot cease, hence the word everliving. A minority read the claim symbolically.
What does "I and I" mean when Rastafari speak?
Roughly we, with a theological argument built into the grammar: 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 mean I, we, us or our. The I also echoes the numeral in Haile Selassie I. Fluency varies by house and generation.
Can anyone become a Rastafari, or do you have to be born into it?
Anyone can, and nobody is born into automatic membership. There is no conversion ceremony, no baptism required across the movement and no register of names. You become Rastafari by taking up the livity, sitting in reasonings and being recognized over time. 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 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, let households grow a few plants, and made specific provision for sacramental use by Rastafari at registered places of worship. Elsewhere it is uneven. South Africa decriminalized private adult use by a 2018 Constitutional Court ruling. Most other countries grant no religious exemption, and Rastafari travelers have been prosecuted for carrying herb across borders.
How many Rastafari are there in the world today?
Nobody knows. The figure of roughly one million worldwide in reference works is an estimate, not a count. Jamaica's 2011 census recorded about 29,000 Rastafari in a population near 2.7 million, a number most writers treat as low, since many adherents refuse 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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Related topics: rastafari beliefs, rastafarianism, haile selassie rastafari, rasta religion, rastafari practices, ital livity, rastafari houses
