The Sunday Mail
Ibo Foroma : Rastafarian Perspectives
AS first Rasta, Leonard Percival Howell’s contribution is most compelling in that he delivered a message to African Jamaicans that was similar to the one Marcus Garvey had enunciated after his own return to Jamaica in 1927.It said Africans in every part of the African Diaspora should look east to Ethiopia for the crowning of a king who would lead them out of white domination.
Garvey had abandoned this idea in 1937 after Selassie exiled to London to escape the Italian perversion of Ethiopia, which started in May 1936.
In a famous editorial, Garvey condemned the Ethiopian Emperor as a “coward”.
However, Howell never lost his faith in the Emperor, and continued to advocate the millenarian perspective of his ascension in 1930 as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy, and the beginning of black liberation in Jamaica and around the world.
Mainly due to the “Garvey-ites”, initially Garvey was solely considered as having pioneered the Rastafari Movement and the rest were barely made mention.
However, in recent years, the scholarship on Howell has seen a great deal of growth. This is a welcome change in light of the years of neglect, seen from the start of Rastafari studies in the work of the American anthropologist, George E Simpson, who had not even mentioned Howell in his ground-breaking article. (Simpson 1955:167-70)
In the famous Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica, published in 1960, Howell was presented to the public mainly as a criminal, and as someone who was quite likely insane. (Smith, Augier & Nettleford 1960:6, 8, 9)
Leonard E Barrett and Joseph Owens’ studies in the 1960s and 1970s spread knowledge of the Rastafari Movement. Howell was mentioned as one of the founders of the movement in these studies, but he was not examined in great detail, and the attempts to suppress him were not given the deserved attention.
However, there is at present a great deal more on Howell in terms of scholarship. The change started with Robert Hill’s gripping article, which was published in 1981, in the same year that Howell died. (Hill 1981:30-71)
This was followed in the 1980s and 1990s by studies by Michael Hoenisch, Barry Chevannes, Frank Jan van Dijk, and William David Spencer, and in the first decade of this century by Hélène Lee and Charles Price.
Attempts to suppress Howell were largely unsuccessful, given both the worldwide success of Rastafarianism and Jamaican Independence. Despite Lee’s argument, Howell did not become wary or disheartened because of the attempts that were made to bring about his suppression. (Lee 2003:218)
After suffering for years on behalf of the Rastafari movement, it was no longer necessary for Howell to occupy the national spotlight. Other leaders were in place to carry on the work that Howell had started.
Claudius Henry, for example, had established an encampment of his own in the hills of St Andrew’s parish in 1959, and the revisionist Dr Vernon Carrington, also known as Prophet Gad, founded the 12 Tribes Mansion in 1968, which gained adherents from Jamaica’s brown-skinned/coloured middle class.
After the 1954 police incursion at Pinnacle, Howell decided to play a secondary role, leaving the movement in the hands of the other leaders. They began to modify the early doctrine of Howell and to broaden the leadership provided by Hinds, Hibbert, Dunkley, and Altamont.
Meanwhile, reports in the Daily Gleaner, which had remained the most widely circulated newspaper in colonial Jamaica, showed that Howell continued to beharangued by the government and its police force, and by members of the civilian population after 1954.
There were reports that Howell was attacked more than once at Pinnacle due to his unwavering stance on the cultivation of marijuana in the community, and of course its use as a sacrament by members of the Rastafari Movement. The police returned to Pinnacle several times following the second raid in 1954 on ganja eradication expeditions, and to remove any remaining followers of Howell who were still residing in the community.
These raids even took place during the post-colonial period of the 1970s under Michael Manley’s government, which had embraced an Afrocentric policy in its promotion of Jamaica’s cultural identity, one that drew from the philosophy of the Rastafari Movement.
In essence, Manley adopted the Black Nationalism of Rastafari as a way to gain support from the island’s black majority for his democratic socialist ideology. (Birthwright 2011:264-70)
Because of this, Howell could not have withdrawn himself fully from the spotlight as one of the founders of Rastafari, even if this was what he might have wanted to do.
In Charles Price’s “Becoming Rasta: Origins of Rastafari Identity in Jamaica”, the author argues that Howell was thrust into the “national spotlight” by the “government’s attempts to quash the Rastafari” during the period of British colonial rule.
He suggests that the publicity that Rastafari got from these attempts to suppress the movement was one of the, “unintended consequences” of the campaign, or “by reporting on Howell and the Rastafari as well as by reprimanding Howell, the authorities’ effort to disrupt the emergent Rastafari had the unanticipated consequence of amplifying their beliefs”.
In other words, the movement was able to undergo at least some of its growth within colonial Jamaica because measures were taken by the government to undermine and to end the leadership of foundational figures such as Howell (Price: 2009:58, 60).
This is an interesting thesis, but it is essentially untrue.
In fact, Howell was the one who made himself famous promoting the message of Rastafari and Black Nationalism, and the colonial regime, fearing popular independence and revolution, responded in one of the longest and most consistent campaigns against any opponent of colonialism in British Jamaica during the twentieth century.
Howell remained the main target, even when it was his community of Pinnacle that was raided by the police, and his followers were sent to jail. Knowing more of his pivotal contributions liberating Jamaica from British colonial rule and establishing self-sustaining “Pinnacles” is inexorable in honour of The First Rasta.
References
George E Simpson, “The Rastafari Movement in Jamaica: A Study of Race and Class Conflict”, 1955
MG Smith, Roy Augier & Rex Nettleford, “The Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica”, 1960
Leonard E Barrett, “The Rastafarians: A Study in Messianic Cultism in Jamaica”, 1968
Joseph Owens, “Dread: The Rastafarians of Jamaica”, 1976
Robert Hill, “Dread History: Leonard P. Howell and Millenarian Visions in Early Rastafari Religion in Jamaica”, 1981
