The religious movement born among poor Black Jamaicans around 1930 that proclaimed the new Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie a living God and Messiah, built a way of life from the Bible, Marcus Garvey's Back-to-Africa prophecy, and the longing for a homeland, and through reggae and Bob Marley carried its message of Black pride and resistance to a watching world.
In 1930, in the hills and slums of Jamaica, poor descendants of enslaved Africans heard that a Black king had been crowned across the sea, in one of the few African lands Europe had never colonized, the great symbol of unconquered Black sovereignty. To them this was no ordinary coronation. It was prophecy fulfilled. They proclaimed the new Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, to be God in the flesh, the Messiah returned for a scattered and despised people. From the Bible, Garveyite Black pride, and the promise of a homeland they built a faith that gave a colonized people pride and a name of their own: Rastafari. The emperor himself stayed a quiet Orthodox Christian and never claimed to be divine. The faith did not need his permission, and through reggae it would reach the whole world.