The Suppression of Leonard Howell in Late Colonial Jamaica, 1932-1954 D.A. Dunkley De

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The Suppression of Leonard Howellin Late Colonial Jamaica, 1932-1954
D.A. Dunkley
Department of History & ArchaeologyUniversity of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston 7, [email protected]



Abstract



This article is about Leonard Percival Howell, the man who is widely regarded as thefounder of the Rastafari movement, which started in Jamaica in 1932. The article focuses onthe attempts to suppress Howell during the foundational phase of the Rastafari movementfrom 1932 to 1954. This was the period in which Howell began preaching the divinity of HaileSelassie I, who was crowned the emperor of Ethiopia in 1930. In 1937, Howell established thefriendly organization known as the Ethiopian Salvation Society, and in 1940 started the firstRastafari community in the hills of the parish of St. Catherine, Jamaica. These and his otherreligio-political activities made Howell the target of one of the longest and most aggressivecampaigns to suppress an anticolonial activist during the late colonial period in Jamaica.However, one of the main points of this article is that the attempts to suppress Howell, whowas seen by the colonial government as seditious, implicated not just the colonial regime,but also a number of other opponents within the society. This article is an attempt to showthat Howell’s suppression was not exclusively a colonial endeavor, but a society-wide cam-paign to undermine his leadership in order to disband the Rastafari movement. Howell advocated an anticolonialism that was seen as too revolutionary by every participant in thecampaign to suppress him and his movement, and particularly aggravating was the notionthat a black monarch was the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, and whose ascension signaledthe start of black nationalism as a global liberation movement to end white rule over Afri-cans and people of African descent.
Keywords
Rastafarianism, colonialism, black nationalism, Ethiopia, millenarianism
Introduction
In this article, I examine Leonard Percival Howell’s foundational leadershipof the Rastafari movement to show his contribution to black nationalism
© 2013 D.A. Dunkley DOI: 10.1163/22134360-12340004This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

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and by extension, his role in Jamaica’s fight against colonialism.1 I have cho-sen to focus on the attempts to suppress him by the colonial government,local press, traditional churches, labor leadership, and creole nationalism,as well as parts of the civilian population, including whites, coloreds, andblacks. The attempted suppression of Howell was an extensive campaign,which indicates the fear that Howell’s message and activities might trig-ger the violent removal of British rule from colonial Jamaica. Howell andhis lieutenant, Robert Hinds, spread the ideas of the Rastafari movementduring its early phase, when it gained traction among the poorest groupin the society, the peasantry. (Hinds, Joseph Hibbert, and Henry ArchibaldDunkley later became leaders of their own groups.)2 Interestingly, it wasn’tthe institutional opposition to Howell per se that catapulted him andthe early Rastafari movement to the national stage; instead, antagonismtoward Howell was couched in a resistance to his promotion of the divin-ity of Emperor Selassie I. Between 1932-1954, Howell preached the divinityof Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia (who had been crowned in AddisAbaba in 1930), and established the first Rastafari community in Jamaicain the hills of St. Catherine’s parish in 1940. In 1954, the police force of thepartially creole nationalist government raided the Pinnacle encampmentfor the second time, hoping to end the popularity of Leonard Howell andthe burgeoning Rastafari movement.
Howell’s message was revolutionary. He advised the black people ofcolonial Jamaica that Emperor Selassie I was “the head over all man” and“the Supreme God”—advice or instructions that he repeated in his smallbook, The Promised Key, which was published in 1935 (Howell 1995:5).Howell delivered a message to African Jamaicans that was similar to theone that Marcus Garvey had enunciated after his own return to Jamaicain 1927. This was that Africans in every part of the global African diasporashould look east to Ethiopia for the crowning of a king who would leadthem out of white domination. Garvey had abandoned this idea in 1937
1 Many thanks are due to Dr. Jahlani Niaah and Dr. Rachel Moseley-Wood, of the Uni-versity of the West Indies, Mona, for their help with this article, and also to the anonymousreviewers, who pointed out where other revisions were needed. I also wish to thank MontyHowell, Sister Hodesh, and the Howellites, who introduced me to vital archival materialsand consented to have me interview them for this article.
2 To the best of my knowledge, I am not related to the Rastafari patriarch Henry Archi-bald Dunkley.

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after Selassie fled to London to escape the Italian occupation of Ethiopia,which started in May 1936. In a famous editorial, Garvey condemned theEthiopian emperor as a “coward.”3 However, Howell never lost his faith inthe emperor, and continued to advocate the millenarian perspective of hisascension in 1930 as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, and the beginningof black liberation in Jamaica and around the world.
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 startof Rastafari studies in the work of the American anthropologist, GeorgeE. Simpson, who had not even mentioned Howell in his groundbreakingarticle (Simpson 1955:167-70). In the famous Report on the Rastafari Move-ment in Kingston, Jamaica, published in 1960, Howell was presented to thepublic mainly as a criminal, and as someone who was quite likely insane(Smith, Augier & Nettleford 1960:6, 8, 9). Leonard E. Barrett’s and JosephOwens’ studies in the 1960s and 1970s spread knowledge of the Rastafarimovement. Howell was mentioned as one of the founders of the movementin these studies, but he was not examined in great detail, and the attemptsto suppress him were not given the deserved attention. However, there isat present a great deal more on Howell in terms of scholarship. The changestarted with Robert Hill’s gripping article, which was published in 1981, orin the same year that Howell died (Hill 1981:30-71).4 This was followed in the1980s and 1990s by studies by Michael Hoenisch, Barry Chevannes, FrankJan van Dijk, and William David Spencer, and in the first decade of thiscentury by Hélène Lee and Charles Price.5
3 Marcus Garvey, The Failure of Haile Selassie as Emperor, Black Man, March-April1937.
4 A shorter version of this seminal article was republished in Jamaica Journal (1983). Theoriginal article is now available as a short monograph, Dread History: Leonard P. Howell andMillenarian Visions in the Early Rastafarian Religion (2001).
5 Hoenisch 1988:432-49; Chevannes 1994:121-24; Dijk 1995:67-101; Spencer 1998:361-89; Lee2003; Price 2009:58-64. Chevannes mentions Howell throughout his study, but provides abrief biography of him in the pages to which I refer in the in-text citation. Lee’s book isa biography of Howell, and in fact the first full-length work on Howell. Price’s book, likeChavannes’ earlier work, also mentions Howell throughout, but without a biographical sec-tion like Chevannes provided. Nevertheless, Price goes into some amount of detail aboutHowell’s arrest and trial for sedition in 1934, which can be found in the pages that I refer toin the in-text citation.