The most important force behind black jamaican counter culture & reggae music is the Rastafarian faith. It's origins begins with Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican born visionary who led a black nationalist "Back to Africa" movement in Harlem in the 1920's. In 1927 Garvey Prophesied "look to African, where a black king shall be crowned for the day of deliverance is near.

In the 1930's, an Ethiopian prince named Ras Tafari Makkonen was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I; several Jamaican preachers maintained that the emperor was the Messiah. The most important of these early preachers, L.P. Howell, Formulated the principles of the Rastafarian movement, based on black superiority and hatred of the white establishment.

Howell and other early leaders were jailed, effecting a permanent vendetta between Rasta and the police. To escape persecution , Howell and his followers established communes in remote rural areas, where they developed such customs as the use of Ganja as an aid to religious meditation, and the wearing of their hair in the natural, lion-like"Dreadlocks" style.

In 1954, the police destroyed the last of Howell's rural settlements. But, rather than destroying the movement, this event set the stage for its growth. Rastafarianism largely relocated to Kingston slums and became a pervasive, unofficial mass movement which dominated the cultural life of Jamaican The movement stresses universal love rather than anti-white and anti-establishment violence Christianity is rejected as a death-oriented religion used to pacify slaves. Rastafarianism is based on anti-authoritarianism and an espousal of the individual absolute worth (each man is God).

Rastafarian Culture

ll institutions ( such as police) and decadent western society in general are rejected under the collective term of "Babylon". To preserve his independence from "Babylon" the Rasta man does not beg or work for wages. He prefers to earn his livelihood by self-employment skills such as

farming or fishing , by participating in communal workshop, or by developing a craft that insures his economic independenceOne example of Rastafarian autonomy is the evolution of it's own highly developed patois to replace standard Jamaican English, considered the language of slaves. The language used in the lyrics of Reggae singers is a free- styled English without grammatical or structural rules.